Generation Kill On HBO (USMC in Iraq)

[jetdawgg]

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

[Pete0331]

I read the book, it was alright. A little to much bravado though.
And I had the distinct feeling that some of the info the author had was taken from the "Lance Corporal Underground."

With that said, I'll still watch it.

[fontman]

Camp Pendleton Marines laud drama's authenticity
Miniseries portrays unit in early days of Iraq war
By Rick Rogers
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
July 10, 2008

Camp Pendleton officials rolled out a red carpet last night for the warts-and-glory miniseries “Generation Kill,” a drama about an elite unit from their base that played a pivotal role in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In seven hour-long episodes, actors and a real-life Marine chronicle 40 days in the lives of troops from the Bravo Company, 1st Reconnaissance Battalion as they battle their way to Baghdad.

They are shown fighting insurgents, bonding with each other as a second family, making homophobic and sexist comments, degrading Iraqis, talking about the thrill of killing, joking to lighten the stress of combat and pondering their post-war existence.

They also complain about poor, even incompetent, leadership by their commanders and rail against the Marine Corps' frequent changes to its rules of engagement.

“I think the majority of the guys are very happy with the series,” said former Staff Sgt. Eric Kocher, 28, who helped lead the reconnaissance unit and is a veteran of five combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Just watching it makes you feel like you're there because of the detailed accuracy put into the filming,” said Kocher, who served as a technical adviser for the project.

Cpl. Josh Ray Person, another Marine portrayed in the miniseries, said the Marine Corps might not be happy with the show because it expects perfection from its troops.

“But every family has its problems. I hope audiences will see that the war is being fought by real people,” said Person, 27, who left the military shortly after his 2003 deployment and lives in Kansas City, Mo.

“I may come off in the movie as hating the Marine Corps,” he said, “but I actually love the service to death and I'm grateful for what it has given me – the leadership skills and the call to action.”

The Marine Corps, like the Army, has an office in Hollywood that advises producers, directors and writers working on projects that involve military subjects. But it did not participate in making “Generation Kill” and does not endorse it.

Nonetheless, Camp Pendleton officials allowed the miniseries to be shown yesterday in a theater on the base. In a statement, they thanked HBO for providing free, off-duty entertainment.

Actors and former members of Bravo Company attended last night's event, where Marines and their families watched two episodes.

“Generation Kill” will start airing Sunday. HBO adapted the controversial Rolling Stone magazine series and subsequent book from a journalist who was embedded with the unit.

The drama's creators and many of the servicemen portrayed in it, including 11 who are still in uniform, said they hope the show will resonate with the public.

“We are trying to depict young men in a modern war and what war has become,” said David Simon, the show's screenwriter and executive producer who was the creative force behind the HBO drama “The Wire.”

“The one thing that I hope people get out of this film, whether pro-or anti-war, is its impact on the people who fight it. . . . It might be nice if there was any reflection about what the Iraqis have endured for five years,” he said. “War is a lot less precise and pristine than we think it is.”

Commanders usually use reconnaissance Marines to find the enemy and infiltrate its ranks. As a rule, such Marines fail in their mission if they have to fire a shot or otherwise give away their position.

Members of Bravo Company carried out reconnaissance work in Iraq, but they also joined standard combat operations.

They and Marines from other units in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion left Camp Pendleton for their first Iraq war deployment in January 2003. The men crossed into Iraq on March 21 of that year.

In the following weeks, they fought battles in Safwan – just across the border with Kuwait – then rolled through Nasiriyah and Kut before reaching Baghdad. Often, their unit was the one that penetrated deepest behind enemy lines.

No one from the 374-member battalion died by the time they returned to Camp Pendleton in June. The Marines survived at least 17 firefights, many ambushes and at least one minefield.

The creators of “Generation Kill” said they strived for the utmost authenticity in depicting Kocher, Person and the other Marines.

On the HBO Web site for the miniseries, they describe the show as “a gritty, uncompromising account of the Iraq invasion . . . from the point of view of the guys on the ground.”

