GENERATION KILL Commands Iraq War Genre to “Stay Frosty” (Part 1 of 2)

“Observe everything, admire nothing,” Lt. Nate Fick advises his platoon of First Reconnaissance Battalion Marines as they’re on the move in hostile territory during the initial phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. As the “tip of the spear” rolling toward Baghdad in lightly-armored humvees, Fick’s warriors have every reason to be wary, or “stay frosty,” as team leader Sgt. Brad Colbert similarly counsels. Fortunately, such heads-up guidance also appears to have motivated the creators of Generation Kill to tell First Recon’s story without capitulating to the preachiness and artifice that have deep-sixed so many other depictions of the war.

Last Sunday night HBO aired the seventh and final episode of the landmark miniseries, which is based on the novel of the same name by Evan Wright and portrays the invasion of Iraq from the perspective of the Marines of First Recon, with whom Wright was embedded as a reporter for Rolling Stone. (The magazine originally published Wright’s account as a three-part series titled “The Killer Elite” in June 2003.)

Shortly before the screen version of his chronicle aired, the author expressed an awareness of claims that American audiences suffer from “Iraq war fatigue,” such as an Army Hollywood liaison’s suggestion that “the public is rejecting” dramatizations of the conflict that too often “feel didactic or inauthentic.” Speaking to an audience of TV critics, Wright recognized that "[w]hen Americans see the Iraq war as an entertainment, they're afraid they're going to be lectured to about how bad the war is or about our politics there.” He added: “We don’t do that,” contending that such political heavy-handedness was not the goal of his collaboration with Generation Kill executive producers/writers David Simon and Ed Burns, co-creators of HBO’s now-iconic series The Wire.

“I have a lot of strong opinions about the war,” admitted Simon, noting that  “they really don’t have a place in this piece. Nor do the opnions of Ed Burns.” Comparing Wright’s book to Dispatches, Michael Herr’s seminal Vietnam reportage (“…it’s that good”), Simon judged that like himself and his partner, Wright also managed to restrain any political viewpoints that might have biased his script contributions to the miniseries. 

“All that said,” Simon added, “what emerges is the picture of an increasingly imprecise and problematic conflict.”

The epic popularity of The Wire failed to imbue Simon and Burns with superstar expectations for Generation Kill’s ratings. ''I'm sure the HBO executives might be concerned about them,” Burns commented shortly before the series aired, “but I have no feeling for the numbers at all. If I did, The Wire might have been different.” In terms of numbers, episodes one through six of Generation Kill averaged 3.5 million viewers per week, placing its popularity on par with reruns of the series According to Jim, according to Salon TV critic Heather Havrilesky. “But then,” as Havrilesky ponders, “who wants to be reminded once a week that five years ago, the patriots of this great nation respectfully and politely followed our honorable president into a devastating, long-term, no-win war overseas?”

It may be argued that many viewers opting for such a reminder were those for whom “Iraq war fatigue” has not exhausted a desire to see Iraq war artistry evolve toward healing America’s wounds from the conflict—those of her veterans first and foremost. But it’s worth pointing out that Generation Kill wasn’t produced for the advancement of a cinematic genre or for the entertainment of those who spent the past seven Sunday nights watching it. Fortunately for Iraq war artistry, the raw nobility and unflinching realism of Generation Kill was created for the benefit of the Marines whose complex and vital story it brings to life.

“We made the movie for them,” Ed Burns explained in an interview with Havrilesky. “The scariest showing we had was in front of them. When they thought it was what their world was, we were very pleased; we knew we had done what we were supposed to do.” Burns, a Vietnam vet, couldn’t have been too surprised by the fact that Generation Kill passed muster with the Marines, however, as he hired many from among First Recon’s former ranks to assist in making it—from senior military adviser Eric Kocher to Rudy Rayes, who portrays himself in the miniseries. Combined with script-writing contributions of Evan Wright, this eyewitness input was integral to making Generation Kill “the first Iraq War movie to aspire to something close to documentary realism,” as Ethan Brown rightly declared in a review for Mother Jones titled “Can David Simon’s Generation Kill save the Iraq War Movie?”.

Brown’s review applauds the downplaying of overt politics that separates the film from the “murky, message-driven” depictions of the war offered previously. According to Brown, the “shaky, nervous intensity” of Generation Kill is due in no small part to the journalistic ethos of David Simon, who characterizes his ethic as a drive to "write for the people you are telling the story about, convince them that you've got the story right, and then everyone else will follow." Whether or not the audience likes the characters they follow is meaningless, in Simon’s view, because the Marines “are doing what they're trained for. They're not asking for forgiveness, and none need be given." Like his partner, Ed Burns, Simon’s primary concern is that the warriors themselves will recognize the “core values of the piece” as fairly and accurately reflecting what they experienced during the invasion. 

