The above like takes you directly to video clips from the movie "Restrepo" and the one I watched was entitled "Specialist Sterling Jones on being a soldier." It is one of the last clips from the movie that appeared just as the platoon that served in the Korengal Valley at O.P. Restrepo were to return home, to the States. Jones was one of the main characters throughout "Restrepo" and what he has to say in the video clip is what being a soldier on the battlefield is really like. You might originally join the Army, or another branch of the military, because you want to serves your country or want to make a name for yourself. For Jones, he states that all that really mattered was the men to his left and to his right, nothing else. He goes on to say how his wife, his family, no one else was there beside him fighting in the mountains of Afghanistan but him and the other dozen or so soldiers.
From this clip, and watching the entire movie, you can see how secluded the platoon that served at O.P. Restrepon actually were, perched on some peak in the middle of the Korengal Valley. I cannot remember the main base of the Korengal, but one soldier had talked about how if Restrepo was in trouble and they called for help, the other base was a world apart; they were that alone. Serving for fifteen months, the memory of home is a long distance, physically and mentally, from O.P. Restrepo. Here at Concordia, we serve our eight months then go home, and get to go home on breaks inbetween; but the men in Afghanistan are there day in and day out until their service has ended. Jones said it quite right, it was just him and the rest of those men fighting beside one another, nothing else mattered when anytime a bullet could take your life.
Last year, in a U.S. history course, my teacher had us read a book called With the Old Breed by E.B. Sledge which was about his experience during WWII as he was Island Hopping as a Marine. When first joining, he had the picture in mind that war was this glorious moment where he could serve his country and maybe get a medal or two for his service. After serving for months on end, Sledge came to the realization that he was halfway across the world and war was far uglier than it was glorious. Sledge too talked about those moments of being under fire and how at those moments it was just you and your men, in the middle of the night on some beach where you could be killed at any moment. There was events where Sledge was nearly killed at the men who surrounded him were killed off by mortar fire or assasinated by a Japenese soldier as they slept. Whether or not the war is in Japan or Afghanistan, it is ugly and although they may come back home as heroes, to those soldier and Marines they were simply doing everything to survive and make sure their fellow platoon members came back in one piece.
