After ‘The Wire,’ Moving On to Battles Beyond the Streets

[thedrifter]

July 6, 2008
Television
After ‘The Wire,’ Moving On to Battles Beyond the Streets
By MICHAEL WILSON

MARTINSBURG, W.Va.

BEER cans on the roof: the Baltimore detectives ended their long days with a couple of cold ones in the parking lot and then threw the empties on top of the station until the pile grew so high that a boss ordered a police helicopter to fly past and blow them all back down.

That was two decades ago, but to viewers of “The Wire,” the throwing of the cans is recent history, an on-screen ritual as familiar as sitting down to dinner was on “The Sopranos.” And like many details from the five seasons of “The Wire” it was harvested from the life of Ed Burns, the cop turned schoolteacher turned screenwriter and co-creator of the show.

Mr. Burns, now 61, put his can-throwing days behind him years ago. Now he is more likely to throw bird seed here outside his new home, a structure so eco-friendly that the power bill in April was $32.65.

“It’s a good place,” Mr. Burns said of this rural retreat, where he sits and remembers his old lives for new TV shows. “It’s peaceful. It’s a good place to write.”

It has been more than 20 years since Mr. Burns, then a detective, met David Simon, then a young police reporter for The Baltimore Sun, sharing a handshake that neither man could have imagined would lead to a book and three television shows — and counting — for HBO.

Their latest project, and their first set outside of Baltimore, is “Generation Kill,” a seven-part mini-series that will have its premiere next Sunday. Based on the 2004 book of the same name by Evan Wright, a Rolling Stone reporter embedded with a Marine battalion, the series follows a group of marines as they race, crawl, shoot and wisecrack their way north through Iraq. The show’s portrayal of the marines and the invasion, as seen from Mr. Wright’s seat in a bullet-riddled Humvee, was spot-on to me, a reporter who had been embedded with a different Marine unit during the same weeks in March 2003.

Mr. Burns agreed, with a little polite reluctance, to a rare interview in anticipation of the show’s premiere. Throughout the run of “The Wire” he let Mr. Simon do the talking to the press; his most recent in-depth interview was in 2006, on the NPR program “Fresh Air.”

“I’m something of a loner,” he said. “I have all these stories going around in my head, so I spend time with them.”

He spoke for hours over the occasional barks of his two big dogs, Max and Kima (the latter named for a detective on “The Wire”), in a living room littered with books and a sparsely decorated home office. Mr. Burns and his wife, Anna (he has a son and a daughter from a previous marriage, and she has one daughter), bought the land where they now live five years ago, but they have been living in the house for only six months. It sits at the end of a winding, unpaved road.

“There’s a rumor he’s up there with a barbed-wire compound with hounds he can release,” said Mr. Simon, who has yet to visit.

But though Mr. Burns may prefer a degree of solitude and anonymity, he is far from a recluse and is open and generous with his time and stories, which tend to veer from the short and the simple. A question about his wedding date is answered with a long aside about the Zapatistas, the Mexican rebels who stormed cities and communities in the Chiapas region in an overthrow attempt on Jan. 1, 1994. It is unclear whether he remembers the uprising because it occurred on his wedding day or vice versa. “Anyway, that was the date,” he said.

And though he repeatedly insists that “The Wire” was not about him, calling the show a giant collaboration among himself, Mr. Simon and a stable of writers, there is no question that the show was able to open doors to two Baltimore bureaucracies — the police and the schools — only because Mr. Burns was carrying the keys.

Born in 1946 in the Govans neighborhood of Baltimore, Mr. Burns attended Catholic schools. “We were kind of wild,” he said of himself and his brother, Michael. “We kept getting hit by cars. We were running, as kids would do, and we’d get whacked. People didn’t drive fast, or maybe kids were tougher, but my parents became alarmed and moved us out to the suburbs.”

He joined the military and spent a year in Vietnam working with the Kit Carson Scout program, which used former Viet Cong fighters as translators and guides. In a way the scout was Mr. Burns’s first informant of many.

He came home and, armed with a degree in history and a minor in philosophy from Loyola College in Baltimore, improbably joined that city’s police department in 1971. He was assigned to the tough Western District, then the wide-open battleground of drug dealers.

Why? “I really didn’t see myself working in offices and things like that,” he said. “I thought at that time police work was the way to go. You get to help people.”

But the job had its frustrations. “I thought some of these guys should be good,” he said of his fellow officers. And he was struck by the inability of the homicide unit to solve cases, which he blamed on old-fashioned, one-case-at-a-time investigation techniques. So he scooped up 12 open case files that all made some mention of the same Baltimore drug gang and brought them to his boss.

“I’ll give you 12 murders,” he told him. “It takes about a year, year and a half to bring down a good organization.”

Mr. Burns worked on cases in ways that had not been tried in Baltimore, using wiretaps not just on private telephone lines but on public pay phones and placing hidden cameras inside drug distribution hubs. “He was one of the first to recognize you have to go for the head of the organization,” said Lt. Terrence Patrick McLarney, 55, a fellow detective at the time. “He kind of invented what is today our meat and potatoes.”

Mr. Burns talks with pride and fondness of those cases, recalling every detail of this arrest, that wiretap recording. Many characters on “The Wire” are drawn from people he knew on either side of the law, like the drug dealer Avon Barksdale (played by Wood Harris) and the reformed addict, Bubbles (Andre Royo). “I’ve seen hundreds of Avons,” he said. “You knew how they would act. I’ve had tons of informants. I knew the real Bubbles.”

But his disillusion with the way crime was addressed only grew. “It was painfully clear that they were not going to change the way they were doing things,” he said. “The Police Department was into the numbers game. We were going in different directions.”

The fateful meeting with Mr. Simon took place in the early 1980s, when Mr. Simon was researching a project for The Sun, where he was a police reporter. Mr. Burns ended up trusting him, and thus began a decades-long collaboration during which Mr. Burns’s role shifted from guide to collaborator.

He retired in 1991 after 20 years on the force, just as Mr. Simon approached him with an idea that would probably repulse most retired detectives: spending a year on the streets of a drug-infested ghetto, chronicling the lives of the users and the dealers — the very people he used to lock up — for a book that became “The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood” in 1997.

The cover carried both men’s names, and for Mr. Burns it was the first time he’d written anything except affidavits and a couple of technical articles for journals. “It wasn’t that monumental,” he said. “You had in the back of your mind that if you screwed up, David would be there.”

But he didn’t rush to get an agent, wasn’t directly involved in the “Corner” mini-series and returned instead to public service, this time as a geography teacher in a middle school. He liked the energy he got from coaching his kids, he said, and his wife was working, so they could afford his small salary; “we weren’t starving to death.”

In his first class, 13 of the some 220 students had been shot — two of them twice. “They don’t graduate,” he said. “It’s tough.” He taught for seven grueling and rewarding years that showed him the flip side of his life as a cop, “being with kids and seeing the problem from a different perspective,” he said, “trying to understand the drug culture, the impact of the drug culture and our responsibility for creating this culture.”

But then Mr. Simon swooped in again, this time with the idea for “The Wire,” and Mr. Burns left teaching to sign on as a story editor. (“For somebody who never made money, it was like, ‘Whoa, I can have a few dollars,’ ” he said about getting his first paycheck for the series.)

