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Generation kill mini series


Charlie

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Just saw that they are making a mini series based on the excellent book "Generation kill". Should be right up there with Black hawk down if the pull it off.

If you haven't read the book yet, I suggest you pick it up right away. It's written by Evan Wright who was embedded with a marine recon unit during their advance through Iraq.

-C-

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Just saw that they are making a mini series based on the excellent book "Generation kill". Should be right up there with Black hawk down if the pull it off.

If you haven't read the book yet, I suggest you pick it up right away. It's written by Evan Wright who was embedded with a marine recon unit during their advance through Iraq.

-C-

Generation Kill? That sounds like an insult... First Gen-X then this?

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I guess you haven't read the book Hackworth. It's really a good read. I think it was an objective observation without any of the glossy stuff. I think you'll get why it's called generation kill as well. It's not really an insult, more of an observation. If soldiers had trouble pulling the trigger in times gone by, these guys didn't.

It's not a lot like band of brothers, at least I didn't think so. Maybe it's because you can relate more to the soldiers and their references. Like in the beginning of the book where one of the marines compares grand theft auto to the ambush they just drove through. Also the author was there, he experienced everything himself and didn't just write the book after doing a lot of interviews. He is honest about how stupid he felt in the beginning when he knew nothing about everything. He also doesn't sugar coat anything and I mean anything. It's all there, even the really grim and horrid stuff.

-C-

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  • 3 months later...

So from what I'm getting from the clip...most US soldiers are ex-gang members from the street who are used to killing...

"They killed well in Iraq..."..It sounds like living on the streets of the hood made them that way, not training your muscle memory to shoot lighting fast with an M-4 carbine with CCO for months/years. (I thought the part about "A presidential sex scandal" funny, like that supposedly helped to turn us into killers) Now I know that some soldiers (many in fact) grow up "jadded" like that, but I grew up in the mountains and farmlands of Pennsylvania, reading about Audie Murphy while learning to shoot (responsibly) from my dad, as have thousands of others in other rural areas.

I can't up but feel stereotyped and insulted by that clip.

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LOL, Cadet Hokie.

Are you in for a surprise! Wait til you pin on those bars and get off that college campus :)

Audie Murphy came from a dirt poor Texas sharecropper family. He had only a fifth grade education and his daddy wasn't around to teach him how to shoot. Murphy's dad had abandoned his family. Those rabbits Murphy killed were for his family's supper.

Street smart (in a rural way). Most good soldiers are.

He was a very tough kid and he loved killing. A friend of mine, now deceased, was his battalion commander (actually, he had three MOH recipients in his battalion, Murphy was one) and he told me Murphy frequently would sneak across the lines alone at night with his carbine to kill as many Germans as he could.

And he was the best soldier ever.

The ones with high tech smarts go in the Air Force and Navy, not the 3rd ID.

Oh, and there is only one d in jaded :)

HT

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Haha, thanks Hot Tom. I will I wrote most of those remarks with a hot head, but I still think that the American soldier is stereotyped a little unfairly, at least from what I gathered from that clip.

I mean, Audie Murphy didn't listen to rap music when he went on his patrols and play Grand Theft Auto. Yes, culture has changed, but I think Americans have always had a sense of fighting in them. Plus good training doesn't hurt...

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Well, most of what I post here results from a hot head :)

The whole premise of the YouTube piece is stupid.

(I haven't read the book but Ill order it...it got great reviews but many mention the author was really reaching for some shock effect to sell it when he chose the title because it's a very minor theme in the book.

("Fortunately, Wright is not exposing the strengths and weaknesses of a new generation of American fighting men, as the misleadingly hyped-up title and subtitle indicate," the Publisher's Weekly review said.)

Rap music is what urban kids listen to and, yes, these soldiers are mostly kids from poor urban neighborhoods (The real question should be: Where the hell are the rich kids? Where are the Bush twins?).

Rap music doesn't make them into lustful killers. It's just what they play on their intercoms in the vehicles. It's what they play in their cars at home. So what?

In my day, it was acid rock. "Apocalypse Now!" got it dead solid perfect using music from The Doors, who were very popular with the troops in Vietnam.

But Jim Morrison's lyrics didn't cause the My Lai massacre.

I suspect Audie Murphy hummed "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" (along with "I'm Just a Dog-Faced Soldier," still the 3rd ID's marching song).

