However you judge the response of American news organizations during the early days of the war, they certainly made those days vivid to viewers, and they helped us understand the terrible significance of the resistance the Marines faced ["-] I don't see anything to be gained by retracing the path from Kuwait to Baghdad. Tell us, as they say, something we don't know.
What we didn't know was these particular Marines in their natural combat environment, unfiltered by the likes of Geraldo Rivera scratching maps in the sand or Ollie North reporting, as episode six of Generation Kill points out, on a Marine Reserve unit's unjustified destruction of an entire village and "filming the whole f--kin thing like it was the turning point in the f--kin war."-
Franklin also derides the the "verisimilitude and earnest believability"- of Generation Kill, and suggests that the public might have been better served by an Iraq war drama that "emphasized ideas as well as trying to describe the experience, one that went further up the chain of command to the real decision-makers."- While a film version of Seymour Hersh's investigative writings on the conflict might make for an illuminating vehicle somewhere down the road, it seems that the cultural impact of war films-as-national cathersis involves a more glacial process that doesn't operate through "top-down"- representaion.
In Heather Havrilesky's interview article, "Good Men, Bad war,"- Ed Burns makes clear his conviction that "we should try those people responsible for putting us to war. Put them in a courtroom, because what they did was a crime."- But Burns was fortunately not interested in dramatizing such a trial's evidence for the screen""probably because by now we're quite familiar with who those individuals are, and their offenses are obvious to anyone paying attention. Regarding his choice of First Recon's Marines as subject matter, Burns offers that:
We don't know these people. Particularly the upper middle class, we don't know these people. These are the working-class guys who're doing this. The disconnect is profound. ["-] These are the guys who are carpenters, or electricians, or cops, or paramedics. They're the backbone of our country ["-] I think that by looking at these guys, you get an understanding that there are a lot of good guys out there. And this is their world.
One either appreciates an honest working-class perspective on a pivotal historical event, or one doesn't. Nancy Franklin makes the claim that reminders of "what was involved in being a soldier [sic]"- served a utilitarian purpose at the commencement of hostilities, but that so many years into the war "such a "-faithful' depiction"- as that of Generation Kill smacks of "an abdication, a moral failure to judge and to acknowledge the horrors that followed."- But a Marine, a former Marine, or anyone who knows anything about the U.S. Marine Corps might counter that Semper Fidelis means always faithful, and even a casual observer of the miniseries could cite a scene or two in which the horrors of the first few weeks of the invasion were vividly acknowledged, objectively submitted for the individual viewer's moral judgement.
A recent Los Angeles Times article is titled "The Iraq war movie: Military hopes to shape genre,"- so Nancy Franklin would be well advised to consider that there's no need to give the Pentagon media moguls and their critic minions more "didactic or inauthentic"- fodder by using troops to serve, as Evan Wright has rightly put it, in the capacity of "vehicles for a particular agenda."- Maybe that's, as I say, something Ms. Franklin doesn't know.
Its Own Place in the Firmament
In this article's introduction, I've implied that the creators of Generation Kill one reviewer noted, the trio's personal respect for their film's subjects has provided America with a basic training in Marine comradery and helped to raise the bar of squad-level combat storytelling to boot.
have apparently heeded Lt. Nate Fick's battlefield advice to "Observe everything, admire nothing,"- and it's true that Wright, Simon and Burns have uncompromisingly observed and faithfully represented both horrors and triumphs of the Iraq invasion. But it would be misleading to leave the impression that they've admired nothing along the way. While their lack of admiration for the war itsef is "not going to do much for military recruitment,"- as "Lt. Fick could call me at 3 in the morning,"- Wright declared, "and say, 'Evan, I can't tell you what this is about, but you have to come with me. The ticket will be waiting for you. Colbert and Person [two of the Marines with whom Wright rode into battle] will pick you up.' I would go anywhere they said."- Remaining true to the journalistic ethos crucial to the success of Generation Kill, Wright added: "I would bring my notebook with me, though."
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