While taping the episodes, the producers held screenings in which they shared excerpts with Marines and sought their comment. They also decided to spend $150,000 on special effects after concluding that the natural setting in South Africa, Mozambique and Namibia didn't sufficiently resemble Iraq's landscape.

The result is one incredibly realistic episode after another – down to the chatter on the radio that's heard during many scenes, said some of the troops portrayed in the miniseries.

“People are going to be entertained,” said Antonio Espera, 35, who left the Marine Corps after eight years. “We have a very unique culture.”

Creators of the show said that in addition to accuracy, they tried to avoid politicizing the war. They wanted to convey an enduring message of how the Marines showed courage, forged unwavering unity and displayed a commitment to honorable behavior – even if they didn't always behave that way – despite the dehumanizing nature of war.

“I think overall, this is going to help the recon community and the Marine Corps,” Kocher said. “Our bad is that not that bad and our good is very good. The series is something positive coming out of the war.”

The project sprang from the writings of Evan Wright, a journalist who spent seven weeks in spring 2003 with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion.

Wright's series for Rolling Stone won the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting in 2004. That year, he published a book by the same name and it went on to win the PEN USA Award, J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. It also was honored with the Gen. Wallace Greene Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation.

“What I hope the series does,” Wright said, “is expose the public to the human story of a bunch of 20-somethings who are fighting because we sent them there.”

[ZSKI]

I have the first episode set to record on my DVR, incase i miss it. I want to see what its all about before i judge.

[fontman]

A grunt's-eye-view of war's snafus
Posted on Fri, Jul. 11, 2008
BY GLENN GARVIN
ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com

• Generation Kill, 9-10:15 p.m. Sunday, HBO

Two bedraggled enlisted men, exhausted after days of dodging snipers and artillery barrages, are awakened to search for a captain who went to a latrine outside the perimeter and got lost in the desert. 'Bleepin' officers will be the death of us yet,'' grumbles one as they resignedly head off into the night.

The moment is both the perfect distillation of every grunt's war, from Thermopylae to Valley Forge to Fajullah, and the perfect summation of Generation Kill, a raucous, raunchy and utterly loving account of life at the bottom of the military food chain.

A seven-part miniseries that debuts Sunday on HBO, Generation Kill is adapted from the nonfiction book of the same name by Evan Wright, a Rolling Stone reporter embedded with a Marine reconnaissance platoon during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. With a cast of outstanding if mostly unknown actors, it offers an unapologetic grunt's-eye view of the military, in which a brass hat is less a symbol of authority than an indelible mark of stupidity, cupidity or both. ''To think I believed the judge when he said the Marine Corps was a superior alternative to jail,'' sighs one Marine after yet another senseless order filters down from headquarters.

A kind of Catch-22 for the millennial generation, Generation Kill documents life inside an armed bureaucracy governed by martinets, morons and maniacs. One officer, nicknamed Encino Man after a cloddish movie caveman, mistakenly calls down a potentially murderous artillery strike on his own men; they survive only because he got the map coordinates wrong. A gunnery sergeant who forgets to order lubricants for the unit's machine guns, leaving them hopelessly jammed by Iraq's ubiquitous sandstorms, offers the men counseling instead: ``Remember, I am a certified combat stress instructor.''

Against officers who can mislay a truck containing the unit's entire supply of food and explosives, then bawl out a corporal who lost his helmet during an attack, the men have no weapon but irony. They deploy it to stinging effect, greeting every new cascade of contradictory orders with a deadpan twist of the Marine motto: ''Semper Gumby'' -- always flexible.

Rough-and-tumble fratboy humor, in fact, is their defense against almost everything: lousy food, dysentery, malfunctioning radios, errant fire from units of idiot reservists, Dear John letters from home. They posture as racists, loony-left conspiracy theorists (favorite: the mainstream media have suppressed news of the death of J.Lo to avoid a collapse in military morale), right-wing nuts and raving homophobes -- especially once the unit is joined by a reporter they enjoy twitting -- but it's all bluff. In reality, they divide the world, regardless of race, religion or even nationality, into two camps: The men in the foxholes around them, who've got their backs, and the loathsome POGs, Persons Other than Grunts -- that is, everybody else.