Murphy really was a cold-eyed killer. People who knew him repeatedly described him as having the coldest eyes they had ever seen. And he never really recovered from the war ("No Name on the Bullet" is the best biography of Murphy IMO).

My late friend his CO said they often talked long after the war, even after Murphy became a movie star, and what they talked about most was the nightmares they both had for decades. They didn't discuss The Andrews Sisters' music :)

It wasn't the music. It had nothing to do with Apple Trees or Bugle Boys From Company B.

It was learning to hate, which is essential in successful combat. And which is sometimes impossible to shed afterward. The video missed the whole point.

I think you have a great treat ahead of you.

What I miss most being retired is being around young soldiers. They may not live in mansions and they may may not have doctorates from Harvard but they are tough and smart, amazingly resourceful, unflinchingly loyal to their buddies and often very funny.

They never get out of a truck. They "unass the vehicle." They never fix things. They "unf*ck the situation." It's stuff you'll never hear in the civilian world :)

I think they're the greatest young people in the United States.

Consider yourself privileged to serve with them.

HT

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Ditto what HT said.

In case people haven't noticed, anti-war movies aren't doing well nowadays at all. One thing is clear, historians will be revising this war for decades to come.

There is a new movie coming out last week in December called "Charlie's War." It's about our local congressman, Charles Wilson, and his actions during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. His involvement makes him a legend in these parts. He . . . is proclaimed to be the one single person responsible for the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union. However, his meddling in Afghanistan ultimately lead to the rise of the Taliban and 9/11/01. Folks overlook that.

Get the book. See the movie

TK

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Well, most of what I post here results from a hot head :)

The whole premise of the YouTube piece is stupid.

(I haven't read the book but Ill order it...it got great reviews but many mention the author was really reaching for some shock effect to sell it when he chose the title because it's a very minor theme in the book.

("Fortunately, Wright is not exposing the strengths and weaknesses of a new generation of American fighting men, as the misleadingly hyped-up title and subtitle indicate," the Publisher's Weekly review said.)

Rap music is what urban kids listen to and, yes, these soldiers are mostly kids from poor urban neighborhoods (The real question should be: Where the hell are the rich kids? Where are the Bush twins?).

Rap music doesn't make them into lustful killers. It's just what they play on their intercoms in the vehicles. It's what they play in their cars at home. So what?

In my day, it was acid rock. "Apocalypse Now!" got it dead solid perfect using music from The Doors, who were very popular with the troops in Vietnam.

But Jim Morrison's lyrics didn't cause the My Lai massacre.

I suspect Audie Murphy hummed "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" (along with "I'm Just a Dog-Faced Soldier," still the 3rd ID's marching song).

Murphy really was a cold-eyed killer. People who knew him repeatedly described him as having the coldest eyes they had ever seen. And he never really recovered from the war ("No Name on the Bullet" is the best biography of Murphy IMO).

My late friend his CO said they often talked long after the war, even after Murphy became a movie star, and what they talked about most was the nightmares they both had for decades. They didn't discuss The Andrews Sisters' music :)

It wasn't the music. It had nothing to do with Apple Trees or Bugle Boys From Company B.

It was learning to hate, which is essential in successful combat. And which is sometimes impossible to shed afterward. The video missed the whole point.

I think you have a great treat ahead of you.

What I miss most being retired is being around young soldiers. They may not live in mansions and they may may not have doctorates from Harvard but they are tough and smart, amazingly resourceful, unflinchingly loyal to their buddies and often very funny.

They never get out of a truck. They "unass the vehicle." They never fix things. They "unf*ck the situation." It's stuff you'll never hear in the civilian world :)

I think they're the greatest young people in the United States.

Consider yourself privileged to serve with them.

HT

Well said HT, Reminds me of a story a marine buddy use to tell how a marine used the word f*ck in all forms when asked a tech question about some glitch with his weapon.

The F*cking F*cker is all F*cked up! Sir.

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alright... i'll have to check the book out. but, i still don't like the title or its implications.