“How did he learn it?” Mr. Simon recalled. “I gave him a bunch of scripts. ‘Homicide’ scripts, ‘Corner’ scripts, showed him the dynamic. One thing about Ed is you don’t have to show him anything twice. This is a guy who devours any idea he encounters.”

For Mr. Burns, who believes most Americans think starting a wiretap is as simple as one guy in a cop show saying as much to another, “The Wire” was an opportunity to “get it right,” he said. He conceived the morbid arc for the fourth season, in which killers working under the drug dealer Marlo Stanfield dump bodies in boarded-up row houses. “Police work has come to be about numbers,” he said. “This was a twist on it. This was Marlo doing his part. ‘If I don’t have murders, then they won’t come.’ ”

Mr. Burns also came up with a mystifying split second in a third-season episode: a shot of William A. Rawls (John Doman), a hard-line deputy commissioner, during a scene that takes place in a gay bar. The moment was never revisited or explained. “It would have been a nice twist to have Daniels, who is in line to be commissioner, have him discover Rawls’s fatal flaw and choose to ignore it,” he said. “And have Rawls cut him down. We laid the mine. We just never stepped on it.”

And yet for all the praise “The Wire” garnered, Mr. Simon said, Mr. Burns finished every season “absolutely frustrated and convinced we had ruined the show.” But then he would come around. “He would put the tape in, in the end, and I’d hear from him a month afterward. ‘No, actually, that was really good in the end.’ ”

Mr. Burns said he was surprised by all the attention “The Wire” received from policymakers who were piqued by the show’s gritty civics lessons — the very sort of people, he said, who more or less ignored him when he worked in the public sector.

“The irony is that you have to be somebody before anybody listens to you,” he said. “I wasn’t an expert when I was an expert, and now that I’m not an expert, I’m an expert. It’s kind of curious.”

HBO took “Generation Kill” to Mr. Burns and Mr. Simon a few years ago. Mr. Burns’s time in Vietnam attracted him to the material, which he said captured the universal traits of men at war. “What is similar is the way people act, men in close quarters,” he said. “It’s always us against them. The us becomes ever, ever smaller, and the them becomes the whole world.”

There were similarities to “The Wire,” as well, like the discord between the rank and file and the commanders. But Mr. Burns’s role was different this time, no longer subject or creator but instead an adapter and a filmmaker. “In the case of ‘The Wire’ Ed was more of the diagnostician,” Mr. Simon said. “He was the guy who had lived these events. In ‘Generation Kill,’ like me, he’s become more of a clinician. He was a filmmaker trying to deliver someone else’s vision.”

“Generation Kill” follows a string of recent films about Iraq that have tanked at the box office, but he doesn’t seem worried. “It’s like ‘The Wire,’ ” he said. “I think the trick is getting someone to watch it.”

His next projects include a feature film about a true but unlikely romance between Donnie Andrews, a Baltimore holdup artist who robbed drug dealers (and inspired the character Omar Little on “The Wire”), and Fran Boyd, a crack addict who recovered with his help and married him last year (and was also a character in “The Corner”).

After that Mr. Burns hopes to make, with Mr. Simon, a period mini-series about the Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886, when the police, trying to break up a labor demonstration, were struck by a bomb that killed seven officers and sent four wrongfully convicted defendants to the gallows. With its troubled police department, corrupt city officials and compromised press, the incident has echoes of “The Wire.” But Mr. Burns sees it in broader strokes:

“We’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a working man,” he said. “There was a flush of money, and we’ve forgotten our roots. These stories have a power because it’s when men stood up.”

He considered the often bleak worldview of “The Wire,” with its overarching theme that no matter what a person does, it will never be enough to stop the city from grinding over him. “I’m not a fatalist,” he said. “I’m very optimistic. In America, before we notice things, things have to become bad.”


Paul Schiraldi/HBO

Ed Burns is a co-creator of “Generation Kill,” with Stark Sands, left, and Jon Huertas.

Official Web Sites:

The Wire
http://www.hbo.com/thewire/

Generation Kill

http://www.hbo.com/generationkill/

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Baltimore to Baghdad
The team from 'The Wire' takes on the Iraq war

By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff | July 6, 2008

When HBO sent along the book "Generation Kill," Ed Burns recalls, he and David Simon - his producing partner from "The Wire" - knew they had found their next project: another series that would be as challenging for viewers as it would be for producers.

This detailed account of the first days of the Iraq war shared many of the elements Burns and Simon had used in five seasons of "The Wire," a sprawling HBO drama about crime, corruption, and politics in Baltimore. Based on the Rolling Stone pieces Evan Wright filed as an embedded reporter, "Generation Kill" had a web of vivid characters and a complex vernacular. It dug deeply into a world that was far from that most HBO viewers experience.

And viewing it would require the sort of attention that devotees of "The Wire" were accustomed to paying.

"It's up to the audience to put in the work if they want to see these wonderful worlds," Burns said by telephone from his home in West Virginia. "And it can be a lot of work."

The difference is that "Generation Kill," the seven-part miniseries that premieres on HBO next Sunday, is nonfiction - the story of the Marines of the First Recon Battalion, who were among the first Americans to invade Iraq. For the most part, names in the book and series haven't been changed. One sergeant. Rudy Reyes, even plays himself.

And when he co-wrote the screenplay with Simon and Wright, Burns said, he felt pressure to create a world authentic enough to satisfy those real Marines.

"The obligation of the storytellers is to write for the characters," Burns said. "So that when the cop and the longshoreman or the addict or the Marine sees it, if they can authenticate it, then you've done your job."

Some of that authentication fell to Sergeant Eric Kocher, who was present for events depicted in the film and served as the series' military adviser. (He is played onscreen by Owain Yeoman, and has a small acting role, as well.)

Kocher said the initial script felt right, with a few small exceptions, largely having to do with dialect.

"It was actually mostly radio traffic," he said by phone from Nashville. "Marines, particularly Recon, have got a very specific way that we speak on the radio." It's a language of nicknames piled on nicknames: The men called one of their fellow Marines "Encino Man," but referred to him on the radio as "Echo Mike."

And while a handful of the actors had military experience - Jon Huertas served in an Air Force para rescue unit, for instance, and Alexander Skarsgard was a Swedish Marine - Kocher trained them to behave like real US Marines.

"The guys with the military experience, I think they knew just enough to be dangerous," Kocher said. "We had to re-teach them the way we do stuff in reconnaissance. We also had to teach them our heritage: the verbiage, the posture, the way we carry ourselves."

Kocher ran a six-day boot camp for the actors in a remote part of Namibia, putting them through 14-and 20-hour days and authentic military exercises. They took part in physical tests, practiced shooting blanks, and conducted a Humvee raid on an abandoned village.

"They actually did surprisingly well," Kocher said. "They weren't being babied through it. I expected them to turn back and run."

"They actually did surprisingly well," Kocher said. "They weren't being babied through it. I expected them to turn back and run."

Huertas, who plays Sergeant Antonio Espera in the series, said he was struck by the scant resources Marines received, compared to the special operations units he served with in the Air Force. But the basic purpose of training was the same, he said: to prepare your mind for unrelenting physical demands.

"You push your body past its physical limit to see if your mind will overcome," he said. "They don't care if your body fails. If your mind is starting to tell you to keep going, you keep going."

And to all of the actors, Burns said, Kocher was a striking mentor.

