Generation Kill

[Jason Port]

So, I just finished a crash viewing of all seven episodes. I set aside things like first name references as making the show palatable by a wider audience than just old warfighters, (like my wife) and the racial talk as mild exaggeration for bs-ing between brethern, the show as a whole took me right back to the right seat of an uparmored turtle HMMWV rolling out of the gate to kick in some doors. While never in the current fight, the show's sounds, images, and intensity brought me right back into the mindset, and reminded me of a great bunch of guys I once knew. (and for every Marine in the AO, I can think of one or two cavalrymen I knew just like them, especially Encino Man, and Captain America.) I really liked the series, and I plan to read both books to try and understand the realities of the story more.

[Schmedlap]

I just watched the first three episodes of this. The main characters - the team leader and platoon commander - seem normal. A few others do too. But many of the characters strike me as exaggerations of quirky personalities. Much of the series seems exaggerated - the trigger happy behavior, the outlandishly incompetent officers, the racial trash talking seemed over the top. Racial slurs are commonplace in every unit that I was in, but they were not used in the way that they were used in the series. It was common to have a close-knit fire team (in real life, not the show) that included a black, hispanic, asian, and white and for each to call one another by the corresponding racial slur. It was kind of a way of showing that they were such good friends that they could get away with it. In the show, it seemed more adversarial, not like anything that I ever saw in any unit that I served in.

The lack of initiative shown by the leaders in the show also struck me as exaggerated. There were several instances where the platoon commander was asking permission to do something that I would expect a team leader to do without asking. It seemed like it was embellished for the screen.

Haven't seen episodes 4 through 7 and I don't see them listed on Netflix, so I probably won't get around to them.

On a side note, I also watched The Battle of Algiers. I haven't gotten around to reading A Savage War of Peace, yet, but the movie struck me as a good one to help a lay audience understand a few concepts about insurgency and COIN.