You know, what's interesting
about war is that there's
lots of generalizations made up about it.
But in going to these extremities, that what's
interesting is that you see
that even in these terrible
times, in these terrible moments,
in these terrible extremities,
that people are still human.
I think that that for me is
like the redeeming factor
of the human experience.
No, that sounds too fucking bullshit.
INTERVIEWER: Well, I think it was good.
I think we're almost there.
You know, there's a lot of people who make
kind of generic--
No, I don't want to say,
"There's a lot of people, you know.
I think the important thing for me is
to make work that is connected to people,
you know.
Uh, I like to--Oh, shit. Sorry, man.
Ha ha ha!
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Start over. Yeah.
[Clears throat]
How can I get it--I just kind of, like, bloop!
Ah...
I think the important thing for me is
to connect with real people, you know,
to document them in these extreme
circumstances, you know,
where there aren't any kind of neat
solutions or where you can't put
any kind of neat guidelines
and say, "This is what it's about..."
or, "This is what it's about..."
It's not.
I hope that my work kind of shows that.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, that was strong.
Yeah?
INTERVIEWER: Yeah.
♪
[Radio playing American pop music]
TIM: So which way is the-- which way is the front line
from here?
MAN: That way.
♪
DIFFERENT MAN: Jesus, Guillermo.
You got to stay down.
Fuck. Look at that, nice little shooter.
TIM: If we got shot at, just jump on it.
[Laughter in truck]
[Gunfire]
[Shouting in foreign language]
[Shouting commands in foreign language]
[Man laughing off-camera]
Good.
TIM: Crazy.
Yes, it's crazy.
[Men talking and shouting in foreign language]
[Gunfire]
♪
[Men talking and shouting in foreign language]
[Gunshots]
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: I risk my life
for a lot of different things.
As a documentary photographer,
I probe this idea the whole time,
of what am I doing and why am I doing it.
You know, a single photo isn't necessarily a story,
so you have to ask yourself the question, "Why do you
put yourself in that position?"
And I do it for lots of different reasons.
I do it also for personal reasons, you know,
as much as I do it for the objective truth.
In war, you see so many crazy things happening.
You see all sorts of different human emotions
crystallized.
Reporting on these things that are very complex
and political gives you
an insight into human behavior that imbues
your reporting with a sense of meaning and significance.
It's addictive in that way, yeah.
[Crows cawing]
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: As a photographer, you need
to develop a way of working that suits your personality
but also allows you to bring out
the sort of subject matter that you think is important.
[Kids talking in foreign language]
TIM, VOICE-OVER: At the root of my work is
really this kind of whole idea of intimacy.
I become deeply embedded emotionally
in all the work I do.
[Speaking Tamil]
Wow! She's really a bright character, eh?
How old are you?
[Speaks Tamil]
TRANSLATOR: 9 years old.
TIM: 9 years old?
What's her favorite time at school?
[Girl speaks Tamil]
[Translator speaks Tamil]
TIM: You seem very intelligent for 9, huh?
Just keep looking in here and don't move.
[Translator speaks Tamil]
TIM, VOICE-OVER: It's necessary, I think,
in raising sort of consciousness
of serious political or social events
to create something that works on a more
imaginative level, something that will allow the viewer
to engage creatively with the subject.
[Speaking foreign language]
TIM: Can you see me?
Hello, Britad!
OK, we're going to swap now,
and you're going to come and sit here.
TIM, VOICE-OVER: For me, it's all
about personalization.
Often, we see scenes of disaster,
and it's almost like we forget
that the people imaged are individuals,
with individual stories and lives.
TIM: You're done, OK, no problem.
Ask him, "Was that painful?"
[Translator laughs]
"Yeah."
TIM: It was painful.
[Laughs]
Yeah, that's the sad truth about photography.
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: I got into photography because I got
into travel.
I lived in 12 different places in Britain;
I never had a community that I lived with.
And what I do now is a reflection of that.
Because of my work, we moved around quite--quite a lot.
I don't say that we were-- the family was gypsies,
but Tim certainly was brought up in a family
that were used to living
in different parts of the country.
WOMAN: He was always very comfortable and confident
with people, and I think that was
one of his great gifts,
that he could communicate at whatever level,
whether it was children or adults,
and in whatever condition.
ALISTAIR: As an undergraduate at Oxford, Tim had a very wide
and enquiring mind and was intensely interested
in everything that took his attention.
He finished his degree, and he went to India.
After a year, we couldn't get him back.
Had three faxes in over two years from him
from odd places.
He was a person who seldom became a tourist.
His mind and the interest led him
really to immerse himself.
That sort of commonplace impulse was
of the foundation of really the rest of his life.
♪
TIM: It kind of occurred to me that we were living
in an image-based world
and that that would be kind of a really
interesting way to communicate with people.
Eventually a friend of mine said,
"You know, if you really want to do this properly,
you should go back to college,"
and there was a course in Cardiff that he pointed out,
and it was about photojournalism.
And he said, "Well, that's
telling stories with pictures," and I thought,
well, that's a pretty--
that's kind of what I want to do.
MAN: Well, as I remember Tim in '96, he was a big,
rangy fellow.
Tall, thin, very affable,
and he had a nice laugh
and a relaxed manner
about him, but he was also, obviously, very bright
and he was also warm.
My whole belief--about photography is that it's
about engaging with people, and Tim engaged with people
with knobs on.
DIFFERENT MAN: I think he was willing to put himself
in difficult situations.
He did a piece about a hospital,
and as it turned out, he had spent sort of 24 hours
at A & E, which most of us wouldn't, you know,
dream of doing at the time.
It's a lot of dedication
to spend 24 hours in that situation.
♪
ROSE: It was a pointer to the sort of way he worked
and what he did later on.