Generation Kill's title is mordant wordplay on the Greatest Generation label bestowed on the men and women who fought World War II, a reminder that no matter how great their cause, soldiers achieve it by killing people and blowing things up. It's a realization that comes slowly to the men of Bravo Platoon, who as they train for the invasion seem to think they're at the controls of a video game. ''That was cool,'' says one Marine after machine-gunning a truck during an exercise. ``I wonder what it would look like if it hit a person?''

He'll find out soon enough. The real war, when it arrives, is confusing, bloody and maddeningly oblique. After one battle, Bravo Platoon encounters a Marine wandering through a field, mourning a friend whose stomach has been blown to pieces. ''We returned fire and shot a donkey's head off,'' he says desolately. ``We didn't see much else.''

If the Marines in Generation Kill sometimes seem callow, why shouldn't they? Most of them are barely out of their teens. It's not fashionable to say so, but so was the Greatest Generation. As American troops fought another desert war 65 years ago, against the Nazis in North Africa, their commanders were horrified by an Army survey that showed the overwhelming majority had no idea what the war was about. The winning entry in an essay contest titled Why I Fight read, in its entirety: ``Because I was drafted.''

Generation Kill never condescends to its characters. It's written and produced by David Simon and Ed Burns, the team behind The Wire, HBO's morbid dissection of the criminal justice system's war on drugs, and they've retained The Wire's recurring theme of good people trapped in a bad system.

That's never more apparent than when they're dealing with the rules of engagement, or ROE, the ever-shifting regulations about when and at whom the Marines can fire their guns. In the opening hours of the invasion, the rules are so tight that when a convoy of armed Iraqis blocks the highway ahead, Bravo Platoon can only wave. ''Our ROE states uniformed soldiers only, and they should be firing at us,'' explains a headquarters officer on what it would take to authorize shooting. (It later turns out the men belonged to Saddam Hussein's death squads, hunting Iraqi army deserters.) Within a day or two, the rules have been relaxed enough that young boys tending camels are approved targets.

Even when headquarters stays out of it, the Marines learn, the war is a collection of painful uncertainties calling for split-second, life-or-death decisions. A man spotted through binoculars, 300 yards off -- is that a rifle in his hand, or a walking stick? Is that vehicle speeding toward the roadblock driven by a suicide bomber intent on mayhem or a desperate refugee fleeing Saddam?

One night, the lights of a village shimmering with the heat is mistaken for an approaching column of Iraqi armor, resulting in an air strike -- again botched by bad map coordinates. ''Eleven thousand pounds of ordnance dropped,'' muses an officer the next day, ``and we didn't hit any armor. Didn't destroy any villages, though, either. I guess that sort of goes in the win column, right?''

In the world of Generation Kill, definitely. War, Simon and Burns are reminding us, is a mighty club, powerful but also crude and -- for all our modern technology -- undiscriminating. ''Make no mistake!'' an officer bellows at the Marines as they assemble for the invasion. ''There will be no bleep-ups!'' Oh yes there will.

[idvs]

Reading the book about two years ago, I felt as though I was in the company of Marines. I'm currently stationed more than a thousand miles away from a Marine base and I re-read the book when ever I want to get nostalgic about my buddies.

What resonates with me more than the war stories or the (very) occasional politics is the idle jokes and friendly insults, the jabs between brothers who shrug their differences and know that the men around them are among the very best they'll ever know.

[fontman]

'Kill' shows savagery, cynicism of war
By David Zurawik
Baltimore Sun Television Critic
July 13, 2008

In HBO's Generation Kill, the dust is endless, and the hostile terrain is marked by one ambush after another. Guns, blood and death are everywhere. After a while, all that seems to matter is movement - breaking camp, lining up the convoy of vehicles and grinding on deeper into the savage frontier.

This is the Iraq war as a postmodern American Western - nasty, profane and existential, steeped in stoicism and fueled by the cowboy courage of brave, cynical and angry young men who are highly trained, oversexed and under fire.

