PDA

View Full Version : Rolling Stone writer's TV take on Iraq war



thedrifter
01-25-09, 07:50 AM
From The Sunday Times
January 25, 2009
Rolling Stone writer's TV take on Iraq war
Evan Wright and the team beind The Wire tell it like it really is for American soldiers in Generation Kill, based on his book

In early 2003, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Evan Wright, a writer for Rolling Stone, was sitting in a room with hundreds of other journalists. He was waiting to find out which branch of the US military he would be embedded with for the next 40 days. The year before, Wright had written about the US army in Afghanistan, in an article headlined “Greetings from Ass-Crackistan”. It was infamous in military circles — loved by the grunts, loathed by the officers. Even Donald Rumsfeld had seen it; the army was not likely to welcome Wright into its ranks again.


The marines, however, didn’t seem to mind. He sat in the room full of expectant reporters as the placements were read out. “When I was assigned First Recon,” he recalls, “all the reporters looked at me with expressions of intense jealousy and hatred. I didn’t know what First Recon was, but I realised it must be a good assignment, because if other reporters look that envious, it's good.”


It turned out to be very good. Recon marines are the United States Marine Corps’ special forces, and their role in the war was to spearhead the blitzkrieg. Bravo company, with which Wright was embedded, was ambushed 17 times on the way to Baghdad — all “good” in terms of stories. So good, in fact, that Wright’s dispatches eventually became a book, one that has already become a modern classic of war reportage. Now that book, Generation Kill, has been made into an HBO miniseries, with The Wire’s David Simon and Ed Burns at the helm and Wright one of the writers. Its aim is to show, in forensic, almost obstinate detail, exactly what it is like to be in the crucible of a modern war.


In person, Wright is tall and a little goofy, lolling about in a plaid shirt and chinos. He speaks in the kind of muddy drawl you would hope for from a Rolling Stone reporter, and he is amiably droll, especially once the cappuccino kicks in. His sole screenwriting experience before Generation Kill came on a film called The Psychosexuals. It was a porno: “I didn’t tell anyone at HBO that.”


Whatever his credentials as a screenwriter, Wright’s porn background stood him in good stead with the marines. In one of the early scenes of Generation Kill, his character, Scribe, played by Lee Tergesen, is introduced to the men of First Recon at Camp Mathilda, in Kuwait, as they wait for the war to begin. They assume he’s a dope-smoking peacenik and hurl offhand homophobic abuse his way, until he mentions that he used to write the Beaver Hunt column in Hustler. Straightaway, someone offers to carry his bag.


That sets the tone for Generation Kill — it is a war story told from the point of view of those who actually fight. They like porn, hip-hop, Jerry Springer and Grand Theft Auto. For them, “motherf***er” is a term of endearment. And, as Generation Kill makes clear, it is on their shoulders that the weight of America’s war on terror has fallen. “It gives voice to what we call the E5s downwards: sergeants and below,” Wright says. “These are the people who are often voiceless. I wanted to get a picture of what their perspective was.”


To keep that perspective to the fore, in both book and film, Wright’s character takes a back seat. Literally — he sits behind the series’s de facto hero, Sgt Brad “Iceman” Colbert (Alex Skarsgard), in the team’s Humvee, taking notes while the car’s driver, Cpl Josh Ray Person (James Ransone), spouts an endless monologue on matters including Justin Timberlake and the “gay dog” episode in South Park. The supporting cast includes several marines from the campaign playing themselves, including the unforgettable Sgt Rudy Reyes — part male model, part cold-blooded killing machine. References to the wider politics of the war are consciously avoided. “In America right now,” Wright says, “the politics are so divisive that people analyse information from the standpoint of whether it’s left- or right-wing, which is a phoney way of looking at something like this.”


He adds that the Iraq war films and television series made so far haven’t helped. “You know what? Most of the war movies totally sucked. And Over There (Steven Bochco's 2005 drama series about a unit in Iraq) I thought sucked too. It’s not just my opinion. Go to military blogs — that show is ridiculous. I don’t blame the American public for not wanting to watch another crappy war movie, or one that’s lecturing.”


If the politics of the war were to remain in the background, Wright, Simon and Burns knew they had to make Generation Kill painstakingly realistic. “David Simon realised that if he didn’t get it right, people, for political reasons, would use any excuse to tear the work apart,” Wright says. “So they gave Eric power to change things.”


“Eric” is Staff Sgt Eric Kocher, the series’s key military adviser. Wright, who met him while with First Recon, recommended him: “On a lot of war films, the adviser is some old drunk who was never even in combat, and he sits on the set eating doughnuts and talking about weapons. Eric had only just gotten out of Iraq in November, from his fifth combat tour, when he started in January 2007. If you read the afterword in my book, he was in a lot of gnarly **** over there.”


I meet Kocher in Los Angeles, and the gnarliness of the **** he was in is readily apparent. He can’t move his right arm much above his waist, and one of his fingers won’t curl up. He speaks extremely fast, barking out answers as if in reply to a snappy sergeant major. “Served nine years in the marine corps, six years in First Recon battalion, the battalion depicted in this film. Toured Afghanistan right after 9/11, then two tours in Iraq. Third tour wounded — hit by an RPG in the battle for Fallujah. Got my right arm mangled up. . . ”


With two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star, Kocher is the real deal. On Generation Kill, he was given unusual sway. His abiding insistence that the light armoured vehicles looked wrong (“Every time I saw one, I vomited,” was how he described it) ended up costing HBO $250,000 in post-production. He also helped to script the radio traffic and had them tweak flight patterns of Cobra helicopters and remove “Hollywood explosions” from 40mm grenade blasts (military explosives detonate cleanly, using all their energy for the blast, not the fireworks). It was Kocher who kept Generation Kill honest. “Truth is, other people don’t know what we do,” he says. “The military **** needs to go through me: it’s my reputation at stake.”


Kocher didn’t just keep an eye on the pyrotechnics, he also took responsibility for ensuring that the series held true to the experience of the men on the ground. “I made sure we were depicted in the best way possible,” he says. “They could have hired Chuck Norris to play Brad Colbert, and had nuclear hand grenades and magazines that never run out of ammo. We could have added this whole bull**** subplot. But we didn’t. This is a generation of guys who are ready to go kill for their country.


They’re not all heroes; they’re humans like anybody else. They do make mistakes. But why hide those mistakes?”


Such mistakes give Generation Kill its polemic clout. Through the seven episodes, we witness a catalogue of errors made by senior officers that rebound on their men. Viewers of The Wire will recognise a familiar Simon and Burns theme: how the chain of command wrings the life out of men with good intentions, leaving self- preservation and the dirge of protocol to prevail.


Generation Kill shows the same corrosive effects at work in the military. Many of the stories of a trigger-happy officer nicknamed Captain America by his men, or of feckless commanding officers blaming mistakes on subordinates, came to Wright via Kocher.


“I got in some trouble when the book came out,” Kocher says. “They didn’t like my comments. It’s the senior guys who have issues. They call it airing our dirty laundry. Well, unless you air dirty laundry, you’re not going to change anything.


“The truth is, this is positive for the marine corps. Truth is, war is chaos. Bad things happen. War stories either turn everybody into heroes, or into antiwar protesters that don’t want to be there. This is a story that tells it the way it is.”




Generation Kill starts tonight on FX at 10pm


Ellie