"These guys followed him around like puppy dogs," Burns said. "It was amazing, the power just of who he is. At the time, Eric weighed about 245 pounds, and 150 of it was his chest and his arms."

Kocher was accustomed to authority; at the time the Iraq War began, he had just turned 23. "I was a kid running a five-man team making huge decisions that would shape the entire war," he said.

And he said he's glad the series - as well as the book - centers on those young men and big choices. When the book came out, "I thought, every story you see, they always focus on the officers and the officers carry the men," Kocher said. "That's not the way it usually goes. You have these great corporals, great lance corporals, great 22-year-olds who are the backbone of what goes on over there."

Burns said he hopes viewers come away with the same appreciation.

"I hope they take the same thing they took from 'The Wire': a privileged look into a culture that you really don't have access to," Burns said. "We poured into the war without a whole lot of thought, and we committed these really great guys to do battle. So you should know who these guys are."

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to boston.com/viewerdiscretion

Ellie

[thedrifter]

baltimoresun.com
HBO rolls the dice on pricey 'Generation Kill'
Network battles U.S. audience's apathy toward Iraq war

By David Zurawik

Sun television critic

July 6, 2008


America may be very much at war, but in the nation's pop culture trenches, telling stories about Iraq is a losing battle.

That truth has become increasingly clear as the same American majority that supported the start of the war in 2003 has come to consistently tune out feature films, TV series, books and nightly news accounts about the conflict today.

In July 2005, cable channel FX introduced producer Steven Bochco's Over There, the first TV drama to air concurrently with a war in which it was set.

Despite much advance praise, the series about a platoon of Army soldiers fighting in Iraq bombed in the ratings. It was canceled after just 13 episodes.

In the past two years, there has been a steady stream of theatrical films, some by such acclaimed directors as Brian De Palma and Kimberly Peirce, that have all flopped at the box office. They include Redacted, No End in Sight, In the Valley of Elah and Stop-Loss.

As HBO prepares for a July 13 launch of the most expensive TV production yet on the Iraq war, Generation Kill - a seven-part, $55 million miniseries about a battalion of young Marines in the lead of America's invasion force - analysts wonder about the cable channel's big gamble and whether any film or TV series can penetrate America's pop culture aversion to the war.

And though a debate over the war is still part of the presidential campaign, experts question how it is that so many who wanted the nation to invade Iraq now seem to be going out of their way to avoid bearing any on-screen witness to the results.

"I think most of America has kind of become numb to it," Eric Kocher, a senior military adviser for the HBO miniseries, says of the conflict in Iraq.

"I mean it's the same thing: Where are all the yellow flags on the cars, you know? You saw them big in the beginning of the war, but with America's attention deficit disorder, they lost interest in it now, and they don't want to see it anymore," says Kocher.

He was one of the Marines depicted in Evan Wright's Rolling Stone articles and book of the same title, on which the cable channel's miniseries adapted by Baltimore's Ed Burns and David Simon is based.

Philip Seib, editor of the journal Media, Conflict and War, uses the term "Iraq fatigue" to describe the mood of the American public when it comes to Iraq.

"You can see it in the political polling, with people saying that the economy is the big issue and they are not interested in the war," says Seib, a University of Southern California professor of journalism and public policy.

"Except for those with family or friends in the war, it just seems so remote, pointless and maybe endless, that they have tuned it out. Also, people don't think they can have much of an effect on things when it comes to this war, and that's most unfortunate."

If Americans were avoiding only dramatized film and TV versions of the war like Over There and Stop-Loss, that would be one thing, analysts say.

But more troubling is the fact that the public's aversion has spread to news accounts and journalistic books about the war as well - with publishers and network executives taking note.

Kimberly Dozier, the Peabody Award-winning CBS News correspondent who was seriously wounded by a bomb blast in 2006 while covering the war, says she had a difficult time finding a publisher for a book about her injuries and road to recovery, even though her near-fatal attack in Baghdad was front-page news around the world.

The reason she almost didn't find a publisher is that "books on Iraq don't sell," Dozier says, recalling what editors told her when she was shopping the book and informed them that it would have a strong focus on Iraq.

"But I had to admit that when we put Iraq on TV, people are changing the channel. ... Every chance we get, it seems like we turn away from Iraq."

(Dozier did eventually find a publisher in Meredith Books of Des Moines, Iowa. Her powerful and widely praised narrative of injury and recovery, Breathing the Fire, was published May 13. At the end of last week, it ranked 21,748 at Amazon.com. There were no books about Iraq in Amazon's Top 100.)

Most disturbing to some critics is the sharp cutback in network TV news coverage of the war during the past six months.

Through the third week of June (just under half a year), the evening newscasts on NBC, ABC and CBS had combined for 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage. That's precipitously down from 1,157 minutes shown during 2007, according to data from Andrew Tyndall, a TV analyst who monitors network news.

"One reason the public is tuning out Iraq is that the news media, for the most part, are tuning out," says USC's Seib. "Without consistent reminders about Iraq from news organizations, the topic slides down the issues agenda."

Dozier, now based in Washington, thinks the public has tuned out the war in part because it is confused.

First, it was covered as a victory, then a debacle, and now there are conflicting analyses as to whether the surge and rebuilding efforts are working.

"The public, like the press on the ground, and even the commanders on the ground, got whipsawed by Iraq," Dozier says in an e-mail. "That's fairly devastating for troops on the ground, who are working their guts out, and believe they're actually getting somewhere - and it seems like folks back home don't know or don't care. Who gets the blame? We, the media!"

Burns, the former Baltimore police detective who serves as executive producer along with Simon and others on the HBO miniseries, also places some of the blame on the media - but only some.

"We live in a media-controlled society, and the emphasis now is on the economy," he says. "I guess they're sort of ducking this war because it's better to fight a war when no one is looking."

But Burns also points to the national psyche to explain Iraq avoidance.

"I think there's almost a shame we feel because we're living on two parallels," says the former writer and producer of The Wire. "There's a war on one street, you know, and America on another street - and we're not meeting up. So, you know, you sort of feel you should be there, but you're not."

So, will the big-budget Generation Kill succeed in finding a mass audience when so many productions have failed?

Burns says that is not his concern.

"I'm sure the HBO executives might be concerned about them, but I have no feeling for the numbers," he says. " ... I haven't seen any of these other shows on Iraq, so I don't know how good they were or how bad they were."

Kocher says he has seen some of the other films, and he believes Generation Kill is different.

"I think this is one of the first movies or series that you actually get to see what it's really like over there - and the decisions these guys have to make under the stressful conditions, under the fog of war and everything else," he says.

In Kocher's estimation, most of the films and TV productions that failed "overdramatized" the war, offering black-and-white renderings with "everybody either as a hero" - or "the opposite" with an "anti-war" point of view.

"Some people don't agree with me, but there were really no heroes in Generation Kill," he says. "I always tell people I think the war is kind of the background. This is more like a portrait of a day in the life of your average Marine in combat. I mean, that's why I think this series is going to do OK."

Most analysts are not expecting a big audience for Generation Kill. Given the mood of the country and a history of box office failure for Iraq projects, they doubt that even a quality production like HBO's will find much mainstream traction.

"Not now, not in this climate, when so many people feel so frustrated and helpless about the war, and seem like they just don't want to think about it until after the election in November," says Shirley Peroutka, a professor of media studies at Goucher College.

