Tim Hetherington

Tim Hetherington, a photojournalist and co-creator of the Afghan War documentary Restrepo, was killed on April 20th in Misrata, Libya while covering the Libyan civil war. He was doing what he did extraordinarily well, telling of the horrors of war in pictures.

I happened on an interview he did on NPR last June, talking about Restrepo. Restrepo, if you haven't seen it, focuses on the 15 month deployment of a company of airborne troopers into the Korengal Valley, a six mile tangle of villages and wilds which has remained a Taliban stronghold throughout the Afghan War. I was immediately drawn in by his humanity. He was on the show to shill his film, but he was not talking about it so much as he was showering respect on the extraordinary soldiers he had met and lived with in the Korengal. What got me, and convinced me of his dedication to telling about the soldiers he now counted as friends, was his breaking down in telling the story of soldiers finding out that one of their most respected comrades had been killed. There was no way to fake the emotion he conveyed in talking about that death.

Restrepo blew me away. Tim Hetherington and his partner in making the documentary, Sebastian Junger, did an amazing job of not inserting themselves, their thoughts, or anything about them into the film. The film was about the soldiers of Battle Company and their experiences in the Korengal, where they came in contact with the enemy nearly every day, and often two or three times in the same day. Tim and Sebastian silently captured all the horror, fear, focused moments of life and death, boredom, humor, and agitation of a small unit in combat. Every American, regardless of position on this or any war, should see it, to witness what young men are doing half a world away in our name.

Restrepo was just one shining light in a body of work that chronicled death and struggle in many dark places. Tim spent years covering African Wars, even earning himself a death "sentence" from Liberian dictator Charles Taylor after he traveled with and filmed rebels fighting against Taylor's brutal government.

It is in fashion for those on the right to attack the "mainstream media", to dismiss them as leftist dilettantes who write or broadcast about that which they do not understand, all in the name of a socialist agenda. Tim Hetherington gave the lie to this stereotype. He was a real guy, telling stories in pictures and words about real people struggling and dying in horrific circumstances, and always staying in the background, doing nothing for self-aggrandizement. The world is a little bit sadder, and some of its darkest places will not have light shown upon them, because of Tim's passing.