“We did our job and now we’re going home,” says a GI. This is the theme of “Restrepo,” a National Geographic documentary which describes the 15-month tour of duty of an Army platoon whose job was to secure a valley in a mountainous area of Afghanistan so that a road could be built there to “help” the people of the valley.
“Restrepo” follows in the footsteps of the Oscar-winning film, “The Hurt Locker” which tells the story of caring, capable men assigned to a U.S. Army bomb-disposal unit. It brings to life the U.S. ruling-class slogan to “support the troops even if you oppose the war.“ But the only way to support working-class troops is for PLP to organize in the military to turn the guns around on the warmakers. The only way the working class wins is when we build a Red Army to fight for a communist revolution.
In this film we are asked to feel the camaraderie of men at war, the grief they feel at the death of one of their platoon members and their joy at the death of one of the insurgents. They all “have a job to do” and they do it without any questioning of the Afghan war or their role in it. It recalls the oft-repeated line in “The Godfather” movie that “it isn’t personal, it’s just business.” The ruling class needs soldiers to believe this so they will continue killing their working-class brothers and sisters, in the bosses’ widening wars for profit and control.
In the film, one of the Army’s strategies is to win over the people in the village near their camp. The Army must apologize for the mass destruction of the villagers and their resources. The Army replaces the officer held responsible for the atrocities. His replacement meets with village elders and tells them that he won’t make the same mistakes as the previous officer and that the elders should trust him.
This pushes the idea that the military as a whole is doing the right thing, and is for the villagers. By replacing the one “bad” officer, we are to believe the villagers will be protected.
After their 15-month tour of duty, the soldiers go home, but the village and its elders are still there with the insurgents and a new group of soldiers who they are supposed to trust. The U.S. troops eventually withdraw from the valley after 50 U.S. soldiers have been killed. The documentary neglects to document how many civilians and insurgents were killed or how much destruction the U.S. military caused.
“Restrepo,” like “The Hurt Locker,” is a description of U.S. military duty as “just another job.” The men are shown as accepting the necessity of fighting imperialist wars for control of oil, oil pipelines and new-found mineral wealth. Neither the men nor the documentary questions the politics or morality of the war. Couched as “objectivity,” this allows ruling-class justifications for the war to go unquestioned and therefore dominate the discussion.
We need to bring CHALLENGE’S understanding of U.S. imperialism to high school students who will be joining the military and we need to win soldiers to PLP so that these wars will not be “business as usual.” Then we can make new documentaries that will tell the story of working-class rebellions and communist victories.