Good men, bad war

"The Wire" co-creator Ed Burns expresses his admiration for the 1st Recon Marines depicted in his and David Simon's upcoming HBO miniseries, "Generation Kill."

By Heather Havrilesky

Read more: HBO, Arts & Entertainment, Heather Havrilesky, Arts & Entertainment TV Features, Iraq War

July 7, 2008 | Having wrapped the final season of their critically acclaimed HBO series "The Wire" this spring, you'd think that David Simon and Ed Burns would spend at least a few months sipping on cocktails by the ocean somewhere, toasting each other on creating what many have proclaimed the best show in TV history.

Instead, Simon and Burns shifted their focus from the drug kingpins of Baltimore to the 1st Reconnaissance Marines of the Iraq war. Based on the bestselling book "Generation Kill" by Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright, who was embedded with the 1st Recon Marines spearheading the Iraqi invasion in 2003, HBO's seven-part miniseries depicts the early days of the war with all the sharp, clever dialogue and painfully vivid scenes of destruction that you'd expect from the team behind "The Wire." When one enlisted officer says to another, "We need to make sure the stupidity in this company doesn't roll down too hard on our guys," you can practically see McNulty grumbling over a beer with Bunk about the incompetence in the Baltimore P.D.

But incredibly enough, most of the dialogue of "Generation Kill" (premieres 9 p.m. Sunday, July 13) is real, lifted from a combination of Wright's book and his notes. (Wright collaborated with Simon and Burns on the script.) When Marines trade insults or a soldier with a camcorder quips, "CNN would definitely pay for drama like that, bro. That shit was extreme!" we're offered a glimpse of the surreal experience of modern warfare that's very different from either romanticized, heroic war movies like "Saving Private Ryan" or nightmare scenarios like "The Thin Red Line" or "Platoon." Unlike the nervous, reluctant rookie soldiers we've been introduced to so many times before, the 1st Recon Marines remain unnaturally calm in the most harrowing encounters along the long and winding road to Baghdad, reflecting both their close ties to one another and their intense training and preparation for the frightening realities of guerrilla warfare.

The real focus here is less on the war than on the Marines themselves. Like the corner drug dealers of Baltimore, the 1st Recon Marines form a culture that possesses its own structure and language. Crude exchanges, racist jokes, pop-cultural references, sparring, insults, impromptu singing of Nelly's "Hot in Herre" -- these are all a part of the bonding between the Marines of Bravo Company. Although their banter ranges from incomprehensible to off-putting at first, by the time they roll up on an unoccupied airstrip, it makes perfect sense when, instead of expressing relief or disappointment, Cpl. Ray Person proclaims, "As the great warrior poet Ice Cube once said, 'If a day does not require my AK, it is good.'"

Speaking to Salon over the phone from his home in West Virginia, Ed Burns, a former cop, teacher and Vietnam vet, explained the process of dramatizing Wright's story and expressed his admiration for the Marines who led the charge into a war he nonetheless calls "a tragedy."

How did you make decisions about where to stray from writer Evan Wright's story and where to stick to it?

Well, we try to stay as much as possible with the story. A lot of times we didn't stray so much as we got into Evan's notes -- Evan was right there. We just squeezed his brain like a sponge and he either went to his notes or remembered or went to his tapes, and we found a way to begin a scene or end a scene with dialogue there.

The dialogue among the Marines is so full of quips and barbs, similar to "The Wire," that I was surprised at how often the quotes in Wright's book were exactly the same as the dialogue in the miniseries. I assumed a lot of that was invented by you and David Simon.

We thought that Evan's work was phenomenal, and that the best we could do was just to stick with the book.

The themes of "Generation Kill" are closely in line with the themes of "The Wire," too. Were you amazed that you found the same sorts of dynamics among the men that you found among the police officers of Baltimore, or did you expect it?

I think [the dynamics are] pretty much the same, particularly when you're looking at institutions. Because of the different tiers, everybody has a different viewpoint. And the higher up you go, the guys down on the bottom are going to think that you're nuts, because they don't see the issues that you're dealing with. So from [Lt. Col. Stephen] Ferrando's point of view, the violence of warfare makes a lot of sense. To the Marines [under him], it's "He's trying to kill us!"

What is the advantage of sending Humvees and other light vehicles into these towns in Iraq first, instead of tanks? Is it the speed?

Oh, it completely unbalances the opponent. When you blow past him, he can't react to it, and now you're cutting off his supply lines. So the enemy is on his own little island all of a sudden. He doesn't want to be there. So he's going to start pulling back, he's going to start doing things that give the attacker the advantage. If he had to come out from his defensive positions, then he's going to get swacked by the Air Force. So this blitzkrieg, this lightning warfare, whatever they call it, gives you an incredible advantage if you can pull it off.

So why not just roll a tank in there? It just takes too long?

Well, you saw what happened when they went to Nasiriyah and they tried rolling tanks in there and preparing for battle. This kind of warfare is not about battle; this is about positioning. It's like a chess game where the threat of a move is much more powerful than the move itself. So you're always worried about the threat, and the opponent doesn't let you off the hook by making that move. He can do other things that can complicate your life. So the straight-out Stalin-type attack on Germany, where they leveled everything in front of them by artillery, they don't do that anymore.

In Afghanistan what they did was they sent in teams of Special Forces and recon guys, and gave them sat phones; and Special Forces has tons and tons of money. They just bought the Northern Alliance, put that together, and very quickly turned the country over.

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