Is an entertainment journalist out of his depth with a hard news reporter and documentarian? Expertise in superheroes and slasher killers might not impress war correspondents, but we do what we can to help out. We can't send Suicide Girls to Afghanistan for the troops, but at least we can talk to some people who went.
Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington spent a year with a platoon in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. They documented a year in the unit's tour for articles in Vanity Fair, Junger's book War and Heatherington's photo galleries. The experience also became the film Restrepo.
Juan Restrepo was a soldier who died early in the Junger and Hetherington's chronicle. Restrepo impacted his troop so greatly that when they set up an outpost in the Korengal, they named it Restrepo. The movie shows the perspective of an embedded camera, taking fire with the soldiers, dealing with difficult translations with Afghani people, and trying sometimes to kick back and relax.
Years of war correspondence, filmmaking, post-production and press tours have kind of wiped out Junger and Hetherington. They'd been on the run so long, they found themselves catching up in between questions during an interview. Junger may be best known as the author of The Perfect Storm which inspired a hit movie. Hetherington makes his directorial debut with Restrepo after serving as a cameraman on previous war docs.
Fred Topel: A bigger picture question I had about this movie is is you obviously have National Geographic and Vanity Fair behind this. With so many hard news organizations losing money and folding, who will pay for this type of in depth journalism in the future?
Sebastian Junger: We actually financed the film ourselves. We sold the finished film to National Geographic.
FT: But you had an assignment for Vanity Fair that allowed you to do the work.
SJ: Yeah, the trips over there were very cheap. The painful part of the financing was post-production, the editing. The trips over there were really, really cheap. We could have paid that ourselves but we didn't have to. Would Vanity Fair sign up for this again? I think they probably would.
FT: Does that also suggest that pure human initiative can get news done even without a company paying for it?
Tim Hetherington: Well, a lot of books are written, a lot of projects are done out of pure human initiative. At the end of the day, there needs to be some kind of coherent strategy for covering news that pure human initiative doesn't generate. If you think about The New York Times, regardless of what you think about the reporting, what you do notice is that stories are followed coherently. The Afghan War is covered every day and Pakistan's every other day. They follow a story through and through on a kind of cycle. Those are the kind of cycles I've noticed have been lost in the U.K. on U.K. newspaper reporting, which is a great tragedy. So that strategy of covering news needs to continue but if newspapers or the media cuts down on foreign reporting, then it's going to break into that strategy and no amount of human initiative, no amount of individual funding of desire to go and make a story because you think it's valuable can really make up a coherent news strategy for covering foreign events.
FT: Has the new media changed the way you do journalism and documentary?
TH: I think what you've seen with Sebastian and I is a new kind of paradigm. Traditionally, you might think I'm a photographer but I'm also an image maker. Sebastian is a novelist, is a writer. We're both contributors to Vanity Fair but he, you see, is working completely across the spectrum. That might point to one of the solutions in terms of the future covering of stories, that instead of just being somebody who works in one media form, here we are, we did magazine assignments for Vanity Fair, we did two Nightline pieces for ABC news. I did photographs that were syndicated worldwide. I made art gallery pieces. He's written a book. I've got a book coming out in October called Infidel. We made a feature film. I think the problem with journalism partly is overproduction of short pieces. The best journalism is about time. You can read a piece of journalism or see a piece of journalism, you can smell the time that's spent. And yet, there's less time you can put into a story and we've got this overproduction of short pieces which in the end is meaningless ephemera floating.
FT: Even in entertainment, the market is going towards quantity over quality.
TH: That's also what I mean because journalists are working in one single form strand, therefore they're creating all these pieces. What we've done is we've gone across the different forms on one story. So in supporting ourselves with bits of money and bits of funding or bits of financial payment from each of those strands, that's what allows us therefore to follow the story concretely.
FT: Do you see new opportunities as the industry changes?
