Generation Kill by Evan Wright

[lightreads]

Generation Kill by Evan Wright

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I had no idea this book would be so funny, but for real, it's hilarious. Also exhausting and enraging and painful. And truly excellent, for the record.

For anyone who doesn't remember, this is the account of a reporter embedded in a marine recon unit during the invasion of Iraq. And by "embedded" I mean he rode in the lead car that was repeatedly the northernmost American presence in Iraq, and the very tip of the invading spear. There are a lot of firefights recounted – or more accurately, a lot of incidences of marines driving purposefully into ambushes – but that's not what's good about this book. What's good are the character portraits, the deft touch Wright has in fanning out people like a hand of cards. He is particularly good at laying out the wildly different individual reactions to violence -- celebratory, num, anguished, indifferent, everything in between. It is a focus on the individual, and I found it rich and thoughtful.

I have a friend who spends a lot of time getting paid to think about how we can prosecute war better. On a technical level, I mean – what can our guys eat, read, learn, what drugs can they take to make them more effective in the field? Judging by this book, almost anything would do, because almost anything would be better than the starvation and disease they work through now.

I do think there is something . . . dishonest is the wrong word, but close. Obfuscating? Maybe. Wright spends most of this book eliding himself flawlessly out of the narrative, to the point where it is jarring when he records some action he took or something he said. He writes most events as if they occurred without him. Which is deeply ethical in a way – this isn't his story. If this were an autobiographical book by a reporter about how hard it is to decide to go off to Iraq for a few months as a civilian and then go home again, I would have rolled my eyes a lot. But at the same time . . . you throw a stone in the river, the course of the water changes. The observed behave differently. And Wright did his best to tell us a story about the river without the rock in it. Wright lived in these guys's pockets for months; he slept in holes dug in the sand with them and drove into bomb blasts with them, and then wrote coolly, almost formally about them. Until the acknowledgements where he calls them by given name for the first time and pulls the curtain back, very briefly, on the depth of the relationships he formed.

He's not obligated to write a personal memoir. And like I said, there is something ethical in his choices. Just . . . a rock in a river changes things.



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Comments

[newredshoes]

Hi, here via network! Hmm -- I'm super interested in your issue with the book, being both a grad student in journalism and one who is particularly interested in war reporting. It's been a while since I either read the book or saw the excellent HBO miniseries that came from it, though I'm hoping to revisit both in the near future. That said, we're always told that we have to think very hard about when to include ourselves in our own story, and that it's imperative that we, as journalists, don't make the story about us. His job is to understand these guys without getting (or presenting himself as) close. I'll have to think some more about this, but your reaction is really interesting to me.

[kate_nepveu]

Whenever I read journalism, I always wonder about the effect of the journalist on the subject and the actions around them. It's just curiosity.

(I haven't read this book, though.)

[newredshoes]

It's a weird thing on both sides. One exercise they've had us do in a class or two is to be an interview subject for your classmates. The ideal, especially the Gay Talese-style "art of hanging out" ideal, is for people to just forget you're there, so you can observe them, but it's different for every person. I love talking, for instance, so I really enjoy pouring forth spontaneous paragraphs of quotes at people, but even when I'm just being observed (as I was for a photojournalism assignment like this), there was always this -- hope that I'd be interesting enough, all the time. You have to work at being natural, but there's still this sort of -- like, whenever I make posts on the first of the month, I've always got that "List the first sentence of each month's first post" meme in the back of my head. It's like that.

But you also want the subject and people familiar with the subject to recognize what they know in the story. It can't be phony. So you have to gain people's trust, sometimes very quickly, and the way you do that is by being completely open and genuine in your interest in what they have to say. There's no other way around -- people can smell a phony, and it'll show up in your reporting.

...clearly I could go on about this stuff. These questions really are fascinating! I suspect there were many times the Marines would show off for (or even hassle) Wright, but they also had a job to do, which he had no part of and they should not have been thinking about him in the least, as professionals. Reporters who embed with troops have to be in peak physical condition, so they don't hold the unit back or get in the way. So the question of Wright's presence and effect on the unit is even more complicated than all that.

[lightreads]

What really got me thinking about it was the second or third time I thought, "wow, that's a great quote," and then realized the quote in question was presented as if naturally occurring in casual conversation. Whereas in reality, it could only have been the result of careful probing. You know the style I mean.

I think my fundamental issue comes down to authenticity and how, to me as a consumer of narratives, that requires a certain amount of transparency from my "narrator." Or at least conscious acknowledgement of his personal slant on the story, because of course he has one, we always do, and pretending otherwise is absurd. So in that way pretending that the reporter is on one side of a wall of glass and the story is on the other strikes me as obviously inauthentic. Not something that bugs me in a 1500 word Newsweek article, but in reporting of this length and this complexity, it stood out.

I dunno, I have a . . . contentious relationship with nonfiction books by reporters, but that's a different problem having to do with how some science journalists write great short pieces and terrible long pieces. It's a thing. But this book really is excellent, and I will be thinking about it for a long time.

[lightreads]

P.s. the author replied to my review on Goodreads with some thoughtful things to say on this topic. I'm not engaging with him because authors talking to reviewers on Goodreads freaks me out, but he seems lovely and if this interests you, follow the link in the post.

[newredshoes]

How about that! In my head, writers and journalists and other people I admire always exist in this rarefied other place, but they're usually quite nice when you actually talk to them, and I'm always surprised. Thanks for the heads-up!

[norah]

Okay, now I am maybe interested in reading this. I skipped it because I just wasn't sure if fandom loved it because fandom, or because awesome.

[lightreads]

I hear the miniseries is legit good as well, though cannot personally say. But yes, I found this engaging and worthwhile.