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Situation NormalWhat Generation Kill gets right about the invasion of Iraq.

By Peter MaassPosted Friday, July 18, 2008, at 3:44 PM ET

Generation KillI hate Skittles. I perfected this dislike while covering the invasion of Iraq, because the gummy pills of sugar and fruit were included in the MREs fed to soldiers, Marines, and journalists who were racing to Baghdad in 2003. On the continuum of foods I can't stand, they are surpassed only by lima beans. But the cameo of a red pack of Skittles in the opening scene of David Simon's new HBO miniseries, Generation Kill, was a welcome sight, because it signaled that the program was going to be faithful to the smallest detail of the invasion I had witnessed.

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Premiering last Sunday and running through Aug. 24, Generation Kill also gets the not-so-sugary things right. The program's obsession with the hyper-real extends to the pitch-perfect sound of a Humvee idling and the baggy cut of the Marines' chemical-warfare suits, which made these 21^st-century warriors seem to be wearing hand-me-down uniforms. The dialogue is un-Hollywoodized, too—the unfiltered use of foul language and military acronyms made me think I was listening to a replay of what I heard five years ago.

Yet the highest achievement of the miniseries is the way it unveils the disordered workings of the American military and the inevitable destruction of all objects in its path, including civilians whose only offense is to tend their sheep or drive down a road. With its $550 billion budget and 1.5 million troops, the military might seem a mechanized colossus of precision-guided violence, give or take a few bad apples and errant artillery shells. But if you have served in the military or written about it from the inside, you know that on the unit level it is filled with men and women of vastly different motivations and skills. The Marines in Generation Kill are intelligent and dimwitted, panicked, sensitive, racist, comic, homicidal, brave. It is a wonder when things go according to plan. "You know what happens when you get out of the Marine Corps?" says one of the characters. "You get your brains back."

Even in liberal circles, it has become a convention to blame the Bush administration for bad execution of a good idea (i.e., invading a large Middle Eastern nation). Generation Kill offers a reality-based counternarrative to the critique that was embedded in, for example, No End in Sight. That documentary excoriated Washington for messing up, through poor planning and wishful thinking, an invasion and occupation that, the documentary implied, might have worked. Generation Kill, which is faithfully based on the nonfiction book by Evan Wright, who was embedded with the Marine reconnaissance battalion featured in the miniseries and who wrote some of the episodes, certainly provides abundant evidence of inept preparation. There are not enough batteries for night optics, maps are late in arriving, the Humvees are not armored, and no one in the battalion, aside from its disheveled interpreter, speaks more than a word or two of Arabic. Yet those types of shortcomings, as well as the ineptitude of some members of the unit—a vital supply truck is hastily abandoned in battle, commanders are obsessed with facial hair, a captain orders his men to go the wrong way on a road—are rooted in systemic faults that predate the election of George Bush in 2000. The Bush team was incompetent and naive—the critics are right about that—but the military had more than enough built-in deficiencies to undermine even a well-planned conquest of Iraq. Snafu, which is a military acronym that stands for "Situation Normal: All Fucked Up," did not come out of Iraq; its origins are generally traced to World War II.

Generation Kill is the opposite of a lecture—the paragraph you just read contains more politics than you'll get in the entire series. Generation Kill doesn't insist that the military—George Bush's, Bill Clinton's, Barack Obama's, or John McCain's—can only get things half-right on its good days. Instead, it presents the untouched messiness and ambiguity of killing in modern warfare. You can draw your own conclusions. One of the first combat scenes in the series occurs when a Marine sniper takes out two Fedayeen; the head of one of them explodes like a watermelon. Returning to his Humvee, the sniper is congratulated by his buddies, but you can see, as the camera lingers on his face after the high-fiving, that he looks as though he will be sick. This is not an anti-war varnish. The Marine battalion that I followed to Baghdad had a veteran sniper who clocked dozens of kills during the invasion; he was proud of his work, but I never saw him celebrate.