♪
MEADOWS: Tim embraced--
and he was the only student that year
who really got into it-- he embraced multi-media.
I think of him as probably my first genuinely
modern student.
He saw right from the word go
that the future wasn't going to be just about print.
♪
The future is about learning to work across many
different platforms, for many different audiences,
in many different ways.
It's about having a subject matter that you've immersed
yourself in completely.
And he had a way of being able to do that
that was remarkable, and not many people
have been able to do that.
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: Photography liberated me
from the workplace.
It made me free.
It would allow me to express myself.
It channeled me.
It made me free
from a kind of destructive tendency
that I guess I had inside myself
so I could channel my energy somewhere.
It made me free to move.
I need to move.
That's just how I am.
[Man speaking foreign language]
TIM: It's OK?
Yeah. You can--carry on.
No problem.
TIM, VOICE-OVER: I love working with people.
I think that I can move into diverse situations
as a stranger fairly easily.
I've spent the last-- you know, many years
doing that.
TIM: How do you say "very good" in Tamil?
"Allam."
TIM: "Allam" is good?
Yeah. Very good?
Yeah, very good. "Allam."
"Allam"?
"Allam."
TIM: OK, your English--"allam."
Allam. Yeah. Yeah.
I know about 5 words of about 30 languages.
Yes. Allam.
TIM, VOICE-OVER: I find that instead of interaction
ruining the dynamic of the images,
it actually breaks through the ice straightaway
and allows you just to get on and start working.
I mean it's really obvious I'm there.
I'm a big white guy, I'm in your country, and for me
to pretend otherwise is just plain stupid.
It's nice to see. Yeah.
TIM: How do I say "good-bye?"
But not a good-bye. "I'll see you again"?
FISHERMAN: Foi du aarum. Tamil.
TIM: Foi--
Foi du aarum.
[Foi DU AIR-um] Foi du aarum.
Aarum. Right!
Foi du aarum. Yeah.
OK, because I'm going to walk off.
I see. So, "Foi du aarum"
and "nandry."
"Nandry."
[Laughter]
[All speaking Tamil]
"Nallam." Nallam.
TIM, VOICE-OVER: The idea of becoming a journalist
and illustrating my own ideas came, you know,
about in '99.
And that was when I found out
about a group of footballers from Liberia
coming to the UK on a football tour.
And they were ex-combatants that had fought in the war
in Liberia.
Here they were from one of the poorest countries
in the world visiting one of the richest,
and I thought that was
a really interesting story about worlds colliding.
And they said, "You know what?
"We're looking for somebody to go to Liberia.
Will you go for us?"
And that's how it all began.
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: When I went to Liberia,
it just blew me away.
I'd never experienced a country
like that before in my life.
And it was two years after the end of the civil war,
two years into the reign of Charles Taylor,
and I went to photograph football
as one of the more positive things that was going on
in Liberia at the time.
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: "Healing Sport" was
the first coherent project
that I made as a photographer.
I made it under the idea of "Trojan horses."
The idea was: can we talk about things that people are
reluctant to talk about by disguising them
in other vehicles?
And so basically "Healing Sport" was about war,
but it was disguised as sport.
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: After working in Liberia,
I went to Sierra Leone in '99.
A rebel army,
the Revolutionary United Front, the RUF,
had invaded Freetown.
And I went with a surgeon into the interior, and we
came across people that had been blinded by the rebels,
so I made a series of portraits of them.
[Students singing in Sierra Leone dialect]
MAN: Many of the children lost their parents;
We have to take care of them.
TEACHER: Are you listening to me?
STUDENTS: Yes.
TEACHER: Hello...
CAMPBELL, VOICE-OVER: There's one girl, Sophie,
who had a rebel beat up her father and kill him
and rape the mother,
and then when she started crying, they melted
this plastic and dropped the thing in her eyes,
and that made her to be blind.
[Students speaking in Sierra Leone dialect]
MAN: Tim's work at the Milton Margai School
for the Blind was really pivotal to what happened
next in his career.
♪
BRABAZON, VOICE-OVER: He became really invested
in those children's lives.
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: A lot of photographers, I think,
are presenting their work as if it's like, you know,
"You have to see this,
the world needs to see this,"
this kind of, you know, moral outrage.
And for me, you know, moral outrage motivates me, but I
don't see it as a useful tool to get people to engage
with the world.
I think that we need to build bridges to people.
♪
BRABAZON, VOICE-OVER: He didn't give a Western audience
the images that they expected to see of the worst stereotypes
of what violence in West Africa means.
What he came back with was a really in-depth personal
profile, not just of the horror that they've been
through, but of the hope that they had of where they
were going.
What Tim saw in the blind school were
the effects of war.
He wanted to understand how it would be caused
in the first place.
And I think that what he went on to do in West Africa,
when he came to Liberia with me, when he stepped into
the middle of that war, was to see very clearly who was
perpetrating these acts of violence and why.
♪
BRABAZON, VOICE-OVER: I first met Tim
because he rang me up out of the blue and said,
"Hi. You don't know me. "My name is Tim Hetherington.
"I'd really like to come to Liberia with you and take
photographs of the rebels."
And I was kind of taken aback,
the idea of just suddenly taking Tim along
and, you know, throwing that exclusive
out the window.
It was like, "Yeah, sure, come along"--it's like,
Never going to happen, right?
It was just one of those meetings where things
just clicked and, you know, he's the same height as me,
we had similar education.
He came along to shoot video for the film that we
were making.
But part of the deal was that he'd be able to shoot
entirely his own portfolio of photographs.
SOLDIER: Liberia government officials are not enemies.
Taylor is our only enemy.
[Soldiers chant in foreign language]
BRABAZON, VOICE-OVER: In a way, I felt sort of
quite guilty, you know.
I mean, Tim had never been in combat.
He had never been on a front line in war
like this before.
