Restrepo Essay

Introduction Restrepo is a documentary that portrayed the daily lives of American soldiers during their duty in a very dangerous part of Afghanistan known as “the Valley of Death”. What makes the movie so special is that the viewer is dropped into war immediately. There is no back story or obvious message rather than residing along with 15 soldiers in their deployment. The viewers are not only introduced to the horrific events of a war zone, but they are also shown the real emotions that are carried behind battles as well. Restrepo does a great job reflecting on what it is like to be a soldier fighting against an enemy a long ways from home land. There is no doubt that it is a beautiful thought that we care for the soldiers who do the fighting

In Restrepo, during the first few weeks of deployment, two men were killed; one of them being Doc Restrepo, the medic for the soldiers. This death hit these soldiers hardest in the gut because Restrepo happened to be a friend to everyone. Restrepo was shot in the neck, a wound that a medic could have easily fixed. He tried to tell the soldiers how to operate on the wound by walking them through it, but it was hard with a wounded neck, and no other doctor around to help. This event impacted the soldiers a lot because they had a chance to save a close. Everyone felt guilty because of their friends who died, to the point where some of them felt that they should have died instead. Soldiers in battle see things they'd like to forget, but years later combat memories come back to haunt them. The reminders of the fighting that cause post-traumatic stress so much as the void ex-combatants face when they leave the community of soldiers behind. Often soldiers and war survivors are flooded with a sense of guilt for having survived, or about things they did or failed to do. Shame, blame and guilt are huge issues within PTSD and particularly in complex PTSD among soldiers. After traumatic events, guilt may be a part of an ongoing sense of helplessness and/or ineffectualness. Very often, people who have experienced a traumatic event are particularly troubled by the fact that they were unable to exert control over what was happening (Carlson & Dalenberg, 2000). Lifton (1993) describes this process as