Narrative movies about war can be harrowing to watch, but it’s easy to remind yourself that when the scene cuts, the actors go back to their trailers. Documentaries about war, while taking place in reality, rarely have the in-the-trenches gut-punch affect that draws us into their narrative counterparts.

And then there’s Restrepo.

Filmed over the course of a full 14-month deployment of a single Army platoon in Afghanistan by journalists Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, this is a film that literally looks over the shoulders of soldiers in the middle of the firefight. The only thing awaiting these young men when the camera cuts is the boredom that punctuates the combat, and the directors show plenty of that, as well.

The assignment given to this platoon isn’t just any ordinary deployment, either. They’re dropped into the Korengal valley, a narrow tract of land between mountain ridges in northeastern Afghanistan, near Pakistan, a key strategic location in the fight against Taliban forces and the search for Al-Qaeda hideaways. Once there, the soldiers can expect to see multiple firefights each day; one member of the platoon mentions that during a certain period of the war, 70% of the bombs dropped by the U.S. in the entire Afghanistan campaign were dropped in the Korengal.