[Gunshots]
[People shouting in foreign language]
I mean, he was totally unfazed, but then he
didn't really know what was about to happen next.
[Conversation in foreign language]
No.
TIM: No...
Yes.
Wow.
You can see, eh? Yeah.
There's all of us.
So you think he's a good driver or rubbish?
No, he's a good driver.
[Conversations in foreign language]
MAN, VOICE-OVER: The rebels, from the North, the LURD,
who Tim was traveling with, they were
largely ethnic Mandingo,
and they had felt really cast aside
by Taylor's regime,
and so to join up with the rebels would be
to throw your lot in with a bunch of young men--
teenagers at best,
and you're going to walk through some of the most
treacherous jungle conditions
that you can find anywhere,
toward a regime that's one of the most feared regimes
in West Africa.
Charles Taylor's regime was considered the source
of instability for Guinea,
Sierra Leone, and Ivory Coast.
[Chanting in foreign language]
BRABAZON, VOICE-OVER: The nature of the fighting
in Liberia, it wasn't just two armies facing each other off,
it was two groups of young men absolutely enamored
with the theatrics of war.
They used the drama to instill fear,
but they also used it to give themselves courage,
and the effect that that has on you is terrifying.
[Conversation in foreign language]
TIM, VOICE-OVER: It's kind of strange doing a job
where you're actually going out and then you're looking
for fighting.
[Man speaking foreign language]
TIM, VOICE-OVER: I remember in Liberia going down a road
and it was like this fucking heavy fighting
out there, man-- shouting and bombing,
and I'm like, "We're walking that way?"
Like, "It's like, too close up there
"and we're walking there?
Are we fucking insane?"
[Gunfire]
BRABAZON: Down, down, down, down, down!
[Bombs exploding]
[Men shouting in foreign language]
TIM, VOICE-OVER: You really kind of think, "Man,
"you wanted this, and now it's just gone too far."
Like, "You've really fucked it now.
"You're going to end up dead of..."
You know, "You've let everybody down, and you've--
just for what, for a picture, you know?"
[Gunfire, conversations in foreign language]
TIM, VOICE-OVER: And that's very frightening.
That's the ultimate loss of control.
Tim was just in it.
There comes a point where that just is your reality.
That stops becoming weird and different.
It's just what you're living
and breathing at that moment.
[Men shouting in foreign language]
TIM: Fuck! Fucking talk...
[speaking foreign language]
TIM, VOICE-OVER: You really don't know how you're going
to react in a combat zone, and luckily I kind of
reacted OK, when it first happened to me.
And I kind of keep my head together.
[Conversations in foreign language]
And I just think I have the ability to, like,
"OK, "I got to do this fucking shit.
I hate this shit, OK." Click that side of the brain off.
I can just do that.
[Camera turns off]
And I looked at Tim, and I thought, you know,
he's cool.
And I'd spent so long working there alone,
and suddenly I was there with someone
who really had his shit together,
who really knew what he was doing, who was filming
great stuff, taking amazing pictures.
And to get both video and stills, but really good,
you know--that's hard.
That's hard.
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: Not being so much interested in action
or traditional war photography, what I've tried
to do in the work was bring a quieter kind of reflection
to images of conflict, and I've done that by using
a medium format Rolleiflex.
It's a square-based format, which is
suited to portraiture.
♪
The great thing about using those kinds of camera
in war, apart from the fact that no one else was--
the fact that you had to slow down
and look for the moment, it's almost like
he saw a different layer visually to the conflict.
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: It changes the dynamic
of my relationship to people.
I look down into the camera at them, and I'm very tall.
If I put a camera to my face, it's like an object,
in a war zone it's like I stand out,
I'm very threatening,
so I changed the way that I worked.
It also means that I can talk to people
whilst I photograph them.
So you hear some photographers that will say
that they never talk to people,
that it's this objectivity thing.
TIM: No, no, no, no, no, no, Stay, stay.
What is it, what is it?
[Translator speaking foreign language]
TIM, VOICE-OVER: You know what?
I got to talk to people.
♪
MAN: Tim's work was not about war.
Tim's work was about human nature.
There's this picture of a fighter about to head
off to the battle, and you recognize immediately--
exactly for what it is,
this moment of saying good-bye.
It's this moment that speaks such a greater truth
about what war does to people
than seeing the action.
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: I was documenting different things
at different times, but one consistent thing
that I saw as I traveled around the country
during the war was this wall graffiti
that had been painted by armed factions in houses
that they'd taken over.
And I started to document this.
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: The names of people
became very important,
being able to trace where certain fighters were.
Taylor perfected a system of inversion in Liberia,
you know, where kids became killers, where women were
carrying ammunition,
and so that the graffiti, it sort of for me has
all of that loaded into it.
It was like these psychic scars of the war.
TIM, VOICE-OVER: And I think they have far more power
for me than some of the more gory images
that were taken by press photographers.
[Vehicle engine running]
Well, we just come in from--we walked
yesterday about, how far?
BRABAZON: About 35 miles.
Nothing to eat.
We slept at Po River Bridge, about ten of us
in a fucking sentry post,
and then we just endured--
fucking, I don't know--
5, 10 kilometers of firefights
to make it here to the beer factory,
and I'm pretty fucked.
BRABAZON: And did you just have a refreshing drink
at least?
I did. The beer factory is over there!
BRABAZON: And how good was that refreshing drink?
It was fucking awesome,
but I can't wait for my first beer
in the Mamba Point Hotel.
We got to the beer factory, which the rebels had turned
into their sort of headquarters,
and they'd also converted the interior
into a makeshift clinic.
And after about an hour or so, Iron Jacket--
deputy chief of staff, he decided
that this doctor, a paramedic from Monrovia
was a government spy.
[Men shouting in foreign language]
BRABAZON, VOICE-OVER: I turned around,
and I can see this happening.
