Original subtitles

My name is.

My name is Matt Van Dyke.

I'm 29 years old.

I carry a Smith & Wesson Xtreme Ops knife.

It flips out.

It's a basic pocket knife.

It's decent, partially serrated blade.

I also have a knife that I wear attached to my shin.

Okay for cutting, primarily for stabbing.

So this is the armor vest.

In addition to body armor and a jacket, of course, I have a helmet.

This helmet's been fitted with a helmet camera mount.

I'll pick this up in the next clip.

♪

♪

♪

♪

Last fall, I met Matt Van Dyke, who told me he'd been

home in Baltimore when revolution broke out in Libya.

Rebels had taken up arms against Muammar Gaddafi, the country's dictator.

When Matt heard about the uprising, he bought

a plane ticket and set off to join the rebels.

In his bag, he carried a video camera.

Alright, you good?

Yeah.

Okay, so how did a guy from Baltimore end up fighting in the Libyan Revolution?

Oh, I don't know.

Were there some influences growing up?

Books I always read when I was a child were-own-adventure books.

This is a great white water adventure!

My mother says that as a child, I always had a deep desire for adventure.

Matthew!

I was raised on action movies.

I wanted to be a CIA agent, and I wanted to be a spy.

Movies shaped a lot of who I was.

On the new Indiana Jones!

But in reality, I was sort of sheltered and spoiled growing up.

Be careful lifting those rocks.

I was an only child of an only child of an only child.

And I was raised in a house where my grandparents lived with my mother and I.

I was just the center of my family's universe.

Don't you look sharp.

I lived at home in the basement through college.

I didn't have many friends.

I would spend, at times, 12 hours

straight in front of a computer playing games.

All my adventures were virtual.

I first saw Lawrence of Arabia when I was in

college, and it became one of my favorite films.

These are not ordinary men.

I don't want ordinary men.

I decided I wanted to study Middle East.

So I went to Georgetown University and earned

a master's degree in Middle East concentration.

but it was all just academic and intellectual.

I had never actually even been to the Arab world.

When I graduated from Georgetown, I

really did not know much about the real world.

I still wanted to do something that was extraordinary.

But here I was in my mid-20s.

My mother and grandmother would do my grocery

shopping and do my laundry and bring it to me.

Never really paid my own bills.

No job.

I had to do something drastic.

And so I needed to, you know, do a course correction quite quickly in my life.

So I decided I'd just do it the hardest way possible.

You know, a crash course in manhood.

And then one day, I was sitting at home

watching television, and there was Albie Mingles.

♪

He's an Australian filmmaker from the 70s and 80s.

And he set off a multi-year journey doing all

sorts of crazy adventures in Africa and so on.

And he produced these films that were very popular in Australia.

All this blonde hair, and dressed kind of

funny in his cut-off denim shorts and no shirt.

But there was just something really appealing about these films.

He was like a real-life Hollywood

hero and rather than just

filming other people he was filming his own adventures in himself.

It was exactly what, that's the life I wanted to live.

So I decided I would go and make travel adventure films like Albie Mingles did.

♪

Okay, this is the first recording with the new camera.

So I went out and bought a camera and I bought a motorcycle.

I wanted to make a cutting-edge travel adventure documentary.

I was going on my crash course in

manhood, and I wanted to capture that on film.

Did you hope that by making a movie and being in

your movie that you'd sort of be able to play a

character on camera that made you become the real love?

Yeah, yeah I did.

I suppose I was crafting myself.

Using the camera to write my own life story.

I supported the idea of him doing something that would force him

to be more independent and more responsible for his daily existence.

You know, Lauren's sort of the more

responsible, kind of-to-earth, you

know, steadily employed,

rational, reasonable, one that kind of keeps me a bit grounded.

That's part of why I felt like this trip would be so good

for him, because he'd have to do all these things for himself.

There wasn't going to be anyone there to help him or do it for him.

Oh, this is an awesome shot.

This one's making the film.

What are you doing monkey?

Go.

Jesus

Okay, I'm in Gibraltar.

I'm at the Pillars of Hercules.

And behind me is my first view of Africa.

And here it is.

Africa.

It was very picturesque and very, you know, just

like I would have, you know, written it into a script.

♪

and I saw a camel, and I was like, wow, I am really here.

I'm filming and photographing, but I

didn't know anything about Arab culture really.

So for example, there were a lot of guys walking around holding hands.

I called Laura and I said, you know, Morocco is really

progressive and they're really open with homosexuality.

And she's like, you're an idiot.

Like, men hold hands over there.

-I was like, really? -And when I went to

use the bathroom, there was a squat toilet.

I had no idea what this hole in the floor was.