Still, she applauds HBO for trying:

"So what if the public doesn't want to see it? What's the purpose of TV anyway if not to tell these kinds of important stories?"

david.zurawik@baltsun.com

The war on the screen
• Over There: TV series debuted 8/27/05 on cable channel FX. Average audience 2.1 million. Steven Bochco drama about a platoon of soldiers in Iraq. Canceled after 13 episodes.

• No End in Sight. Documentary released in theaters 7/27/07. Box office gross $1.43 million. Chronicle of Iraq's descent into chaos after U.S. invasion.

• In the Valley of Elah. Feature film 9/14/07. $6.78 million. Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon in a murder mystery about the death of a soldier back from Iraq.

• Lions for Lambs. Feature film 11/9/07. $15 million. Robert Redford directs Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise in an exploration of America's war on terror.

• Redacted. Feature film 11/16/07. $65,000. Collection of stories about soldiers fighting in Iraq, directed by Brian De Palma.

• Stop-Loss. Feature film 3/29/08. $10.9 million. Kimberly Peirce film about a young soldier from Texas forced back to Iraq for another tour of duty.

Source: Sun reporting and boxofficemojo.com

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Good men, bad war <br />
&quot;The Wire&quot; co-creator Ed Burns expresses his admiration for the 1st Recon Marines depicted in his and David Simon's upcoming HBO miniseries, &quot;Generation Kill.&quot; <br />
<br />
By Heather...

[thedrifter]

'Generation Kill': A shooting script for alpha males

By CRISTINA KINON
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Monday, July 7th 2008, 4:00 AM

James Ransone, one of the stars of HBO's "Generation Kill," wants viewers to know beforehand that the Iraq war-set mini-series is apolitical.

"It has nothing to do with why we're in Iraq or what we should do to get out of Iraq, it just has to do with the soldiers that are on the ground right now," Ransone told the Daily News. "For all the political rhetoric we hear about how much the war costs and the bad decisions we made, hopefully what the series will do is put a face on who's over there and, to an extent, remind us that we should all care about them."

"Generation Kill" is based on an award-winning nonfiction account by Evan Wright, a journalist for Rolling Stone who spent time embedded with the 1st Reconnaissance Bravo Company's Second Platoon as it crossed over from Kuwait into Baghdad in the spring of 2003.

Wright's article, as well as the series, captures the events as realistically as possible, including actual battles, actual names and, in most cases, precise dialogue.

"The way that those dudes talk to each other, if you're too overtly politically correct, I think you might misconstrue them as being racist or sexist or crazy, but the thing is I think they're pretty far from that," said Ransone, who plays Cpl. Josh Ray Person. "They're just dudes doing their job."

"Generation Kill" launches Sunday at 9 p.m.

Executive producer Ed Burns said some of the language may offend at first but should be re-considered given the circumstances.

"If you follow these guys, you begin to see that the language they use is an attack mechanism," said Burns. "It's always better to attack than be on the receiving end."

What happens in the mini-series is real, said Eric Kocher, the senior military adviser for the series and one of the Marines portrayed in "Generation Kill."

"You get a bunch of alpha males all jammed up together with a lot of time on their hands and this is the way they test each other," said Kocher. "We can't just go kick the s— out of each other to see who is tougher. Instead we test each other verbally and how do you do that best? How do you one-up shooting somebody in the face with a 556? You pick apart his race. You pick apart that he's got really soft skin and you think he's gay. You pick apart whatever you can that you think will get underneath his skin."

After spending seven months shooting in Africa, bonding with Kocher and Wright and all the other Marines on the set and hearing about their own war experiences, Ransone says his mind hasn't necessarily changed about the war but it has "softened some hard corners about what I think about people who would enlist in the service.

"I definitely came away from my relationship with these guys a lot less judgmental," said Ransone. "The truth is, I honestly think some people were born to be warriors. I don't think Achilles was born into this world to be a seamstress."

ckinon@nydailynews.com

Ellie

[thedrifter]

The worst ‘Generation’
Muddled HBO series shows there’s no valor, glory in Iraq mission
By Mark A. Perigard / Review | Thursday, July 10, 2008 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Television Reviews

Generation Kill: B-

The invasion of Iraq seems doomed from the start.

Marines have been issued substandard equipment.

Commanding officers are buffoons. One officer is maniacally obsessed with the lengths of his troops’ mustaches.

The enlisted men worry the media is concealing the death of Jennifer Lopez.

One Marine almost becomes the first casualty - when his espresso maker explodes.

I’m going to make a safe bet: President Bush isn’t going to TiVo HBO’s “Generation Kill.”

The seven-part nonfiction miniseries (debuting Sunday at 9 p.m.) dramatizes the story of the First Recon Battalion, the force at the vanguard of the 2003 Iraq invasion.

The miniseries is based on the prize-winning book by Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright and was produced by David Simon and Ed Burns, the duo behind the acclaimed “The Wire.”

Shot in South Africa during several months, “Generation Kill” features some of the most harrowing combat sequences staged for the tube.

It also features an impossibly unwieldy cast and reams of military jargon that will fly over the heads of the average home viewer.

HBO’s press materials include a guide to the military terminology used in “Generation Kill.” It’s 15 pages.

This viewer watched the first three episodes in succession and found it difficult to tell the characters apart.

In the desert, when a cast of two dozen, primarily young white men are dressed in camouflage and helmets and given no back stories, they all blur together.

Of the cast, perhaps the best known to viewers is Lee Tergesen (“Oz”). He plays Wright and does little more than chuckle at the rants of the troops he writes about.

In their zeal to be accurate, Simon and Burns neglected to make the story accessible to viewers.

As the miniseries details, the Marines find themselves just as much at risk from their overzealous leaders as they are from Iraqi forces.

When some men encounter armed Iraqis, they radio their commanders for guidance and are ordered to wave them off.

“Know what happens when you get out of the Marine Corps?” one trooper says ruefully. “You get your brains back.”

“Generation Kill” has lots of great moments like these. But that won’t win the war for viewers.

Series premiere Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

True grittiness of Iraq
From battlefield chaos to soldier-strength profanity, HBO's "Generation Kill" faithfully captures Marine Corps life during the invasion.

By Anna Badkhen

Jul. 10, 2008 | They certainly got the profanity right.

It's 15 minutes into the first episode of "Generation Kill," the new HBO miniseries that starts on Sunday about a Marine battalion in Iraq, and I am already inundated with the familiar cacophony of racial and homophobic slurs, military jargon, graphic homoerotic passages and explicit diatribes you may not want your mother to hear. This is language I learned to understand well, if not speak it, during the time I spent as an embedded reporter with American troops in Iraq.

Such invective-laced tirades serve a purpose that is as much a fundamental part of the Marine Corps as "semper fi": The men spew out expletives and they bond. No one gets offended; this is just how they communicate with each other in their testosterone-loaded world, where swearing approaches an art form, almost any sentence uttered requires a translation into standard modern English, and the words "cocky mother****ers," uttered by the battalion commander, are as close as it gets to terms of endearment.

The veracity of Marines' communication habits is not the only thing the creators of "Generation Kill" got right. For the most part, the miniseries' take on the Marines who helped invade Iraq in the spring of 2003 rings as true as a drill instructor's upbraiding of a teenage recruit about life in the Suck.