SJ: I think for a freelancer, it's actually not a bad time. If I were young, I would go to Kabul. I'd have a video camera, a tape recorder. There's internet obviously. Because the news organizations don't have the money to pay to have a correspondent there permanently, freelancers I think can step in and fill that void in a number of different media. You could be freelancing for the New York Times when the regular correspondent is somewhere else or they're not there at all. Then you're shipping video off to ABC News or whatever. Actually, I think it's an interesting time for freelancers.
FT: Everything I've seen about the war is on ground level. Why do you think no one else has documented the mountainous regions?
TH: I think there's a lot of information out there. There's a lot of political information about the war really floating out there. A lot of people covered it pretty thoroughly. Because we see network news where we have two or three minute news clips of the kind of combat where the reporter is often the story, what you don't have is really a long form experiential visceral kind of war films. I'm a photographer. I do see pictures from the mountains but I'd never seen somebody make the kind of film we've made.
SJ: It was also on foot. On the flatlands, there's a lot of humvees and stuff. The mountains is on foot. The gear is heavy. Frankly a lot of journalists are not in very good shape. You really have to be to be on a patrol with those guys, so I think there's a certain amount of weeding out that happens just in that sense.
FT: Even in Hollywood fictional films, they stick to Iraq or the desert.
TH: Maybe it's easier to film. Or I don't know, they could obviously film in Colorado. I was going to say they could film in Jordan.
FT: How well did each of you get to know Restrepo before he died?
SJ: I met him but I didn't get to know him very well. It was my first trip. Tim wasn't with my yet. You meet 35 guys all at once and it's hard to keep them apart at first. It takes a couple of trips to sort people in your mind. By the time Tim and I went back, Restrepo had already been killed. So I met him but I didn't know him.
TH: It's kind of interesting that the title, people have asked, there was discussion about what we were going to call it. We call it Restrepo for a number of reasons. I think when you've watched the film maybe you understand. It's like sure, it's named after Juan Restrepo, this guy you really don't get to know in the film. And it's named after this outpost they build and they call it Restrepo. It's where all the action takes place. Okay, I get that. It's what you call the film. But also really Restrepo is really a metaphor. It's a metaphor for every soldier or the sense of loss that every soldier goes through. The end of screenings, we have Vietnam vets coming up to us and telling us, "Thanks for telling our story." I have friends in the military who have watched The Hurt Locker and say The Hurt Locker is a very good Hollywood film for them but they don't think it represents their experience. For some reason, this film manages to communicate an experience of what it's like to be a soldier. In that term kind of having the idea of Restrepo is this kind of larger idea that this is every soldier's experience.
FT: This also spends an entire year with them.
TH: We did 10 one month trips, five each coming in and out. It's very funny because we were coming and going, we both had responsibilities back in the States we had to take care of. Sebastian's married and I had other jobs I had to do. Somebody asked me and said, "Do I have any regrets at the end of making the film?" I said yeah, it was that I didn't spend the whole time out there. I wish I'd done the whole deployment.
FT: Are things going any differently under Obama?
SJ: There's more troops there. The reason there's a war happening right now is that Bush essentially walked away and went to Iraq. They crushed the Taliban very easily. The Taliban were hated by the Afghans and he left 15,000 troops there and that wasn't enough and it just got worse and worse every year. So now Obama's got 97,000, heading towards 100,000 American troops there. It may be too late so I don't know if it's going to work or not but that's certainly a different level of involvement than under the Bush administration.
FT: Is that even a good thing? Can there be a good outcome to this?
TH: I don't know. What's interesting is that Human Rights Watch came out with the figures for civilian casualties in the 90s and the present day. I think the figures are since 2001, the NATO invasion, 16,000 Afghans have died, civilians have died because of the war. That's a terrible figure, you know what I mean. Obviously those figures need to come down but at the same, Human Rights Watch figures for the 90's under the Taliban and the civil war were 400,000. So whatever your politics, the fact is that less civilians are dying now than did in the 90's. Obviously [with] a swift NATO pullout would be the danger that you go back to the old days.
