Generation Kill

[Granite_State]

Tom,

I've got the exact opposite perspective; I read the book, but don't have HBO, so I'm reduced to inviting myself over to others' houses to see the miniseries. So far no takers. . .

Anyway, I think your negatives can only be addressed by reading the book. Even in 7 hours, I don't think the series will be able to address the sources of it.

In the book, I too found the view of Recon's leadership a little startling - Wright was riding with four enlisted guys and had far less contact with any officers; from platoon leader to company commander to a few of the battalion officers. Fick's book is instructive in this regard, because he too believed his company commander (derided in the book as "Captain America") was incompetent, as did apparently many of the men in the battalion. But Fick had more sympathy for First Recon's commander, Ferrando, than Wright's book (and certainly more than the enlisted guys had).

For what it's worth, I found Fick's book much better than Wright's, I didn't even finish the latter because I thought the writing was so bad, only other book I can ever remember doing that with was DaVinci Code. I'd say if you want to read one after watching the series go with Fick's.

As far as the racism, the book featured a Latino Marine who believed he was fighting for the evil white government, and yet good-naturedly traded "spic" and "nigger" epithets with other troops in the platoon. I have no experience with troops, obviously, but just in my generation as a whole, I've found so many guys perfectly comfortable trading those epithets in mixed-race social groups. Whether that's a good thing or not, I don't know, but I think it's a cultural shift.

Second that, with my friends the N-word is usually out of bounds (more in the U.S. than Britain), but everything short of that is fair game, and very rarely results in offense. I tend to think that's a good thing.

Still looking for someone who has DVRed this. . .

Regards,

Matt

Matt go to www.surfthechannel.com, they've got the first episode up. I'm currently torn on whether to start watching it online now or wait til I get home in two months and see them all then.

My pacifist lefty German mother started watching the series though, I'd have to think if you can get someone like that to watch a relatively sympathetic portrayal of the military, it makes up for some of the negligence of the media in covering the wars now (way more Britney on the news than Afghanistan, etc.).