I ended up using the shower as a toilet and it got really gross.

A little bit horrifying, actually.

You alright?

It's a problem I've had since I was probably about 16 years old.

In high school, I started to become sort of obsessed with washing my hands.

I went to a psychiatrist who diagnosed me as

having obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD.

My OCD is anxiety about various things, phobias.

I avoid trash cans, sugar.

If sugar were to get on me, I would feel contaminated.

It ranges from minor inconvenience to extremely stressful.

OCD video.

Everything's okay, right?

Just making sure I didn't hit anybody here when I pulled over.

Part of my OCD is a constant fear of doing

something that will accidentally harm somebody else.

If I'm driving down the road and I hit a bump I will start to

think could that have been a person could I've hit Somebody

and then I might get 20 more miles down the road before I

decide to go back and check just to make sure Okay, this is a OCD shot.

Could I have caused somebody to fall off the cliff?

Consciously, I know it's not real, but I still have to get it off my mind.

Here's a view of it.

I don't see any cars that could have crashed.

Fuck four fucking OCD videos.

When I started using a helmet camera it took a lot of that

stress off me because I would just let it roll and then I knew

I could always go back and check the footage but even with the

helmet camera it would cause me to look back over my shoulder

and try to angle the camera to make sure I captured this fear

on film and then I'm looking over my shoulder one time and I

look back and there's a car coming right at me, crazy Moroccan

driver like driving in the wrong lane and I swerved off the road and crashed.

This is me the day I broke my collarbone.

Can you see that?

It's gross.

I don't know what to say.

I had a motorcycle accident and I broke my

clavicle and so ends the adventure for now.

Okay, let's go.

But after this accident I became terrified basically.

I had like called Lauren from the hotel room in

Morocco and whined about how afraid I was to leave

the hotel room and she said to me, why are you such a coward?

And it stuck in my head for years.

I still bother, I still, you know, bring it up

from time to time whether she thinks I'm a coward now.

And I mean I think that really stuck with him.

He was kind of hurt by it but he recognized that I was right.

So, I mean whether it caused this whole

trajectory or not, who, I mean, who can, who knows?

Who can say?

Now she probably wishes she hadn't said it.

But um, so I end up, I went back, I got the bike.

And I decided I'm going to hit every similar country.

Spent some time in Tunisia, went to Egypt.

Through Jordan, through Syria, you know, I tried

to see everything, I zigzagged across the region.

♪

♪

And I'm filming everything

♪

♪

I wasn't just watching television.

I was reading about other people.

I was finally having my own adventure.

It was incredible.

♪

In total, I did about 35 ,000 miles on that bike.

It's one of the best days of my life.

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

Shit!

Damn it, well I almost made it and now I just crashed the bike.

I'm trying to wade to this truck to get help.

-Damn it. -Damn it!

Fuck!

I don't know what to do.

I can't get the bike up.

It's very, very difficult to shoot a motorcycle film by yourself.

Sometimes I would drive up a mountain, set up the camera on a

tripod, and then drive back down the mountain, showing myself driving.

The whole process would take, you know, 30 minutes,

an hour for one shot that I probably wouldn't even use.

Shit!

Oh my god!

Yeah!

I taught myself how to do wheelies so now I'm kind of like wheelie

crazed and I just want to do wheelies in like every shot and I

have to resist the urge to do it because it'll just look really show-off

but the problem with adrenaline is that

every time you reach a new level you need it.

You know, adventure is a little bit like a drug, and you build a

tolerance to it, and then you have to take it to the next level.

I approached a newspaper in Baltimore, the

Baltimore Examiner, and said, look, if you just

give me the paperwork, I'll go do some embedded journalism.

And they said, that's great, but you can't even

afford to send our reporters to away football games.

So now they had a war correspondent.

All right, let's go.

Mount up.

-Mount up. -Mount up.

Seeing war up close for the first time, it

was like the movies, but not like the movies.

Oh, guys, it's Cal.

We don't have a Cal.

Oh, shit.

There goes the bingo camera.

Soldiers would ask me to film them acting like

soldiers, even though that's what they actually were.

They wanted to define their image on camera.

Yo, make sure you get the picture of me kicking the door.

No, seriously, so what should we do with this?

Let's go.

Oh, my God.

I don't want to kick it.

Kick that shit.

All right, now take a picture of this shit.

-Hold on. -What? -What are you gonna do?

Go clear it first. Go fucking clear it first.

The soldiers were very friendly towards me,

especially when I told them about the film I was making.

My vision look good.

Yeah, it does.

It's better than I expected it to be

Huh don't know yet

There were times when I was in Iraq that I

felt like I was on the wrong side of the camera.

