Day 108: Generation Kill (7/8/2008)

I picked this book in anticipation of HBO new miniseries of the same name about the 1st Recon Marines in Iraq. I was expecting something completely different than what this book was. I suppose I was under the impression that this would be another journalistic endeavor that painted the current generation as soulless video game addict killers. However, Evan Wright does a good job of actually being humanistic about the Iraq war. We still the seedy side of things - wars kill people - but we also see the side of how this impacts the soldiers from a personal level. We see the bureaucratic bumbling at the onset of the war which ultimately resulted in the guerrilla war that only recently seems to have subsided. I was amazed at the honesty of the book but after watching the first episode of the miniseries I don't think that will hold out.

I