Generation Kill (Marines in Iraq) - Also will be HBO Miniseries in July

[RamboLiberal]

Generation Kill by Evan Wright from Amazon.com
In the HBO preview an Iraqi holding up his baby saying "We love Americans" a Marine yells out "Fuck you, we're Republicans!"

From Publishers Weekly
Wright rode into Iraq on March 20, 2003, with a platoon of First Reconnaissance Battalion Marines—the Marine Corps' special operations unit whose motto is "Swift, Silent, Deadly." These highly trained and highly motivated First Recon Marines were the leading unit of the American-led invasion force. Wright wrote about that experience in a three-part series in Rolling Stone that was hailed for its evocative, accurate war reporting. This book, a greatly expanded version of that series, matches its accomplishment. Wright is a perceptive reporter and a facile writer. His account is a personality-driven, readable and insightful look at the Iraq War's first month from the Marine grunt's point of view. It jibes with other firsthand reports of the first phase of the Iraqi invasion (including David Zucchino's Thunder Run), showing the unsettling combination of feeble and vicious resistance put up by the Iraqi army, the Fedayeen militiamen and their Syrian allies against American forces bulldozing through towns and cities and into Baghdad. Wright paints compelling portraits of a handful of Marines, most of whom are young, street-smart and dedicated to the business of killing the enemy. As he shows them, the Marines' main problem was trying to sort out civilians from enemy fighters. Wright does not shy away from detailing what happened when the fog of war resulted in the deaths and maimings of innocent Iraqi men, women and children. Nor does he hesitate to describe intimately the few instances in which Marines were killed and wounded. Fortunately, Wright is not exposing the strengths and weaknesses of a new generation of American fighting men, as the misleadingly hyped-up title and subtitle indicate. Instead, he presents a vivid, well-drawn picture of those fighters in action on the front lines in the blitzkrieg-like opening round of the Iraq War.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Straight from the depths of embeddedness comes Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War (Putnam, $24.95), Evan Wright's group portrait of a Marine Corps platoon that fought in Iraq last year. In Wright's view, this sample of the front line of the American military "would be virtually unrecognizable to their forebears in 'The Greatest Generation.' . . . These young men represent what is more or less America's first generation of disposable children. More than half of the guys in the platoon come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own parents. Before the 'War on Terrorism' began, not a whole lot was expected of this generation other than the hope that those in it would squeak through high school without pulling too many more mass shootings in the manner of Columbine." Near the end of Wright's stay, one member of the platoon concluded, "War doesn't change anything. . . . This place was before we came, and it's now. I personally don't believe we 'liberated' the Iraqis. Time will tell." And yet this same naysayer, Wright reports, has since signed up for another mission.

HBO preview: http://www.hbo.com/events/generationkill/