Photographs and text by Tim Hetherington
For 14 months off and on during 2007–08, my colleague Sebastian Junger and I followed a platoon of U.S. Airborne soldiers deployed to Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. In a remote outpost—named Restrepo, after the platoon medic Juan Restrepo who was killed earlier in the year—located high up on the side of a mountain, Sebastian and I forged a unique bond with the men of Second Platoon. We lived in rudimentary conditions, slept where they slept, ate what they ate, and went where they went. When we arrived in September 2007, the news focus was still very much on Iraq, and I was unprepared for the level of combat that was already taking place in the six-mile-long valley. By the end of October, 18 percent of all fighting in the entire country was happening in the Korengal, 70 percent of U.S. ordnance was being used there, and Battle Company was running a casualty rate of close to 25 percent. As I gained a growing intimacy with the men, I was able to get to a deeper perspective on the nature of war. Images of baby-faced soldiers deep in slumber became more disturbing when viewed alongside pictures of the same men crying over recently dead friends or looking on as local Afghan men carried their children wounded by U.S. airstrikes. The following photographs tell some of their stories.
Tim Hetherington was killed in the Libyan city of Misurata on Wednesday, April 20, 2011, along with colleague Chris Hondros. Two other photographers working beside them were wounded. Hetherington and Junger’s film, Restrepo, was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