It wasn't until later episodes that I realized this miniseries is so realistic it should be used as an educational tool for troops going to Iraq and Afghanistan. I do not give much away, particularly to readers of Wright's book, in mentioning that the Marines of Generation Kill set up checkpoints on roads that are used by civilians as well as fighters who are not in uniform. The consequences are not attractive, and these gut-wrenching scenes illustrate the tactics and guesswork that lead to tragedy—not only for the civilians who are in the wrong place at the wrong time but for the Marines who must live with the awfulness of their lethal mistakes. The battalion I was with killed a number of civilians after storming across a bridge, and afterward, a lance corporal surveying the carnage angrily told me, "How can you tell who's who? I don't think I have ever read about a war in which innocent people didn't die." Shooting at approaching Iraqis without knowing for sure whom you are shooting at—this practice began in March 2003 and continues today, because it's unavoidable with an imperfect military and a confusing battle space. In Generation Kill, one of the Marines, after a buddy unintentionally kills civilians in a military version of a drive-by shooting, mentions the far greater carnage of American bombs dropped on innocent villages and says, "So fucking what? It's war, dawg."

I was eager to watch this series because David Simon and Ed Burns, who co-produced it, were the wise men behind The Wire; I wanted to see what these masters of urban narratives would do with a military story. Here the miniseries is revelatory, because it shows a similarity between the emotional hydraulics of a military unit in Iraq and a drug gang in Baltimore. As in The Wire, the Marines who are the focus of Generation Kill are crude young toughs who have a hard-to-decipher patois of their own. (By the end of the series, you still might not know the meaning of ROE, MSR, RCT, POG, and AO.) Their chain of command is led by an intelligent lieutenant and a veteran sergeant known as "Iceman"; if you put together the characteristics of these two warriors, you have Marlo Stanfield, the coolly analytic gang leader of The Wire. Just as a drug gang can be more sophisticated than we thought, a Marine battalion can be less perfect than we wish.

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Peter Maass, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, is working on a book about oil that will be published in 2009.

COMMENTS

Comments from the Fray

Expecting to learn something about war from Generation Kill or from any other series/film/novel is sort of equivalent to expecting to learn about rocket science by watching Wile E. Coyote and The Roadrunner. I have watched most parts of the first episode in installments over a few days but not continuously through. The cutesy kills.

The Slate review article's author makes a big deal about the small details, like Skittles. Such is the stuff of art and literature at all times. The slant of her hat, her piercing one-eyed stare from below it's brim and the way that the light from the street lamps shining through the gently swaying leaves of the sweet smelling Magnolia trees bathed the sidewalk cafe in mottled shadows, yadda, yadda, yadda. Let's be clear. War is not pretty. People tend to avoid it for good reason. Making war pretty enough to get the masses to watch it on TV means that you must essentially give up on faithfully replicating the brutal experience, an impossibility to do in any event. And give it some pizzazz too, you know, character development and all that jazz.

War is not just another slice-of-life experience. It tends to be thoroughly atypical in many dimensions simultaneously which makes its only points of reference internal to the experience of war itself. In other words it gets a little bit crazy when viewed from an external, normal frame of reference. When one goes home again and things are normal there is no way to translate the war experience into non-war terms. There simply are not enough common reference points upon which to draw for you to align the two different experiences in ways which are even vaguely accurate. The parallels to gang wars which the reviewer suggests that the producers have brought with them from their work on The Wire are perhaps as close as one could aspire to in such an effort. They are still woefully inadequate to the task however.

Crime within a society has a certain business-as-usual flavor (rare bizarre incidents excepted). That is why there are so many police shows, it is just too easy make another new one. War on the other hand defies all boundaries. It is the complete absence of normal law and order, hence the absurdity of trying to define 'war crimes' as if there were a proper way to conduct day-to-day war operations as we do with the goods and services of the civilian economy. Indeed I find the mix-up stems entirely from the way that so many people view war as being just 'business by other means' and not the last resort of a sovereign nation at severe risk of it's own dissolution.

Everyone who has ever used petroleum products (and that pretty much means everyone) have been collectively guilty of causing the several oil-related conflicts of modern times. Most people feel that they can in good conscience just pass the blame for such wars off onto the heads and shoulders of the elected officials (their elected officials) and the soldiers (their soldiers) while maintaining an aloof innocence themselves. Whatever gets you through the night sugar plum. If you desire to not feel guilty about the inevitable consequences of the lifestyle which you live, go ahead.

Those who have been to war know the truth, and it can't be made into a mini-series. To know war you must wage war.

--wmccomninel

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