This was the week that Iceman met Riverbend and Chaffin and that other whiskey tango piece of shit met an actual female soldier. “Concertina bush” — jeez, what a pig. I was so repulsed by that, not the least by the writer’s co-yuks with his new homies. Seeing as how this is an all-girl blog, anyone want to take that one on?

First thoughts on A Burning Dog.

Well, first off, it’s safe to say we’ve moved into politics. Encino Man (”Whoo! Whoo!”)  doesn’t quite get it but everyone else does. Fick:

“It’s all on that guy’s passport. Two weeks ago he was still a student in Syria. He wasn’t a jihadi until we came to Iraq.”

Last week’s metaphor, masturbation, was about waste and futility and missed opportunities.  Compared to tonight’s episode, Combat Jack seems like a walk in the park in retrospect.  Person’s Stevie Wonder joke was ironic, given that more than in any ep so far, the blinders have come off.  If there was any doubt of their mission, it’s gone. They are there to drive into ambushes and draw fire.  If there was any doubt about the ineptitude of Encino Man and Captain America, it’s gone.  One’s as dumb as a rock, the other is a hysterical menace. If there was ever any doubt that innocents were going to get blown to bits on a daily basis, it’s gone.  See, when I saw them surveilling frolicking children and old ladies baking bread this time, I thought it was a narrative device to simply heighten the tension.  Which, I guess, it was after all.  Another day, another hamlet obliterated.  Time to dig a hole.

Even Ice Man and Fick are at odds, though they are both coming from more or less the same place, which is that this war is not one of the good ones, is not played by the rules, is not the war they trained for, is not going to be winnable, is not ever going to leave them alone, its dead children haunting their dreams forever. If the assembled clowns running the show don’t get them killed, that is. To Afghanistan, gentlemen!

That thing about being the last man to die for a mistake?  Imagine dying because there aren’t enough batteries? Even though I knew the outcome, that nighttime sequence leading up to the bridge ambush was terrifyingly effective.  Imagine rocking through pitch blackness toward a certain ambush, the dark out your window illuminated only by artillery fire, knowing that the guy driving your humvee can’t see what what he’s doing? No wonder Scribe can’t stop the shakes.

I know I’m flogging this parts of a body idea a little hard but let’s go there again. These guys are all parts of the same body. You see now the importance of calling in the shots, the constant back and forth communication about even taking shits, it’s the nerve impulses that let the body operate effectively. The supplies, and the lack of them, that’s the blood flow. Guys like Colbert, Kocher, Pappy, they’re just the arms, the legs. The officers are the brains.  So these guys have Encino Man at the top, so already their brain is mostly gone. I don’t know the name of the Lt. in Alpha company, the one that called in the massive artillery strike on a bare patch of desert?  At that same level, in Bravo,  there’s Captain America.  No matter how good and steady and reliable his counterpart Fick is, there’s Captain America skittering around, like a bad case of epilepsy, with a little bipolar thrown in for good measure.

Oh man, they are all so fucked.

I’m going to revise that arms and legs thing, just for Colbert. He’s the eyes.  In the book, Wright notes that Colbert, especially, was obsessed with figuring out small visual details in the distance, and the film’s borne that out over and over again.  Colbert watches, looks, sees.  Last night’s ep was about seeing, and not seeing.  How awful and appropriate then, that last shot.  Colbert looking into the face of this war, a dead civilian looking back at him forever, through one eye, the other shot out by one of the Marines on his team.

Alpha and Bravo go their separate ways and the awesome gets spread around a bit wider this week.  Even Trombley does something right.

Discuss.

(UPDATED:  Corrected the misspelling of Trombley’s name. Regret the error)

During my final days in the newspaper business, the editor of my tiny (and getting tinier by the quarter) p.m. daily had the idea to send someone to Afghanistan. As our paper was not the sort to keep a foreign bureau, the hook was the time-honored “follow some local troops” angle. The only problem is, our local troops were on, shall we say, a really boring mission. They were an ordnance company. One of my fellow copy editors was a veteran, and when she heard this, said, “I can see the stories now: ‘Today we delivered some bullets here. Then we delivered some bullets there.’” (And you know what? She was right.)