FT: How do these guys even wake up in the morning to face this daily onslaught?
SJ: They're soldiers. They're trained for it. They're like the football team. Football players play football and they're good at it and they're into the fact that they're good at it. Soldiers fight and they're into the fact that they're good at it. They didn't get drafted into this. They chose it. Furthermore, they didn't just choose to join the army, they chose to be in a combat unit. There are psychological adaptations that happen in combat or in any crisis that people make and you can sort of get used to anything.
TH: But what they're not good at is they're not good at talking about it. Soldiers don't come back home and talk to their wives or their loved ones about what happened there. Those wives and those loved ones are caught up in this kind of maelstrom of trauma. The guys out there have a unit that they can kind of bond to but their wives or their girlfriends are usually alone. They want to know what is that experience like? That's what we really hope the film helps those people, all the hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people back in the states who have loved ones in the military who want to know what is it that happens out there that my husband comes back and won't talk to me about. What is it? I think the film kind of can help them understand that.
FT: They even play war games on PSP. What do you make of that?
SJ: I mean, they're teenagers.
TH: It shows you how divorced the video games are from the real thing. At the end of the day, as Sebastian said they're 18 to 24. There's an idea that combat is addictive but it's also about this kind of sense of brotherhood that draws them back.
SJ: The analogy would be football players some kind of football video game which they probably do.
FT: What was your latest follow-up with the guys?
TH: I was out with them last night. One just came to the screening down in Santa Monica and I went out and had a drink with him. We're in touch with them all. Facebook pages, through Facebook and they come to the screenings. We showed them the film first of all actually.
FT: Are any of their situations drastically different now?
SJ: They're almost all of them in the army. They're still in the army. They didn't come home. They're soldiers. One of them got out so his situation's drastically changed but they're all either in second platoon and they're back over there fighting again or they're in other units and getting ready to deploy.
FT: By choice or were they stop lossed?
SJ: By choice. You sign a contract with the army and when your contract comes due, you either sign up again, you renew the contract or you don't and you go home? Only one guy decided to not renew his contract.
FT: Which one?
SJ: Brendan O'Byrne.
FT: What's going on at Restrepo today?
TH: The U.S. left the Korengal in April. They totally pulled out. Images were on the TV from Al Jazeera who were embedded with an insurgent group that took over Restrepo. The guys that we spoke to our really upset about it all obviously. They could understand that strategy needs to change. It evolves as the war evolves but the U.S. has pulled out and it hurt them a lot, knowing that all that blood, sweat and tears went into those places.
FT: And now it's being used by the insurgents?
TH: In fact I have no idea. The Korengal is no longer in U.S. [possession]. There is no U.S. presence in the Korengal and my guess is that the Korengalis are out kind of tilling their fields and getting on with life as they know it.
FT: What feedback have you had from Restrepo's family?
TH: They sent an e-mail the other day actually wanting to know when the film was going to come and open in Canada. We were in contact with Restrepo's mother when we decided that we wanted to call the film Restrepo, and she was supportive of that.
SJ: Yup, she was very supportive. I met her in Miami a few days ago.
TH: Oh, you didn't tell me that.
SJ: Yeah, I know. We have a lot to get caught up on. She hadn't seen the movie yet but we're going to send her a DVD. It's a delicate matter when you send the material to someone who's lost a loved one. So we had a nice dinner. She asked me to explain exactly how her son died. So I told her in as much detail as I knew. It was a very emotional conversation.
FT: Did she have an opinion on naming the film after him?
SJ: She said she was very proud of it. She thanked me for what we'd done. There's no footage of Restrepo being killed. We weren't there when he was killed so there's nothing in the movie visually that relates to her son except a couple brief frames of him. But she said she was very proud of the fact that the film bore her family's name.
