Generation Kill by Evan Wright

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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