Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, directors of the documentary Restrepo, recently met with a few reporters for a roundtable interview to discuss their film and their experience being embedded with a platoon in a remote outpost in Afghanistan.

Did you have to get permission from the military to interview the men you were embedded with?

Sebastian Junger: There's a system for embedding journalists with units. If the public affairs office okays someone and puts them with a unit, the men themselves don't have to talk to you, but they have no basis for rejecting your presence there. But no one can force someone to talk. Likewise with officers—some officers really don't like the media and I think raise a stink when they're told journalists are going to come with them, and other officers are fine with it. The guys we were with were absolutely fine with it. I think at the end of the day, if a battalion commander says "I don't care what you think, you're going to be nice to this guy," that's not a good situation for anybody. At the end of the day, it's the chain of command.

Tim Hetherington: Also, at the beginning when you first turn up, the military has a peculiar relationship with the press—and justifiably so. When we first turned up in the Korengal, the company commander, Kearney, said "Go up to Restrepo; go with Second Platoon." And it was kind of like saying "Second Platoon, you have to have these guys with you." They were probably grumbling a bit, but after a while—they started "Yes, sir. No sir." to you, and after a while those barriers break down. They realized we were in there for a long haul. We were going to do everything that they did—eat their food, sleep where they slept, go our on patrol. So they didn't have to talk to us, but in the end they wanted to. And the Italy interviews are very revealing. The way we turned up in Italy three months after the end of their deployment, we weren't authority figures; we weren't the company commander; we weren't the people from the public information office; we weren't the company shrink. We were people who had lived these experiences with them and they opened up to us in a way that was pretty revelatory.

When you think about Rock Avalanche [a brutal and costly battle], what memory comes up for you?

TH: Rock Avalanche was a really tough situation. In the film we boil it down to three days. In fact it was six or seven days. You know it was a pretty traumatic time for the guys there, and it was a traumatic time for me. I was with them when American lines were overrun—guys were killed. It was also a couple of days after this that I broke my leg and had to walk down the mountain in the middle of the night. I got out, but unfortunately the First Platoon, the night I got out with my injuries, they got ambushed and two were killed and three were wounded. So it was a costly battle. I also remember the five Afghans who died and the ten who were wounded. I think it was a traumatic time, but war's traumatic and I had the brotherhood of the soldiers while I was out there. I think of the families back home left worrying when they hear on the news that something happened, they don't know what. The men have a kind of brotherhood, but the wives are on their own. They're fighting the war at home. I hope the film kind of—soldiers don't come home and tell their loved ones what they went through. Yet those loved ones want to know what happened. And there are millions of Americans here who I think the film will help understand the experience of combat.

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