Review of Generation Kill (2008)
Seen in 2026.
A war of aggression as seen by the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the US Marine Corps, from before going into Iraq and proceding to their first few days in Baghdad, all in the spring of 2003.
The talent behind the The Wire (2002) put a similarly bleak, well-researched and realistic spin on Operation Iraqi Freedom. There’s a political dimension, with characters making some favourable references to Republicans and one guy reading What Uncle Sam Really Wants (1992), but Generation Kill is a view from the ground, of the war and of its perpetrators: Mostly working-class Americans doing what they think of as a job, albeit a job for heroes.
At first it seems as if Sergeant Brad Colbert will be the main character. He’s as handsome as Alexander Skarsgård, charismatic, practical, competent, and relatively innocent, steering clear of the battalion’s political problems while protecting his squad of more colourful characters crewing the first Humvee in Company B, 2nd Platoon, Team 1. Like The Wire, however, this show has a solid ensemble cast. In the last few episodes, the soft focus shifts toward Colbert’s immediate superior, Lieutenant Nathaniel “Nate” Fick, who is in a better position than Colbert to do something about the battalion’s war crimes. Among parallel plots, there’s tension between Platoon Commander Fick and his immediate superior, Captain Craig “Encino Man” Schwetje.
Schwetje is played by Brian Wade, whose glamorous physique borders on the implausible even next to Skarsgård. However, unlike Colbert, Schwetje emerges as a villain, which in this story is a fine symbol of real and systemic problems. A superior officer naturally absorbs the enmity of the soldiers at his command, and by the standards of the corps, Schwetje’s neither malicious, nor aggressive, nor corrupt, nor a stickler for the personal grooming standards enforced by Sergeant Major John Sixta channeling his counterpart in Full Metal Jacket (1987). Schwetje does blame Colbert personally for an early mistake, but the captain functions as a villain mainly because of the Peter principle: He’s been promoted to his current rank for his competence in some previous role, thereby moving one step beyond the domain of that competence, and unable to grow.
There’s a heartbreaking scene where Schwetje is overwhelmed by analysis paralysis. Another man, who knows him well, sees this and frames the problem at hand in the terminology of American football. Schwetje, unable to process the real world, gratefully replaces it with the mindset of the game. Relatedly, a 2013 article in PLoS Medicine put the total excess deaths in the war at 405,000, including deaths from causes featured on the show: increased lawlessness in the power vacuum, air support wrecking the infrastructure, etc. That’s not a touchdown.
Even when I saw it, 18 years after it aired, Generation Kill was more disturbing than The Wire ever becomes. Episode 5 is horrifying. I’ve mentioned that some of the actors look pretty, there is a lot of comic relief, there are numerous sing-alongs to popular music in Team 1’s Humvee, and you can sense the irrational admiration that embedded reporter Evan Wright must have felt, protected by these burly men in a strange land, but this show has no truly romanticized or whimsical assholes like The Wire’s Omar or Brother Mouzone to take the edge all the way off. I wouldn’t say that it is minimally fictionalized or that it predicts the next war in Iraq, but it’s very much about the reality of the war as an avoidable tragedy for almost everyone involved.
References here: Zero Dark Thirty (2012).