In memory of photojournalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington, killed in April while covering conflict in Libya, Open Show partners with the San Francisco Film Society to bring you a special screening of his Academy Award nominated film Restrepo, which follows a platoon of US soldiers posted to the remote and heavily contested Korengal valley of Afghanistan.

Before the show we will present highlights of Tim’s work, including his last images from Libya, with words from his Bay Area friends. There also will be a silent auction of limited edition posters used by Tim for his Infidel photography exhibition.

The proceeds will benefit the Committee to Protect Journalists, an organization dedicated to the global defense of press freedom. Details below:

Restrepo
7pm, December 7, 2011
New People Cinema
1746 Post Street, SF
Tickets

Co-director Sebastian Junger is a journalist and author of The Perfect Storm and War. As a prelude to the event, he was kind enough to chat with me about collaborating with Tim, keeping the camera running during combat and what soldiers miss about war:

 

Your career as a journalist began when you decided to report in the Balkans with no prior experience. What made it possible to make this leap of faith?

Everyone’s first overseas trip is with no prior experience, so I’m not any exception. I was thirty and couldn’t really make a living as a freelance writer in Boston reporting local issues, so I thought I would take a leap and see if I could make it work. Also I was curious about war – what war was like – and I thought if I can’t make it professionally, at least I’ll find out something personally about this topic which interested me.

What was working with Tim like?

I loved working with Tim. He and I complemented each other very well. He taught me a lot about film and I taught him… I don’t know what I taught him about! I taught him about writing. We were a good team.

Had you worked collaboratively before?

No. On assignment, I’ve always had a photographer to shoot the stills, but I’ve hadn’t collaborated in that sense.

Did you like it? Were there advantages, disadvantages?

I couldn’t see any disadvantages, but I was collaborating with a really extraordinary person. No one person could make that film. Tim by himself couldn’t have made it and I by myself couldn’t have made it. It really took two of us to finance it, to produce it, to direct it, to shoot it. We did all of it in equal shares. There’s no way that would exist if we hadn’t collaborated.

You’ve worked primarily as a print journalist. Was putting out visual work very different?

I started shooting video in 2003 in Liberia, but I didn’t really use a camera until 2007 with Battle Company. Using a camera wasn’t that hard. We weren’t doing these highly produced interviews, we were shooting on the fly. I usually had autofocus and autoexposure on.

I started to realize there’s some real similarities between telling a story with words and telling a story with visuals. You still have a basic narrative you have to construct for maximum impact. I gradually over the course of my five trip got a feel for the vocabulary of visual images and by the end I was pretty good with a camera.

The edit was a whole other issue. There was a year long struggle to put a story together. It was complicated. We didn’t have a film crew out there. Tim and I were the film crew, and we shot that film without lights, without wireless audio. We shot that film with what we could carry on our backs in combat in the mountains, so it was minimal equipment. We didn’t even have a tripod.

So that was more difficult.

Yeah. We financed it ourselves, and we hired an editor and an associate editor but we were very much in the edit room directing things and it took a full year. It took way more time than shooting it and in some ways it was harder. We figured it out. Tim and I are both storytellers. I know how to build a dramatic narrative, and it wasn’t that different from writing a book.

Did you have any preconceptions of war before you went in?

Everyone’s conceptions of war come from Hollywood. I had a certain vision of what it would look like and feel like, and it wasn’t anything like that. There were awful instances of massacres and ethnic cleansing, but by the time I got there there was very little front line combat, which is of course what we all picture when we think of the word ‘war.’ I was surprised by that and I realized war is a lot more elusive than people imagine.

Photojournalist Ben Lowry recently said something interesting in an interview. He said that as soon as he picks up the camera, he’s able to temporarily put aside his natural human reactions to what he sees in front of him. How do you feel behind the camera?

For me having a camera in my arms was like having a baby in my arms. I had something to focus my concerns on rather than thinking about myself. Once I was in combat without the camera and because I had nothing to do, I thought about my fear and then it became overwhelming. The camera gives you something to do, but I can’t imagine a situation where you’re filming civilian casualties and somehow because you’re looking through the lens you’re not getting affected by those things.

And anyway, you’re not really looking through the lens. I would keep the camera at my hip and point it. Because you need situational awareness, so I very rarely have the camera to my eye.

So you are able to think about technique and craft as a cameraperson and reporter during combat situations.

Yeah – hold the camera 10 seconds, try not to react to every noise because it makes for chaotic footage. Make sure you see the audio levels popping and I would make sure the record light’s on. Shooting’s pretty intuitive when you remove the technical aspects, which in combat I would do.

