Restrepo

Posted on November 29, 2010

Tonight at 9PM on the National Geographic Channel there will be a showing of Restrepo, the award winning documentary by Sebastian Junger (of A Perfect Storm fame) and Tim Hetherington.

I have been eager (and a little frightened) to see it.  The reviews say that it is an extraordinary depiction of a deployment in Afghanistan in the Korengal Valley, the most dangerous war zone in the world right now.  It is not political.  It apparently offers little perspective.  It’s all about the immediacy, the reality of what these soldiers go through and it is apparently harrowing.

I continue to have a gnawing fear that our society has made war too easy.  It is distant, mostly fought by too few people with too few options in life, and our society at large makes too few direct sacrifices (though the $190m per day we spend in Afghanistan seems to register not at all with deficit hawks).  We thus go about our daily business while these men and women live in a kind of daily hell.  If the draft were re-instituted today, the war would end tomorrow.  That’s the simple truth of the matter.