But, this pompus commentator at the beginning of the video, this Gitoes (s.p.) jackass... what's this "this is the first war that's been driven by poetry... this urban rap and rock-and-roll" crap? has this guy never read anything about WWI or from any of its participants? some of the best poetry was written in those trenches. vietnam? WWII? GF1? I heard many GF1 vets when i served mention piping music like Metallica and Slayer (Slayer has to be the best combat music, though i've never experienced combat.) the commentator is old enough to remember vietnam if not to have served in it... what a self-serving twit. of course he would have participated in Moore's Fahrenheit 911. and this jack-ass thinks all the "urban" (does he mean black or latino?) kids are all gangbangers who pulled this same work on the streets of the US? this man is completely misguided by his own leftist bias. what ivory tower does he live in? and the author's reference to the LA riots as his basis for the same comparison is just plain ignorant. these two have no historical prospective, but i'll look forward to the recounts though try and avoid any of the BS commentary.

BTW: Tom, great post!

cock the glock,

fill the empty bottles with gasoline

and stuff the necks with soaked rags.

comin' to you live from the Urban American Warzone,

Hack

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Well, without starting a whole new thread, here's one from today's Washington Post (yes, Hack, that evil liberal media that I read every day along with The Army Times :)) about how the Army is treating one of its soldiers:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/01/AR2007120101782.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2007120101816

Proof that "You can love the Army but it won't always love you back."

This is shameful.

HT

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  • 7 months later...

Knowing that the Army is loath to court martial commissioned officers, and that the beating that it has taken over the care of Soldiers has given the Army a ton of bad press which it hates, I figured that whatever actually happened in this Soldiers case, she wouldn't get prosecuted. Seeing that the original link was a few months old , I did a Google search and found this. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/30/eveningnews/main3772831.shtml

Lt Whiteside was committed to a secure ward of the psychiatric unit after another suicide attempt, also the charges against her were dismissed.

As for generation kill, Ive only seen trailers, which seem to portray Soldiers as desensitized to the act of killing by video games. Perhaps true. Whatever. Ill not go on any rant, suffice it to say that the media has a liberal bias, and this is yet another product of it, I'm sure.

Mog

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As others have encouraged, it would be a good idea to consider reading the book first. Since it is an HBO series, it'll be outlandishly sexed-up beyond the extent of the book upon which it is based. The author/reporter's commentary is on the nature of the society that the younger servicemen and women have grown up in and the socio-economic setting in which a majority of these service men and women have come from.

Of course the Virginia Tech ROTC/Officer might be coming from a different angle. And, of course, some of the more mature enlisted might be coming from a different angle. But the author/reporter is conveying what *he* saw and commenting on how the environment from which these servicemen and women translates to the environment of iraq.

I won't hold my breath for accuracy in the series, and I'm sure it'll be over the top, but the book itself is a worthwhile read. I await more books from those who served over there vs. reporters. But there is something to be said for the perspective of an outsider looking in. Most of the first cadre of books on the Iraq experience were from this perspective, I now await more titles from the "inside looking out" viewpoint.

Anybody have a title to two to recommend?

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Ill not go on any rant, suffice it to say that the media has a liberal bias, and this is yet another product of it, I'm sure.

Mog

Of course, the military has its own bias as well. I'm not sure if I'd even place the military's bias as "conservative," I think the military's bias is... the military. The conservative agenda is usually more supportive of the military: both at the "grass-roots" level with strong undercurrents of patriotism and calls for supporting the troops and also, where it counts, in supporting larger military budgets and growth. The press needs stories and sensationalism and reporting on things military will surely deliver this in times of crisis.

I would agree that the press, in total, leans somewhat left (Fox notwithstanding), but as a self-preserving mechanism, the military is not going to be happy with any probing and scrutiny. Lastly, the "things are going fine over there" message hasn't played well for 50 or 60 years anytime there really ARE bad things to report along with the good. Given the option, the press, on the whole, will go for titilation over temerity.

I don't know how to get what the majority will consider a fair press. If you get the government to give the news, you've got the smell of totalitarianism. If you let the free market do it, you've got "the media" as we know it today. In the end, the facts will comingle with bias to serve the proclivities of the target audience. Since the profit motive accompanies news, sensationalism and any bias which can drum interest will be what runs.

Of course there IS ethical journalism out there, but it has to swim in the same pool as the rest. I think it is sufficient to say that are great things and not-so-great things going down in Iraq and Afghanistan - our willingness to address them candidly and impartially is the challenge. I don't think the political climate in our society is up to it right now - we're too polarized. :frown:

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