By a Very Proud Soldiers’ Angel

Dear Angels,

The week as we celebrate the incredible blessings of freedom and safety here in America, let’s also remember those who have sacrificed so much for us to have those blessings. Some are coming home with wounds on the outside, others with hidden wounds on the inside.

Parties and community gatherings are great opportunities to show others how we can care for those to whom we owe so much. Please share the word about these great activities!

By ELISABETH BUMILLER (NYT)

A special inspector general said that even top-rated Afghan units could not operate independently and that the ratings of many security forces overstated their actual capabilities.

WORLD / ASIA PACIFIC

Quest to Neutralize Afghan Militants Is Showing Glimpses of Success, NATO Says

By THOM SHANKER and ALISSA RUBIN (NYT)

About 130 important insurgent figures have been captured or killed in Afghanistan over the past 120 days, according to NATO military statistics.

OPINION

Afghan Lessons, Beyond McChrystal

(NYT)

Readers respond to articles about the removal of General McChrystal and the war in Afghanistan.

OPINION

McChrystal Is No Victim

(NYT)

David Brooks provides an insightful historical summary of American public affairs reporting in his column “The culture of exposure” (Views, June 26).

More Articles On This Topic »

With Command Shift in Afghanistan, Talk Turns to Withdrawal

By PETER BAKER (NYT)

As President Obama tries to maintain flexibility on the withdrawal timeline, many are wondering just what will happen next summer.

U.S.

U.S. Military Deaths in Afghanistan

(NYT)

The Department of Defense confirmed the death of an American as a part of the Afghan war and related operations.

Return of Refugees to Kyrgyzstan Disrupts Relief Effort

By ANDREW E. KRAMER and MATTHEW SALTMARSH (NYT)

Tens of thousands of people who fled ethnic fighting in Kyrgyzstan earlier this month streamed back into the country over the course of a few days last week.

OPINION

Wrong Track Distress

By BOB HERBERT (NYT)

With no end to the employment crisis in sight, the U.S. desperately needs to enact an aggressive jobs-creation campaign.

More Articles On This Topic »

Dear donnette,

“When I saw people putting the dead bodies of my children, parents, and other relatives in bed I couldn’t bear it anymore and fell on the ground. I lost my sense…as if hell fell on me.”

This shocking testimony comes from a 25-year old Pakistani man who lost nine family members when two shells, fired by Pakistani security forces, hit his house.

Far from an isolated incident, the civilian killings took place in the alarmingly violent and lawless tribal areas of northwest Pakistan.

The residents in these regions are subject to horrific abuses by the Pakistani Taliban and have no legal protection by the Pakistani government. Most disturbing is the fact that they are increasingly attacked on three different fronts – by the Taliban, by the Pakistani army and by U.S. drone strikes.

Yet the suffering of the people of this area has been ignored, sacrificed in the name of geopolitical interests.
Blow off the veil of silence. Sign our petition urging the U.S. government to face the human right crisis in northwest Pakistan.

Remote and mountainous, northwest Pakistan has become a dangerous place to collect research. At one time, little was known about the overall situation in region.

But we’re using our new website, www.eyesonpakistan.org, to help both private citizens and policy makers gain access to these previously inaccessible conflict zones. Using state of the art mapping tools and in-depth research, the site provides concrete visual evidence of destruction and human rights abuse.

We also launched a companion report, “As if Hell Fell on Me: The Human Rights Crisis in Northwest Pakistan,”1 which documents the systemic abuses carried out by the Pakistani Taliban. The report is based on nearly 300 interviews with residents in this region, equally as tragic as the young man’s account shared at the beginning of this message.

And topping off our evidence is a report recently published by the UN which refers to US drone strikes as an “ill-defined license to kill without accountability”.

We’ve got the proof. The pressure is building. Now all we need is for the U.S. government to draw a line and stand on the side of human rights.

Urge the U.S. government to uphold human rights in Pakistan.

In solidarity,

Christoph Koettl
Crisis Campaigner
Amnesty International USA

PS: Would you like to do more for human rights in Pakistan? Participate in our Eyes on Pakistan Writing Contest and win a Flip HD camera!

