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As a child in Oregon, Misha Pemble-Belkin wasn't allowed to have sugar, toy guns, violent video games or movies. His labor-organizer father and hippie mom even confiscated his turtle squirt gun.
As a young man, he's an Army specialist in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan, one of the most dangerous postings of the war. CNN once branded the rugged six-mile slice of land near the Pakistan border "the deadliest place on Earth."
You wonder how paratrooper Pemble-Belkin got from there to here, but the movie "Restrepo" doesn't tell you. Instead, it allows you to parachute into the war as the documentary delivers on its tag line: "One platoon, one year, one valley."
- Rating: R for language throughout and some descriptions of violence.
Filmmakers Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington chronicled the deployment of a platoon of U.S. Army soldiers who ended up in the mountains, a two-hour foot patrol from the main base in the valley.
The producers-directors-photographers each made five monthlong trips to the Korengal, shot a total of 150 hours of footage and logged another 40 hours interviewing soldiers at a base in Italy after the deployment.
They sliced and shaped the material into a documentary that runs 94 minutes and won a grand jury prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Mr. Junger, already known as the author of "The Perfect Storm," also chronicled the experience in a highly regarded book titled "War."
"Restrepo" takes its title from a remote, 15-man outpost named for medic Juan "Doc" Restrepo, who was shot twice in the neck and was stable when loaded on a chopper headed for medical treatment.
Any sense of relief felt by his friends was fleeting and false; the 20-year-old from Pembroke Pines, Fla., bled to death during the ride. As a buddy recalls, "You know, your heart just sank. You were like [expletive]. I mean, it was Doc Restrepo."
The film has no narrator, no political point of view and no background on how these particular men came to be in this part of the world that looks nothing like the Normandy beaches of World War II, the dense jungles of Vietnam or the scorching deserts of Iraq.
Seventy percent of the bombs dropped in Afghanistan are dropped in and around the Korengal Valley.
As Capt. Dan Kearney, a 29-year-old husband and father from Fort Benning, Ga., explains, "Right now, the road ends at Korengal outpost. Where the road ends is where the Taliban begins."
His job includes sitting down weekly with the valley elders, and the language, cultural, military and historical divide is so wide that you wonder if there can ever be a meeting of the minds. Is this folly or part of the fearlessness necessary to push the Taliban back?
The directors don't ask those questions, but they give you the most vivid picture yet of the war in Afghanistan and the bond among these men (and in this case they are all men).
They lie to parents in birthday calls that everything is all right, they draw, play guitar and even dance to pass the time, they find a way to honor a dead friend, they question locals who tell them, "If we let you know about the Taliban, then we will get killed."
"Restrepo" whets your appetite for Mr. Junger's book, which provides the sorts of details not possible in a film that spans a year in an hour and a half. The movie has no politicians or high-ranking military strategists or cable TV commentators or images from 9/11 or mournful families back home.
It's a soldier's story told by men who lived with and like them and even sustained injuries (a broken leg, a torn Achilles tendon, the shock of riding in a Humvee when an IED exploded under the engine block).
"Restrepo" honors Juan "Doc" Restrepo and his comrades in arms by showing who they are, what they did and how they endured. Together.
Opens today at the Manor Theater in Squirrel Hill.
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