OF PHOTOJOURNALISM, BIN LADEN, AND THE "RIGHT TO SEE”

A few days ago, the journalist Sebastian Junger visited West Point, where I am on the history faculty. He was there to show Restrepo, his documentary film about a U.S. Army combat team deployed on a dangerous assignment in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, and then do an on-stage interview with me in front of an audience of cadets and members of the general public. When it was planned many months ago, Junger was to have been joined by Tim Hetherington, a photojournalist who was Junger’s equal partner in the making of this film (they were co-directors), but two weeks before their appointed visit to West Point this month, Hetherington was killed by a mortar while covering the Libyan civil war near the city of Misrata. He was one of two cameramen who died in the attack. The other was Chris Hondros of Getty Images. Junger came to West Point anyway, and among the reasons he cited for not cancelling was the feeling that an audience composed of soldiers and would-be soldiers was precisely the kind of place where he should be as he coped with his grief.