Restrepo

Today I spent the majority of my time basking in the sun, reading "The Federalist", and writing my personal statement. Quite a life of leisure it seemed.

To wind down the day, my friend and I popped in "Restrepo" the movie.

"Restrepo", a movie about the Korangal Valley, was very intense. Emotionally it can be hard to bear but it also informs the watcher of what happens in one of the deadliest and most dangerous areas of war. The men in the film were on a mission to build a camp in the Valley which was known to take fire from the Taliban daily.

While in the valley, fighting was on an off, but the deployed soldiers lost two during the film. One of the men was Officer Restrepo, whom the camp is now commonly referred after. You get to see his exuberance, his uplifting spirit and his commitment to the deployment. The hardest part of the film was not seeing the dead soldiers but seeing the reactions to the death by the fellow servicemen. It was hard to see them troubled and emotionally unstable. Their interviews brought me to tears without even a description of the events. It was the faces of the soldiers, the quiver of the lips that brought me to tears. To know that someone so strong, willing to fight for the country and having faced so many Taliban soliders; to know that even they wanted to cry can only bring the strongest of heart to cry.

The film was well worth the watch and I highly recommend that anyone looking to form an opinion on the tours of duty in Afghanistan watch the film. Beware it is all real footage, but it can only be so moving that way.