TH: I had a phone call once. We've been doing these kind of festival screenings. We were screening in Missouri and I was going to get out of there but we were caught in a snowstorm in New York. One of the soldiers went down to Missouri and he phoned me up before the screening and he was really excited. Not just excited but a bit beside himself. He was overcome a little bit and Rudy, as we called him, he said, "You won't believe it, Tim, you won't believe it. I'm looking out on the street and up on the cinema in big letters outside is the name Restrepo." He said, "I'd never ever dreamt that I'd see my dead friend's name writ so large." That shows you how moving it is for them that their experiences are not being forgotten in Afghanistan. Although outpost Restrepo is dismantled and in insurgent control that the idea of their experience lives on.
FT: What will your next assignments be?
TH: I think you're going to be spending time with your wife.
SJ: Maybe take a long nap.
TH: I think we've got to do an assignment for Vanity Fair coming up.
FT: Is there another subject you're interested in pursuing?
SJ: I mean, I've been covering Afghanistan since 1996 so I'm going to keep going back there. Yeah, there are subjects. The Horn of Africa. Just spin the globe and put your finger on it and there's a subject so I don't know exactly yet.
FT: Has fishing gotten any safer since The Perfect Storm and the movie came out?
SJ: No. I mean, there's just a certain reality that you can only make ships so big and steel are only so strong and waves get to be 100 feet and it's just math at that point. So I don't think there's much you can do about it.
FT: Even as far as not going out in dangerous times, they haven't taken precautions?
SJ: Well, if you're 1000 miles out fishing and a storm comes in in three days, it's not a question of not going out. They do one month, six week trips. They're way out in the middle of the Atlantic. They're not day fishing.
FT: Have you had any news from the children of those families, who have now grown up and gotten some help from The Perfect Storm Foundation?
SJ: Yeah, I'm not as much in touch with that as I used to be but they get a certain amount of help. It's not life changing but it helps some of these kids in Gloucester. I don't know if we radically changed anyone's life but we definitely helped a few people. We help a few people every year.
Restrepo is now playing in select cities.
Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington spent a year with a platoon in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. They documented a year in the unit's tour for articles in Vanity Fair, Junger's book War and Heatherington's photo galleries. The experience also became the film Restrepo.
Juan Restrepo was a soldier who died early in the Junger and Hetherington's chronicle. Restrepo impacted his troop so greatly that when they set up an outpost in the Korengal, they named it Restrepo. The movie shows the perspective of an embedded camera, taking fire with the soldiers, dealing with difficult translations with Afghani people, and trying sometimes to kick back and relax.
Years of war correspondence, filmmaking, post-production and press tours have kind of wiped out Junger and Hetherington. They'd been on the run so long, they found themselves catching up in between questions during an interview. Junger may be best known as the author of The Perfect Storm which inspired a hit movie. Hetherington makes his directorial debut with Restrepo after serving as a cameraman on previous war docs.
Fred Topel: A bigger picture question I had about this movie is is you obviously have National Geographic and Vanity Fair behind this. With so many hard news organizations losing money and folding, who will pay for this type of in depth journalism in the future?
Sebastian Junger: We actually financed the film ourselves. We sold the finished film to National Geographic.
FT: But you had an assignment for Vanity Fair that allowed you to do the work.
SJ: Yeah, the trips over there were very cheap. The painful part of the financing was post-production, the editing. The trips over there were really, really cheap. We could have paid that ourselves but we didn't have to. Would Vanity Fair sign up for this again? I think they probably would.
FT: Does that also suggest that pure human initiative can get news done even without a company paying for it?
