It's made the rounds in the theater & now on TV....



NatGeo channel, Mon 29 Nov.....

A must watch....I've got the tivo set....

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/epis...t-4808/Overview

THE NEW YORK TIMES
June 20, 2010
FILM
Valley of Death: One Platoon’s Tour of Duty

By DAVID CARR
Ask almost any American, even those opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they will state that they “support our troops.”

It’s a lovely thought, that we care for the soldiers who do the fighting regardless of politics at hand. But for the most part public interest and understanding of what American soldiers do on our behalf remains remarkably limited in wars that go mostly untelevised and undernoticed. American men and women fight, die and kill a long ways from home, and many want it to stay that way. “Restrepo,” a documentary directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, which will open on June 25 in Los Angeles and New York, is a 94-minute tutorial on life at the tip of that very sharp spear. Specifically, Mr. Junger, a veteran war correspondent and author of several books, including “The Perfect Storm,” and Mr. Hetherington, a longtime war photographer, spent 14 months, beginning in May 2007, with a platoon of United States soldiers in the Korangal Valley of Afghanistan.

“Restrepo” avoids the conventions of documentary film: there is no back story, no drive-bys with experts for context, no underlying ideology or obvious message. The viewer is dropped into war, with a hard jolt, and resides, along with 15 soldiers from Second Platoon of Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, in a remote and raw outpost called Restrepo, so named after one member of the platoon who is killed early in their rotation. In practical terms the soldiers of Second Platoon hump up a mountain with lots of bullets and some shovels and dig in. During the day they make efforts at outreach, handing over food and sometimes cash to local people, many of whom return at night to shoot at them. “It is a weird sort of anti-paradise,” Mr. Junger said in a phone call from Houston, where he was on a book tour for “War,” his best seller based on the same reporting. “They were in the most extreme place in the valley, which was the most extreme place in Afghanistan. By 2007 a fifth of the fighting in Afghanistan took place there.”

The Korangal Valley, full of giant peaks and hidden enemies, has a bit of reputation inside the military.

“Everybody is like, ‘Oh, you’re going to the Korangal?,’ and they feel sad for you,” Capt. Dan Kearney says in the film. “The deadliest place on earth. The Korangal Valley.”

The battle-hardened approach to depicting the current conflicts has shown up in features, on television and in other documentaries: “The Hurt Locker,” a feature film about a bomb-disposal unit in Iraq that won the best picture Oscar this year; “Generation Kill,” a 2008 HBO mini-series by David Simon and Ed Burns; and “Gunner Palace,” a 2005 documentary about an artillery unit in Iraq.

But “Restrepo” (pronounced res-TREP-o) may be the most frightening among them because the soldiers are so clearly on their own, isolated and often beyond the reach of the technological might of the United States military. Once viewers adjust to seeing life from inside a helmet, they could not be blamed for wondering how Mr. Hetherington and Mr. Junger survived. Suffice to say that both men, who each did assignments for Vanity Fair magazine while working on the film, still bear marks from their time alongside the soldiers in the Second Platoon.