Not necessarily that I wanted to be a

soldier, but I didn't want to

be just a documentarian.

I wanted to be shaping events around me

and having an impact, not just watching.

Matt, you gonna shoot?

Yeah, sure.

Hey, go put up a target for him.

When I was there, I learned a lot of

things that would become useful later in Libya.

He's close.

So?

He's ready to fire.

How am I doing pretty fucking good for guy never shoes

I'm just saying he's in the fucking black

I've been here looking at my map, Map

of Iraq, probably one of the

worst selling maps that the International Travel Maps Company makes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We talked.

It wasn't like he was gone for months and months and I didn't hear from him.

In almost every country he went to, we'd have

periodic access to email, we'd have video chats.

And that gave me the opportunity to see him and to

see the changes and to hear him talk about the

things he had seen and people he'd met and places he'd gone.

And it was amazing.

Amazing.

This is my utterly filthy hotel.

Absolutely disgusting in here.

Is this a live wire?

Look at this thing.

Having a camera to film my OCD helped me control it.

Look at the walls.

I felt I had sort of grown out of Matthew Van Dyke.

I was over there without my family and I was on my own and

doing things that Matthew Van Dyke would never have been able to do.

So I felt it warranted a new name.

My name is Max Hunter.

I'm 29 years old and I'm driving to Afghanistan.

Max Hunter.

Max Hunter was a swaggering, egotistical, ridiculously fearless,

reckless guy that wanted to show off and get famous and these sorts of things.

Very much informed by films in Hollywood.

And at the beginning, I was struggling to project that on camera.

But, you know, over time, I think I sort of grew into the me on camera.

We all gotta get our thrills somehow, right?

And this is how I get mine.

♪

I started doing things that now I realize

are a bit crazy, things that I would not do now.

I went through Tehran, crossed the border, got to Afghanistan.

I got dressed as an Afghan.

I'd been growing my beard out.

They blended in fairly well.

I bought salt-off shotguns.

I kept them under my clothes for-defense. -...

I ended up getting to Kabul, traveled

around the country, got attacked by a village mob.

I got punched in the face by a cop.

Got arrested a few times.

My head's, like, can't move.

He's, like, talking to me.

-Fire. -Fire!

I spent some time with U.S.

soldiers.

Just make sure you get the shell casings coming out.

I gotcha.

The more I did, the more I wanted to do it.

And the more I survived, the farther I thought I could push it.

I went to Osama Bin Laden's old house in Jalalabad.

I snuck in there and planted an American flag in the ruins.

I also took a brick that I still have as a souvenir.

It was a very dangerous project, it's very miraculous that I even survived it.

got bitten by a dog, a wild dog.

That's what it looks like.

It was just one crazy adventure after another.

In all my years filming hundreds of hours of footage, the most

important, pivotal moment of my entire journey I didn't even capture on film.

And that was meeting Nori.

Nori and his cousin were traveling through Africa mostly by foot.

And Nori was a hippie.

He had a lot of hair, talking about peace and love,

and this was a very cool Libyan to meet for the

first time because this wasn't my impression of Libyans.

Nori and I becoming friends was sort of a little bit

unexpected for me as well because, you know, I'm not a hippie.

I'm sort of more uptight.

I have OCD.

But Nori's one of the nicest people that you'll ever meet.

He's like, I used to describe him as almost

saint-like, like his mentality and his kindness.

He's one of the greatest people I've ever known.

We exchanged numbers and Norah said I should go to Libya.

Americans weren't able to get tourist visas to Libya at that time.

So I paid a fairly large bribe and got into Libya.

When I got into Libya, I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

Of course, I ran around with the motorcycle and posed

for pictures in front of Qaddafi's posters to prove it.

At that time, I think Qaddafi had been in power for 38 years.

The 38 was in the posters.

I still sort of can't believe I'm here.

It's almost like a dream.

I called Nori and hung out with him and his cousin.

And I met these bikers.

These became, like, really good friends of mine.

When I was in high school, I didn't have any friends.

I was mostly alone in high school.

And the few I have, I value highly.

And the friends I made in Libya were better

friends to me than almost all my friends in America.

Say something.

I'm celebrating the top of the world.

It just felt like I'd sort of arrived home in a way.

And the good friendships that I made really made me fall in love with Libya.

I can't believe you.

You're out of Libya now.

Laughter

Is it filming?

Yes.

Okay.

Merry Christmas.

Yes, thank you.

He came back and, I mean, everything was just better.

I mean, I just, like, it's cliche, but, you know, a weight just lifted.

And I was so excited and just so relieved.

Well, I'm recording you right now.

It's the way things should be.

