Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, whose behavior has enraged and mystified so many people, was serving, in 2009, at Outpost Mest Malak, in Paktika Province, in eastern Afghanistan. In recent days, many soldiers in Bergdahl’s platoon have offered a fragmentary impression of what Bergdahl was like. What they haven’t conveyed—what they may not want to convey—is the reality of living and fighting for months at a remote outpost surrounded by hostile members of the Taliban.
But such an account exists—an extraordinarily visceral and intimate record of something very close to Bergdahl’s experience. In 2007 and 2008, Sebastian Junger and the late Tim Hetherington spent fourteen months with the Second Platoon, Battle Company, in a similar outpost—this one in the Korengal Valley, in northeastern Pakistan. In 2007, the U.S. was convinced that having a presence in the valley was a strategic necessity. The Americans were intended to flush out Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, and to draw other fighters away from regions that were more likely to work with the U.S. In other words, the Americans were a kind of magnet.
In two great documentaries, “Restrepo” (2010) and its sequel “Korengal” (2014), Junger and Hetherington got the daily routine of an outpost onto film, with moving results. The terrain, as we see right away, is spectacular but harrowing for standard military operations—a small, green valley surrounded by huge, brownish mountains with sparse vegetation and split by angled, rocky roads that would challenge most military vehicles. In the first film, on the way into the valley, Junger and Hetherington were riding in a Humvee when an I.E.D. went off under the engine, sparing the soldiers and filmmakers who were sitting to the rear. The camera jumps, the men leap out of the Humvee and start firing—the sequence is unnerving, to say the least. Much of the movie feels that way. The filmmakers accompany patrols that were explicitly meant to draw fire. Under attack, the soldiers, in a state of crazy fear and exhilaration, pour fire into the bush. They rarely see the enemy. The threat came from “three hundred and sixty degrees around you,” as one man says. Some of the men are veterans; one of them is a boy who speaks about calling his mother.
Early in their time in the valley, a popular twenty-year-old medic named Juan “Doc” Restrepo was killed, and the platoon decided to name a firebase they built, perched on a ridge, after him. They didn’t start from scratch—the Taliban had used the position before them. In the middle of the night, the platoon fortified the area, eventually completing a rough enclosure where the men could sleep and eat. Some of the fiercest firefights take place right at Restrepo as the men, standing behind sandbags, fire across the valley at unseen targets. Holding their lightweight sound and recording equipment, the filmmakers hang in there as bullets fly all around.
The entire movie has a preternatural alertness, an acquaintance with fear. Junger and Hetherington don’t speak, but, in a later interview, the platoon leader Captain Dan Kearney told them that “I felt like I was a fish in a barrel.” No one at Restrepo is quite at ease. The men talk about family and wrestle each other just for some affectionate body contact. It’s hot, and uniforms turn decorative and skimpy, just as at Bergdahl’s base. The fear-tinged boredom, alternating with bouts of fighting, goes on day after day, for months. There isn’t a hell of a lot to do. Men in Bergdahl’s platoon thought that he was odd because he liked to read.
In between skirmishes, Kearney performed his job of winning “hearts and minds,” that sickeningly familiar phase from Vietnam days. The captain sits down with red-bearded village elders and tries to explain to them that a nearby road-building project will bring money into the valley; the soldiers are there, he says, to divert the Taliban from the project. He promises wealth and demands coöperation and information. But the elders, who look like a canny lot, don’t say much. In a later sequence, three of them climb to the outpost and demand five hundred dollars for a cow that the Americans killed after it got tangled in razor wire. The Americans offer them the cow’s weight in beets and rice, and the three men go away in a rage.
Their concerns are local and immediate; they want to survive the two military forces and protect their families. Kearney’s frustration is palpable (he senses that he’s being played by the elders), and, in his later interview, he admits that the population of the valley was deeply rooted in local traditions and religious ideals, and getting them to fight the Taliban “is the hard part.” A nervous young villager, captured in the valley, informs the soldiers, “If we tell you about the Taliban, then we will get killed.”
“What are we doing?” asks specialist Sterling Jones, one of the more thoughtful men in Second Platoon. In “Korengal,” which Junger edited after Hetherington was killed, in Libya, the men ask that question again. After heavily bombing the valley and suffering forty American deaths and many more casualties, the U.S. finally abandoned Korengal in 2010. What Captain Kearney said earlier turned to to be right: despite handing out cash, building medical facilities, and aiding agriculture, the Army couldn’t turn these rooted Afghans against the Taliban. As you watch the two movies, you know that grand strategy has collapsed into absurdity.
What Bowe Bergdahl went through has to be one of the most enraging and baffling experiences of futility that any soldier has faced in the last fifty years of America’s benighted military operations. Perhaps not every scene in “Restrepo” and “Korengal” bears on his life, but the outposts were certainly similar, and the two movies are full of menacing intimations of what he went through. If you want to understand what Outpost Mest Malak felt like on a blistering day, or what a reconnaissance patrol in Taliban-controlled country did to infantry soldiers like Bergdahl, you have to see these films.
Above: Outpost Restrepo. Photograph by Tim Hetherington.