There is Afghanistan, yes, but militants have become adept at exploiting the sentiment of global Muslim brotherhood on the limitless landscape of the Web.

More Articles On This Topic »

Image Coopyright & used with permission and thanks to Michael Yon

The New York Times

Wed, June 23, 2010 — 1:30 PM ET

MOSUL, Iraq — Staff Col. Ismail Khalif Jasim, the top intelligence officer in Nineveh Province, was scrutinizing faces last week as he walked through what the police say is the most dangerous neighborhood in Iraq’s most violent city. The place is so risky that some of his colleagues apologetically offered reasons why they would be unable to accompany him there.

One major admitted he was simply too scared. He was forced, though, along with more than 200 other soldiers and police officers, to go to the neighborhood, Amil. Iraqi security forces claim to control it. But in reality Amil is in the throes of another spate of killings, as the American military works to root out Islamist militants from the area before it reduces the number of its troops in Iraq to 50,000 from about 90,000 by the end of August.

Colonel Jasim’s visit there was aimed at persuading groups of stone-faced residents to cooperate with the Iraqi Army — an entity almost universally loathed here for its unapologetically rough treatment of the area’s people. But, he suggested, the authorities were better than the insurgents holed up there.

“They are not just outlaws,” the colonel was saying, suggesting that they were far more dangerous and had none of the romance sometimes associated with criminals. The men regarded him impassively.

“They say you have to slaughter soldiers and police,” he said. “We found information that they want to slaughter more people. Do you want more people killed?”

No luck. The men did not answer. The colonel, his sunglasses hiding his eyes but not the look of contempt that curled around his lips, moved on to the next cluster of men.

Soldiers walked on either side of him, and in front and behind. Armored police and military vehicles were parked on every corner in the neighborhood, its entrance points blocked to traffic. The street had been strung with concertina wire. Only a few people dared to leave their houses.

Amil is a stronghold for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely homegrown group of Sunni insurgents, but that is something the neighborhood does not want to discuss. Questions about the group elicit only nervous, evasive responses in the largely Sunni Arab enclave. No one dares mention its name.

During the past several weeks, United States forces have aggressively begun to try to root out Qaeda operatives in Amil before the last of the American combat troops leaves. This month, the American military said in a statement that it had arrested a man who had committed “assassinations against Iraqi judicial and police officials, and has allegedly coordinated improvised explosive device attacks against” the Iraqi police and army. The man’s identity was not released.

Four days later, gunfire in an adjoining neighborhood killed two Iraqi police officers on patrol. The same day, in central Mosul, the deputy governor survived a bomb blast that demolished his armored car. The next day, a bomb in a public market near Amil killed 2 people and wounded 27.

Several days later, United States forces announced the arrest in Mosul of another senior member of Al Qaeda, along with several other men.

The violence goes on, however, seemingly unabated. There are car bombs every day. Some are defused. Some blow up.

Colonel Jasim’s patrol posed a specific problem for people in Amil: Being seen talking to an Iraqi Army or police officer, regular targets for Al Qaeda, would mean trouble. Talking to an American soldier, even exchanging hellos, could mean torture and death.

“We believe they have many supporters in the neighborhood, so we’re afraid of them,” Majid Riyadh Ahmed, 40, said about a group of men who in broad daylight recently gunned down a politician on a sidewalk.

“It is a hot spot,” he said, using the term that has become synonymous with Amil.

Like many here, Mr. Ahmed differentiated between the types of violence that take place.

“There are some terror actions and there are some jihad actions,” he said. Jihad actions are those aimed at American forces or their Iraqi security force allies. Terror actions are those directed at residents.

Asked if he felt safe, Mr. Ahmed, a father of four, did not hesitate. “I am scared,” he said.

On this warm morning, Amil was swarming with soldiers and police officers. People peered through their windows and expressed amazement. They said there were normally very few security force members around, leaving members of Al Qaeda to roam freely, extorting shop owners and intimidating everyone else.

“I’m wondering why the police, who know this area is dangerous, don’t move on it,” one resident said.

But Atheel al-Nujaifi, the provincial governor, said the issue was more complicated.