As in the real Iraq, in "Generation Kill" -- which is based on the eponymous book by Evan Wright, a Rolling Stone reporter who was embedded with 1st Recon Marines during the invasion -- Marines ***** about food, their officers, faulty equipment, the inconvenience of defecating during wartime, and the shortage of opportunities to kill some "hajis" (the derogatory term for Muslims that has been almost universally adopted by American troops in Iraq). As in the real Iraq, they stuff dip under their lips and then spit it out into empty Gatorade bottles. They spend their downtime masturbating over photos of other people's girlfriends and guffawing in contempt of peace-loving letters they get from schoolchildren back in the States. The miniseries even got right the mismatched Marine uniforms -- the corps in 2003 was in the process of transitioning from the old desert camouflage uniform, which Marines shared with the rest of the military, to the new, pixelated camouflage pattern (commonly referred to as "digi-cammies") they currently wear -- and the sheets of orange cloth that all U.S. land forces stretched over the hoods of their humvees to signal to American warplanes that these are friendly vehicles. Kudos to Sgt. Eric Kocher, the series' military advisor who was a member of 1st Recon Marines during the invasion.

Most important, "Generation Kill's" action scenes crackle with the real-life confusion of the Iraqi battlefield, which is nothing like the cut-and-dried heroics of, say, the "Sands of Iwo Jima."

In the war zone that has no clearly defined front lines and where the elusive enemy wears no uniform, one of the toughest tasks is making decisions under fire. For the most part, the Marines don't want to act improperly, but even in such a well-trained military as that of the United States, the extreme stress of war -- and the conundrums war brings -- sometimes can push people to lose self-control. Often, the situation forces them to make decisions many will question -- like the time the 3-6 Marine battalion, with which I spent some time as an embedded reporter in the fall of 2005, fired a tank through a civilian house to respond to a rocket-propelled grenade round someone had shot at them from behind the house. An Iraqi family was inside the house; the American tank shell badly injured a baby.

But this was Karabila, a border town near Syria that American military believed al-Qaida used to smuggle fighters and weapons into Iraq, and an al-Qaida stronghold where billboards encouraging Iraqis to kill Americans lined the roads the same way that billboards in the States encourage Americans to buy the latest Toyota SUVs. This was Operation Iron Fist, a massive American offensive the goal of which was to reclaim control of the border towns on the Euphrates River from insurgents in time for the referendum on Iraq's first post-Saddam Hussein constitution. The tense offensive -- during which about 1,000 Marines swept through four towns, down perilously booby-trapped roads, taking fire from Iraqi snipers and dodging enemy mortars and rockets -- showed the ability of the Marines to go into enemy territory and kick ass, but also showed the limitations of that kind of head-on approach in towns where civilians live. Earlier during the offensive, the same Marines led bomb-sniffing dogs -- animals that Islam considers almost as unclean as pigs -- into a mosque they had suspected was being used for weapons storage.

The Marines in "Generation Kill" confront similar quandaries in almost every one of the seven episodes. In the first segment, they are told to abandon a group of surrendered Iraqi Republican Guard members even though these Iraqis will almost certainly be killed by Hussein's vicious Fedayeen Saddam death squads -- and even though it violates the Geneva Conventions, which obligate a fighting force to protect surrendered enemy combatants. In another episode, 1st Recon Marines choose not to send a child they had wounded to a field hospital because the resulting delay would be detrimental to their push north toward Baghdad, and even though leaving the boy without elaborate medical care means he would almost certainly die. These decisions -- and the Marines' mixed reaction to them -- are as realistic as the scenes of nighttime battles, when tracers light up the sky like deadly fireflies.

But as much as watching "Generation Kill" made me feel like I was, once again, riding in the back of a dusty, sweat-drenched humvee, I could not help noticing some inconsistencies. Out of necessity, the miniseries was filmed in Africa, where the vegetation (and lack thereof) is similar to the barren wastelands of Mesopotamia (shooting in Iraq was obviously a no-go). However, a few slanted rooftops give away that the Marines on the screen are not in the ancestral land of Iraqi Shia tribesmen, who would never put a slanted roof on top of their mud-brick huts, since that would deprive them of a place to store water, dry laundry, and stay cool during Iraq's impossibly hot summer nights.

Also, in the miniseries almost no one smokes. Good for them, of course, but I have rarely met a man who carried an M-16 and didn't carry a pack of Newports or Marlboro Reds (or bum them off someone who did). Even as they wait stealthily for a nighttime raid or set up mortars under a moonless Iraqi sky, most real-life American combat troops smoke, carefully cupping their hands over the butts so that enemy snipers don't see them.

And as close as "Generation Kill" comes to nailing the particular vernacular of American Marines, I found it odd that the film's Marines had no standard greeting. In the Army, the battle cry "hooah!" is commonly used as a way of saying hi. The 3-6 Marines, the unit I was embedded with in 2005, growled at each other, apparently celebrating the elite fighting force's nickname "Devil Dogs" (which dates back to World War I, but the origins of which are disputed). And, despite the obscenity-laced and military jargon-saturated nature of the dialogue in "Generation Kill," sometimes the conversation seemed a bit too stilted. More than once, Cpl. Ray Person (played by James Ransone), whose comrades identify him as "whiskey tango" (Marine-speak for "white trash"), launches into diatribes that are far too sophisticated and scripted for any enlisted Marine I've met.

"And although peace probably appeals to tree-loving bisexuals like you and your parents, I happen to be a death-dealing, blood-crazed warrior who wakes up every day just hoping for a chance to dismember my enemies and defile their civilizations"? I don't think so. "I'm gonna go **** me up some hajis" is much more like it.

Oddly enough, it's the Rolling Stone reporter that the miniseries gets really wrong. For someone who spent two months riding through vicious battles with an elite Marine unit, the Evan Wright character is too often surprised, too often afraid, too often caught unaware. Everyone knows that reporters embedded with units are not exactly the brawniest of warriors. But in order to produce the detailed, insightful stories from the front, and, later, write the book on which the miniseries is based, Wright had to win the trust of the troops, and I'm sure he didn't do that cowering in his seat.

But most amazingly, Wright's character in the movie almost never asks questions. The real Wright must have talked up a lot of Marines, asked a lot of questions and taken a ton of notes. The on-screen Wright (played by Lee Tergesen) spends most of the time on the screen riding around in the back of the humvee silently, with a look of trepidation or surprise on his face -- and his notebook very rarely comes out. Trust me, even the most lily-livered, panicked reporter will jot down something -- "They're trying to kill us again," or "Oh, ****!" if nothing else, out of a knee-jerk reaction to fear.

Even watching "Generation Kill," I found myself taking notes as though I would need to write up the action I was witnessing -- a testimony to the veracity of the battle scenes. But in a film that got so much right about Marines in this war, they messed up on the journalist. My colleague on-screen rarely wrote a word.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

TV Critics Tour: Marines Give Thumbs Up to ‘Generation Kill’
HBO’s Seven-Part Miniseries Detailing Iraqi Invasion Debuts July 13
By Linda Moss -- Multichannel News, 7/10/2008 10:01:00 PM

Beverly Hills, Calif.—U.S. Marines at Camp Pendleton responded well to Generation Kill, the HBO miniseries about the 2003 invasion of Iraq, during a screening at the base this week, officials said Thursday.

Generation Kill, which debuts July 13, is a gritty seven-part miniseries based on a book by Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright, who was embedded in a Marine unit during the invasion. It was executive produced and co-written by David Simon and Ed Burns of The Wire.