The seven-part miniseries that starts tonight is based on the Rolling Stone magazine articles and book of the same title by Evan Wright. It is adapted and executive-produced at a cost of $55 million by Baltimore's Ed Burns and David Simon, who most recently used the Western genre to explore urban life and institutions in HBO's The Wire.

Baltimore and Baghdad are not such distant cousins, and the Western has nobly served as a structuring device for several winning depictions of war, such as Michael Cimino's 1978 journey back to Vietnam in The Deer Hunter. But based on the five hours made available by HBO, Generation Kill has neither the scope nor the psychic resonance of epic Vietnam films such as The Deer Hunter or Apocalypse Now.

There is, however, plenty of action, as well as a genuine sense of being on the ground in the sandblasted confusion of battle with guns booming, helicopter blades thwacking and always the sound of radios crackling in the background with military cross talk and confusion. And maybe, the lack of depth is more a matter of the writers being true to the Iraq experience than a failure on their part to discern deeper meanings from the subject matter.

Generation Kill follows an elite unit of Marines during the first 40 days of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In Humvees and other armored vehicles, they were in the lead of a blitzkrieg-like attack strategy favored by then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Their position on the battlefield was one that Pentagon news releases took to describing as being at "the tip of the spear."

Wright was a reporter embedded with the Marines, part of a 2002 Department of Defense program that involved reporters training with and being allowed to accompany troops entering Iraq, subject to certain limitations on what they could report. Wright, who is played by Lee Tergesen (OZ), wound up with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, one of the nation's most highly-trained and celebrated military units.

But don't sit down with HBO tonight expecting a "Greatest Generation" depiction of these Marines. The men - and they are all men - chronicled by Wright are, in the main, far too pessimistic and self-consciously ironic to present themselves that way.

"See, the Marines are like America's little pit bull," one of the men in the featured platoon, Cpl. Josh Ray Person (James Ransone), tells Wright. "They beat us, they mistreat, and every once in a while, they let us out to attack someone."

The remarks are part of a darkly humorous and bitter critique on the lack of support given these warriors. It includes an account of the driver and sergeant in charge of the lead Humvee having to spend $500 out of their own pockets to try and make their thin-skinned vehicle a little safer and more efficient. They are still waiting for a gun turret shield for the Humvee that they tried to buy off eBay.

Person, Wright and sergeant Brad "Iceman" Colbert (Alexander Skarsgard), who all ride in the same lead vehicle, are three of the characters most quickly and skillfully delineated. A fourth rider in the Humvee, Lance Cpl. Harold James Trombley (Billy Lush), also stands out in the way he comes to embody one of Wright's major themes.

In an illuminating introduction to the book, Wright explains his goal of using the microcosm of this Marine unit - particularly the crew in the lead Humvee - to examine the current generation of young adults as warriors. He wondered how growing up in single-parent homes (more so than any other generation in U.S. history) while surrounded by an inescapable media web of violent video games and TV shows would affect them. Would they be better, worse, the same or different from the Greatest Generation that fought World War II and the baby boomers that went to Vietnam?

The miniseries is not as deft in distinguishing one Marine from another or in providing the generational context found in the book. But some viewers will likely get the latter from the title.

By and large, the Marines in Generation Kill are portrayed as multidimensional human beings, and not psychos or saints. Some of the most powerful moments in the miniseries involve the Marines bearing witness to the results of what U.S. military bullets and bombs have done to innocent civilians, especially children - often as the result of a foolish mistake made by officers in command.

There is a near-perfect symmetry between the sensibility of Wright's book and the work of Simon and Burns. Anyone who has seen even one hour of The Wire or HBO's The Corner knows that there is going to be no wholesale stereotyping.

While the miniseries generally hews closely to the book, one of the few examples of literary license taken involves the exaggerated comic depiction of the highest ranking sergeant in the battalion who comes off more like an over-the-top character in the 1960s TV sitcom Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C. than a credible character in today's military. But, by the standards of most TV docudramas, the writers have been steadfast in staying true to Wright's account.

Americans have been relentlessly tuning out accounts of the Iraq war in movies, TV series, books and network news. It would be nice to think Generation Kill will change that. But, in the five hours made available, at least, there is not enough emotional power, dramatic thunder or punishing truth in this miniseries to turn that cultural tide.