But of course, that was only part of the hook. The rest was a big, newspaper-sponsored support-the-troops hoo-ha, in which the paper raised funds to send “care packages” to the front. I suggested we fill them with Cpl. Person’s suggestions: Some good porn, maybe a flask-bottle of bourbon, you know the drill. They went out with paper and pencils, “fruit-flavored drink mix,” diaper wipes, the usual. Watching the troops read the kids’ letters in Episode 1, I suspect they were received the same way.

But never mind that. As you can see, I’m getting to this game late, having vacationed through episodes one and two and only getting caught up recently via OD. I’ll confess to a little early disappointment; Burns and Simon are far out of their usual territory, at least geographically. It took me an hour or two to see that some things — incompetence up the chain of command, mainly — never change, whether in Nasariya or Baltimore. And these two are about the best chroniclers of that particular problem we’ve got.

Still, I can see Nancy Franklin’s point when she wrote, in the New Yorker, that none of this feels particularly new. It’s not as though the tragedy of this war is a secret. We don’t see the depictions of top-down lack of planning, supply-chain shortfalls, muddled orders and the rest of it as revelations, at least not if we read “Fiasco,” and who hasn’t?

But. I’m enjoying the way “Generation Kill” is taking the clichés of military movies — mainly the way a group of ethnically diverse soldiers work, or don’t work, together — and making them fresh again. I suppose they can be freshened because they’re true; the military has been one of the great American mixing bowls throughout our history, throwing together people who normally wouldn’t encounter one another in a lifetime and requiring them to sleep, eat and shit in close proximity for months on end. The lesson close quarters teach you is how to get along, and it’s entertaining to watch.

I wonder what sort of viewership this is getting. Franklin’s point is, I think, part of the reason Iraq-war movies are tanking all over. This is going to go down as a painful period in our history, maybe even an epochal turning point, and frankly, it’s a big fuckin’ bummer and you can’t blame people for wanting to watch something else. Bummers on screen can be strong black coffee or brussels sprouts, both of which can be a bear going down.* But only one leaves you energized.

I’m looking forward to the next four parts, just the same. These things are important and, besides, hasn’t Blown Deadline shown us they know how to do this?

(This might be the stupidest sentence ever written. I leave it in to remind you you’re reading a blog, and not The New Yorker.)

I stumbled across a link to this recent Slate piece on GK by Peter Maass.  I’m posting about it here not just because it’s so favorable, but because part of it speaks exactly to a chain of thought I’ve been wrestling with as I’ve watched (and read) GK, which is the connection between these characters in this narrative and the US administration that sent them into this unnecessary war.

To say I hold strongly negative opinions of the forces behind the Iraq invasion is an understatement.  Immersing into the world of Generation Kill, it’s been a struggle trying to shoehorn that analysis into this story.

Maass:

…those types of shortcomings, as well as the ineptitude of some members of the unit—a vital supply truck is hastily abandoned in battle, commanders are obsessed with facial hair, a captain orders his men to go the wrong way on a road—are rooted in systemic faults that predate the election of George Bush in 2000. The Bush team was incompetent and naive—the critics are right about that—but the military had more than enough built-in deficiencies to undermine even a well-planned conquest of Iraq. Snafu, which is a military acronym that stands for “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up,” did not come out of Iraq; its origins are generally traced to World War II.

Of course, it is their fault that First Recon was in Iraq to begin with.  Watching Episode 3 unfold, watching that hamlet burn, I was overwhelmed with the thought that one narrative about one battalion and the damage and death they dealt represented a fraction of the total devastation.

More Maass:

Yet the highest achievement of the miniseries is the way it unveils the disordered workings of the American military and the inevitable destruction of all objects in its path, including civilians whose only offense is to tend their sheep or drive down a road. With its $550 billion budget and 1.5 million troops, the military might seem a mechanized colossus of precision-guided violence, give or take a few bad apples and errant artillery shells. But if you have served in the military or written about it from the inside, you know that on the unit level it is filled with men and women of vastly different motivations and skills. The Marines in Generation Kill are intelligent and dimwitted, panicked, sensitive, racist, comic, homicidal, brave. It is a wonder when things go according to plan. “You know what happens when you get out of the Marine Corps?” says one of the characters. “You get your brains back.”