When I came back, I was completely exhausted.

I was done with traveling.

I told Lauren, now we can have a normal life.

And then Libya happened.

And, uh, all those plans changed.

A revolution is spreading across the Arab world with anti-government protests.

Tunisia is in chaos this morning after

protesters forced out the country's president.

Egypt is now in a third day of massive protests.

Even in Syria, protesters are planning two days

of rage against the hard-line dictatorship there.

They want freedom, they want social justice,

an end to economic deprivation and corruption.

It's about democracy, it's about personal liberties.

We need freedom!

Freedom! Freedom! Protests all across the Arab world, from Morocco to Iran.

Governments have fallen in Tunisia and Egypt.

Will Libya be next?

February 2011, a revolution in Tunisia and Egypt.

It spread to Libya.

It just started as a protest.

But when people in Libya protested, Gaddafi came out and shot them.

Gaddafi has reportedly sent out death squads to hunt down protesters-to-door.

People, if they ended up in a hospital injured in a protest,

they would just disappear from the hospital and be executed.

Suffering and bloodshed is outrageous, and it is unacceptable.

Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello.

Foreign journalists are banned from the country.

So cell phone cameras illegally capture these pictures,

then they're posted on YouTube and funneled out underground.

Virtually everybody involved was filming

everything that was going on around them.

It's sort of what I've been doing on a micro level for a

much more important purpose than my motorcycle adventures.

Four years earlier I'd set off on this crash course on manhood, and now

here was the Arab Spring challenging my very image of what manhood was.

I was nothing compared to people that were going out on the

streets of Tripoli, the protests being returned with gunfire.

My friends that I made in Libya, they still had internet access.

So I was talking to them on internet chat and email.

And they started telling me, you know, their

neighbor was killed, their cousin was arrested and beaten.

My friend Tariq went out to protest.

Two people were shot by snipers right near him.

The media footage is one thing, but when it's your friends

telling you personal stories about people they're seeing

being killed, it takes on a whole different level of meaning.

At this point, America wasn't involved,

NATO wasn't involved, the UN wasn't involved.

One of my friends said, why doesn't anybody help us?

I could not imagine sitting at home watching

on TV my friends being killed.

So I called Lauren at work, and I said, you

need to come home from work, I'm going to Libya.

That day, I made the plane reservation for a plane leaving that evening.

My mother driving to the airport, me in the car, and then I turn

the camera and look at Lauren, and she just looks really pissed off.

I can't say that I was surprised, but I was angry.

I wasn't as angry that he was going as that he

was going to go, that day, with no notice, no

time to get his stuff really together, or anything.

I mean, I was pissed.

Today's February 28th, and I'm in Cairo, Egypt.

I'll be taking a car to the border tonight.

I hope to get across the border, get to Benghazi, and

once I'm there, I'll document what's going on and do

what I can to help in the effort to overthrow Gaddafi.

Part of me intellectually knew it might be a little bit ridiculous.

The same guy that had his family bring him his clean laundry and

his groceries, now I was heading into a war halfway across the world.

Moammar Gaddafi is showing no sign of backing

down an 18-day struggle for control of Libya.

Gaddafi appears to still be in control, but anti-government

groups claim that they are now in charge of much of eastern Libya.

Fuck.

Where are you coming from?

I'm going to Benghazi.

-Benghazi? -Yes.

Okay.

I called Nori, and I said to Nori, you know, Nori, I'm coming to Benghazi.

And he was like, yeah, man, come on, it's cool.

And when he said that, he said it in, like, his normal hippie-sounding voice.

And I thought when I got to Benghazi, Nori

would just be like the same Nori, the same

hippie, just hanging out, doing his thing, peace and love.

But Nori walked in with a flak jacket, fatigues, a

camouflaged boonie hat, and he was completely serious.

When the war starts here, and all the Gaddafi army going

out, the freedom, feeling your

body flying, smelling

something open inside you, like fresh air, fresh air

exactly, like you're in highland, you know,

and flying, and safe, safe.

And Benghazi already all have this feeling, all man,

but then Terrible still lies there worried about him.

This is a big hospital.

The guy is shooting his gun.

I hate the guns.

Yeah, I don't want to kill anyone from Libya.

Not just Libya, anyone from the world.

At the beginning of the war, Nouri said, I was

like, well, what do you want to happen to Gaddafi?

He said, you know, I just want him to

leave and go live in his tent and just go away.

Not like I want to catch Gaddafi and I want us to kill him.

He doesn't have, like, the hatred in him.

To welcome you guys is to sign the chain to the...

Yeah, really, sign the chain.

Nice city to go.

People had started to organize into small units.

