From The Times:

Tim Hetherington, the conflict photographer who was a director and producer of the film “Restrepo,” was killed in the besieged city of Misurata on Wednesday, and three photographers working beside him were wounded, one fatally, when they came under fire at the city’s front lines.

I'd avoided watching Restrepo until today. 

One reason is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are painful to think about.  These are the wars of our time — not something in the past we can say we've learned from — something in the present that shows what we are, somehow, incapable of learning.

And from the start the push for war was like a cheap pulp novel hack-written without a note of nuance.  There was nothing subtle in the opportunism and profiteering at the price of our young people's lives.  And yet all the world seemed to treat it like a real page-turner, a thriller of the first order!  New York Times Best Seller! 

Even documentaries like Restrepo seemed sure to me to rehash an ancient tale, too often repeated that should never be told again.  Marx famously wrote that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.  War is the exception.  War is always tragedy. 

And our helplessness to prevent it — our real and palpable helplessness — is the source of all tragedy.  This helplessness wears the mask of fate, and under it?   There is violence. 

Is war inevitable?  Is it human nature, the sturm und drang of human history?  We so eagerly engage in conflict, so readily accede to the logic of violence.  Something about it is easier for us to understand than any other form of expression or social interaction. 

And violence is social.  We gather to engage in it.  It forges bonds as surely as it breaks them, tests our allegiances.  There is nothing more authentic than an act to violence and the reaction to it.  Violence is real. Love doesn't have that kind of power.  It doesn't. We too often doubt it. And half the time it drives us to violence. 

Restrepo is something like the ancient tragedies — predictable as stichomythy — but less cathartic in the end.  Because, well, it doesn't really end.

Or you could say it ends where it begins. 

Hetherington seems to have shot what he saw, and the moments he captures here are poignant and true.  His death by the violence he documented is part of the story he was telling.  A real tragedy.