In the interviews in the film, I noticed that the men try to suppress their emotions, so when we finally see their emotions break through in the battles, it’s a gut-wrenching moment. We don’t really see men who are not actors express intense emotion. Does emotion fit into your job as a journalist?

Without emotions, you’re not really a journalist in some ways. You have to be very human to be a good journalist. Emotions are part of being human.

Does it affect your ability to be neutral about a situation?

Listen, I don’t think there is neutrality. If I see civilians who’ve been killed or wounded, I’m definitely not neutral about that. Whoever did that made a mistake or committed a crime. There’s only two choices. In terms of human rights, I’m not neutral at all. In the Korengal we were getting shot at a lot. I don’t think journalists in World War II were neutral about the Nazis, nor should they have been. On and on through the wars, neutrality is an illusion.

You can evaluate the two sides neutrally in terms of basic respect for human rights and human dignity – I think there are universals and it’s a kind of neutrality to apply those universals to everybody. But in the end, the idea that you could be perfectly neutral while someone’s trying to kill you is a fantasy.

The film wasn’t neutral either. Or maybe apolitical is a better word.

We were as political as the soldiers were, which is to say, not at all. Had we shot that same film in Vietnam, you would’ve heard soldiers talking about the war and whether we should be in Vietnam or not. It was a draft army, a lot of guys resented being there. In Restrepo, they just didn’t have those kind of conversations. We wanted to capture and convey the experience of the soldiers.

We’re journalists and journalists really shouldn’t express their personal opinion – that’s not journalism, that’s advocacy. Which is great. Advocacy is a fine, powerful thing and there’s definitely room for it in the media but it really isn’t journalism. What we didn’t want to do was approach it the way Fox News approaches their stories, which is trying to lead viewers to their opinion. We were very, very careful about that.

As soon as you broaden the context of the movie and start talking to generals and politicians, you inevitably wind up in the big argument about the war. That’s fine, but then you lose sight of the soldiers. We focused on what the soldiers experienced out there. And you really can’t do both. You can’t have the grand strategic, political argument and show what an MRE tastes like.

The great thing about the media is, if we’re not doing it, someone else is. I don’t think narrowness of focus is a problem as long as news consumers get their news from a broad spectrum of sources because then they do get every food group.

One of the things that’s very hard for a civilian to understand is how sometimes it seems that soldiers can be gleeful about killing, can be happy that they struck down an enemy. Do you think that reaction is necessary for survival in war?

I don’t think it’s necessary, but I think it’s unavoidable. When they’re gleeful about killing someone, they’re gleeful about someone who’s trying to kill them – a guy with a gun in his hand who’s dedicated his life to killing them. It’s one more down, five hundred to go. They’re a little bit safer, they’re a little bit closer to going home alive. Those are very ancient, universal human responses to danger. As soon as another human being tries to kill you, in your mind, they stop being a human being. That’s how war works.

I grew up in a very left-wing family in Cambridge, Massachusetts post-Vietnam and as soon as someone blew me up and started shooting at me, I couldn’t care less about that guy. Seriously, if I could kill [him], I would push the button. I’m there with a camera, so that’s not the role I’m in, but in my mind that was absolutely my reaction to being targeted.

You mention in other interviews that you didn’t really see the enemy up close. Would that have made a difference?

Someone pointing a gun at you at fifty feet is not a person. There’s no humanizing aspect to that. If anything, they are more threatening, more scary, more evil. If a motorcycle gang broke into your house with shotguns, seeing those guys up close, worrying about what they’re about to do to you – there’s no humanizing aspect to that.

If you sat everyone down at a dinner table and had some sort of conversation, that’s a humanizing process, but being in a firefight so close that you can see the other guy’s face, that doesn’t do anything. It just means you’re in more danger than if he was 300 yards away.

Could you explain the ritual of blood in, blood out?

Before you went on leave, you got jumped on and beaten up a bit. When you came back, the same thing happened and now you were part of the group again. They even did that with Lt. Gillespie when he was taking command in 2008. And they wouldn’t have done it to him if they hadn’t respected him. And had he said, “Guys, stop; I’m a lieutenant, get your hands off me,” they would have stopped immediately and they would have never respected him again. It wasn’t inflicted arbitrarily – he had control – but they were watching his reaction very carefully.

The idea was that everyone was reliant on everyone else at Restrepo. That’s a particular set of rules that allowed people to survive, and when they went home on leave, they would adopt a different set of rules where back in society you’re the most important thing to yourself. At Restrepo, you had to be the least important thing to yourself. The welfare of the platoon had to be the most important thing. That’s a very different way of thinking.