Most of them were civilians.

Nouri had a friend named Ali, and he was one of the rebels.

So, Ali is there when the bomb was started.

A little guy died, but he survived.

His truck had been bombed by Gaddafi's guys.

And we need to fight with this car as well.

We do?

Yeah. This is the car that we're all going in?

-Yeah. -Really? -Yeah.

We fix it.

We have emergency fix it.

Three guns down, 14 and a half.

-Yeah. -We move.

Nothing stop us.

I asked what we need more and Matti said we need the guns now, you know.

We start the game.

No games, war, big war.

Nuri and Ali are inside a government building

getting papers to allow us to get the weapons.

So I'm keeping my head down here so that

nobody sees me and recognizes me as a father.

Hopefully this war won't last too long.

and nobody gets hurt.

I've been praying that nobody gets hurt.

Qaddafi's jets had bombed a rebel army base.

We went in looking for ammunition.

It still worked.

No, we're supposed to find a gun here.

Did you see anything?

At this point, Qadhafi's army was much better equipped than the rebels.

Be careful.

Very few of the rebels had any military experience.

A lot of them had never handled a gun before.

Go for it, Nori.

Safety off now, yeah?

Put it on R.

On the other side.

At the point that I joined the Revolution, that I had

fired a heavy machine gun, this gave me more experience

than the guys that I was with, the group that I was with.

People might say, well, you didn't have military experience.

Neither did anybody else, really.

Ha!

That's how you put it in place, mate!

The guys who were fighting at that stage in the war

were guys like us, you know, independent groups,

small groups, put a weapon in the back of a truck and go.

Previously, I've been in war zones as an

observer, but this time I was a participant.

And the feeling was completely different.

I was on the inside.

I was dressed like everyone else.

I was assuming the risks of other people.

For the first time in my life, I felt

like I was doing something really important.

We were preparing for the war and at the

same time we were watching the war on television.

And at this point, Gaddafi was winning the war.

Colonel Gaddafi's forces are on the offensive.

With their superior firepower, they push the

front line many miles east to the oil town of Brega.

We decided that we would go and recon Brega.

Because that was going to be the next target.

Here is Benghazi, sir.

And here is the rest of Nuva.

We're going to identify a defensive position,

where to set up the ditch, where to set up the mortars.

Nuri had to go work at the army base, so he wasn't going to be coming with us.

And he survived because of that.

We were at Ali's house before we went to Brega.

And Ali said something I'll never forget.

It's the last dinner.

You know last dinner?

Last supper?

No, it's not the last supper.

You sure?

Last dinner?

-Yes. -What's happening to him tomorrow?

I don't know.

We went to break it

There were still civilians there people had their

children in the street They've been some concerned

All of a sudden the truck stopped It was a set of ambush

Ben, you were out on the front lines with rebel forces outside of Brega.

Give us the latest.

What's happening out there?

We were with them this morning, and they came

under constant and heavy bombardment by Qaddafi forces.

I talked to him on the phone for a couple minutes on March 12th.

And he was actually on his way to Brega.

And the next morning, I woke up really early for some reason.

It was a Sunday, and I woke up like six-something.

And I saw that Qaddafi's troops had moved into Brega.

It was on TV, and I knew.

In all the years of his travels, I was always terrified of that phone call.

And it never occurred to me that the

worst thing would be not getting a phone call.

It would be silence.

♪

I was hit in the head during whatever happened.

I was in and out of consciousness for days.

I don't know where it was.

I was transported quite far.

And then I woke up in prison to the sound

of a man being tortured in the room above me.

I had this blindfold, and they came and interrogated me.

And they started playing video off my camera.

It was a clip of Nori.

At the end of the clip, I said, Nori, you remind me every day why we fight.

And the interpreter said, You will never see America again.

♪

I bit down my nails, cut down my toenails with a piece of plastic

spoon, thinking they were going to rip out my nails to torture me.

They never came interrogated me again.

I figured that they had enough from the video camera.

They didn't need to ask me any questions.

It was all there

Took me out three times a day to go use the squat toilet.

These black bugs would crawl into my cell at

night, climb on the walls, climb on me sometimes.

Bugs that lived in the toilet.

Trash piled up, there were maggots.

And my OCD got really bad.

That was going to be the rest of my life.

I would position myself under the hole and stare up at the sky.

I thought America had satellites that would see down through

the skyline and see me and I would sit up there and sometimes

I'd make looks on my face of Real terror, you know try to make

it look like I'm not doing well So these guys would know

looking down the satellite man that Americans like he's really in rough shape.

We got to get him out

I started to worry about everything.

I was really worried that Qaddafi had sent

people after knowing his family because of my belief.

