New Documentary Tells Story of American Man’s Travels in Iraq, Syria

Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage(NEW YORK) — When Matthew VanDyke set out on a “crash course in manhood” in 2007 — a motorcycle journey that would take him through North Africa and the Middle East — the 27-year-old with obsessive-compulsive disorder was at first afraid to leave his hotel room in Morocco. Four years later, he would become a foreign fighter, taking up arms with Libyan rebels to overthrow then-dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

A new documentary, Point and Shoot, tells VanDyke’s story of transformation through footage he shot himself over his years-long adventure.

VanDyke’s odyssey would take him through Iraq, where he spent time embedded with U.S. troops as a war correspondent for a Baltimore-area newspaper. While there, VanDyke said he began to feel that he was “on the wrong side of the camera.”

“I felt that I wanted to affect events, not just document events,” VanDyke said. “I felt not at place necessarily being behind the camera and just filming. Part of me wanted to be with them. When the mission is actually as one of them doing something I felt would have more of a tangible impact.”

He would soon get the opportunity to have a tangible impact on the direction of a war when the Libyan revolution broke out in 2011.

“I was talking to my friends in Libya who I had known by that time frame — most of them for three years, one of them even for four years — and they told me what was happening, and one of them said basically, ‘Why doesn’t anyone help us?’” VanDyke recalled. “These were people I had become good friends with. Libya was my favorite country from all my travels, and I realized I couldn’t just sit at home and do nothing while this was happening to people I cared about. So, I went to Libya.”

Not long after joining the rebels, VanDyke was captured by Gaddafi’s forces and endured five-and-a-half months in solitary confinement, an experience he remembers as “psychological torture.”

“That was the most difficult experience,” Van Dyke said.” [I] basically stared at the wall for about half a year, no books to read, nothing to do but pace back and forth in the cell…I basically was struck in the head and woke up in prison to the sound of men being tortured in the cell above me. After nearly six months of that, I escaped prison with other prisoners and went back to fight on the front line.”

VanDyke would stay in Libya through the end of the revolution and joined in celebrating with the rebels following Gaddafi’s overthrow.

He would later consider becoming a foreign fighter in Syria also, but decided against doing so, citing the rebels’ lack of weapons and ammunition. And while VanDyke said he could not speak to what motivates other people to become foreign fighters, he said he does not see a problem with doing so when motivated by the right reasons.

“Some people go for adventurism, some people go for war tourism, some people go because they’re jihadists — it varies greatly why people do it, and a lot of those reasons I don’t agree with,” VanDyke said. “But if they have a connection to the region and the right reasons and connections on the ground, I don’t really see a problem with foreign fighters.”

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