During a session on the miniseries at the Television Critics Association summer tour, Wright said Generation Kill had been shown Wednesday at the Marine base just north of San Diego.

“There were several hundred Marines,” Wright said. “It was f---king awesome…That audience totally got exactly what David and Ed and I were all doing on this project. They laughed at all the right jokes…It was the most gratifying moment of the whole production, to see these guys laughing and nodding their heads with recognition, especially as controversial as it was in some quarters.”

Panelist Simon added that the airing at Camp Pendleton was what everyone cared about.

“We screened this at Camp Pendleton,” said Eric Kocher, a former Marine and military advisor for Generation Kill. “We screened it to the real Bravo 2 Marines and the biggest comments they say are, you know, the dialog is excellent,” Kocher added. “It hits exactly the way Marines talk, and the atmosphere is visually what you see, what you hear in the background. Everything is it. It hits Iraq…That’s the biggest comments that everyone tells me, especially in the Marine community.”

At the Generation Kill panel, HBO Films president Colin Callender denied that the miniseries was cut down to seven episodes from eight because of fear that it would not perform well, since many TV shows and movies on Iraq have flopped.

“It was a budget issue,” he said. “It wasn’t an editorial decision.”

During the network’s executive session earlier Thursday, HBO officials argued that Generation Kill really isn’t about the politics of the war, but about the young soldiers sent in as part of the invasion.

“It has nothing to do with politics,” HBO co-president Richard Plepler said. “It’s really the story of this particular Marine reconnaissance unit as it came into Iraq…it is the emotional truth, the psychological truth of what those kids experienced.”

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Marines Snack on Skittles, Mock Kids in Gritty Iraq War Series

Review by Dave Shiflett


July 11 (Bloomberg) -- The creators of ``The Wire,'' HBO's gritty tale of urban warfare in Baltimore, have shifted the battlefield to the Middle East in ``Generation Kill,'' the network's new series about a Marine battalion during the Iraq War.

David Simon and Ed Burns wrote and produced the seven-part series, which runs Sunday nights starting July 13 at 9 p.m. New York time. The story is told from the perspective of the Marine's First Reconnaissance Battalion, the ``tip of the spear'' in the ground invasion of Iraq.

You wouldn't want to meet these guys in a dark desert -- or a well-lighted one. You might not want your sister to meet them either, unless she's tougher than Margaret Thatcher.

Based on the award-winning book by Evan Wright, a Rolling Stone reporter embedded with the unit, the series starts out with the troops cooling their heels in northern Kuwait awaiting the green light from Lieutenant Colonel Stephen ``Godfather'' Ferrando (Chance Kelly).

Ferrando's raspy voice, which makes him sound like Don Corleone, is caused by throat cancer, even though he doesn't smoke.

``I guess I got lucky,'' he wisecracks.

There aren't any household names in the large cast, though there are memorable characters. One Marine has A-bomb envy, wishing he had participated in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Other soldiers mock letters from schoolchildren who believe peace is better than war.

``War is the (expletive) answer,'' one grunt says.

`Beaver Hunt'

Viewers with G-rated ears may want to find something else to watch. These Marines often make the street criminals on ``The Wire'' sound like ushers at a tent revival. They're also a sensitivity trainer's worst nightmare. Racist and sexist remarks are as common as cigarettes and chewing tobacco.

While there are no women in the battalion, they have a definite presence. The Marines are wary of Wright (Lee Tergesen) until he reveals that he once wrote the ``Beaver Hunt'' feature for Hustler magazine, which makes him an immediate hero. Another soldier explains why the entire war could have been avoided if Iraq's sexually repressed Republican Guard had spent a week in Las Vegas.

There's not much combat in the opener, though one soldier is burned by an exploding espresso machine. The focus is on mundane aspects of military life, which are often ruled by incomprehensible rules. For instance, Skittles are allowed in Humvees, but Charms candies are banned because they're thought to bring misfortune.

Mustache Ban

Sergeant Major John Sixta (Neal Jones) enforces the unit's ``mustache protocol'' with howitzer-level ferocity, one reason why he's known, far behind his back, as ``Mr. Potato Head.''

While the series concentrates on the initial weeks of the war, it includes controversies that have marked the five-year conflict. The Marines are ordered to hold their fire in their initial encounter with armed Iraqis, an early indication this is not going to be a typical war.

``I had a beautiful head shot,'' complains one sharpshooter.

The series is more personal than political, a unvarnished view of war from the ground up. Watching a bombardment through night-vision glasses, one soldier laments, ``Damn, I wish I had some 'shrooms.''

(Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Dave Shiflett at dshifl@aol.com.
Last Updated: July 11, 2008 00:01 EDT

Ellie

[thedrifter]

HBO's drama of Marines in Iraq has gritty edge
YOUNG MARINES' LIVES AREN'T SUGAR-COATED
By Rob Owen
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Article Launched: 07/12/2008 01:34:01 AM PDT



The depiction of U.S. Marines deployed to Iraq in HBO's "Generation Kill," based on the non-fiction book of the same title, won't appeal to viewers who see America's armed forces through blindingly patriotic, rose-colored glasses.

They'll be appalled by the profanity of the troops and the Marines who mock letters from schoolchildren and make lascivious comments about the photos that kids send of themselves ("She's pretty hot. I like the braids"). But all these elements make the seven-episode miniseries, from writers David Simon and Ed Burns (HBO's "The Wire"), feel absolutely authentic.

An engrossing, detailed military character drama, "Generation Kill" - which debuts 9 p.m. Sunday - is a modern-day "Band of Brothers," a warts-and-all account that hits closer to home because it depicts such recent events.

It's not the first TV program set during the Iraq War. FX's "Over There" offered its own take on battlefield life three summers ago. But, good as it was as a TV drama, "Over There" was more earnest and traditional in its depiction of American soldiers. "Generation Kill" is more raw and profane, more wild and woolly.

"Generation Kill" follows the U.S. Marines First Reconnaissance Battalion, which was part of the first wave of attacks in 2003. Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright, played by Lee Tergesen ("Oz") in the miniseries, was embedded with the Marines and wrote three articles for the magazine and later expanded them into the book, published in 2004.

The miniseries begins before the invasion as the amped-up, pop-song-singing young Marines prepare to go into battle against "the Hajis," as they refer to all Iraqis. But they feel ill-supplied.

"This is like 'Gilligan's Island,' " one Marine complains. "They're giving us rocks and coconuts to make radios with."

The core characters quickly emerge, led by dedicated, smart, responsible Sgt. Brad "Ice Man" Colbert (Alexander Skarsgard) and outrageous Cpl. Ray Person (James Ransone), a hyperactive, opinionated light-armored-vehicle driver.

"Why can't we ever invade a cool country with women in bikinis?" Person asks in Sunday night's premiere. But next week he changes his tune once the convoy comes upon some attractive Iraqi women in a village. "I didn't know Hajis could be hotties. I thought they were all camel-faced hags."

As in many military stories, it's sometimes a challenge to tell the characters apart: It wasn't until episode four that I realized Colbert and First Lt. Nate Fick (Stark Sands) are two different characters.

The frat-house atmosphere begins to dissipate in episode three when a gun-loving, overly enthusiastic Marine shoots a child, bringing dishonor on his platoon.

"You've got to see these people are just like you," another Marine lectures the shooter. "We're not here to destroy their way of life."

