"Generation Kill": Band of brothers for a new age

After five years fulfilling his epic vision for “The Wire,” David Simon has returned to his journalistic roots with “Generation Kill,” a seven-part miniseries about young Marines under fire in Iraq that begins at 8 p.m. CT Sunday on HBO.

As he did in the series that made his bones with HBO viewers, “The Corner,” Simon has put on the screen a barely fictional adaptation of a barely nonfictional book -- in this case, the awe-inspiring, novelistic first-person account of Evan Wright, a writer for Rolling Stone who accepted one of the most treacherous embed assignments of the Iraq War. For two months Wright rode with a platoon of the elite, 364-member First Reconnaissance division as it pushed its way through some of the most hostile resistance American forces would see during the 40-day invasion.

The result is almost uncannily the same in “Generation Kill” as it was in “The Wire.” Once again, Simon and his producing partner, Ed Burns, plunge us deeply into the culture of foul-mouthed men, many of them barely out of their teens, who have ready access to firearms and agendas that have little to do with the American dream you and I understood it growing up. And, as before, you can't stop watching it.

**Related story:** The incredible story behind "Generation Kill"

The drama centers on the dozen or so men Wright rode into Iraq with. They are among the most extreme Marines at the disposal of the U.S. These men (they are all men) are trained to run for miles in the desert with 150-pound packs, then jump in the ocean with full packs and swim a few more miles. They are eternally bulking up and beating up on each other, even playing psy-ops mind games on each other (think ethnic slurs on steroids), in an never-ending effort to remain tough and ready for anything. They are what you get when you spend a million dollars training one man to kill. They are, as one of the First Recon puts it, what you get when you breed a pit bull to fight. They cannot wait to get off the leash.

Wright's story sings, however, not because of its engrossing descriptions of Marine life and combat, but because he has breathed flesh and personality into each of the diverse souls who dragged his soft carcass along for the invasion.

There is Sgt. Brad Colbert (Alexander Skarsgard), aka the “Iceman,” who makes his best decisions when heavy artillery is blazing all around him. There is Lt. Nate Fick (Stark Sands), the platoon's commanding officer, a Dartmouth graduate whose idealism seems as out of place here as his Ivy League degree. There is Cpt. Cpl. Josh Ray Person (James Ransone), a rock-and-roll nerd from Nevada, Mo., whose hilarious ephedra-fueled riffs belie a Radar O'Reilly genius at the kind of mundane tasks, like driving, that could get them all killed if done badly. And that's just the start of a great ensemble that goes on and on and even includes one actor, Sgt. Rudy Reyes, who actually served with First Recon in Iraq.

If you can get past all the scatological towel-snapping of the early scenes, you realize they're actually good boys, united less by love of country than by a desire to prove themselves -- and found their muse in Wright, who clearly had something to prove as well. (He's also in the show, played by an oddly older-looking Lee Tergesen.) These Marines appear to have few loyalties other than to each other. They despise peaceniks, of course, and in one scene loudly eviscerate an anti-war letter (admittedly a badly clichéd one) they receive. But they are equally dismissive of worthless shows of support, like “Standing Tall!” bumper stickers or the Aaron Tippin song “Where the Stars and Stripes and Eagles Fly,” which Colbert declares to be “straight homosexual country-music Special Olympic gay.”

As we see from the outset through Wright's eyes, these men have been trained to depend on each other and boost each others' morale. This is aided by each man's personal sense of invulnerability, by their shared misery (they spend weeks wearing heavy, itchy chemical suits, even to bed), and by their knowledge that they are there to be expended. Mission first, Marine welfare second -- those are the rules and everyone knows them.

A major reason “Generation Kill” works so well is that Burns and Simon were handed grade-A material. Wright's articles for Rolling Stone, which vividly yet respectfully chronicled his journey into Hell with the First Recon, won a National Magazine Award and led to the publication of his book.

It is hard to read Wright's book and not see a movie treatment unfolding before your eyes. Each character in the platoon where Wright was embedded is fully realized, every line of dialogue beautiful in its vulgarity and phrasing, and seemingly the smallest detail does not escape the reporter's notice, which is amazing considering how much time he spent sleep-deprived or under fire. Even the lines we barely hear in the background are gems (“Semper Gumby - always flexible!”).

That said, another producer, another network, would have yielded very different results. I remember how fond I was of Steven Bochco's 2005 effort “Over There,” which shriveled up and died on the FX channel. But comparing that to “Generation Kill” would be like sending in the Munchkins to do the work of Marines.