And I'd already filmed several executions
in Liberia, and I thought,
"It's going to be another execution."
So I turn around and got it in a wide shot.
[Conversations in foreign language continue]
Next moment, Tim comes in, he grabs the, um...
the gun hand of Iron Jacket and starts negotiating
for the guy's life.
He just says, "Look, you know,
this is the only doctor you've got,"
and really just put himself directly
in the path of this.
They let the guy off, they didn't shoot him,
and very shortly he was back treating wounded
at the hospital again.
Tim had this ability to...
just do very surprising things.
You know, he didn't see a division between being
a photographer or a videographer
or a journalist
or a humanitarian or a participant.
He was just Tim.
And that...
It's very hard to find that.
[Conversations in foreign language]
ALISTAIR, VOICE-OVER: Tim was almost immeasurably
affected by what he had seen...
the horrors that had been perpetrated.
It was something that sort of sat on his shoulder
a bit, really,
and it reinforced his attitude to...
to the world.
I remember him once saying to me, you know,
"You're--very rich,"
And I said, "Well, with what definition?"
He said, "You are very rich because you are able to
"control and determine your own life
"and avoid the absolute devastation
that I have seen overwhelm people."
[Gunfire]
He was very forceful about it.
He said, "No, no, no,
you must understand, we are all very privileged."
[Conversations in foreign language]
You know, working at war,
myself, Tim, other journalists
develop mechanisms to cope.
A lot of the time, I think Tim looked for refuge
in his work...
[Gunfire]
striving always to be the best
and to get it right and to be different.
I think that brought him a lot of comfort,
and it helped him
to assimilate what he saw at war.
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: There were a lot of atrocities
committed during the war in Liberia.
I witnessed all sorts of different things.
But more importantly, what I witnessed were
the power relationships that happened
between the guys on the ground
and the people directing them.
♪
I was interested in young men and power,
young men and violence.
I think that war is part of the hard wiring
of young men, how they're really ultimately used
as tools for political process
because of genetics and chemistry.
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: The interesting thing
that I've recently come to understand
is that the role of witnessing
carries a kind of strong responsibility.
This is the only photograph that exists of the mortaring
of Monrovia that killed over a thousand people.
The leader of these rebels denied that his men
had mortared the city and everybody said, "No!
We've seen the picture, we've seen the picture."
Suddenly you realize that you're part and parcel
of this important historic process
of coming to terms with what happened.
♪
I decided at the end of the war to stay on
in Liberia.
It seemed that although the war had finished
that my job was not finished.
I felt that what Liberia needed was for people to
really take part in society,
and I lived and worked in West Africa for 8 years--
3 or 4 of those in Liberia.
BRABAZON, VOICE-OVER: It shows Tim's commitment.
He went in and he stayed in,
and he worked as a filmmaker,
as a photographer, as a teacher, as a mentor,
as an investigator, and as a humanitarian.
[Conversation in foreign language]
They see...
It's you and me.
TIM, VOICE-OVER: I have no desire to be a kind of
war fire fighter flying from war zone to war zone.
I have no--really, I don't really care
about photography.
I have no interest in photography per se.
I'm interested in reaching people
with ideas and engaging them with views of the world.
Me--Tim. You?
Me? Jima.
Jima. Yes.
So Tim...
[Explosion]
BRABAZON: All right.
TIM: Jesus Christ, man. That was right--
MAN: What just happened?
TIM: Ah, we were fucking walking down the hill and...
I think we were their targets.
It was just right, very close over our head,
incoming.
It looked like a kind of sniper or something.
It was like maybe about 5 rounds or so.
♪
MAN, VOICE-OVER: I had this idea of following a platoon
for an entire deployment in Afghanistan, and I realized
I needed to work with a photographer who was
really comfortable shooting video as well.
I needed someone who was in shape, who could carry
a lot of gear, and who had been
in a lot of combat.
Basically I needed someone like Tim,
and then I met Tim.
[Helicopter]
TIM, VOICE-OVER: In my work
as a photographer or filmmaker,
I always look to be as close to the subject as possible.
You're always looking for those moments
when the machine breaks down,
where there's cracks in it.
And I think what happened to us in terms
of being given access into this remote valley
in Afghanistan was
that people kind of forgot about us.
And I think it was that persistence of going back
and back that gave us such unique access.
Hey, guys, how you doing?
SOLDIER: Really sucking there, buddy.
Oh, you know, perfect day
for a stroll.
JUNGER, VOICE-OVER: When Tim and I got
into the Korengal Valley,
the things that soldiers evaluate are: are you going
to cause a problem, are you going to freak out
during combat and need to be taken care of,
and finally, are you going to be sort of
nasty and political about all this?
And Tim and I were clearly not doing that.
All right. Listen up.
Today we're going to conduct a movement to contact
in the village of Obi Nauw.
All right. We got 11 U.S. personnel,
5 A and A,
one terp and Sebastian and Tim.
Does anyone have any questions?
Let's go.
TIM, VOICE-OVER: I think what was interesting was
working with one platoon of soldiers
in this valley in Afghanistan,
and in some ways I could've been anywhere--you know,
it could've been any war.
I was looking at the experience
of the American soldiers.
I wasn't necessarily trying to say
anything about a truth of Afghanistan
or the truth of the political realities
on the ground.
MAN, VOICE-OVER: It was a very different
kind of project for Tim to take on
to spend all of this time with American soldiers
because Tim's instincts
would've been much more to just spend time
with Afghan civilians.
But what comes through is that war is difficult
for everybody.
[Man speaking Pashto]
All right. If there was anything,
suspicious going on,
would he be willing to tell us,
you know, come to OP Restrepo at any time
to let us know?
INTERPRETER: Yeah, all right.