Tim Hetherington: Well, a lot of books are written, a lot of projects are done out of pure human initiative. At the end of the day, there needs to be some kind of coherent strategy for covering news that pure human initiative doesn't generate. If you think about The New York Times, regardless of what you think about the reporting, what you do notice is that stories are followed coherently. The Afghan War is covered every day and Pakistan's every other day. They follow a story through and through on a kind of cycle. Those are the kind of cycles I've noticed have been lost in the U.K. on U.K. newspaper reporting, which is a great tragedy. So that strategy of covering news needs to continue but if newspapers or the media cuts down on foreign reporting, then it's going to break into that strategy and no amount of human initiative, no amount of individual funding of desire to go and make a story because you think it's valuable can really make up a coherent news strategy for covering foreign events.
FT: Has the new media changed the way you do journalism and documentary?
TH: I think what you've seen with Sebastian and I is a new kind of paradigm. Traditionally, you might think I'm a photographer but I'm also an image maker. Sebastian is a novelist, is a writer. We're both contributors to Vanity Fair but he, you see, is working completely across the spectrum. That might point to one of the solutions in terms of the future covering of stories, that instead of just being somebody who works in one media form, here we are, we did magazine assignments for Vanity Fair, we did two Nightline pieces for ABC news. I did photographs that were syndicated worldwide. I made art gallery pieces. He's written a book. I've got a book coming out in October called Infidel. We made a feature film. I think the problem with journalism partly is overproduction of short pieces. The best journalism is about time. You can read a piece of journalism or see a piece of journalism, you can smell the time that's spent. And yet, there's less time you can put into a story and we've got this overproduction of short pieces which in the end is meaningless ephemera floating.
FT: Even in entertainment, the market is going towards quantity over quality.
TH: That's also what I mean because journalists are working in one single form strand, therefore they're creating all these pieces. What we've done is we've gone across the different forms on one story. So in supporting ourselves with bits of money and bits of funding or bits of financial payment from each of those strands, that's what allows us therefore to follow the story concretely.
FT: Do you see new opportunities as the industry changes?
SJ: I think for a freelancer, it's actually not a bad time. If I were young, I would go to Kabul. I'd have a video camera, a tape recorder. There's internet obviously. Because the news organizations don't have the money to pay to have a correspondent there permanently, freelancers I think can step in and fill that void in a number of different media. You could be freelancing for the New York Times when the regular correspondent is somewhere else or they're not there at all. Then you're shipping video off to ABC News or whatever. Actually, I think it's an interesting time for freelancers.
FT: Everything I've seen about the war is on ground level. Why do you think no one else has documented the mountainous regions?
TH: I think there's a lot of information out there. There's a lot of political information about the war really floating out there. A lot of people covered it pretty thoroughly. Because we see network news where we have two or three minute news clips of the kind of combat where the reporter is often the story, what you don't have is really a long form experiential visceral kind of war films. I'm a photographer. I do see pictures from the mountains but I'd never seen somebody make the kind of film we've made.
SJ: It was also on foot. On the flatlands, there's a lot of humvees and stuff. The mountains is on foot. The gear is heavy. Frankly a lot of journalists are not in very good shape. You really have to be to be on a patrol with those guys, so I think there's a certain amount of weeding out that happens just in that sense.
FT: Even in Hollywood fictional films, they stick to Iraq or the desert.
TH: Maybe it's easier to film. Or I don't know, they could obviously film in Colorado. I was going to say they could film in Jordan.
FT: How well did each of you get to know Restrepo before he died?
SJ: I met him but I didn't get to know him very well. It was my first trip. Tim wasn't with my yet. You meet 35 guys all at once and it's hard to keep them apart at first. It takes a couple of trips to sort people in your mind. By the time Tim and I went back, Restrepo had already been killed. So I met him but I didn't know him.