So they marked that transition ritually. Everyone got it. They replicated initiation rituals that have existed for thousands of years in every tribal society in the world. They’re not anthropologists, but they somehow replicated a very, very ancient male ritual of defining inclusion in the group through your willingness to submit to a certain amount of pain.

Do you still talk to the men in the film?

Some of them. I was closer to some than others.

How are they doing? Are they still serving?

About half of them are. About half of them have gotten out. Most did another deployment.

That’s a strange decision for me to understand because war is portrayed as so traumatic and yet soldiers sign up again.

They’re young, so they don’t have a productive role in society. They’re 20, 21 years old. What society offers them pales in comparison to the level of responsibility, status, significance and sense of purpose that combat offers them. Everyone wants to be purposeful and useful and valued and clear in their mind about what they’re doing, and combat offers those experiences way more intensely than life as a teenager does.

Belonging to a unit, belonging to a group, is a very particularly human force. We evolved in communities of thirty or forty, and everyone was inter-reliant. A platoon probably reproduces that part of our evolutionary past and resonates very deeply with people who experience it, so they miss it. They miss that and to some degree they miss the adrenaline of combat.

If they could come back from war and be a successful 48 year old with a business and a family… but that’s not where they’re re-entering society. They’re entering society as an unemployed 19 year old who’s trying to get a job during a recession. Compared to that, combat’s a great deal. It’s no comparison.

So how should we as a society help vets reintegrate and deal with the physical and mental consequences of war?

That’s a huge broad problem, but first thing: they need a job. I don’t know why there isn’t a national job program for vets where you’re guaranteed a job. Period, end of sentence. Even if it’s raking leaves in national parks. Every vet should have a guaranteed job when he comes back and it’d be a great stimulus to the economy. I don’t think it would cost that much and it would give people a sense of purpose and an income.

Some of them need therapy, some don’t. Some need talk therapy, some don’t. Some need drugs, some don’t. All of that stuff is available through the VA. I think the VA is a horrible bureaucracy that’s sluggish and that’s got to be somehow made leaner and more effective. It could take months for someone to get a drug prescription filled, a drug they really need.

But to some degree there is no coming back. You’re best friend gets shot in the head during combat – you’re not going to be made fully whole. And society has this idea that if we just do the right things, we can make these young people exactly the way they were before their experiences of war. It’s an illusion. They got good things out of combat and they suffered for it in ways that will always pain them. You can’t rewind the clock any more than you can for any other of life’s tragedies. But that’s not to say we can’t do a lot more.

Is that how you feel about your own reaction to war?

To a limited degree. I don’t have the moral issues surrounding killing, which are troubling to those guys, especially if they worry that they may have killed civilians. As a journalist, I never dropped bombs on anyone, I never had a gun. I don’t have to worry about having gotten anyone else killed because no one was relying on me for mutual self-defense. I can’t imagine that I failed in some way and that’s why So-and-So got killed, which is torture that all soldiers put themselves through.

Those are two huge sources of PTSD. All I had to deal with was the trauma of almost getting killed and being in danger, which is relatively minor compared to those other two. The idea that you killed civilians or that your mistake caused someone else’s death – that’s a life-long trauma. Almost getting killed passes pretty quickly. The initial aspects of it dissipate within a few weeks and then I would say within a few years there’s a lingering effect, but it’s totally manageable.

What sort of effects?

I still have dreams occasionally. They’re not necessarily bad dreams, but they’re emotional.

When you look back at your time in Afghanistan, is there a single event or series of events that you remember more than others?

There were some firefights that I won’t soon forget. Getting blown up in that Humvee was intense. I had a good time out there. It’s strange to phrase it that way, but it was twenty men on a hilltop and we definitely knew how to make each other laugh. I miss it.

What’s your outlook for Afghanistan now that bin Laden has been killed and the troop drawdown has been announced?

What happens in Afghanistan depends on what we do. We’re not leaving by 2014. I might be wrong but I really doubt it. If we just pulled the plug and walked out right now, Afghanistan would implode and the level of violence would skyrocket. Corruption in the government is probably the next front of the war. The next phase is tackling corruption in the Afghan government which will raise the level of confidence Afghans have in the process and make it harder for the Taliban to operate there. But that’s another ten years.

Have your experiences at Restrepo changed the way that you work or look at your own work?

It changed me as a person. I’m never going to do an assignment like that again. It was a particular thing. In some sense, it didn’t change anything because it was so particular.

Will you do more film work?

I’m making a film about Tim for HBO.

Thanks for taking the time to speak to us.