Restropo

Restrepo, a fly-on-the-wall documentary feature observing US soldiers at work in Afghanistan during a 15-month tour of duty, has been long-listed for the documentary Oscar in 2011. The platoon was sent to the Korangal valley, a Taliban stronghold, to win hearts and minds.

Those key targets had not been gained by the previous platoon, as a platoon commander admits to a gathering of village elders (dozens of ancients with dyed beards and expressionless faces). The new platoon is trying hard but getting nowhere, and the movie indirectly shows why through such incidents as the uncompensated slaughter of a cow and the collateral damage suffered by a bombed hillside village.

Two photo-journalists, American Sebastian Junger and Englishman Tim Hetherington, were embedded with the platoon for a year in its small main base and the outpost the soldiers create on a nearby hilltop. It is called OP Restrepo in tribute to a medic killed soon after the platoon arrived in the lethal valley.

Nearly all of the time, the dozen or so soldiers (all men) in the small outpost sit, watch and wait. The platoon's mission is to help organise the building of a new road through the mountains, but the elders won't or can't provide labourers or support. Reports are phoned back to the base all the time, where a decision is made eventually that OP men will attack a dangerous Taliban position.

The documentary-makers (probably only one of them) join the hillside clamber, during which enemy fire kills a sergeant and injures other soldiers. Their assault clearly scares the young men at the time, and leaves them with distressed memories (stated in face-to-camera interviews back at a US army base in Italy). The bitter footnote, shown in an end-caption, is the fact that the US abandoned the outpost in April 2010, after the film was completed.

The making of the feature film must have had official approval, and the individuals on which the documentary focuses are notably above-average young grunts with pleasant dispositions and accents, and a minimal usage of four-letter words. They obviously accepted, and mostly ignored, the presence of non-combatant watchers: they joke, relax, stare into gun sights, smoke, sunbathe, eat (well), burn faeces and exercise, they do their job.

Restrepo is a very good, quietly respectful portrait of young men struggling, and it draws no simplistic anti-war, anti-occupation conclusions. Their moments of doubt regarding their mission are few. None of them are heard to wonder why Vanity Fair magazine commissioned the journalists, why the Pentagon approved (or proposed) their assignment, why their filming became a movie screened by the National Geographic channel, why they only spent a couple of days of their 15-month tour actually attacking the enemy.