TH: It's kind of interesting that the title, people have asked, there was discussion about what we were going to call it. We call it Restrepo for a number of reasons. I think when you've watched the film maybe you understand. It's like sure, it's named after Juan Restrepo, this guy you really don't get to know in the film. And it's named after this outpost they build and they call it Restrepo. It's where all the action takes place. Okay, I get that. It's what you call the film. But also really Restrepo is really a metaphor. It's a metaphor for every soldier or the sense of loss that every soldier goes through. The end of screenings, we have Vietnam vets coming up to us and telling us, "Thanks for telling our story." I have friends in the military who have watched The Hurt Locker and say The Hurt Locker is a very good Hollywood film for them but they don't think it represents their experience. For some reason, this film manages to communicate an experience of what it's like to be a soldier. In that term kind of having the idea of Restrepo is this kind of larger idea that this is every soldier's experience.
FT: This also spends an entire year with them.
TH: We did 10 one month trips, five each coming in and out. It's very funny because we were coming and going, we both had responsibilities back in the States we had to take care of. Sebastian's married and I had other jobs I had to do. Somebody asked me and said, "Do I have any regrets at the end of making the film?" I said yeah, it was that I didn't spend the whole time out there. I wish I'd done the whole deployment.
FT: Are things going any differently under Obama?
SJ: There's more troops there. The reason there's a war happening right now is that Bush essentially walked away and went to Iraq. They crushed the Taliban very easily. The Taliban were hated by the Afghans and he left 15,000 troops there and that wasn't enough and it just got worse and worse every year. So now Obama's got 97,000, heading towards 100,000 American troops there. It may be too late so I don't know if it's going to work or not but that's certainly a different level of involvement than under the Bush administration.
FT: Is that even a good thing? Can there be a good outcome to this?
TH: I don't know. What's interesting is that Human Rights Watch came out with the figures for civilian casualties in the 90s and the present day. I think the figures are since 2001, the NATO invasion, 16,000 Afghans have died, civilians have died because of the war. That's a terrible figure, you know what I mean. Obviously those figures need to come down but at the same, Human Rights Watch figures for the 90's under the Taliban and the civil war were 400,000. So whatever your politics, the fact is that less civilians are dying now than did in the 90's. Obviously [with] a swift NATO pullout would be the danger that you go back to the old days.
FT: How do these guys even wake up in the morning to face this daily onslaught?
SJ: They're soldiers. They're trained for it. They're like the football team. Football players play football and they're good at it and they're into the fact that they're good at it. Soldiers fight and they're into the fact that they're good at it. They didn't get drafted into this. They chose it. Furthermore, they didn't just choose to join the army, they chose to be in a combat unit. There are psychological adaptations that happen in combat or in any crisis that people make and you can sort of get used to anything.
TH: But what they're not good at is they're not good at talking about it. Soldiers don't come back home and talk to their wives or their loved ones about what happened there. Those wives and those loved ones are caught up in this kind of maelstrom of trauma. The guys out there have a unit that they can kind of bond to but their wives or their girlfriends are usually alone. They want to know what is that experience like? That's what we really hope the film helps those people, all the hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people back in the states who have loved ones in the military who want to know what is it that happens out there that my husband comes back and won't talk to me about. What is it? I think the film kind of can help them understand that.
FT: They even play war games on PSP. What do you make of that?
SJ: I mean, they're teenagers.
TH: It shows you how divorced the video games are from the real thing. At the end of the day, as Sebastian said they're 18 to 24. There's an idea that combat is addictive but it's also about this kind of sense of brotherhood that draws them back.
SJ: The analogy would be football players some kind of football video game which they probably do.
FT: What was your latest follow-up with the guys?
TH: I was out with them last night. One just came to the screening down in Santa Monica and I went out and had a drink with him. We're in touch with them all. Facebook pages, through Facebook and they come to the screenings. We showed them the film first of all actually.
FT: Are any of their situations drastically different now?
SJ: They're almost all of them in the army. They're still in the army. They didn't come home. They're soldiers. One of them got out so his situation's drastically changed but they're all either in second platoon and they're back over there fighting again or they're in other units and getting ready to deploy.
FT: By choice or were they stop lossed?