Details that ring true distinguish "Generation Kill," especially the perfect character nicknames: "Encino Man" for a Neanderthalish captain; "Godfather" for a raspy-voiced lieutenant colonel; and "Captain America" for a seriously paranoid captain.

In the five episodes HBO sent for review, "Generation Kill" doesn't stir the emotions in the same way "Band of Brothers" did. But it does an admirable job of conveying a sense of life on the battlefield for modern Marines without taking a stance on the legitimacy of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Generation Kill

****


Airing: 9 p.m. Sunday, HBO

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Article published Sunday, July 13, 2008
THE REAL WAR
New HBO series is first-hand account of elite Marines in Iraq

By MIKE KELLY
SPECIAL TO THE BLADE

If war is hell, does that mean that the people who go to war are hellions?

When they’re U.S. Marines, maybe so — particularly if they’re members of one of the Corps’ elite “Recon” battalions who receive highly specialized training and usually operate deep behind enemy lines. Recon (or Reconnaissance) Marines are the special forces of the Corps, the equivalent of Navy SEALS or Army Green Berets.

They’re trained to parachute, scuba dive, snowshoe, climb mountains, and rappel from helicopters. They can run 12 miles loaded down with 100-pound packs, then jump into the ocean and swim miles more, still wearing their boots and fatigues and carrying their weapons and packs. And though they’re trained in all types of combat, their most effective weapon is stealth — the ability to move quickly and quietly among the enemy without being detected until they’re ready to strike.

In a searing, true-life miniseries called Generation Kill that begins tonight on HBO, a group of Recon Marines is given a most unusual assignment in the early days of the Iraq War. They’re ordered to rush headlong at the enemy and engage them as the “tip of the spear” of the Iraqi invasion of 2003.

The seven-part series is based on a bestselling 2004 nonfiction book written by Evan Wright, a journalist on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine. Wright was embedded for seven weeks with the 1st Recon Marine Battalion in the spring of 2003, and he rode in a lightly armored lead vehicle at the front of the invasion. His three-part magazine series focusing on the day-to-day lives of the Marines of Bravo Two (Bravo Company’s 2nd Platoon), called “The Killer Elite,” won a slew of national awards, including one from the Marine Corps.’ own Heritage Foundation. The magazine stories were later expanded into a book titled Generation Kill.

HBO’s adaptation of Wright’s book was produced by David Simon and Ed Burns, the creative team behind the gritty and celebrated HBO series The Wire, which ran from 2002 until this year on the premium cable channel. Generation Kill, which will continue on successive Sunday nights, covers the first 40 days of the invasion. Several real-life members of Bravo Two served as technical advisers on the series, and are cast members as well.

No ambiguity
Tonight’s premiere episode (9 to 10:10 p.m.) introduces several of the Marines as they wait at a staging area in the northern desert of Kuwait for the war to begin. The members of Bravo Two are plenty tough, but they’re hardly battle-hardened veterans. Most are in their early to mid-20s, and they’re a lot more familiar with video games, reality TV shows, and Internet porn than with history or politics — or warfare, for that matter.

They see themselves as highly trained killers — which they are — but they don’t know yet what it means to kill. They never consider the righteousness of the U.S. invasion, and they’re ready to do their jobs without qualms or moral ambiguity.

Some of that, one suspects, will come later on.

They’re not thrilled when the writer from Rolling Stone is brought into their midst (“You gonna write about how we’re all baby killers and momma rapers?” asks one), but after learning that he once worked at Hustler magazine, they’re more ready to accept him. Before long they’re talking freely in front of him, as he scribbles furiously in his notebook.

When the order to attack finally comes down to roll into Iraq — it’s signaled by the bizarre sight of a fleet of Pizza Hut delivery vehicles rolling into camp — most in the platoon are overjoyed, ready to finally get into combat.

As they roll along dirt roads and pitted highways in a convoy of Humvees, the grunts pass the time talking about music, sex, and all the Hajis (their term for Iraqis) they’re planning to “smoke.” Nobody, it seems, is considering the fact that at any moment, he could get smoked by a roadside bomb, missile, or AK-47.

One Marine, buzzing from lack of sleep and large quantities of Ripped Fuel, a popular ephedrine-based stimulant, can’t keep quiet, and entertains others in his Humvee with an endless string of songs, dirty jokes, and ruminations.

“How come we can’t ever invade a cool country with, like, chicks in bikinis?” he asks as they pass a group of Iraqi women clad in long robes and veils. “You know? How come countries like that don’t ever need Marines?”

Point of view
Fictional accounts of the Iraqi war haven’t done much at the box office — consider In the Valley of Elah, Home of the Brave, or Stop-Loss — and a 2005 Steven Bochco series on FX called Over There flopped, too. But Generation Kill is unlike any of those. It’s not Hollywood’s version of war, but a first-hand account of young Marines in an actual war.

Real events are depicted, real names are used, and viewers will hear real, raw dialogue. (That’s one reason the series is definitely R-rated — that, and of course, its graphic violence.)

If Generation Kill is similar to anything that’s come before, it might be HBO’s own award-winning 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers, which followed an Army company during World War II. That series was based on interviews with veterans and research by historian Stephen Ambrose, but Brothers producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks admitted taking literary license with some wartime facts.

Though the Generation Kill series originated with articles in Rolling Stone, a publication most would consider liberal, producer Ed Burns said the HBO project has no particular political slant.

“When I read the book, I initially saw it as anti-war, and yet the Marine Heritage Foundation gave Evan an award for writing it, so they must have seen a pro-Marine side,” he said in an interview. “It has that kind of range and that’s a credit to the work itself. Evan has said his own politics were kind of beside the point. He just wanted to tell the story of these guys and what they went through.”

Susanna White, director of several episodes of the series, said the production is about people, not politics. “I’d like viewers to come away from the show with a new understanding of what it was really like on the ground for those Marines in the early weeks of the war, thinking there were weapons of mass destruction, going out in thin-skinned Humvees, and putting their lives on the line.”

Another director, Simon Cellan Jones, said it would be up to viewers to decide what the series’ message is. “I hope viewers conclude that war is a blunt and inexact instrument that is at best a clumsy and inefficient — and utterly brutal — way of imposing one’s will, but also that it produces complicated and conflicted emotions: fear, boredom, rage, and joy.

“However, the whole point of the show is that the audience is not led by the hand. They will make up their own minds how they feel.”

Eric Kocher, a Marine from the 1st Recon Battalion who served as a technical adviser and appears in the mini-series, summed up the mission of the miniseries, one that he contends was achieved.

“Generation Kill gives an objective view of what happened, without politics or agenda,” Kocher said. “It’s the lives of these individuals and their road trip, and that’s the main story. The war is just the backdrop.”

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Imbed yourself in 40 days of war in Iraq
By Kevin McDonough | United Feature Syndicate
July 13, 2008

Based on Evan Wright's acclaimed book, the seven-part miniseries ''Generation Kill'' (at 9 on HBO, TV-MA) follows a battalion of young Marines as they advance into Iraq during the first 40 days of the 2003 invasion. Wright, an embedded reporter for Rolling Stone, becomes a character here, as well.

''Generation'' imbeds the viewer, too. These are not the Marines of a John Wayne movie, but a wildly contradictory group including a health-obsessed body builder, a white supremacist and another grunt eager to share his theories about the white man's oppression.

