Writer and producer David Simon draws on his background as a crime reporter for The Baltimore Sun to inform his style of making television shows like NBC's "Homicide: Life on the Streets," "The Wire," and the HBO mini-series "The Corner." They all lack the theatricality of most shows that dial up the melodrama to illicit emotions. By simply allowing the viewer to observe the events as they happen, his projects let the audience form their own opinions..
It makes perfect sense that he chose to adapt Evan Wright's book "Generation Kill" into a seven-part mini-series for HBO.
During the first three weeks of the war in Iraq, Rolling Stone journalist Wright rode along with the Marines First Recon unit on their excursion from Kuwait to Baghdad. He wrote three articles for the magazine, expanded on them and wrote the book.
Wright records his observances in a very minimalistic way devoid of heady euphemisms or purple prose. The entire book is a string of short declarative sentences, capturing the soldiers reactions to everything around them. It's also an unflinching look at the human error of combat and leadership.
The mini-series is quite possibly the most faithful book to visual medium creation I have ever seen.
Every character in the show is based on a real person, but even the phrase 'based on' is misleading. Yes, actors are portraying these people, but having read the book, ?I can say each character on screen is almost an exact interpretation of the real men.
The soldiers of First Recon are a few of the Marine's most elite force. They are warriors who aren't there to strike a chord of fear. They are the real deal. They are killers and revel in it, never making apologies for their savagery because without that mindset, they would never survive the war.
First Recon soldiers are trained to quietly and efficiently engage and defeat the enemy. But their training didn't prepare them for their real objective. At the time, they didn't know that their convoy was intended to be a moving target. The idea is that the enemy opens fire on this small band of marines and mistakenly thinks they have fought the main force of soldiers. The plan was to wear them out so a larger unit can come behind First Recon and wipe out the weary enemy.
What you witness in the mini-series and the book are men going days and days without sleep, spun on Ripped Fuel, screaming "Get Some!" as Marines kill the enemy or drop bombs on motorcades.
The Marines deal with idiotic gung-ho commanders like "Captain America," or "Encino Man," who make decisions that jeopardize the lives of the men. They must contend with faulty weaponry that almost kills a few Marines. They also see how their actions affect the citizens of Iraq. Keep in mind, what you are watching happened. You will see children killed and other unimaginable atrocities of war. Even though it was very hard to watch, I learned more about the war from this show than any newscast or documentary on the subject.
I'm one of the millions of people who purposely stayed away from Iraq war movies like "In the Valley of Elah," "Home of the Brave," Lions for Lambs" and "Stop-Loss." I didn't want to see someone's fictional interpretation of what these soldiers were going through. We owe it to the soldiers not to fill our guts with popcorn and sugar watching manipulative string music fakery. While certain scenes will feel like reality gut-punching your breath away, the experience of seeing the events as they transpired is worth those few seconds it takes to suck in air and regain your composure.
If you want to see a movie on how terrible the war in Iraq is and who's responsible, look elsewhere. If you want to see soldiers complaining about the war and regretting their decision to be warriors, look elsewhere. If you want to step into the shoes of real-life killers fighting for their country, if you want to know how a soldier deals with killing the enemy and innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, if you want to see life unfold before your eyes in vivid exciting detail, check out "Generation Kill."
Simon is one of the few producers in Hollywood who has total respect for the viewers. They don't preach. They don't force their politics on you. They let us make up our own mind.
The show airs Sundays at 9 p.m on HBO.