“The security forces are deployed everywhere in Mosul, but there are areas we call unsafe because it is easy for Al Qaeda to commit actions, and then to hide among the people in those areas,” he said. “A hot spot doesn’t mean there isn’t any army or police. The neighborhood is under the control of the federal police.”

He said Al Qaeda was able to operate in Amil because “the people are either sympathetic or afraid.”

Whatever the reason, no one has been able to quell Mosul’s violence: It is one of the few urban areas in Iraq where American combat troops patrol the streets. Some 18 Iraqi Army battalions are stationed in the city, and hundreds of Iraqi police officers staff checkpoints.

But in Amil, people say they want nothing to do with the Iraqi Army in particular — which in Mosul is composed primarily of Shiites from southern Iraq. Residents complain the soldiers do not understand their culture, and are rude at best, brutal at worst, suspecting everyone in the neighborhood of being a member of Al Qaeda.

“There’s no trust between the security forces and the people,” said one resident, Hazim Mahmud al-Sahan, whose son was recently killed in Amil, not far from an Iraqi Army checkpoint.

For years, though, the greater scorn was poured on Americans. But in a few months they will be gone, it seems regardless of whether places like Amil descend into worse violence.

“There will be greater problems when the Americans leave,” said Didar Abdulla al-Zibari, a member of the local provincial council. He paused for effect, before saying that America “will be blamed” for leaving.

Britain marked its 300th military death in the Afghanistan war on Monday, a milestone that Prime Minister David Cameron described as “desperately bad news” and a reminder that Britain was “paying a high price for keeping our country safe.”

The milestone, gloomily awaited in Britain in recent weeks, was reached with the death on Sunday of a Royal Marine in a hospital in Birmingham. He was flown there after being wounded by a roadside bomb in the southwestern Afghan province of Helmand on June 12. He has not yet been identified.

Among the foreign powers involved in the war, Britain has suffered casualties second only to the 1,126 of the United States. But the British losses are higher proportionally when set against the two nations’ populations, overall military manpower and Afghanistan deployments. Britain, with about 60 million people, has nearly 10,000 troops in Afghanistan. The United States, with five times the population and its commitment still building from the 30,000-troop surge ordered by President Obama last year, has about 94,000 troops there.

In both countries, the governments have come under political pressure from faltering public support for the war. The statement from Mr. Cameron — who visited British troops in Helmand 10 days ago — reflected the growing sense that his government, in office barely six weeks, is resolved not to allow itself to be dragged into an open-ended military commitment.

“Of course, the 300th death is no more or less tragic than the 299 that came before,” Mr. Cameron said. “But it is a moment, I think, for the whole country to reflect on the incredible service and sacrifice and dedication that our armed services give on our behalf.”

“We are paying a high price for keeping our country safe, for making our world a safer place, and we should keep asking why we are there and how long we must be there,” he added. “The truth is that we are there because the Afghans are not yet ready to keep their own country safe and to keep terrorists and terrorist training camps out of their country. That’s why we have to be there.

“But as soon as they are able to take care of security for their own country, that is when we can leave,” he said.

Also on Monday, officials in the Foreign Office confirmed that Britain’s most senior diplomat dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, is leaving his post. Sir Sherard, 55, has been Britain’s counterpart to Richard C. Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special envoy to the two countries, and has occasionally ruffled feathers in Washington with his outspoken advocacy of a more radical shift from war to talks with the Taliban. The officials who confirmed that he had quit said that he had not been fired, and was seeking appointment to another diplomatic post.

The unnamed Royal Marine who died Sunday, from the 40 Commando Royal Marines, was wounded near the embattled town of Sangin. As in his case, nearly two-thirds of all allied military casualties in recent years have been caused by so-called I.E.D.’s, or improvised explosive devices. Senior government officials, including Mr. Cameron, have joined military chiefs in accusing the former Labour government of not giving British troops enough transport helicopters or updated mine-resistant troop carriers to cope with the threat from the roadside bombs.

In other ways, the new government in London has signaled an impatience with the war, and a readiness, if progress is not evident by the end of the year, to review its commitment and move toward a graduated troop withdrawal beginning next year.