[POOLEE DEAN]

I read the book, " One Bullet Away", it is written by retired Captain Nathaniel fick, the Lt. in charge of the unit. I figured his book would be a lot less over the top and exaggerated then it's counterpart "Generation Kill", I was right. A very no nonsense book, with some insight into both OCS and Recon.

[gobuffs10]

The show was ok. Pretty funny. I dunno how the public will react. Racism and homophobia, intense desire to kill...who knows how folks will take all that? Oh well. Entertaining at least.

[thedrifter]

Posted on Sun, Jul. 13, 2008
A grunt's-eye-view of war's snafus
BY GLENN GARVIN
• Generation Kill, 9-10:15 p.m. Sunday, HBO

Two bedraggled enlisted men, exhausted after days of dodging snipers and artillery barrages, are awakened to search for a captain who went to a latrine outside the perimeter and got lost in the desert. 'Bleepin' officers will be the death of us yet,'' grumbles one as they resignedly head off into the night.

The moment is both the perfect distillation of every grunt's war, from Thermopylae to Valley Forge to Fajullah, and the perfect summation of Generation Kill, a raucous, raunchy and utterly loving account of life at the bottom of the military food chain.

A seven-part miniseries that debuts Sunday on HBO, Generation Kill is adapted from the nonfiction book of the same name by Evan Wright, a Rolling Stone reporter embedded with a Marine reconnaissance platoon during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. With a cast of outstanding if mostly unknown actors, it offers an unapologetic grunt's-eye view of the military, in which a brass hat is less a symbol of authority than an indelible mark of stupidity, cupidity or both. ''To think I believed the judge when he said the Marine Corps was a superior alternative to jail,'' sighs one Marine after yet another senseless order filters down from headquarters.

A kind of Catch-22 for the millennial generation, Generation Kill documents life inside an armed bureaucracy governed by martinets, morons and maniacs. One officer, nicknamed Encino Man after a cloddish movie caveman, mistakenly calls down a potentially murderous artillery strike on his own men; they survive only because he got the map coordinates wrong. A gunnery sergeant who forgets to order lubricants for the unit's machine guns, leaving them hopelessly jammed by Iraq's ubiquitous sandstorms, offers the men counseling instead: ``Remember, I am a certified combat stress instructor.''

Against officers who can mislay a truck containing the unit's entire supply of food and explosives, then bawl out a corporal who lost his helmet during an attack, the men have no weapon but irony. They deploy it to stinging effect, greeting every new cascade of contradictory orders with a deadpan twist of the Marine motto: ''Semper Gumby'' -- always flexible.

Rough-and-tumble fratboy humor, in fact, is their defense against almost everything: lousy food, dysentery, malfunctioning radios, errant fire from units of idiot reservists, Dear John letters from home. They posture as racists, loony-left conspiracy theorists (favorite: the mainstream media have suppressed news of the death of J.Lo to avoid a collapse in military morale), right-wing nuts and raving homophobes -- especially once the unit is joined by a reporter they enjoy twitting -- but it's all bluff. In reality, they divide the world, regardless of race, religion or even nationality, into two camps: The men in the foxholes around them, who've got their backs, and the loathsome POGs, Persons Other than Grunts -- that is, everybody else.

Generation Kill's title is mordant wordplay on the Greatest Generation label bestowed on the men and women who fought World War II, a reminder that no matter how great their cause, soldiers achieve it by killing people and blowing things up. It's a realization that comes slowly to the men of Bravo Platoon, who as they train for the invasion seem to think they're at the controls of a video game. ''That was cool,'' says one Marine after machine-gunning a truck during an exercise. ``I wonder what it would look like if it hit a person?''

He'll find out soon enough. The real war, when it arrives, is confusing, bloody and maddeningly oblique. After one battle, Bravo Platoon encounters a Marine wandering through a field, mourning a friend whose stomach has been blown to pieces. ''We returned fire and shot a donkey's head off,'' he says desolately. ``We didn't see much else.''

