David Simon and Ed Burns have been hard at work. Since the massive success of their five season HBO television series "The Wire", the two have shifted gears to portray the similar but more distant reality of of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Generation Kill follows the 1st Recon Marines on their journey from Kuwait to Baghdad.
The Company commander, code named "Godfather", is a self-rightous battle hardened marine, who speaks with a raspy voice due to a bout with throat cancer. Under his leadership the chain of command is divided into a number of lieutenants, half of whom are completely incompetent and the other half having to pick up the slack and deal with the errors as they come. The company travels by way of armored humvee's through Iraqi highways and is fronted by Sgt. Brad "Iceman" Colbert played by Alexander Skarsgard and Cpl. Josh Ray Person played by James Ransone.
As the Marines press forward they are constantly cut off at the knees by bad leadership, poor planning, lack of supplies, and general sense of "what are we doing here"? Orders and chain of command are questioned and challenged on a regular basis. The mission itself, is extremely bleak.
The portrayal of Operation Iraqi Freedom leaves a trail of questions in our minds that one could assume are the questions of the men who were fighting. So little information is given as to why they are there or what they are supposed to do. This results in Marine companies rolling around Iraq in humvees searching for random targets like cowboys in the old wild west. No true objective is ever present and the Marines are in a constant state of confusion.
This exposition of realism is a common thread in the work of David Simon and Ed Burns. Many similarities can be drawn between Generation Kill and The Wire. In the The Wire, police, politicians, journalists, teachers, and criminals all shared the experiences of bureaucracy in their chain of command. The end result in every scenario was always the unraveling a structurally unsound system of operating put in place by the higher ups.
Putting the big picture aside, David Simon and Ed Burns focused in on the personal experiences of the Marines. What they saw and dealt with on a daily basis. An excellent quote from Iceman sums it up pretty good; "We've been training for years, we are one the most elite fighting forces in the world, the government spends millions of dollars on each one of us, and they just throw us in faulty vehicles and send us into battle with no plan. We're Fararri's in a demolition derby".
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