Last week, it announced it was accelerating the retirement of Britain’s top military officer, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, who, officials in the Cameron government said, was judged to have been too pliant in his dealings with the government of Gordon Brown. Also being hastened into retirement is the Defense Ministry’s chief civil servant, Sir Bill Jeffrey, who, these officials said, was judged to have allowed money-wasting “bloat” in the ministry’s civilian staff, and other management blunders.

The mood of the new government has been closely watched by top Pentagon officials who see any potential weakening of British resolve as a setback for their efforts to persuade skeptics in the Obama administration to give the American troop surge time to try to turn the tide of the war. Under Mr. Obama’s plans, a review of progress is set for later this year, before a 2011 deadline for beginning a drawdown of troops.

Last week, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who has overall responsibility for the war as chief of the United States Central Command, joined Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in lobbying Mr. Cameron and other top British officials in London, telling them America could not fight the war without Britain, and urging them to defer judgment about the surge’s success.

9 NATO Deaths in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — Nine NATO service members died Monday in southern and eastern Afghanistan, according to a NATO spokesman.

Four were killed in a helicopter crash and two others in separate bomb attacks in southern Afghanistan. A seventh was killed in a firefight. Two others were killed by attacks using improvised explosive devices in eastern Afghanistan.

Six Afghan National Army soldiers were also killed Monday in attacks in four provinces in southern and eastern Afghanistan, and two Afghan national police officers were killed while patrolling in Helmand Province.

YOUR FREEDOM ISN’T FREE … SOMEONE HAD TO PAY FOR IT

When I was a kid, I couldn’t understand why Eisenhower was so popular. Maybe this will explain why. General Eisenhower Warned Us [ It is a matter of historythat when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead. He did this because he said in words to this effect: ‘Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses -because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened’ This week, the UK debated whether to remove The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it ‘offends’ the (culture) population which claims it never occurred. It is not removed as yet.. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it. It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the,6 million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians,and 1,900 Catholic priests Who were ‘murdered, raped, burned, starved, beaten, experimented on and humiliated’ while the German people looked the other way! Now, more than ever, with Iran , among others, claiming the Holocaust to be ‘a myth,’ it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets. [ This message is intended to reach 400 million people! Be a link in the memorial chain and help distribute this around the world. How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Center ‘NEVER HAPPENED’, because it offends some (Cultures) in the U.S. ??? Do not just delete this message; it will take only a minute to pass this along.. FREEDOM ISN’T FREE…SOMEONE HAD TO PAY FOR IT

This is the week we go to Walter Reed to deliver the beautiful made with love and lots of prayers to our Wounded Warriors. Please keep us, Louise Downs, Carole Carrolle, Judy Miracle and Charles Lunsford in your prayers. Pray for strength, courage, wisdom and let the love we have for God, for our wounded, for our country, for freedom shine like a beacon and be healing. I will do my best to post pictures on my facebook….Be my friend (Louise Downs) on facebook!!

Thank you (Dad) Charles Lunsford for driving YOUR truck filled with the Miracle Quilts and (son) Little Charles Lunsford for opening up YOUR home to us!! Little Charles IS the very reson this ministry was started…9/11 we were attacted and Oct. we started sending sent care boxes to Little Charles and his unit serving our country…we have NOT stopped sending…Care packages now are “Miracle” Boxes!

What a MIRACLE…but then we believe in MIRACLES!!! Praise the Lord!!

I just received 2 request and thought of YOU, my Desert Angel friend. I know together we can get these much needed supplies, that our wounded are asking for to the field hospital at Camp Leatherneck and Troops stationed at Camp Patriot. Both camps are in Afghanistan…

Good day Louise,

I recently went to visit our Wounded Warriors here on Camp Leatherneck and they mentioned that they could use small/medium t-shirts/shorts that they can use when they take off their uniform. They are here recuperating from their battle wounds and most of them come without uniforms or anything. They have quite a bit of toiletry items over there, but I noticed that most of the Shirts/shorts and underwear that have been donated to the Wounded Warriors were size XL/XXL/XXXL. These Marines are just not that large, so the items remain in a box.