I worried Lauren was gonna leave me.

Lauren, I've been patient for years, but you

can't run off and expect your girlfriend, you

know, to stick by you when you're in prison for years.

And my mother, my mother was all alone.

My parents got divorced when I was only a few years old.

And I'd never known my father.

And I have no brothers or sisters.

So I made a decision to go sacrifice not

just myself and Livia, but my mother also.

And maybe it was all just ridiculous and insane.

The whole thing, going back the last four years of my life,

maybe we're very misguided and very foolish and very reckless.

And yeah, I questioned whether it was worth it.

And whether it was worth sacrificing my family for it.

And my future family with Lauren.

It was a very rough time.

I spent-a-half months in two different prisons,

basically sitting in a closet, staring at the wall.

The guards watched the television at the end of the hall.

And Qaddafi was holding a press conference.

I started hearing talk of a prisoner being traded.

And it was me that was being traded.

And then I heard Hillary Clinton talking about trading for me.

The American government is negotiating a deal to free Matthew Van Dyke.

Are you going tonight to one day or appointment at the same time?

I was on one TV all the time.

Day after day, every single day, all the news was about me.

People started bringing their children

up to the prison walls to yell tons at me.

People were singing songs about me.

I heard this all day.

We're fighting for your freedom

But I now realize none of it was real.

My entire existence was in my head.

Having auditory hallucinations, it's a side effect of solitary confinement.

I know that.

That place literally broke my mind.

When I boil it down to just two sentences, it's like oh this

guy thought he was the center of the war You know, what a

narcissistic asshole But I felt like I completely disappeared

So it was a way that my mind said no you do still exist And

you matter and people are looking for you as opposed to the

reality that I felt before this started Which was people think you're dead

I've been in prison for five and a half months.

And one day, I heard a really loud commotion.

And I immediately thought they are going to come get me and kill me.

Then I realized maybe these are Christmas.

And, uh, it was the best day of my life.

That night I was sitting on this sofa at this house

Watching my-in-law and on CNN talking about me

escaping prison that day It was definitely a surreal experience

♪

Tell us what it was like when you finally heard

your son's voice for the first time in so long.

It's just an unbelievable feeling.

It was, you know, joyous.

It felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders.

You get that queasy feeling in your stomach.

It's just, it's just, it's so hard to describe, and it was just wonderful.

Someone to the Corinthia Hotel.

There was just a lot of press there.

I called Lauren, like, is Norya okay?

Have you talked to Norya? And she said, yes, he's fine.

But Olly was driving the truck that I was in when I was captured.

His body was found in, um, in a mass grave.

My strong advice to you will be that it's time to go home.

I mean, you went through a very difficult experience.

Um, I'm sure your mom wants to see you.

And you also need to talk to some people about what you went through.

I had had a personal taste of life under an authoritarian regime.

and it's absolutely transforming.

♪

But what I had experienced for about six months

was what Gaddafi had done to the country for 40 years.

Qaddafi stole so many people's lives and ended so many people's

lives and I felt guilt or remorse

or that I hadn't done enough.

♪

And then I, I actually, I felt.

Lauren started asking me when I was coming home.

And...

I kept being evasive.

You know, I wanted to see Nori first.

And then Nori came, and uh...

I mean, I was really relieved to see him.

Nori had a uniform for me, he had a gun for me, you know,

he had this stuff set aside, he had all this stuff for me.

Just like six months ago.

And we went to the Ministry of Defence.

Nor explain my story

The prison experience bought me a lot of

credibility which then allowed me to openly join as an American

♪

They knew what I had been through, they

knew the story, everybody had been talking.

They were glad to have me.

and they welcomed me, they did this Libyan dance and

clapping and handed me a weapon that they had captured.

It was a nice welcome back.

Welcome back to the revolution.

So, how'd it feel?

Yeah, it was a nightmare.

It was horrible. I had to wake up every morning and I didn't know where he was.

I didn't know if he was okay.

I had to go to bed every night and didn't know where he was.

Didn't know what was happening to him.

I wanted him home.

And I made it very clear that I wanted him to come home.

She's like, you know, this is how you are.

This is a thrill thing.

I'm like, no, this is really serious work.

It's the most important thing I'll ever do in my life is helping this war.

And then I think she sort of understood.

I don't know, I mean, people can think whatever they want, right?

During the-a-half months I was in prison, the war changed dramatically.

when NATO got involved.

And it was a totally different war than it

was when we were just a few guys in a truck.

The momentum had completely shifted from Qaddafi's favorite to our favorite.

U.S.A.?

-Yeah, U.S.A. -Huh? -Yeah.

-Good. -Obama? -Obama!

