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.