If you could find these Marines size small/med/large T-shirts/shorts and underwear (boxer shorts), as they come in wounded without any gear. They would be most grateful. Thanks so much for whatever you can do to help these Wounded Warriors.

They also mention microwave popcorn. There was a microwave donated to their recreation area, so they are able to pop it.

They also need:

Bath size towels/face cloths/shower shoes/body wash
twin-size sheet sets for their cots they sleep on in their tents while recuperating.

Some type of bag to be able to put these items in would also be great.

Thanks for your time and support of the Marines here at Camp Leatherneck , Afghanistan.

Semper Fidelis, Master Gunnery Sergeant

Thank you for the neck coolers!!! They were gratefully received by the Navy,
Army, and Coast Guard. I do not want to over step my bounds so if I ask for
too much PLEASE let me know. I understand that getting help may be hard,
everyone has a life, lol. My request is this, would you have handkerchiefs
that they can just stick in their pocket to wipe the sweat form their faces?
Nothing fancy, plain white ones would be great. If not that is ok. We still
love all of you and appreciate all that you do for us. Also, per the
chaplains request would you have t-shirts, athletic socks for PT, etc. He
would like to know if you had a list of items you can send so we don’t ask
you for too much.
Thank you my friend in MI!

Gratefully serving our Lord and country,

SPC Sharon Camp Patriot

I can email YOU Shields Pizza coupons that need passed out to ALL your
friends. This is a fund raiser The Rochester Shield’s Pizza is doing
the whole month of JUNE for Desert Angels.

Our TROOPS need neck coolers, wet wipe, new socks, foot powder, dry
drink mixes just to name a few items. It is so very HOT there…

Please stop in grab a famous home grown Michigan, SHIELD’s PIZZA and
tell them THANKS!!

We WILL continue to pray for our Troops and their families. God bless the USA!
God bless our Troops and their families!

Louise “Desert Angel”Downs
248 736 6403

Desert Angels, Inc. 4280 Diehl Road – Metamora, Mi.48455
http://TheDesertAngel.org

ASK almost any American, even those opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they will state that they “support our troops.”

Notes from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era. Go to the Blog »

Multimedia

Slide Show

Death Valley Days

Tim Hetherington, courtesy Chris Boot Ltd.

Specialist Misha C. Pemble-Belkin. More Photos »

It’s a lovely thought, that we care for the soldiers who do the fighting regardless of politics at hand. But for the most part public interest and understanding of what American soldiers do on our behalf remains remarkably limited in wars that go mostly untelevised and undernoticed. American men and women fight, die and kill a long ways from home, and many want it to stay that way. “Restrepo,” a documentary directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, which will open on June 25 in Los Angeles and New York, is a 94-minute tutorial on life at the tip of that very sharp spear. Specifically, Mr. Junger, a veteran war correspondent and author of several books, including “The Perfect Storm,” and Mr. Hetherington, a longtime war photographer, spent 14 months, beginning in May 2007, with a platoon of United States soldiers in the Korangal Valley of Afghanistan.

“Restrepo” avoids the conventions of documentary film: there is no back story, no drive-bys with experts for context, no underlying ideology or obvious message. The viewer is dropped into war, with a hard jolt, and resides, along with 15 soldiers from Second Platoon of Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, in a remote and raw outpost called Restrepo, so named after one member of the platoon who is killed early in their rotation. In practical terms the soldiers of Second Platoon hump up a mountain with lots of bullets and some shovels and dig in. During the day they make efforts at outreach, handing over food and sometimes cash to local people, many of whom return at night to shoot at them. “It is a weird sort of anti-paradise,” Mr. Junger said in a phone call from Houston, where he was on a book tour for “War,” his best seller based on the same reporting. “They were in the most extreme place in the valley, which was the most extreme place in Afghanistan. By 2007 a fifth of the fighting in Afghanistan took place there.”

The Korangal Valley, full of giant peaks and hidden enemies, has a bit of reputation inside the military.

“Everybody is like, ‘Oh, you’re going to the Korangal?,’ and they feel sad for you,” Capt. Dan Kearney says in the film. “The deadliest place on earth. The Korangal Valley.”