Generation Kill is the opposite of a lecture—the paragraph you just read contains more politics than you’ll get in the entire series. Generation Kill doesn’t insist that the military—George Bush’s, Bill Clinton’s, Barack Obama’s, or John McCain’s—can only get things half-right on its good days. Instead, it presents the untouched messiness and ambiguity of killing in modern warfare. You can draw your own conclusions.

Be sure and read the rest.

I’ll put up a longer post later, but instead of waiting so long this week, I thought I’d just do some thinking aloud about Episode Three, hoping others will jump in with their own thoughts. Lurkers, don’t be quiet.

This was episode was tough going. That feeling after the RCT troops, aided and abetted by Encino Man, obliterate that little hamlet, after that huge wave of flame engulfs the whole blown-up mess?  That’s how this whole episode left me feeling afterward, though I also found parts of it exhilarating. Each episode keeps taking us farther in, and there’s no going back.

Exhilarating?  Oh Jesus yeah, watching those humvees roaring three or four abreast as they race to the airfield — as full of folly and recklessness as that whole mission was, it was thrilling, after watching this outfit plod and rock along through the dust, to see them, pretty much literally, “hellbent for glory.”

Is it just me, or is anyone else confused by how much Cpt. Patterson (the “good guy” captain of Alpha Co.) and Encino Man/Cpt. Schwetje (imbecilic captain of Bravo Co.) look alike?  I am also distracted every time I see Major Eckloff, aka hotheaded Officer Colicchio from The Wire.  “It’s that guy again, what was his name?  Bad haircut dude…”

How much do I love Lt. “I am assured of this.” Fick?  A lot. It’s a tough role because on one hand he’s so young and idealistic but on the other, he’s pure steel. In the book, Fick says something really thought-provoking at the beginning to Wright, about ROTC units on college campuses being essential.  Not because they militarize the university but because the university has a liberalizing effect on the military, which Fick thought could only be a good thing. It’s probably naive of me to think so, but too bad there aren’t more like him in the Marines.

Speaking of things said in the book, at the very end, Wright quotes Colbert as stating a basic truth, about war, and I guess, about humans in general, which is that people who cannot kill will always be at the mercy of those who can and do. The thing about the book and this television series that I find so powerful is that it dismantles a statement like that, the same way it dismantles the stereotypical soldier. As bad as the worst we’ve seen is, it’s difficult to simply condemn these guys as swaggering barbarians wreaking carnage.  They do swagger, they are barbaric, and they do wreak carnage but they are tasked with killing other humans.  Perhaps this is overstating the obvious, but that’s a profound and grave mission. I think the show and the book do a very good job of laying that truth bare, as well as showing that it’s almost impossible to do it the “right” way, at least in Iraq.

The entire battalion, along with hundreds of other troops, is rolling through the wide open desert under a clear sky as Episode Two opens. It’s an impressive display of organized power on the move, a six-lane convoy of all manner of military vehicles moving purposefully onward. The scene recalls a passage from the book:

If you were to look at from the air, you’d see a segmented column of American invasion vehicles—Marines in various units—stretching for several kilometers along the highway. Despite all its disparate elements, the column functions like a single machine, pulverizing anything in its path that appears to be a threat.

The Iceman is even moved by the spectacle, talking about how, less than 48 hours into the invasion, here they are “rolling with impunity on Saddam’s highway.”

It’s a great image but it doesn’t last long. The convoy stalls and … cue the herd of goats wandering through the gridlock.  Bitching commences in Iceman’s humvee, about the jam, about other units and their displays of “moto shit,” and about how their much-trained-for bridge mission appears to have gotten shitcanned by the higher ups. The Iceman cuts it short, reminding his team that they are all Marines, and Marines follow orders.

