A couple of years ago a friend of mine recommended that I watch a war documentary called Restrepo. My friend had been an infantryman with the 10th Mountain Division and mentioned to me that the film held particular importance for him as his old Battalion had taken a lot of casualties in the Korengal Valley. The documentary follows the 2nd Platoon of the Battle Company (2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team) as they are deployed to the Korengal Valley, first to the Korengal outpost and then later as they construct the Restrepo outpost.
It’s a stunning film. Too often war movies are praised for giving the viewer a realistic depiction of war. Reviews abound with phrases like “a gritty, raw first-hand view” or “exposes the violent and absurd nature of war.” Besides being seldom true, these phrases reveal something about what we expect (want?) from these films. The “realism” is restricted only to battle scenes. What struck me most about Restrepo was not that it caught the constant and overwhelming violence of war; on the contrary, it’s the lack of action that is unsettling. In the middle of the Korengal Valley, the “most dangerous place on earth”, the soldiers go about their daily tasks. The ever-present danger that surrounds the outpost becomes part of normal life. The moments of violence break into the mundane routine and the contrast makes them that much more powerful.
After watching the film I took note of the names of the two codirectors: Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington. Junger I was familiar with; he visited Lemuria for his book A Death in Belmont and I had enjoyed A Perfect Storm as well. But I wasn’t familiar with Hetherington before Restrepo. I looked him up and found incredible photographs from various conflicts and battlefields around the world. And then I learned that he had been killed a few months prior while on assignment in Libya, observing and recording the Arab Spring. Alan Huffman’s book Here I Am tells Tim Hetherington’s story. I was happy to see news of a book about Hetherington; I was even happier that Huffman was writing it. The man can write. Chapter 7 of Here I am opens:
When Staff Sergeant Kevin Rice saw the Taliban fighter taking aim at him with an RPG, he was on his hands and knees on a remote mountainside in Afghanistan, bleeding from his stomach and shoulder onto the ground. At that moment, Rice thought, “Wow, this is the last thing I’m going to see.”
Alan Huffman could have written a fine book about war, but in Here I Am he’s done something a little more complicated — he’s captured and communicated how Tim Hetherington saw war. At the end of Chapter 7 Huffman quotes from Hetherington’s book Infidel:
As anyone who has experienced it will know, war is many contradictory things. […] There is brutality and heroism, comedy and tragedy, friendship, hate, love, and boredom. War is absurd yet fundamental, despicable yet beguiling, unfair yet with its own strange logic. Rarely are people “back home” exposed to these contradictions — society tends only to highlight those qualities it needs, to construct its own particular narrative. Rather than attempt to describe the war in Afghanistan, I have sought to convey some of those contradictions.
If Hetherington sought to convey the contradictions in war, Huffman has the task of conveying the contradictions of Hetherington: a noncombatant seeking out every conflict and war, an artist looking for truth and beauty on the battlefield. Huffman writes:
Hetherington had felt a need to prove himself to the soldiers from early on. He was a journalist, a British guy, approaching middle age, among a group of rowdy, young, tattoed soldiers from California, Florida, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. He had a tendency to view war intellectually, with an artist’s eye, and in some ways he stood out as much as he had when he was the white guy on the motorcycle in Monrovia.
I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to finishing Here I Am and hearing Alan Huffman speak. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch Restrepo. Look at some of Tim Hetherington’s war photos. Read Here I Am, and join us on Thursday, March 28 at 5 PM for Alan Huffman.
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