[Translator speaking foreign language]
TIM, VOICE-OVER: The world was very much focused
on Iraq, and I thought that we would be walking
around in the mountains, we would be drinking
cups of tea with elders,
we'd occasionally get shot at,
and it'd be pretty uneventful,
but it was completely the opposite.
[Gunfire]
SOLDIER: You guys see it?
DIFFERENT SOLDIER: He's right over the top
of that fucking ridge, man.
TIM, VOICE-OVER: I was completely surprised by
the amount of fighting that was going on.
These guys were in a lot of combat.
Give me one.
TIM, VOICE-OVER: People really hadn't raised
their heads up to what was happening in Afghanistan.
DIFFERENT SOLDIER: Oh, shit!
SOLDIER: You up? You good?
Man, I'm good, I'm good, I'm good.
SOLDIER: He's back there, right?
Yeah, he's right fucking there.
Hey, he's still in there!
[Gunfire]
SOLDIER: Shit, man!
[Gunfire]
You got your...
TIM, VOICE-OVER: During that time, what was interesting
was that--not to belittle the kind of--
the fighting but I got kind of tired of it.
For me whilst there is a certain amount
of adrenaline to do with combat
and filming that, I mean, for me the really
important stories were being close to these men.
You know, that's what it's about.
That's what really I'm there for.
Oh...
OK.
TIM: Welcome to Aron's beauty parlor.
ARON: Yup.
Good morning!
So, here we are in the...
we've come to the barbershop in Korengal.
It's the compare for the day.
JUNGER: What's about to happen, Tim?
I'm going to let this lunatic at me
with a pair of clippers.
I don't know why, but, uh...
[Laughs]
I mean, take one look at him.
Would you trust this man?
What's the name of this particular haircut?
MAN: It's called the high and tight.
But for English purposes
it will be called the "high and mighty."
[Laughter]
[Laughing] High and mighty.
DIFFERENT MAN: This is what they do to you
when you first join the military.
Oh, no. You want to see what they do?
[Laughter]
JUNGER: Here he is, ladies and gentlemen.
TIM: How's it look? Pretty sexy, eh?
[Deadpan] Pretty sexy? Yeah.
[Laughter]
SOLDIER: My grandpa-- fucking, he'll sit there
and he'd tell stories about,
like, World War II and shit like that.
He doesn't tell stories about the war;
he tells stories about
the whorehouses in different countries.
[Laughter]
"When I was in Calcutta, India, Jesus Christ,
"craziest fucking broads
"there you ever fucking met.
"They'd do things that would just--
they'd blow your mind."
[Laughter]
DIFFERENT SOLDIER: So, while you're in Amsterdam, Tim,
you going to go to see the Red Light District?
TIM: It depends if my girlfriend comes
with me or not.
[Laughter]
[Laughing]
Oh, my...ha ha!
Oh...
JUNGER, VOICE-OVER: The lure of a place like Restrepo
inhabits a much more profound place in young men
than just, "Oh, I need some adrenaline."
Tim called it
"the man Eden."
It was just sort of for the young male psyche
this easy place to be.
TIM: Mac, what are we doing?
Well, we found a new hole to dig in.
You know, you'd think
after so many months
of being here, we'd be fucking done
with this shit, but we're not, so...
DIFFERENT MAN: Filling sandbags on the side
of a mountain, waiting to get shot at,
while making fun of each other and eating bad food
and telling bad jokes.
It was a great place to be if you're a man.
[Laughs]
O'BYRNE, VOICE-OVER: There was no social norms.
I think that doesn't happen a lot in our society.
Out there, it didn't matter how you were dressed
and it didn't matter how you looked,
how much money you made.
It didn't matter how hot your girlfriend was.
If you weren't filling sandbags, you were
fucking wrong.
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: One of the pictures that I really
like is what I call my kind of "man Eden" picture.
It really isn't like a kind of war photograph.
It's a very pastoral scene to it.
It kind of brings up ideas of medieval paintings,
and it kind of indicated that the work was going
in another direction.
As I stayed on, then I started to make
these more kind of nuanced pictures
about men and war and these kind of--
the relationships, the boredom.
♪
[Laughter]
[Punches being thrown]
O'BYRNE: Welcome back!
SOLDIER: He's like a wild animal, guys!
PATTERSON: Fuck, dude! Ow!
O'BYRNE: They're just family.
They're the best guys that you could ever be with.
You know, even the guys you don't like,
you love them, you know.
Even the guys you fight with,
you argue with, you'd still die for them,
so how much can you hate them?
Talk about dudes that, you know, work together
and you think 13 months, you start to fall apart.
But the truth is, it's only brought us closer.
[Overlapping conversations]
Come on, Tim!
Let's go get burgers.
DIFFERENT SOLDIER: ...intel operation.
O'BYRNE: Hey, Sebastian, grab these two ammo cans
and bring them down.
[Laughter]
JUNGER, VOICE-OVER: Tim had been in a lot of combat
in Liberia, and I think one of the things he was looking
for after that experience wasn't the truth
about combat as a form of conflict,
but the truth about combat as a form of bonding.
And what he saw with his camera in this environment
of killing and fear and hardness was connection.
BRABAZON, VOICE-OVER: My grandfather was
a professional soldier.
he fought right through the Burma campaign.
He lost all of his friends, and I said to him, you know,
"Do you regret any of this? Would you change any of it?"
[Guitar strumming in background]
And he explained it to me like this.
He said, "War is the only opportunity that men have
in society to love each other unconditionally."
And it's understanding the depth of emotion at war
that Tim was fascinated with.
SOLDIER: Hey, buddy, get your numbers.
You don't want me to die, right?
Eh! Meh, hmm. Cool.
[Music playing]
DIFFERENT SOLDIER: We got this.
[Soldier singing with radio]
♪
TIM: What's going on?