If the Marines in Generation Kill sometimes seem callow, why shouldn't they? Most of them are barely out of their teens. It's not fashionable to say so, but so was the Greatest Generation. As American troops fought another desert war 65 years ago, against the Nazis in North Africa, their commanders were horrified by an Army survey that showed the overwhelming majority had no idea what the war was about. The winning entry in an essay contest titled Why I Fight read, in its entirety: ``Because I was drafted.''

Generation Kill never condescends to its characters. It's written and produced by David Simon and Ed Burns, the team behind The Wire, HBO's morbid dissection of the criminal justice system's war on drugs, and they've retained The Wire's recurring theme of good people trapped in a bad system.

That's never more apparent than when they're dealing with the rules of engagement, or ROE, the ever-shifting regulations about when and at whom the Marines can fire their guns. In the opening hours of the invasion, the rules are so tight that when a convoy of armed Iraqis blocks the highway ahead, Bravo Platoon can only wave. ''Our ROE states uniformed soldiers only, and they should be firing at us,'' explains a headquarters officer on what it would take to authorize shooting. (It later turns out the men belonged to Saddam Hussein's death squads, hunting Iraqi army deserters.) Within a day or two, the rules have been relaxed enough that young boys tending camels are approved targets.

Even when headquarters stays out of it, the Marines learn, the war is a collection of painful uncertainties calling for split-second, life-or-death decisions. A man spotted through binoculars, 300 yards off -- is that a rifle in his hand, or a walking stick? Is that vehicle speeding toward the roadblock driven by a suicide bomber intent on mayhem or a desperate refugee fleeing Saddam?

One night, the lights of a village shimmering with the heat is mistaken for an approaching column of Iraqi armor, resulting in an air strike -- again botched by bad map coordinates. ''Eleven thousand pounds of ordnance dropped,'' muses an officer the next day, ``and we didn't hit any armor. Didn't destroy any villages, though, either. I guess that sort of goes in the win column, right?''

In the world of Generation Kill, definitely. War, Simon and Burns are reminding us, is a mighty club, powerful but also crude and -- for all our modern technology -- undiscriminating. ''Make no mistake!'' an officer bellows at the Marines as they assemble for the invasion. ''There will be no bleep-ups!'' Oh yes there will.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

July 14, 2008
Why we fight: Not enough sex
By 24 HOURS NEWS SERVICES


James Ransone's character in Generation Kill has a theory about war. Apparently war has nothing to do with power, security or oil. It's all about sex, or the lack thereof.

According to Cpl. Ray Person, who is portrayed by Ransone, if everyone in the world were getting enough sex, there would be no conflicts.

Sex or no sex, Cpl. Person and his fellow U.S. Marines do find themselves in a war - the 2003 invasion of Iraq - in Generation Kill. It's a new seven-part dramatic mini-series from HBO.

Generation Kill comes from the creative minds of David Simon and Ed Burns, who were responsible for the acclaimed series The Wire. Also serving as a consulting producer is Evan Wright, who wrote the book upon which Generation Kill is based. After spending two months embedded with the Marines in '03, Wright wrote a series of articles for Rolling Stone magazine. Those articles became the basis for his awardwinning book, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War.

In the small-screen version of Generation Kill, Wright is portrayed by Lee Tergesen. There's an amusing scene early in the first episode when the scribe arrives and is bombarded with insults about the peacenik, dope-smoking, hippie rag for which he writes. However, when Tergesen's character reveals that he used to write for Hustler ... well, talk about instant respect!

Now, speaking purely in cinematic terms, wars that occur in the desert don't offer a wide array of dramatic visuals. So for the first half-hour of Generation Kill's first episode viewers may feel as if they're lost in a blizzard of sand. A lot of characters are introduced, they're all dressed the same, and it's difficult to get a firm grasp of who's who. There's a lot of military lingo, too.

Nonetheless, by the end of the premiere episode, you'll be sucked into the tense and edgy narrative.

Call it bridging the Generation Kill gap.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

‘Generation Kill’: Police That Mustache!

