Posted: 4/30/2005 5:25:39 PM EDT
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Hope this isnt a dupe - oh well - I recently read this book along with other guys at my team - excellent in my opinion - its a no bullsh#t assesment of many US military units from what I've seen in the Army and Coast Guard * no USMC experience personally btw* 'Generation': A new breed of solider By J. Ford Huffman, USA TODAY When you see "New Face of American War" in the long subtitle of Generation Kill, you get the impression that author Evan Wright is aspiring to define and categorize the contemporary Marine. What he discovers is that they are as different as they are alike. These friends, Wright discovers, are not a generation born to kill. They are a generation born and bred to try to survive. Wright won the National Magazine Award in May for the war reports in Rolling Stone that became this book. He was embedded in Iraq a year ago with an elite Marine battalion. They are, Wright writes, "more or less America's first generation of disposable children. More than half the guys in the platoon come from broken homes. ... Many are on more intimate terms with the culture of video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own families ..." ABOUT THE BOOK Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Icemen, Captain America and the New Face of American War By Evan Wright Putnam, 355 p.p., $24.95 Generation Kill is an energetic narrative about men fighting a war. It brings to mind last year's Jarhead, a masterpiece of a memoir about the first Iraq war by former Marine Anthony Swofford. Swofford takes us inside the mind of one Marine before, during and after combat. Wright takes us inside the Humvees carrying 23 Marines of the First Reconnaissance ("Force Recon") battalion. Force Recon, Wright writes, is trained for "sneaking behind enemy lines in teams of four to six men, observing positions and above all, avoiding contact with hostile forces. "The one thing they are not trained for is to fight from Humvees, maneuvering in convoys and rushing headlong into enemy positions. This is exactly what they will be doing in Iraq. ..." These few good men are more like the boys next door. They face mud and dust, mortar and death, false starts and "bad comm" (lousy communication — in technology and by management). As one Marine told Wright, a "bunch of psycho officers sent us into (expletive) we never should have gone into." There are a lot of expletives in Generation Kill, and of them, Wright writes: "This is after all the generation who first learned of the significance of the presidency through a national obsession with semen stains connected to (the) White House." What you discover while the platoon is under fire along the Gharaff waterway from March 20, 2003, through the fall of Baghdad and the aftermath is that no two men are alike: • Sgt. Brad Colbert, 28, the Iceman in the title, has a "neat, orderly and crisp" demeanor. Spare with sentiment, he refuses to allow country songs ("the Special Olympics of music") inside his Humvee. He prefers Barry Manilow. • Captain America is identified only by nickname. He's a "former bodyguard for rock stars. ... He'll talk your ear off about the wild times he had working for bands like U2, Depeche Mode and Duran Duran. His men feel he uses these stories as a pathetic attempt to impress them and besides, half of them have never heard of Duran Duran." • Lt. Nathaniel Fick, 25, a brainy Dartmouth graduate: "We had a saying in the military in Afghanistan: 'The incompetent leading the unwilling to do the unnecessary.' " • Cpl. Josh Ray Person, 22, holding the wheel but aspiring to hold a microphone. The only thing he and Iceman have in common is a forced reliance on each other's skills and a fondness for characters like Big Gay Al from South Park. "What unites them," Wright says, "is an almost reckless desire to test themselves in the most extreme circumstances. "There's a definite sense of exhilaration every time there's an explosion and you're still there afterward," Wright writes. "There's another kind of exhilaration, too. ... Here, the Marines face death together, in their youth. If anyone dies, he will do so surrounded by the very best friends he believes he will ever have. "In addition to the embarrassing losses of bodily control that 25% of all soldiers experience, other symptoms include time dilation (time slowing down or speeding up), vividness, a starkly heightened awaresness of detail, random thoughts, the mind fixating on unimportant sequences; memory loss; and of course, your feelings of sheer terror. In my case, hearing and sight almost become disconnected." These friends connected by "hip hop, Marilyn Manson and Jerry Springer," Wright discovers, are not a generation born to kill. They are a generation born and bred to try to survive. |
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Bump... I am reading this book now, am about halfway through it. I like it a lot. I've been finding reasons to go back and read more of it. If it's accurate - I'll have to look up the allegations it isn't - I'd put it up there close to BHD in terms of excellence. In fact it seems that some of the daily workings of the Marines are VERY well laid out in this book (I should say, better than BHD was). Unless the author screws it up in the 2nd half, I'm going to put this up as the best book I've read so far this year. 
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