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thedrifter
03-05-09, 06:41 AM
On DVD: "Generation Kill' engages viewers in a moral, true war
By Ashley Meeks/For Pulse
Las Cruces Sun-News
Posted:03/05/2009 12:00:00 AM MST

There are those who tsk the marines for their lack of head-hanging, their lack of moralizing, the fact that none of the guys in the first recon bust out in tears at the destruction and defect to join a protest movement dedicated to anti-oil marches.

Those people, the guys in Bravo Company would say, are retarded, plus a bunch of other words that can't be printed.

The HBO miniseries "Generation Kill" started as three articles by Rolling Stone's Evan Wright, who spent seven weeks in 2003 with "the tip of the spear" during the Iraq invasion. It's a spear that spends a lot of time waiting, riding in Humvees, waiting, and being unable to take off one's rotting boots for months. The mini-series was made with the help of the guys who did the HBO series "The Wire" and does much what that series did for police, journalists, longshoremen and project-dwellers, with another group of the hated: shows them just trying to do their job and keep some of their humanity about them.

With sarcasm, young-man swagger, bravado and a diarrhea of the mouth concerning all subjects from race to girlfriends to, well, actual diarrhea, the marines roll through Iraq trying to pick out insurgents with guns from mud-walled huts and shuttered cities. The journalist, the one weak character (the rest are, unfortunately, mostly hard to pick apart by name due to their identical camo) alternately gapes and stares wide-eyed when things explode.

Bravo Company does question the changes in rules of engagement (one moment, they have to wave on a group of armed men who turn out to be Saddam's execution squads, the next they're told if they see a woman walking away from them with a gun strapped to her back, they should shoot). But it's not up to these guys to pause during a firefight and wonder about the larger motivations back in Washington for their directions. You philosophize about that stuff in a chemical-warfare MOPP suit. When you're down to one meal a day of pound cake, powdered coffee crystals and "jalapeņo and cheese," all in the rip-open-plastic-packaging they keep toxic toilet-bleach tablets in. When you haven't slept an hour in two days or been able to use the bathroom — on a cut out box — in as much time. When the gun you need to protect the other guys in your Humvee is choked with desert moon dust and you haven't been given the right weapon lubricant or night-vision batteries. You'd go crazy.

"Generation Kill" says the mechanics of war could always be better. No one disputes that. No one calls the motions of the military perfection (especially when air-strikes are being called down by an officer because he wants a promotion, or grenades being lobbed by reservists at women and children because of incompetence). But that so many at home have the privilege of being comfortable, delicate enough to be offended by the dialogue or mentality of fellow citizens — working men, doing filthy, hard-slogging jobs the critics would never and could never do — that's something that needs to be shaken up.

Neither the "baby killer" myth nor the "greatest generation" one reflects the truth. War is not fiction. But for too many people, who never have to face a father, an uncle, a brother who have come home from blood and explosions and bodies, that's all it is — fiction, in which the only good guys are the ones who stayed home.

The seven episodes and nearly eight hours of "Generation Kill" are not a tightly woven rollercoaster in which men are transformed and intricate stories introduced and wrapped up cleverly — fiction. It's slow, sun-baked, jocular, bloody, messy, dirty, gutter-mouthed reality. The same guys who risk their lives to save their fellow marines and random, dehydrated Iraqis alike are just as capable of spewing dark (and hilarious) filth at the braided elementary school girl who writes them the peace-loving letter for an assignment at school. If that's the most uncomfortable thing we, the viewers, are subjected to? We're lucky.


Ashley Meeks can be reached at ameeks@lcsun-news.com; (575) 541-5462

Ellie