The battle-hardened approach to depicting the current conflicts has shown up in features, on television and in other documentaries: “The Hurt Locker,” a feature film about a bomb-disposal unit in Iraq that won the best picture Oscar this year; “Generation Kill,” a 2008 HBO mini-series by David Simon and Ed Burns; and “Gunner Palace,” a 2005 documentary about an artillery unit in Iraq.

But “Restrepo” (pronounced res-TREP-o) may be the most frightening among them because the soldiers are so clearly on their own, isolated and often beyond the reach of the technological might of the United States military. Once viewers adjust to seeing life from inside a helmet, they could not be blamed for wondering how Mr. Hetherington and Mr. Junger survived. Suffice to say that both men, who each did assignments for Vanity Fair magazine while working on the film, still bear marks from their time alongside the soldiers in the Second Platoon.

Sitting in Central Park two weeks ago in shorts, Mr. Hetherington had a deep, angry series of hash marks on his ankle where he broke his fibula. After Mr. Hetherington fell down a mountain, the medic who examined him told him it wasn’t broken; that was a lie because they were four hours away from base, and there was no way to get there except to walk on his mess of a leg.

“That was not a very good evening,” he said, smiling as he looked down at the scar. “There was very little choice at the time, because you don’t want to be the person that is slowing down the platoon and putting others at risk.”

Mr. Junger learned quickly that war makes no distinction between warriors and those who are there to observe them. In one scene captured in the film, a Humvee in which he is riding drives over an improvised explosive device, or I.E.D., which blows up under the engine block rather than the cab, sparing the lives of the men on board, but rocking their worlds. Later in the tour Mr. Junger jumped off a rise to avoid incoming fire and tore his Achilles tendon.

“I tore my Achilles and Tim went back, and then he broke his leg and I went back,” Mr. Junger said. “The fact that we kept coming back gave us a lot of credibility with the soldiers.”

In choosing the members of the platoon, Uncle Sam proved to be an effective casting agent. There’s Captain Kearney, a ramrod who figures that the only reasonable tactic is aggression, projecting power down the valley to keep the enemy on its heels. Specialist Misha C. Pemble-Belkin is a baby-faced dreamer whose hippie parents would not allow him to play with guns, but he seems to know his way around a machine gun pretty well. Pfc. Juan S. Restrepo is a medic and a toothy, grinning instigator who keeps his nails long to serenade his squad on guitar. And Sgt. Brendan C. O’Byrne is a soldier’s soldier who is alert to all incoming signals.

Sergeant O’Byrne, who completed his tour, has read Mr. Junger’s book and seen the film, said the movie has a practical value.

“I’ve received all sorts of e-mails from families and wives of soldiers who say the book and the movie helps them understand why their fathers or their brothers or husbands don’t like to talk about what happened over there,” he said. “There are certain parts in the middle of the movie that I can’t watch, they are so real and powerful.”

Not everyone is a fan of Mr. Junger’s approach to storytelling. Lewis Manalo, who served combat tours in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, wrote a withering critique of Mr. Junger’s “War“ on the Publishing Perspectives Web site, calling his depiction of soldiers “superficial and unsophisticated.”

In a phone call Mr. Manalo, now a book buyer at Idlewild Books in Manhattan, said that he had not seen “Restrepo,” but that Mr. Junger’s suggestion that the soldiers in Afghanistan did not have opinions about the war they were fighting was that of a “condescending fan.” He added, “People enlist as a political choice, and he takes that way from them, and I think that is doing a great disservice to the people who served there.”

Mr. Junger said that the movie reflected what he saw and heard, which was not a lot of talk about politics.

It’s clear watching the film that Mr. Junger and Mr. Hetherington achieved extraordinary intimacy with their subjects over time. There are noncombat moments in the film that are very much part of the military life: the men wrestle one another and in one particularly vivid scene they crank the song “Touch Me” and gang pile on one another as the lyrics “I want to feel your body” pour out of the speakers.

It’s less homoerotic than a clear antidote to the physical isolation of their posting, according to the filmmakers.

READ MORE >> Film – ‘Restrepo’ – One Platoon’s Deadly Post in Afghanistan – NYTimes.com.