Generation Kill on DVD
I got the DVD set of HBO's Generation Kill for Christmas, and if I hadn't received it as a gift I was going to buy it as a gift to myself. When I watched the first episode that aired on HBO last summer, I went out and bought the book. Before the next episode aired the following week, I had read the whole thing. I couldn't put it down. I told my friends about it, and they ended up coming over every Sunday to watch the show.
Generation Kill follows the U.S. Marines of 1st Reconnaissance Battalion during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times explains in her review how the story "tracks a group of shamelessly and engagingly profane, coarse and irreverent marines" whose journey from "training tents in Kuwait to occupied Baghdad is laid out with brutal candor and without the aid of maudlin cinematography or emotive music."
The initial appeal to me and my friends in watching the show was the accurate portrayal of Marine culture -- only later were we drawn in by the actual story. Writer and independent reporter Peter Maass, who was embedded with a different Marine battalion during the invasion, shares our feelings, saying in his review that Generation Kill "is so realistic it should be used as an educational tool for troops going to Iraq and Afghanistan."
In every conversation I have with someone about Generation Kill, I emphatically inform them of how realistic it is, particularly in portraying how Marines interact with one another. I'm thrilled at how accurately it portrays Marines and some of the situations that still permeated combat operations in Iraq when I was there four years after the invasion. Even after I tell people this, I still feel like they don't understand how great it is that the story is told with such stunning pinpoint precision. This is why I'm so enthusiastic about this show, and why I personally lost a great deal of respect for the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps when he said that he didn't like the show. He thought "it was a slap in the face," and that it "doesn't portray a unit in the Marine Corps, from the leadership down." It makes me wonder if he and I watched the same thing. I passionately disagree, and it's disappointing that he thinks that. That statement just adds fuel to the fire of people saying the brass in Washington is out of touch with the ground pounders.
The directors (as well as Evan Wright in his book) took special pains to highlight a unique way of life and did a great job with it: swapping items in MREs with one another such as Skittles and jalapeno cheese; "the pitch-perfect sound of a Humvee idling;" the calls for fire, 9-lines, and terminology that only a small clique of Marines knows how to use when directing fire support; the way some Marines whine and complain but still do what needs to be done to accomplish the mission. The attention to detail is stunning.
It follows Evan Wright's book almost exactly, so smug literary types don't have the opportunity to sniff that "the book was better." Reading the book will give you a much better understanding of some of the show's nuances, back-stories, and jargon, but you can certainly have one without the other.
And frankly, it's a better news source than anything the news media has willingly neglected to provide in the nearly six years since the invasion. Now that things in Iraq are going so well, the war isn't talked about as much anymore, but when times were tougher, all you saw was the slow trickle of negative snippets: an IED explosion in Anbar, a car bomb conveniently close to the Green Zone so reporters didn't have to go far to capture the smoking wreckage on film. I think this will open people's eyes, and I highly recommend that everyone watches this show or reads the book. But first I recommend getting over any apprehension you may have for profanity.
Generation Kill follows the U.S. Marines of 1st Reconnaissance Battalion during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times explains in her review how the story "tracks a group of shamelessly and engagingly profane, coarse and irreverent marines" whose journey from "training tents in Kuwait to occupied Baghdad is laid out with brutal candor and without the aid of maudlin cinematography or emotive music."
The initial appeal to me and my friends in watching the show was the accurate portrayal of Marine culture -- only later were we drawn in by the actual story. Writer and independent reporter Peter Maass, who was embedded with a different Marine battalion during the invasion, shares our feelings, saying in his review that Generation Kill "is so realistic it should be used as an educational tool for troops going to Iraq and Afghanistan."
In every conversation I have with someone about Generation Kill, I emphatically inform them of how realistic it is, particularly in portraying how Marines interact with one another. I'm thrilled at how accurately it portrays Marines and some of the situations that still permeated combat operations in Iraq when I was there four years after the invasion. Even after I tell people this, I still feel like they don't understand how great it is that the story is told with such stunning pinpoint precision. This is why I'm so enthusiastic about this show, and why I personally lost a great deal of respect for the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps when he said that he didn't like the show. He thought "it was a slap in the face," and that it "doesn't portray a unit in the Marine Corps, from the leadership down." It makes me wonder if he and I watched the same thing. I passionately disagree, and it's disappointing that he thinks that. That statement just adds fuel to the fire of people saying the brass in Washington is out of touch with the ground pounders.
The directors (as well as Evan Wright in his book) took special pains to highlight a unique way of life and did a great job with it: swapping items in MREs with one another such as Skittles and jalapeno cheese; "the pitch-perfect sound of a Humvee idling;" the calls for fire, 9-lines, and terminology that only a small clique of Marines knows how to use when directing fire support; the way some Marines whine and complain but still do what needs to be done to accomplish the mission. The attention to detail is stunning.
It follows Evan Wright's book almost exactly, so smug literary types don't have the opportunity to sniff that "the book was better." Reading the book will give you a much better understanding of some of the show's nuances, back-stories, and jargon, but you can certainly have one without the other.
And frankly, it's a better news source than anything the news media has willingly neglected to provide in the nearly six years since the invasion. Now that things in Iraq are going so well, the war isn't talked about as much anymore, but when times were tougher, all you saw was the slow trickle of negative snippets: an IED explosion in Anbar, a car bomb conveniently close to the Green Zone so reporters didn't have to go far to capture the smoking wreckage on film. I think this will open people's eyes, and I highly recommend that everyone watches this show or reads the book. But first I recommend getting over any apprehension you may have for profanity.
posted by Ryan at 12/24/2008
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