Generation Kill Is The Best Depiction of Marine Corps Life Ever to Be Filmed!
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By Josh Holman
“The Marine Corps is like America’s little pitbull. They beat us, mistreat us and every once in a while, they let us out to attack somebody” – Corporal Ray Person
The Marine Corps has always done more with less, operating on a budget of less than 7 percent of the annual defense allotment. The Army is near 26 percent, The Air Force near 29 percent and the Navy is almost 23 percent. This is why it was no surprise to see the highly trained Recon Marines in 2003 heading from Kuwait to Baghdad in Humvees with plastic doors. The sheer stupidity of these men receiving the highest quality night vision goggles, partnered with the fact that they are unable to obtain batteries to actually put them to use is the Marine Corps in a nutshell.
This lack of supplies or logistical support cannot be put all onto the Marine Corps though, as it was actually the Bush administration who took us to war so quickly and without any sort of plan or preparation. In fact, in my mind, the most egregious instance of the lack of preparation would be when I was assigned to drive the Colonel’s security team from Kuwait to Fallujah in the same plastic doors as my company did over a year prior. We didn’t even start installing real armor for a few months in country, and then every couple of weeks we would take that armor off to install new armor. This was done at least five times until it was sufficient enough to actually protect Marines but by then it was so heavy that the lugnuts started snapping off of all the tires. We finally got some army hand-me-down armored vehicles from the Army about a month before we left Iraq.
The Bush administration also Gave Dick Cheney’s old company Halliburton a plus 1 contract. This basically says that for every dollar spent by Halliburton in Iraq, they got that back from the taxpayer plus $1. This meant the company was very motivated to spend as much money as they could as quickly as possible. A semi trucker who worked for Halliburton was ordered to destroy his semi with an incendiary device rather than fix it just so they could just bill the government. After a few months that Iraq, we were all ordered to stop washing our own clothes and we could only take them to Halliburton’s spot who then charged the government $100 for a grocery bag of laundry. Needless to say, the administration screwed things up almost irrevocably by being corrupt and having no plan of action. I never in my wildest dreams would have thought that in 2020, George Bush would be missed in any sort of way, but thanks to the guy we have now, here we are. Sad.
Most of the Marines I served with in Fallujah in 2004 were a part of the initial attack in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq in 2003 and many of them share the same qualities as the Marines from Generation Kill. Almost every single story told in the Generation Kill mini series I have heard first hand from Marines who were actually there. Everybody who ever saw a war movie knows about the impact that an incompetent commander can have on the troops they’re in charge of, but to hear stories first hand about officers like “Captain America” and how they nearly got so many people killed multiple times is just different than seeing it on television.
The difference in this portrayal of Marine Corps life is that It’s not all action, good guys dying or committing heroic acts all the time. You get to see all the mundane nonsense that comes with being at war and the intermittent bursts of intense action. Half the show is just this group of people smoking and joking around and talking exactly how Marines I know actually talk. You get the racism from the some of the southern guys, and I knew plenty of them. You see the men and women who are serving this country, but are not citizens. You have the experiments we all did with the MRE’s or meals ready to eat, mixing this and that to try to make it a little different every time, which is a near impossibility.
The series was written by David Simon and Ed Burns who also wrote The Wire and It was adapted from New York Times writer Evan Wright’s book of the same name. It is based on his experiences while being embedded with Recon Marines in 2003.This is not a show that is easily binged because there isn’t a ton of action, but if you ever wanted to know how real Marines act or speak in wartime situations, Generation Kill is the most accurate portrayal this Marine has ever watched.
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