Through the eyes of embedded reporter Wright (Lee Tergesen), we come to appreciate the leadership qualities of Sergeant Brad “Iceman” Colbert (Alexander Skarsgard), and through Wright’s ears, to delight in the Lenny Bruce soliloquies of Corporal Ray Person (James Ransone). By the time Bravo 2 finally gets from Nasiriyah to Al Kut-after ambush, betrayal, and incompetence after a gunning down of peasant farmers, a drive-by shooting of oblivious children, a depraved indifference to the fate of refugees, and the blowing up of a grammar school-they will be cynics as well as killers. And no one even imagined insurgents or jihadists. Still, no one bothered to explain to these particular Marines that they’d be stuck in Humvee convoys, well behind enemy lines in the Fertile Crescent, without air or armor support, used as bait to distract and confuse Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard. They look forward to stealth and killing that’s what they signed up for. Recon Marines endure the same training as Navy seals and Army Special Forces. Instead, at Camp Mathilda in Kuwait, they had rehearsed violent death. Many of these young men were competing in a mustache contest, and all of them looked as though they should have been rehearsing for their senior prom. An hour and a half into the mini-series, I hadn’t yet figured out who was who.
And I can’t even tell you which Marine says it. “Vote Republican.” As funny as this is, it is one of the few overt political references in the seven-part mini-series that David Simon and Ed Burns ( The Wire) have executive-produced from Evan Wright’s embedded reporting for Rolling Stone and the subsequent best-selling book about the first three weeks of the 2003 invasion. Illustration by Wes Duvall Photo: Paul Schiraldi / Courtesy of HBOĭuring the second episode of Generation Kill, to a tentative wave of welcome from Iraqi civilians on the rubbled road to Baghdad, one young Marine in the Bravo 2 platoon of the First Recon Battalion waves right back from his Humvee.
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