We Needed Hetherington's 'Terrible, Beautiful Vision'

Author Sebastian Junger pays tribute to his friend and Restrepo co-director Tim Hetherington—one of the photojournalists killed in Libya this week—in a Vanity Fair essay. "You had a very specific vision for your work and for your life, and that vision included your death," Junger writes. "It didn’t have to, but that’s how it turned out. I’m so sorry, Tim." He recounts Hetherington's latest idea for a movie, exploring his theory that soldiers in combat behave the way they've seen other soldiers behave in movies and photographs.

"You had this idea of a feedback loop between the world of images and the world of men that continually reinforced and altered itself as one war inevitably replaced another in the long tragic grind of human affairs," writes Junger. It's a great, important idea, he adds. "I don’t know if it was worth dying for—what is?—but it was certainly an idea worth devoting one’s life to. Which is what you did. What a vision you had, my friend. What a goddamned terrible, beautiful vision of things." Click to read the full essay. (More Tim Hetherington stories.)