And that is what this episode is about. Officers, enlisted men, and the glue that binds them together. Judgment. Communication. Orders. Discipline. It’s glaringly obvious that without such, the whole testosterone-fueled enterprise would be chaos.

Wright continues:

The cogs that make up this machine are the individual teams in hundreds of vehicles, several thousand Marines scrutinizing every hut, civilian car and berm for weapons or muzzle flashes. The invasion all comes down to a bunch of extremely tense young men in their late teens and twenties, with their fingers on the triggers of rifles and machine guns.

But what Simon/Burns and Co. takes great pains to show in this episode is that it’s not just the green newbies that need reining in, that are the biggest threat to cohesion.  The ones piloting that unified machine, the brain driving the body,  the officers — they are the ones in a position to really fuck things up.  And in this episode, they do. It’s a key issue in the book as well, but  Simon/Burns depart from the book somewhat noticeably in order to front-load this point before their narrative goes any farther.

In addition, some random highlights:

Are there no limits to The Iceman’s awesomeness?

Very glad that Person is not just source of one-liners. Even after just two episodes, I’m liking James Ransome in this role much more than an entire season as Ziggy.

The scene where Iceman is watching the wandering Marine spoke volumes.  A Marine, alone, unfocused, away from the rest of his unit, was as unsettling as some of the more gruesome aftermath shots.

Likewise, the twilight scene in Godfather’s tent as he muses aloud to his gathered officers was poetry, in addition to adding complexity to whole concept of chain of command.

More thoughts on Episode 1, and the story as a whole, to span the distance between what we’ve seen already and Episode 2, The Cradle of Civilization, airing tonight.

Lynette mentions upstairs that GK “is no Wire,” and true that.  And on the whole, I think that’s good.  Things end, things change. There are lots of stories we need to hear.  But we want some kind of map, some way in, so we look for connections, or at least, that’s what I find myself doing.  It’s impossible not to compare and contrast, and right up front we see our testosterone-fueled anti-heroes in Generation Kill treading along some seemingly familiar Simon/Burns ground: the futility of the individual actor in a larger scheme dictated by forces beyond his control.

As we all know by heart now, the thematic structure of The Wire was tragedy: whatever actions the characters took to triumph or make sure someone else fell, were, more often than not, confounded by the larger truth:  the game was rigged. There were a few villains in The Wire, I’d argue there was at least one hero, Bubbles, and most everyone else was in the gray zones between. Their moral differences and character traits served to move the story along, but few of them could be classified as heroes in the literary sense, few fought and triumphed against the larger system. Bunk and Omar had their codes, they understood the system, the game, and chose to hew to their own code of behavior, and that made them admirable, made them stand out, apart from the other poor slobs that were pawns in the hands of the gods, the post-modern institutions Simon often refers to. As for the other characters, some were fatalists, some were opportunists, some were completely unwitting, but in the grand scheme of The Wire, everyone was a just a player on the chessboard.

So, what about our soldiers, and their officers, in Generation Kill?  One of the points made by Evan Wright early on in his book, and I think we’ve seen it already in Episode 1, is that the Marine knows his place in the scheme of things, which is as a tool, a cog in a larger machine, a member of a pack — “Mission accomplishment first, then troop welfare.”  Unlike the futility experienced by our Wire characters who were pawns in a game they often didn’t understand, I would say our Marine are liberated by this, and I think that’s a key, one of them,  to our map.

Despite the “Vote Republican” bit, Wright takes pains to point out that the average Marine in his story doesn’t have, or doesn’t care as much as you or I do about, a political point of view, doesn’t expect to be respected by the Commander in Chief, doesn’t care that yeah, they’re probably fighting for oil and the corporate state. They aren’t anti-heroes, they are following a wholly different script and tradition.  Their individual characters and morality don’t matter as much as being good Marines.  Their identity is as part of a larger whole, like individual body parts (speaking of Deadwood), they are members dependent on the larger body, even meaningless without it.