DIFFERENT SOLDIER: Well, we were down
at the Aliabad cemetery,
and a round hit me right in the head.
Knocked, knocked the shit out of me.
Knocked me out for a minute.
I heard somebody say, "We got a WIA.
Steiner's been shot in the head,"
Then I heard somebody say, "He's fucked up."
That's when I came to and told them I wasn't.
Just flashing blue spots in your eyes.
It's pretty good to be alive. Good day.
Come here, man.
That ain't very nice to look at right there.
That almost went through, you know.
Then I'd be floating around with a halo and some wings
just drinking beers with the Almighty!
[Laughter]
DIFFERENT SOLDIER: High as giraffe ass, too!
[Laughter]
You know, you're going to hell.
We're all going to hell.
We commit premeditated murder on a daily basis.
I mean, come on, man!
[Laughter]
It's not murder. It's war.
There's a difference.
JUNGER, VOICE-OVER: War is very confusing to soldiers.
It's so terrible when it's happening,
and then you miss it so terribly
when it's over.
The experience of being part of a group like that is
not reproducible in society.
♪
TIM, VOICE-OVER: "Restrepo" is a distillation
of what Sebastian and I have really come to understand
about young men and war.
The war machine isn't just technology and bombs
and missiles and systems in this kind of CNN TV
mediated world.
The war machine is, put a group of men together
in extreme circumstances
and get them to bond together, and they
will kill and be killed for each other.
At the end of the day, you realize
they were all young men just put together
on the side of this mountain, and all they
were trying to do was to survive and look
after each other so that they
all got back home alive.
That was it, really. Nothing to do with war.
Nothing to do with the politics.
♪
[Helicopter]
JUNGER, VOICE-OVER: One day it was this incredibly hot,
boring day, and everyone's asleep except the guys
on guard duty.
I mean, this is the ultimate situation
where nothing is going on
and you can just switch your brain off
because there's no work to do as a journalist.
And I see Tim scuttling around with his camera,
and he's photographing the soldiers who are asleep.
I said, "Tim, man, what are you doing?"
He said, "Don't you get it?"
Of course I didn't, I never did--ha ha!--
often with Tim.
"Don't you get it?"
And he said, "This is what the American public
"never gets to see because any nation is
"self-selecting in the images it presents,
"and we want to see our soldiers as strong.
"We don't want to know that they're
also these vulnerable boys."
♪
ANDERSON: There's something
about those sleeping soldiers pictures
that get at the sense of, of these are just kids,
you know?
And to see them stripped down
and asleep in wartime conveys
this sense of sending off young men to die.
SOLDIER: Hey!
DIFFERENT SOLDIER: Is he hurt?
DIFFERENT SOLDIER: We're good!
[Heavy gunfire]
DIFFERENT SOLDIER: ...this in...
TIM, VOICE-OVER: I returned to the Korengal Valley to go
on an offensive combat operation, and during
this time we saw some very close fighting
where actually the American lines were overrun.
SOLDIER: I need immediate suppression on 2-2-5-1.
The enemy is pushed up on the high ground.
TIM, VOICE-OVER: I was with the machine gun crew
that managed to hold off one area,
and then we ran up to a point where we thought
the scouts were under attack.
[Crying] Over here.
OK.
Over there, too... Come here.
[Crying]
DIFFERENT SOLDIER: Damn it, man.
SOLDIER: It's not your fault, dude.
There's nothing we can do.
TIM: Sergeant, what happened?
Our guys just got overrun, and, uh...we lost one,
got two wounded right now.
We're about to try and get them air-medevaced
out of here.
I don't know what else to say.
TIM, VOICE-OVER: What for me was the real tragedy was
seeing a young man who sees his best friend get killed.
Seeing that young man go through that was
really upsetting.
I mean, I knew it was going to happen
because I've been in a war before. I know what it's
like to see somebody die in front of you.
But for them to see that
and then that's something you know
that they will forever live with.
SOLDIER: We're going to take those two wounded in action
out here.
I want you getting them back to fucking LZ Eagles,
all right? Do you know where that's at?
SECOND SOLDIER: Roger.
Where we fucking drop over there.
TIM, VOICE-OVER: At one point during the ambush,
I was filming, and one of the colleagues
of Sergeant Rougle, who had been killed,
he came up to me and started swearing at me
and told me to stop filming.
Go that way.
SOLDIER: What's up?
SECOND SOLDIER: It's over that way where we got the body bags.
THIRD SOLDIER: They got his weapon, nods,
and, fucking, the 240.
The bad guys?
Got a good picture?
I'm going to fucking smash
that camera off your fucking face!
Get the fuck out of here!
All right. Hey! Let's fucking go!
TIM, VOICE-OVER: But later on, he came up to me
and he said, "Look I'm really sorry
"for shouting at you, you know? I kind of
understand that you got a job to do."
But it was really strange to kind of film people,
you know, who I got close to,
in such a kind of moment of trauma.
SOLDIER: Fuck!
[Helicopter in distance]
TIM, VOICE-OVER: And I remember at one point
the Afghan army tried to drag away Larry's body,
and one of his friends started shouting at them,
like, "You can't drag off his body.
"I'm not seeing them--
you drag his body off like that," and...
[Tim crying]
You know, those were very traumatic events for me,
and, you know, you try to kind of digest them,
but it takes time to work over them.
[Vehicle approaching]
It's not that traumatic almost getting killed,
being in danger.
It really isn't.
It makes you jumpy for a while,
but I wouldn't call it "deep trauma."
Deep trauma comes from the pain of others...
♪
and the sense of being part of the thing
that's hurting people.
And as a journalist, you are part of the machine
that's hurting people.
You're in a war shooting images of people who are
dead or dying or wounded or grieving.
You're part of it, and it leaves you in some ways
quite ashamed.