Obama!

Obama!

I'd been in my brigade for maybe a week or so when some of Qaddafi's

supporters came out of the desert and ambushed one of our checkpoints.

Let's stop here and see what's happening, all right?

Okay.

That was my first taste of like, I am really, really in it now.

What about the situation here, man?

The situation is a checkpoint was attacked.

Nobody saw anybody coming.

There's buildings up here that they could have

had people positioned to look around, spotters.

They would have seen any attack coming.

They were just attacked in the middle of the day.

They had nobody up on top of the roofs.

There's no excuse for it, for people, for this to have happened.

I came out of prison a much different person.

I realized that I had a really close call, and I had to be far more cautious.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Could you not have your finger in the bin?

Please don't keep your finger in the pin.

There you go.

First, the industry would think it's hot, but then it wasn't.

First mission was in Antiba.

Somebody attacked the checkpoint, too, I think.

Follow me, young man.

There's over a dozen guys dead.

We're out in the desert looking for things to do.

In the past, it was easy to be both

behind the camera and in front of the camera.

But while fighting in a war, it was a more difficult thing to manage.

♪

You feel uncomfortable, because you feel, even

though you're not acting, you feel like an actor.

You have to be conscious of, what does it look like on the camera side?

Here, Noah, let me get another angle.

And then you wonder, you know, is this authentic, is this genuine?

Am I choosing my words a certain way?

Am I doing certain actions?

But at the same time, you're trying to capture reality.

It's not easy to do.

Do you have some video about how this guy's fight?

At times I felt that the camera was a bit of a distraction.

I didn't want people to think I was there primarily to film, because I wasn't.

I'm just going to shoot the camera, so no one stops talking about the camera.

Now I'm going to shoot the camera, and

then no one will stop talking about the camera.

But Nury recognized the importance of the filming.

This is history.

I'm very proud of the family.

I got it.

Of course.

I also want to do all the work that the other two are doing.

Yeah, okay.

And I'll film while I'm doing it, but I'm

not going to stand around and be a panelist.

So you fight with your two hands.

John, I can't.

Yeah, that's how it's going to be.

Yeah, okay.

But one time we were in the Jeep, and we started taking fire.

And I basically fell out of a jeep.

Shit!

Fuck, Nori.

My gun's in the truck.

Huh?

My gun's in the Jeep.

Here's this dual role that I'm trying to play.

I'm trying to affect events, but at the same time document events.

Nori has his gun in his hand and I have my camera and we're under fire.

What am I gonna do?

I was like what am I?

Am I a filmmaker or am I a fighter?

♪

Sir, where's Qaddafi's hometown?

This is where his power still was.

And once CERT fell, the war had been over.

That's how you know where some of the first soldiers in here,

they were on the front line because there's still green flags.

The green flag was the flyer Gaddafi

There's a lot of explosions coming.

Supposedly it's Tate Obama.

So hopefully that's all it is.

So thank you for everything, coming for help, you know.

I just, I need to get the peace, man.

I thank you for everything.

If the shooting coming to you, I send you in the good

box in your mom, for a souvenir, for having you here.

Ha ha ha.

Bye. Bye.

Okay, what's that way like?

Is it good?

It's not good.

Shit.

When we got the cert, Qaddafi's guys were

firing at us from buildings, they were using snipers.

Where is the enemy?

Nobody knows?

If they were die-hard loyalists, they were not going to surrender.

This was the most filmed war in history.

It's camera zooming.

You know, guys with cell phone cameras in the middle of gunfights.

Cell phone and camera in one hand, AK-47 in the other.

And these guys, their concept of war is what they saw on television in the 80s.

Guys standing up with machine guns by themselves in the middle of

♪

ammunition at the enemy.

They want another picture taken with the big gun things

that they can they can show friends to family to women.

They like to impress

Yeah, I felt it as well.

Everybody wants something they can share on Facebook.

Everybody tries to create their idealized image

of how they want to be seen and who they want to be.

♪

♪

Oh It's not going to work at all.

I'm about to go on a patrol inside CERT

and I'll be seeing you guys getting ready.

♪

After we took the neighborhood, we went into clear

houses to make sure there weren't snipers or enemy

that were just waiting until we got inside to attack us.

we're in a neighborhood which is a

reference only vehicle just three of us in it

Fuck.

Good job.

Gaddafi had handed out a lot of weapons to people.

So we wanted to capture whatever weapons

were there so it could be used against us later.

We were constantly under fire, where the sound,

like, it's a pew, pew, just like that, just like

you would hear in a movie, constantly over your head.

And you can't tell how high it is or how low it is until you

hear like something metal behind you get hit and then ding,

and then you know, okay, time to take cover because that was close.