The language is salty enough to give you high blood pressure and the sexism, racism, homophobia and nihilism are rampant. The focus on the scatological may be more honest than some find entertaining. In some ways, this may be the most intense all-male setting on any HBO series since the prison drama ''Oz.''

And, like ''Band of Brothers,'' another summer HBO war-drama miniseries, ''Kill'' introduces the audience to a lot of characters in a hurry. Don't be too concerned that you can't distinguish one grunt from the other in the first hour. The cast sorts itself out as ''Generation Kill'' moves along, offering an up-close look at the chaos of battle and the boredom and anticipation of hours in the desert.



We see what it's like to enter combat without proper equipment, to follow changing and at times contradictory orders, and to wade into a country where it's difficult to tell the friendly civilians from the terrorists. The Marines depicted here considered themselves ''the tip of the spear,'' but as early as the opening hours of the war, they realize, and we see, that their interaction with the ''liberated'' population would have ramification for years to come.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

The Road to Baghdad
David Simon’s “Generation Kill.”
by Nancy Franklin

“
Generation Kill,” a new miniseries on HBO, is based on a 2004 book by Evan Wright, which is an expanded version of a three-part series that was published in Rolling Stone, in 2003, about the time Wright spent embedded with a Marine battalion in Iraq. It’s not necessarily the case that a heart beats less robustly when it’s transplanted, but Wright’s creation has become more attenuated with each step it has taken—from magazine article to book to TV miniseries. For one thing, although the title of the magazine series, “The Killer Elite,” may not be especially original, it’s more piquant, because of its very accuracy, than “Generation Kill,” which is Wright’s attempt to coin a phrase that plays off “the greatest generation.” Wright had the good fortune—reportorially speaking—to be in Iraq from the beginning of the invasion, so he was well situated to observe how the war unfolded and how the men he was ensconced with did, or didn’t, change as a result. His articles, which end shortly after the Marines entered Baghdad, appeared just a few months after the invasion and had an organic immediacy—although Wright wrote them after returning home to the States, you could imagine him sitting in the desert ripping pages out of a manual typewriter and sending them off with a courier. The third paragraph of the Rolling Stone series starts in classic field-dispatch fashion: “The war began twenty-four hours ago.” The third paragraph of the book starts with a yawn: “Their war began several days ago.” The magazine pieces are punchy; in the book, the tone has been neutralized and the author’s voice is not nearly as present. Fatally, it is entirely missing from the miniseries.

“Generation Kill,” which airs in what I’ll always think of as the “Sopranos” time slot—Sundays at nine—was created by David Simon, whose HBO series “The Wire” recently finished its fifth and final season. (That show also ran in Tony’s time slot.) “The Wire” could have been called “The Web”—each season involved a different element of life in Baltimore (the drug trade, the waterfront, the city bureaucracy, the educational system, and the press), creating, over all, an intricate picture of the way things work, and don’t work, in that city. It’s possible that if Simon had used “Generation Kill” not as a blueprint but as a jumping-off point he might have come up with something richer than he did. (The series was written by Simon, Ed Burns—Simon’s collaborator on “The Wire”—and Wright.)

Actually, it’s a little surprising that Simon went for this material at all. If you watched TV during the first two weeks of the war, you’ll remember that it was covered exhaustively and enthusiastically, as if it were a hot, sandy pep rally. Troop movements, weather conditions, equipment, terminology, and geography—reporters practically got drunk on it all, egged on, presumably, by the networks, some of which sported American-flag graphics during their war coverage. 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 in southern Iraq as they made their way from Kuwait to Baghdad. Wright’s pieces, coming out so soon after the invasion, brought the same kind of reality home—even more so, since he had greater control over his narrative than the TV reporters did: they were literally blown about by the wind while they were on camera and sometimes were made almost invisible by all-encompassing sandstorms. But that unforgettable time was more than five years ago, and 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.

On the other hand, there would certainly be room right now for a drama about the war 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. But “Generation Kill” is lose-lose in that regard: it has too many characters for the writers to be able to do more than create thumbnail sketches, and it seems convinced that verisimilitude and earnest believability—simple accretion of “slice of life” detail—will add up to drama and watchability. One of the marines in the First Reconnaissance Battalion, with whom Wright travelled, Sergeant Rudy Reyes—who has Hollywood good looks and, indeed, plays himself in the miniseries—told NPR that the show sticks closely to the book. “They don’t dramatize nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing more dramatic going on than a unit of recon marines with no close air support or armor running and gunning into insurgents that are holed up in towns and fighting to the death.” And what’s never acknowledged in the series is the fact that what we’re seeing is only one writer’s reality. The writer onscreen (played by Lee Tergesen) is never named—the men in the platoon call him “Reporter” or “Writer” or nothing—and he’s rarely on camera. Only occasionally is he embedded in the actual drama. One is to some extent grateful for that. Wright doesn’t get in the way in the book, either, and you feel that he’s intelligent and has a good eye. But the writer in the series is a nearly mute cipher; I suppose his dullness is meant to indicate that he’s a decent sort and a true professional, and not a representative of the hated media.

There is very little in “Generation Kill” to distinguish it from other war-is-hell dramas, such as Steven Bochco’s 2005 series “Over There”—though civilians never cease to be surprised by the facts of military life. In the case of “Generation Kill,” that glaring fact is that First Recon’s mission is one that its men aren’t trained for. An élite group of marines whipped into spectacular physical shape, whose function is to scramble stealthily ahead of regular troops and scout the enemy’s positions behind the lines, they are asked to drive north to Baghdad in a convoy of Humvees, like sitting ducks. But to a man they’re all up for it; some of them, in fact, are frustrated and angry when, at times, they receive orders not to shoot.

If we got to know any of the characters in “Generation Kill,” the show might be more interesting, or, at least, more memorable. But only a few accidental distinctions set them apart: a raspy voice in one case (an officer who had throat cancer), hair and skin color in others. Some talk more than others. It’s clear that the laconic Sergeant Brad Colbert (Alexander Skarsgård), the leader of the team that Wright chooses to ride with, is the hero of the piece, because the camera stays on his face to record his every reaction, which is almost always a smile of some kind—rueful, encouraging, conspiratorial, wise, depending on whom he’s trying to placate at the time. The smile is an all-purpose, strong-silent-type reaction into which we can read anything, and which substitutes for clarity, psychological or otherwise. At the start of the war, it was useful to be reminded of what was involved in being a soldier, but at this remove such a “faithful” depiction comes across as an abdication, a moral failure to judge and to acknowledge the horrors that followed—it makes the war in Iraq feel like little more than an adventure story with a few unpleasant wrinkles and an occasional nod to the ethical dilemmas and battlefield difficulties unique to this conflict. The show doesn’t shy away from portraying certain absurdities and outrages—a lot is made of the fact that one officer is obsessed with the width of some of the platoon members’ mustaches, and, at the other end of the scale, you see civilian casualties and marines carrying out various levels of abuse, including one officer who repeatedly jabs his bayonet into the ground next to a prisoner’s head. But one of the most sickening episodes in the book is whitewashed in the series. In the book, as a marine reaches into a car that’s been riddled with bullets to pick up a little girl, “the top of her head slides off and her brains fall out”; in the series, the girl is dead, but intact. In a show like this, if you’re going to get real, you have to go all the way.

Ellie