♪
[Gunfire]
[Sirens in distance]
TIM, VOICE-OVER: I just finished
a 20-minute documentary short called "Diary."
It's the first time where I've located myself
in my work.
It's an artistic rendering of what it feels like
to do my job.
It's kind of very disconcerting sometimes
to feel you've lost the needle
of what is graphic
What is--you know, what is too far.
[Device beeping]
ANNOUNCER ON RADIO: You're listening
to the BBC World Service for Africa.
♪
This is Tovan Doro in London.
TIM, VOICE-OVER: So the film is a stream of consciousness
where you flip between my personal life
and my work life,
and so you kind of understand
that this multiplicity of--
these kind of different realities
that I flip between.
[Overlapping background chatter]
WOMAN: Um, we'll find
a place where it's playing at a reasonable time.
BOUCKAERT, VOICE-OVER: He has all of these scenes
being back in his home life
where he is talking to people, talking to
his girlfriend, walking around in a field,
but you can see that his mind is
actually in another place.
Daddy...
They've got it at the house...
[Child chattering]
[Birds chirping]
BOUCKAERT, VOICE-OVER: After a while,
war becomes normality,
and the hard part isn't about going to war,
it's about coming back home.
MAN: This is England, early autumn.
I mean, look at it.
ALISTAIR, VOICE-OVER: I think in the end,
he drove himself into a welter of indecision.
I remember he once said to Judith and me, he was
bemoaning the fact that he wasn't married and really
couldn't understand why not.
[Radio announcer speaking foreign language]
And when we said, "Well, when you're not here, you're
"in Liberia or you're in the Korengal Valley or
"you're in somewhere equally dangerous, and you come home
"and you are by degrees damaged or undamaged,
"and then you're
"here for a month at most and then you're back
"somewhere else again for another 3 months.
"I mean, why are you surprised
that you're not married?"
♪
JUNGER, VOICE-OVER: One of his deepest fears, I think,
was that he didn't want to be alone.
Nobody wants to be alone.
He wanted to have a family.
He was trying to establish some kind of finality
with violence, with combat, so that he could then
move on to the complicated challenge of
a really deep, committed relationship with a woman.
Hi.
TIM: This is the queen of Somalia.
The president.
It's the president of Somalia.
The president of Somalia.
TIM: Are we going on a state--
is this an official state visit?
Yes.
Yeah? How you find America?
It is--it is nice.
[Laughs]
IBRAHIM, VOICE-OVER: I knew from the first day that
I met Tim that I was in love with him.
You know, I couldn't recognize it right away,
but I knew it,
and I think he knew it as well.
Walking around with him was almost like walking
around with a set of, you know, 10 eyes.
He was always so inspired, you know.
I think that if you-- we could go to McDonald's
and he'd probably find some kind of
creative inspiration there.
It was never-ending.
And when I met him, he told me he was done with war.
I don't know at the time if I believed him, knowing,
you know, slowly knowing his body of work,
but he was so clear, you know: "I'm done with war."
He was ready to almost start a new chapter in New York.
But whether he was done or not, I supported him.
I don't know if I
want to stay covering conflict anymore.
It's a very destructive thing
to carry on beyond a certain age,
not least because if you look at the ages by which
conflict photographers get hurt,
it's usually as they get older
because you're inured to the risks more.
I know when a story is good, and I know where a story
is good and where that is
is usually in the most dangerous area,
and I won't do any of the other stuff.
I'll just go straight to where I think it should be.
I don't know.
You got me at a low point.
[Laughs]
I'll have a drink later. Ha ha! Cheer up.
JUNGER, VOICE-OVER: I think Tim came out of Afghanistan
and out of our close calls out there
very much with the sense that it was time
to stop the combat reporting, and he couldn't
quite get himself to do it.
He was on a cycle that, you know, eventually,
I mean, weirdly, ironically, landed us at the Oscars.
This is our first time doing all this.
You know, we're first-time filmmakers.
It's all a surprise for us.
We're absolutely delighted and honored.
The most important thing for us is that the film is
played wide across America, that people have
responded to it...
Our Oscar experience was quite surreal.
I think most of the time we were there, we
couldn't believe that we were there.
You know, I'm not wearing my body armor today,
but I think I should be
judging by the crowds and the amount of press here.
JUNGER, VOICE-OVER: I think it was very intoxicating
to him and kind of alarming.
TIM: It's been very personal...
JUNGER, VOICE-OVER: And, you know, we're working
journalists, right?
So while this is going on, the Arab world's in flames.
[Crowd chanting in foreign language]
IBRAHIM, VOICE-OVER: By the time Libya came,
Tim felt a need to get close to the stories,
you know, to get close to the current events.
You know, the world was changing, and we were on
a red carpet so far removed from, you know, reality.
All of his colleagues were there, you know, and he was
in a tuxedo in Los Angeles.
It just--it just didn't feel right.
MAN: Yes, you told me just here.
He wanted a project, but I also think he wanted
to understand something.
This sort of self-referential idea
about war where soldiers in war see themselves in ways
that are informed by images of other soldiers in war,
and there is a conscious cycle
of imitation going on.
He just started to realize it was a feedback loop.
BRABAZON, VOICE-OVER: The theater of war
in Liberia, the theater of war in Libya,
at opposite ends of Tim's career,
are fundamentally connected by one really
important question that Tim was trying to answer,
which is, "How do young men see themselves
at war and why?"
♪
ALISTAIR: When he told me that he was going to Libya,
I was incredibly apprehensive,
and I said to him, "I have a very bad feeling about it.
"I just have a bad feeling about the whole thing.
"It's a dangerous sort of situation
"in a dangerous part of the world
at a dangerous time."
And he said, "Well, you know,
I've been in danger before,"
and I said, "Yes, I know,
but you're going to be on your own in Misrata."