But you get so desensitized to hearing that.

Your thoughts are real close.

Even though I was in the war, you know, the OCD never goes away.

I spilled sugar on my truck.

This is a huge problem.

Yeah, I still worried about sugar.

I worry about the bottoms of shoes.

Putting my mouth in a bowl after somebody else.

Yeah, you know what to do it.

-You do it. -You do it.

-Yeah. -Yeah. -Do it.

Do it.

Yes. Yes.

But given that I'd just been through prison and was in a war,

putting my mouth in the bowl didn't seem like such a big deal anymore.

Aah!

I just want to go to school, now you're fighting, man.

All right.

Hey, hey, hey, okay, just take it easy.

All right, you're okay, you're okay.

There were times that Nway and I would take the press to the front line.

Move up here a little bit.

It was very strange, because when I was in Iraq and

Afghanistan, I was filming soldiers, and now I was the soldier.

Baltimore resident Matthew Van Dyke is armed and fighting with

rebels in Libya just weeks after he escapes from a Qaddafi-held prison.

When I saw myself in news reports fighting, it

became validation that I was a real rebel fighter.

Here it was for the world to see that I was where I belonged.

♪

♪

♪

For two years, for nothing.

♪

There were things I saw during the war,

injuries, deaths that were difficult to deal with.

You can't capture it all, and you can't tell on the camera.

You know, the randomness of death in a war.

Everything's fine one minute, people are laughing and joking, and

then the next, something hits out of nowhere, explosion, people are dead.

You'll destroy it.

No bloody day, yeah?

Yeah.

I am.

I'm trying to, you see.

Okay, I love you very much.

I called home on satellite phones a couple

times to journalists to let me use their phones.

Okay, well, bye.

It was hard to talk to Lauren.

Thank you so much.

It was an extremely different existence to hers.

I mean, life on the front line in an Arab

revolution is not like life in Baltimore.

Her problems were there was a student that was bad at

school, and my problem was, you know, I saw a guy whose

body was on fire or a guy whose head was opened by shrapnel.

Yeah, we were living in two totally different worlds.

Did you ever kill anyone?

Well...

One day, towards the end of the war in Sirte, we

had squeezed Qaddafi's forces into a small area.

One of the commanders in my brigade spotted an enemy in a window.

They wanted me to shoot the guy.

How many guys?

Up until that point in the war, we've been fighting

at ranges that I could not see the face of the enemy.

It was, you know, maybe muzzle flashes from the

enemy firing at us, or, you know, the enemies in

that building or in that direction, you know, fire at them.

This was my first experience.

I've never shot in a person before.

-Oh, shut up. -I'm not doing it.

I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it.

I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it.

My commander was yelling for me to hurry up

and shoot the guy before he got out of the window.

He's here.

You can't see because he's between these houses.

You have to see like this.

One of the rebels, I handed him my camera, and I said, film this.

♪

♪

Matthew!

You've got him, so go down.

I wasn't sure, I couldn't be sure if I had hit him.

And then one of the other guys, I saw the guy kind

of pop up and look around and then leave the window.

And all of a sudden, I felt very conflicted.

I feel like I failed because I missed my target,

but at the same time, part of me is glad that I missed.

Do you think there was any part of you that missed him on purpose?

No.

No, I didn't miss him on purpose, and that's part of what's disturbing.

Because I tried to hit him.

I tried.

I had this image of who I always wanted to be and for years

I'd struggled to find that in myself and to become that person.

But I just had myself filmed trying to take another human life.

And what did that say about me?

October 20th, the day after I tried to kill the guy, we

heard rumors that a convoy had been stopped trying to

flee from Sirte, and that Qaddafi may have been captured.

A lot of the rebels who were there, they

had cell phone cameras to film themselves.

What would I have done if I was there?

♪

It's like the war is over.

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

When I was in prison, there were a lot of things I thought I wouldn't do again.

and going to the beach was one of them.

But one day, Noreen and I went to the ocean

and it was incredible.

Be careful

We were back to just Dory and Matt, a Libyan,

and his American friend who had come to visit.

Oh, no, man, I got water on my boots

♪

♪

We found a carpet with Gaddafi's face on it.

I told Nori, you know, go ahead and step on his face if you want.

And Nori wouldn't do it.

He said, like, why, why do something like that?

It's just, he didn't want to, like, be like Gaddafi.

♪

It wasn't about revenge, this was about freedom.

♪

♪

♪

♪

So, five years ago you set off on a crash course in manhood.

Looking back on it now, were you successful?

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Yeah, I got it, yeah, okay,

yeah, I got it, I got it.