"I don't give a f--k about our audience,” Simon told Brown. “I believe in the story itself."

Though it’s obvious that they couldn’t care less, Generation Kill’s creators have been critically greeted as liberators for their affirmative answer to Evan Brown’s central question as to whether it’s “even possible to make a good movie about a war that's still being fought.” And the arguments of their detractors only seem to underscore the genre-saving graces of the team’s observational method.

The most prominent negative review of the miniseries, Nancy Franklin’s in The New Yorker, also presents the most revealing criticisms of its subject matter:

However you judge the response of American news organizations during the early days of the war, they certainly made those days vivid to viewers, and they helped us understand the terrible significance of the resistance the Marines faced […] I don’t see anything to be gained by retracing the path from Kuwait to Baghdad. Tell us, as they say, something we don’t know.

What we didn’t know was these particular Marines in their natural combat environment, unfiltered by the likes of Geraldo Rivera scratching maps in the sand or Ollie North reporting, as episode six of Generation Kill points out, on a Marine Reserve unit’s unjustified destruction of an entire village and “filming the whole f--kin thing like it was the turning point in the f--kin war.”

Franklin also derides the the “verisimilitude and earnest believability” of Generation Kill, and suggests that the public might have been better served by an Iraq war drama that “emphasized ideas as well as trying to describe the experience, one that went further up the chain of command to the real decision-makers.” While a film version of Seymour Hersh’s investigative writings on the conflict might make for an illuminating vehicle somewhere down the road, it seems that the cultural impact of war films-as-national cathersis involves a more glacial process that doesn’t operate through “top-down” representaion.

In Heather Havrilesky’s interview article, “Good Men, Bad war,” Ed Burns makes clear his conviction that “we should try those people responsible for putting us to war. Put them in a courtroom, because what they did was a crime.” But Burns was fortunately not interested in dramatizing such a trial’s evidence for the screen—probably because by now we’re quite familiar with who those individuals are, and their offenses are obvious to anyone paying attention. Regarding his choice of First Recon’s Marines as subject matter, Burns offers that:

We don't know these people. Particularly the upper middle class, we don't know these people. These are the working-class guys who're doing this. The disconnect is profound. […] These are the guys who are carpenters, or electricians, or cops, or paramedics. They're the backbone of our country […] I think that by looking at these guys, you get an understanding that there are a lot of good guys out there. And this is their world.

One either appreciates an honest working-class perspective on a pivotal historical event, or one doesn’t. Nancy Franklin makes the claim that reminders of “what was involved in being a soldier [sic]” served a utilitarian purpose at the commencement of hostilities, but that so many years into the war “such a ‘faithful’ depiction” as that of Generation Kill smacks of “an abdication, a moral failure to judge and to acknowledge the horrors that followed.” But a Marine, a former Marine, or anyone who knows anything about the U.S. Marine Corps might counter that Semper Fidelis means always faithful, and even a casual observer of the miniseries could cite a scene or two in which the horrors of the first few weeks of the invasion were vividly acknowledged, objectively submitted for the individual viewer’s moral judgement. 

A recent Los Angeles Times article is titled “The Iraq war movie: Military hopes to shape genre,” so Nancy Franklin would be well advised to consider that there’s no need to give the Pentagon media moguls and their critic minions more “didactic or inauthentic” fodder by using troops to serve, as Evan Wright has rightly put it, in the capacity of “vehicles for a particular agenda.” Maybe that’s, as I say, something Ms. Franklin doesn’t know.

In this article’s introduction, I’ve implied that the creators of Generation Kill have apparently heeded Lt. Nate Fick’s battlefield advice to “Observe everything, admire nothing,” and it’s true that Wright, Simon and Burns have uncompromisingly observed and faithfully represented both horrors and triumphs of the Iraq invasion. But it would be misleading to leave the impression that they’ve admired nothing along the way. While their lack of admiration for the war itsef is “not going to do much for military recruitment,” as one reviewer noted, the trio’s personal respect for their film’s subjects has provided America with a basic training in Marine comradery and helped to raise the bar of squad-level combat storytelling to boot.

(CLICK HERE FOR PART 2 of 2)