“Hurry up and wait”: It’s a ruling concept of military life, and it was the ruling conceit of the first installment in HBO’s seven-part Iraq-war mini-series — which, after all, was written by David Simon and Ed Burns, reality-obsessed masterminds of The Wire, and based on the account of an embedded reporter for Rolling Stone. So, yeah, nothing really happened last night: As we meet them, the First Reconnaissance Battalion Marines are hanging around Camp Mathilda in Kuwait, indulging their homoerotic impulses and wondering when they’ll get to invade Iraq; then they begin leading the invasion of Iraq. But this onion’s got layers, of course. And if the tears aren’t flowing yet, the series has at least started revealing itself. We’ve color-coded our recap: Red for the hawkish, un-p.c. stuff, Blue for the blue-state bait, and Rainbow, well, that’s where we round up all the homoerotic happenings.

Red
An opening monologue, delivered over a robust ****, ends this way: “It’s destiny, dog. White man’s gotta rule the world.” We’re not sure, but this may prove germane to the animating conflict of the series. Mostly, though, our grunts jabber for bravado’s sake. A letter from a schoolboy elicits a ha-ha rant from Corporal Ray Person (James Ransom — Ziggy from The Wire) that turns on the phrases “Wine-sipping Communist dicksuck” and “Peace sucks a hairy *******.” And then you have the charming Corporal James Chaffin (Eric Ladin) telling Scribe (Lee Tergesen), as he arrives from Rolling Stone and is assigned a bunk, “They got you in the ghetto” as a prelude to some racial slurs that we didn’t even realize were in use anymore. The ensuing tension wends its way to Chaffin declaring that he and a buddy should go and “talk about what we’re gonna do when we get out of the Corps — join border patrol and shoot us some wetbacks.” It all comes to a fine point as they Marines are told how to deal with the fact that they might not able to distinguish Iraqi innocents from enemies: “If in your mind you fire to protect yourself or your team, it’s the right thing.” (Whispered aside: “Yo, I don’t wanna shoot no ****in’ farmer.” Offscreen rejoinder: “I’d shoot a ****in’ farmer.”)

Blue
Muses Corporal Jeff Carisalez, as he wrenches on his broke-down Hummer (we bet it’s not properly armored, either): “Once a year we need holiday where the blue-collar man gets to go into the home of the white-collar man, eat his food, sleep in his bed, and **** his **** up.” Replies Person: “Jeff, you realize you’re a Communist.” “**** I am!” Class war, though, isn’t the issue here — it’s plain war, and whether the troops are properly supplied and supported. Captain America is already a fount of bitterness. Scribe, he’s from the liberal media, so naturally he’s gonna ask, “You’re invading Iraq with just one translator?” But when we finally meet some Iraqis, on the run from the death squads, and they are “unsurrendered” so the soldiers can keep on the move, we witness the kind of thing that makes your heart bleed: that one translator confiscating the Iraqis’ cigarettes as they trudge off, destination unknown.

Rainbow
Well, there’s Rudy “Rhymes With Fruity” Reyes (apparently playing himself). He likes being naked around the other guys; he talks of moving to San Francisco after the war — with his girlfriend, which prompts some good-natured jeers. And of course there’s all the chatter (Person, shortly after shoving a truck part between Jeff’s legs: “I had to suck an officer’s cock to get this”), some intense shirtless wrestling, and close moments made possible by Hustler. Sergeant Major Sixta, meanwhile, uncorks his rage when he notices improperly trimmed facial hair (“Police that mustache!”) or an untucked shirt (“What are you, some kind of ******* hippie faggot?” — and what if Person said he was?). It’s all very cute, until one of those surrenders is found to have a photo of himself embracing a male friend, and the excitement ratchets up to something like you might see on a battlefield. —Nick Catucci


Ellie

[yellowwing]

I saw most of the first episode. Pretty good do far. Some of it seemed far fetched.

[Pete0331]

So far it's been pretty good.

[KABAR7]

I would have given my left nut to have been in the invasion rather than my last tour with the Corps over here. Late 2004 to early 2006 was total sheeeeit in Iraq. That being said, I don't get HBO here in Baghdad but I bet its spun cinematically to the left as much as a Rolling Stone journalist's writing and the producers of "The Wire" can get. I guess we'll see.