[Conversations in foreign language]
[Gunfire]
IBRAHIM, VOICE-OVER: It was difficult to read the news
about Libya all the while knowing
that Tim was there.
However, we were in such constant contact, and we'd
created this vision,
a narrative for the direction
we were going into that, um...
death was not part of, you know, the picture
despite the work.
[Heavy gunfire, explosions]
[Screams]
[Shouting in foreign language]
ANDERSON, VOICE-OVER: We had a very explicit conversation
about how dangerous Libya was,
where I said, you know, "Come on, Tim.
"You know, you can do this work without getting up
"to the front lines, you know.
"Don't take the risk.
This is not your story right now."
But somehow there's the other journalists going,
and there's, you know, 3 other people going,
and you sort of forget
what your immediate mission is and you want
to go closer and closer to where the action is.
♪
[Heavy gunfire, men shouting in foreign language]
MAN, VOICE-OVER: In a war, you lose a lot of things.
One of the things that you lose can be the original
connection that took you there.
I felt that they were not, you know, paying the proper
attention and the proper respect
to everything that was happening around.
[Gunfire]
There were actually trying to get
in front of the rebels.
[Shouting in foreign language]
MAN, VOICE-OVER: I think, me,
I didn't realize well the danger,
where we were, you know.
Tim, I think he realized
because he was, like, looking at everything
like, with a face like you could tell, like,
he was aware of what was going on really.
[Conversations in foreign language]
[Gunfire in distance]
CERVERA, VOICE-OVER: Two rebels that were with us,
suddenly one of them, like, fell and it was like he was
shot in the head, you know, and we took him out.
[Conversations in foreign language]
And then at that point, we look at each other,
all of us. Like, I mean, like, I felt real danger
to be there.
And I think all of us, because we all decided
to leave that place.
[Explosions]
[Men shouting commands in foreign language]
WOMAN, VOICE-OVER: And there was a side street,
and we all kind of stopped at it,
and it was this really eerie scene of
this open truck filled with Gaddafi soldier uniforms,
and they were all over the ground, and there was
a helmet, a green helmet,
with a bullet hole right through the top of it.
Tim took a photo of it.
And I liked that spot, too, because it was behind
a corner, and I didn't like being on Tripoli street.
And then there was just this--this huge blast.
[Explosion]
[Men shouting in foreign language]
CERVERA, VOICE-OVER: There was a lot of dust.
I saw 7, 10 bodies lying at the same place,
and I thought at that moment,
"Oh, my God. They were there."
[Gunfire, shouting in foreign language]
I thought Tim was OK. He was holding his leg.
But, you know, he was, he was shouting,
but Chris wasn't moving, wasn't speaking.
[Shouting in foreign language continues]
CERVERA, VOICE-OVER: I saw a pickup car with two guys,
and I said "Please, please come, come."
And the two helped me to put their bodies
into the back of the pickup--Chris and Tim.
Tim was still conscious but getting dizzy,
getting--losing consciousness.
so I took his hand just to make him awake
and to say, "Tim, come on. Don't fall asleep.
We are getting to the hospital."
Whenever I talked to him, he was like that, like when
you wake up someone who is sleeping
and then falling asleep again.
But each time he was more like going away.
And at one point, he wouldn't wake up again.
MAN: Give them space. Give them space.
[Men saying commands in foreign language]
♪
JUDITH, VOICE-OVER: Something very unusual
happened to me on that day.
There were some beautiful flowers outside the shop,
and I chose some red roses, got back to the car, and I
lifted the boot to put the red roses in,
and I just--I don't know,
I just felt something incredibly...
I just felt I didn't want to take the red roses home.
I just--and I-- and it's something
I've never, ever done in my life before.
I took the red roses back,
and I went and chose 12 white roses
and took them home.
And when I got home, um...
they were in my arms when I found out
that through the home office that Tim had died,
and I just dropped them on the floor.
♪
MAN, VOICE-OVER: The deaths of two outstanding
photojournalists-- Tim Hetherington
and Chris Hondros--
have caused enormous sadness, not only among
friends and family but also within the entire community
of journalists.
Hetherington, aged 40, was a consummate professional,
who took the job of war reporting as seriously
as anyone in the history of this business.
♪
No, I never thought that Tim was going to be killed.
It sounds naive to say that now.
TIM: This is my mom and dad with my book.
What are you looking at, Mom?
ALISTAIR, VOICE-OVER: People don't assume
that family members or people close to them
are going to be killed, even though they do have
a very dangerous occupation.
[Laughing]
Now I'm crying.
No, it's good, it's nice.
Really emotional.
Yeah, good, it's meant to be emotional.
ALISTAIR, VOICE-OVER: It was...
Yeah, it was completely devastating.
IBRAHIM, VOICE-OVER: I went to Sebastian's house,
and that's where I got the news,
and I didn't believe it at first.
I didn't believe it.
It was so worth it because we didn't compromise
in our relationship,
so why would we compromise our passion and our work
and aspects of our lives
that made us feel fully alive
and fully realized human beings.
I wouldn't compromise, so I don't think he should.
♪
JUNGER, VOICE-OVER: I get an email from a Vietnam vet
that we had both met in Texas and he said,
"I'm so sorry about your friend Tim."
He said, "You guys, you know, with your
"movie and your books, like, you really--you really came
close to understanding war."
We're going to war, we're going to war.
JUNGER, VOICE-OVER: He said, "I'm worried this is
"going to sound callous, but you didn't get all the way.
"The core reality of war
"isn't that you might get killed out there.
"That's obvious.
"The core truth about war is that you're guaranteed
"to lose your brothers.
"And now you've lost a brother
"and you know everything you need to know about it."
And it wasn't callous what he said.
I mean the truth can't be callous.
It's the truth.
And finally, I got it.
[Tap tap tap]
[Laughs]
♪