Blame it on YouTube, Reality TV, or America’s Funniest Home Videos. Our minds make an immediate assumption when we see un-stylized and unpolished video. Digital images connotate unobstructed reality. We take what we see in documentaries as reality a piori, and mock-documentaries (from This is Spinal Tap to The Office) use raw video to play with these assumptions. But when digital video cameras are turned on war, what kind of image is captured? That is the question implicit in Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s documentary Restrepo.

The film follows a single platoon on the front lines of the war in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley in 2007. The valley was the setting for the vast majority of combat in the country that year. American troop’s sustained casualty rates of up to 25 percent, and 2007 represented the moment when the military realized that while it was focused on Iraq, Afghanistan had spun out of control. Hetherington and Junger put us there, setting us un-ceremonially in the center of it all. As a result the documentary portrays particular and often unseen side of war – war from the sightlines of soldiers.

War is the most ancient subject of stories, and yet we rarely get a view of it unobstructed by fictions, politics, and embellishments. Restrepo offers a kind of explanation of why war stories quickly turn to the tales of heroes. War, unfettered, is mundane and banal. As seen through this movie, it is cruelly plain. Soldiers fluctuate from extreme boredom to extreme fear, from adrenaline fueled moments of brute aggression, to broken moments of gut-wrenching heartbreak. Watching it, from a cozy theater seat, no less, is as unsettling an experience you can have at the movies – and an almost guilty one.

As the platoon in the film fight to maintain a dingy outpost precariously dug out by hand on an obscure mountain in an obscure corner of the world, Hetherington and Junger’s cameras don’t turn away for an instant. We see death and local politics, banter and humor. But this well-balanced documentary is never accusatory or intended to provoke guilt. The filmmakers merely want to tell the soldiers’ story, and they are particularly qualified to do so. This is no newsreel, no quick CNN glimpse. Hetherington and Junger spent a full-year in hell with these men, unarmed and shot at every day. At one point, Hetherington told me in an interview, he broke his leg and carried himself four hours down a mountain without the aid of the soldiers. The observers, in effect, became unarmed soldiers themselves, and as a result, Restrepo’s sympathies lay squarely with the troops. And, mutual respect earned, the troops unveil their hearts and minds to the filmmakers.

We repeat “Support the Troops” on bumper stickers and television ads, at baseball stadiums and in prayer. But what is not common is an intimate understanding of what exactly it means to be a troop in our two contemporary wars. Restrepo’s portrayal of this reality is so immediate, it is often difficult to stomach, but it is also one of the only chances you’ll get to see the troops’ world. The film can’t help but raise a host of difficult questions: what is the point of war – both our wars and war in general – and having seen the situation on the ground through the movie, it is hard to feel hopeful about our military engagements. But these questions are secondary to the film’s real focus and power: allowing us entry into the world of the soldier. It is not an easy world to exist in, even for ninety minutes. But if you support the troops, you can give them that much of your time.