SJ: By choice. You sign a contract with the army and when your contract comes due, you either sign up again, you renew the contract or you don't and you go home? Only one guy decided to not renew his contract.
FT: Which one?
SJ: Brendan O'Byrne.
FT: What's going on at Restrepo today?
TH: The U.S. left the Korengal in April. They totally pulled out. Images were on the TV from Al Jazeera who were embedded with an insurgent group that took over Restrepo. The guys that we spoke to our really upset about it all obviously. They could understand that strategy needs to change. It evolves as the war evolves but the U.S. has pulled out and it hurt them a lot, knowing that all that blood, sweat and tears went into those places.
FT: And now it's being used by the insurgents?
TH: In fact I have no idea. The Korengal is no longer in U.S. [possession]. There is no U.S. presence in the Korengal and my guess is that the Korengalis are out kind of tilling their fields and getting on with life as they know it.
FT: What feedback have you had from Restrepo's family?
TH: They sent an e-mail the other day actually wanting to know when the film was going to come and open in Canada. We were in contact with Restrepo's mother when we decided that we wanted to call the film Restrepo, and she was supportive of that.
SJ: Yup, she was very supportive. I met her in Miami a few days ago.
TH: Oh, you didn't tell me that.
SJ: Yeah, I know. We have a lot to get caught up on. She hadn't seen the movie yet but we're going to send her a DVD. It's a delicate matter when you send the material to someone who's lost a loved one. So we had a nice dinner. She asked me to explain exactly how her son died. So I told her in as much detail as I knew. It was a very emotional conversation.
FT: Did she have an opinion on naming the film after him?
SJ: She said she was very proud of it. She thanked me for what we'd done. There's no footage of Restrepo being killed. We weren't there when he was killed so there's nothing in the movie visually that relates to her son except a couple brief frames of him. But she said she was very proud of the fact that the film bore her family's name.
TH: I had a phone call once. We've been doing these kind of festival screenings. We were screening in Missouri and I was going to get out of there but we were caught in a snowstorm in New York. One of the soldiers went down to Missouri and he phoned me up before the screening and he was really excited. Not just excited but a bit beside himself. He was overcome a little bit and Rudy, as we called him, he said, "You won't believe it, Tim, you won't believe it. I'm looking out on the street and up on the cinema in big letters outside is the name Restrepo." He said, "I'd never ever dreamt that I'd see my dead friend's name writ so large." That shows you how moving it is for them that their experiences are not being forgotten in Afghanistan. Although outpost Restrepo is dismantled and in insurgent control that the idea of their experience lives on.
FT: What will your next assignments be?
TH: I think you're going to be spending time with your wife.
SJ: Maybe take a long nap.
TH: I think we've got to do an assignment for Vanity Fair coming up.
FT: Is there another subject you're interested in pursuing?
SJ: I mean, I've been covering Afghanistan since 1996 so I'm going to keep going back there. Yeah, there are subjects. The Horn of Africa. Just spin the globe and put your finger on it and there's a subject so I don't know exactly yet.
FT: Has fishing gotten any safer since The Perfect Storm and the movie came out?
SJ: No. I mean, there's just a certain reality that you can only make ships so big and steel are only so strong and waves get to be 100 feet and it's just math at that point. So I don't think there's much you can do about it.
FT: Even as far as not going out in dangerous times, they haven't taken precautions?
SJ: Well, if you're 1000 miles out fishing and a storm comes in in three days, it's not a question of not going out. They do one month, six week trips. They're way out in the middle of the Atlantic. They're not day fishing.
FT: Have you had any news from the children of those families, who have now grown up and gotten some help from The Perfect Storm Foundation?
SJ: Yeah, I'm not as much in touch with that as I used to be but they get a certain amount of help. It's not life changing but it helps some of these kids in Gloucester. I don't know if we radically changed anyone's life but we definitely helped a few people. We help a few people every year.
Restrepo is now playing in select cities.