For a year and three months—from May 2007 to July 2008—Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington traveled back and forth between the United States and Afghanistan, specifically a remote military outpost in the dangerous Korengal Valley, to capture the deadly, dusty, bewildering day-to-day of 15 soldiers fighting in what is now officially America's longest war. Junger, a writer, was on assignment for Vanity Fair; Hetherington, a photographer, was on assignment for ABC News; neither had ever made a film before. The outpost the soldiers set up and then live in and fight from is called Restrepo, named after a medic killed early on. "When I first got here, I thought: This is a shit hole. I'm going to die here," one of the soldiers says. The footage includes soldiers shooting people, being shot at, sweating, sleeping, being bored, arguing with Afghan village elders over a dead cow, burning their own feces, and (at one point) being killed. And in the course of the year and three months, you see evidence of personal transformations: One soldier explains early on that he was raised by hippies in Oregon who were so averse to violence they wouldn't let him have a water gun; later in the film, he's shooting at someone and says that he really wants to see through the trees, see the body of the guy he just killed, to make sure he got him.

I had lunch with Junger and Hetherington the day the film played at SIFF and asked them about politics—specifically, why politics is left out of the movie completely. There are no interviews with military leaders, diplomats, or presidents, and the soldiers don't talk about politics when they're sitting around shooting the shit. They don't talk about internal policy debates (like "don't ask, don't tell") or external policy debates (like whether America should be in Afghanistan at all). Junger said, "At the remote outposts, the men don't make any distinction except who's a good soldier and who's not. So there's no liberals out there, there's no conservatives, there's no ugly guys, there's no handsome guys, there's no gay guys—there's good soldiers and bad soldiers, and that's it. In the incredibly divisive environment in Congress and the media, the example we need to emulate is the men fighting for this country. The fact they don't make those distinctions is what's keeping them alive."

Then he said, "We wanted to know what it was like being a soldier. If they sat around talking about politics, we would have reported it." He added that the soldiers would talk about the politics of Pakistan sometimes—"All the ammo, all the fighters, were coming across the border, and Pakistan is an American ally, and it really pissed them off"—and that one soldier, a 25-year-old staff sergeant from Utah named Larry Rougle, told Junger he planned to vote for Obama. ("He just brought that up in conversation to me, I didn't ask.") Rougle died before he could cast that vote, in combat; they show his death on film, in a wrenching sequence that was insanely dangerous to capture and is notable for its restraint.