![]() The actors playing the Marines of 1st Recon Battalion don’t just look like Marines, though. In an era when popular portrayals of war like The Hurt Locker have gotten big things wrong, Generation Kill took care to get the smallest things right. But it was there, and the message from Simon and Burns is clear: Details matter. It’s such a minuscule detail that, had it been absent, I wouldn’t have noticed or cared. Not only is this detail specific to a particular rank - I was a Marine lieutenant in the same 2003 invasion depicted in the show, and I only saw junior officers wear map pens in their flak jackets - but the fact that the map pens are upside-down means that someone on set knew that felt tips dry out in the desert heat when the pens are stored upright. At one point, Lieutenant Fick (played by Stark Sands) has map pens tucked upside-down in the loops of his modular protective vest. How detailed is the verisimilitude? More than most viewers are equipped to notice. Rudy Reyes, a sergeant during the invasion, even portrayed himself in the series. For the TV series, showrunner David Simon hired Wright to co-author the scripts, plus several of the Marines from 1st Recon Battalion to serve as advisers on set. Much of Evan Wright’s book can be verified in a memoir released around the same time: Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away, written by the lieutenant in charge of the very platoon Wright rode along with. Ten years after the miniseries aired, it is still unlikely that any show in history has been fact-checked as ruthlessly by the people who were there. If you want to know what it felt like to be a Marine during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, watch Generation Kill. The first five hours of the mini-series, however, focus far more on the ever-changing directives from the top and on the senior officers' obsession with enforcing a "grooming standard."Īll that is perhaps to be expected: "Generation Kill," which is directed with immediacy and fluidity by Susanna White and Simon Cellan Jones, is unashamedly a grunts' view of the war.A Marine who took part in the invasion depicted in the miniseries shares just how accurate the show is. There actually were some strategic ideas at work - perhaps debatable ideas, some of which seem foolhardy, but they nonetheless existed. Without downplaying the confusing and contradictory instructions the men of Bravo Company had to deal with as they fought their way north, Wright's book gives more context to the overall battle plan that the Marine brass had for 1st Recon. Despite their addiction to pop culture - they constantly reference games and movies frequently and record their experiences with cameras - these young men have no real points of reference, fictional or otherwise, when it comes to fighting a complex war among civilians. It takes the men of Bravo Company an episode or two to truly get into the action, but when they do, "Generation Kill" depicts the randomness of battle with stomach-rattling vividness. Harold James Trombley (Billy Lush), a fresh-faced, blandly unsettling young man who calls his weapon "she" and positively aches to shoot something. The old-married-couple repartee between Person and Colbert provides much of the road-trip flavor of "Generation Kill," and underneath their bluster, all the men depend on Colbert's steady demeanor.Sitting next to Wright, taking on the role of the wide-eyed kid in the back seat, is Lance Cpl. Also in Bravo's lead Humvee is the character on which much of "Generation Kill" pivots, the taciturn Sgt. Josh Ray Person (James Ransone), whose profane, rambling diatribes provide much of "Generation Kill's" comic relief. Irreverence and camaraderie, two things that were depicted so well in "The Wire," are expertly conveyed in "Generation Kill" too.ĭuring his six weeks on the front lines, the reporter (played by Lee Tergesen) shares a battered Humvee with Cpl. Yet within this nihilistic worldview, which typically doesn't allow for the possibility of competence, let alone honor, at the highest levels of big institutions, there lurks a wellspring of affection for the rebels who jam up the gears of the system. That's how it is in Burns' and Simons' worldview: There's always an inescapable, intrinsically unfair system in control, and, despite its general indifference to human life, the system is always eager to grind down the brightest men on the streets, whether they're in Baltimore or Baghdad. It's a world in which, time and again, the grunts try to do the right thing, but they are, with clockwork regularity, prevented from doing so by the bureaucratic incompetence and the self-serving ambition of their superiors. ![]() ![]() At least Burns and Simon give the audience credit for being smart enough, and game enough, to immerse themselves in the world of "Generation Kill's" profane yet disciplined alpha males.
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