Or not.  As stated, they are liberated by the framework, and are rewarded. That liberation and reward is enjoyed by the individual actor and motivates them. In addition to the romance of battle, to the festival of testosterone, they get to break the ultimate taboo: kill other humans.  They are allowed license the rest of society isn’t.  “Allowed” isn’t even accurate. They are encouraged, honed, trained, to do all these things. In return, they fall in line and set aside their own wills. For the most part. Even if they are well-practiced in setting those selves aside, they aren’t truly separate from those individual selves, those men, those boys, with their backgrounds and beliefs.

And here is the dramatic tension of Generation Kill. Events will happen, we’ve already seen many small ones, and one major one (the “unsurrendering” of the deserting Iraqi soldiers) and individuals will make choices, will question the system and its hierarchies, will act apart from the whole, will question the larger body. And our “road movie” takes a different route. Does heroism lie in surrendering their selves to the whole, or in asserting themselves against it? Is heroism even relevant, or just an outmoded construct?

I’m not sure this is a helpful framework to look at the series as a whole, or to extrapolate out beyond the individual soldiers, beyond the troops, to the masters of war that took us into Iraq, but it’s the direction I found myself taking, on the bridge between The Wire and  Generation Kill.  Your thoughts and feedback, like-minded or divergent, are welcome.

Finally, sorry for the lack of posts. Team NuPac isn’t as well-organized right now as you might think. The encryption codes are screwed up and we’re all out of batteries.

This is not the most elegant of first posts, because I still have this big long thing I keep shuffling around and it will likely not get finished, much less posted, until late tonight.

This is the drive-by placeholder, also an invitation for everyone else to jump in at their own level of confusion or clarity.  Probably best to start with an open thread first anyway.

Okay, reading the book helped,  but partly because I probably didn’t retain enough, and partly because the experience of moving through the show narrative is much more demanding, I found myself struggling between the need to open the book up for reference  and the desire to just float along on the rushing current of the show and fill in the blanks later. I chose the latter.

First thing, it was good, it was worth the wait, and even more engaging than I anticipated,  in a way the book wasn’t  (for me).  I’m not a military buff, it’s largely a foreign planet to me, I don’t have a lot of war narratives under my belt. As I read the book, I struggled with keeping the characters straight, not to mention their rank and their relationships with each other, official and non.  Watching characters portrayed by actors was much easier, and for me at least, helped the narrative flow. In addition, this was probably where I saw the most recognizable Simon/Burns signature thus far, that strength of theirs when introducing  a large cast in a short amount of time.

Mostly though, even after twice through, I’m still in the immersion phase. Overall, the main thing that I was struck by repeatedly as I watched last night —and I find this immensely fucking exciting— is how dense and rich the narrative structure is, how much we have to pay attention to in order to understand what’s happening.  There’s dialogue and characterization, sure.  But we get put on watch immediately that all our senses are going to be needed to really get this, which is good, since there’s a cubic shitload of information flying toward us, seemingly unfiltered (though of course, very carefully so), and it’s all meant to tell us what’s really going down. On re-viewing the second time, it’s immediately obvious the opening sequence is a war game,  because it’s too quiet, too orderly, too understandable and logical to be real.

What did that dude on the radio say?  And who was it that said it? Echo Five Charlie?  Who the fuck is that? Why’d they pick up that gun, not the big one?   Oh, this must not be that dangerous, no one is wearing helmets. What is that they yell so everyone knows to put on their masks and mopp suits?  Etc, etc.

It seemed obvious that the show had to begin before the introduction of Wright’s character, and I dug the way the narrative and the new characters and situations were layered up, also where they broke the first episode, basically at the “We are not in fucking Kansas anymore, and you, Toto, are just lucky you didn’t get your ass shot.”

More later. Have some skittles, we’ll be here a while.

UPDATED:  crickets….crickets.  You don’t post, you don’t comment… hello, is this thing on?

From NOLA.com:

“Treme,” named after the iconic New Orleans neighborhood where many musicians live, will marry one of television’s most prestigious networks with creator David Simon, one of television’s hottest series masterminds.

Simon created HBO’s the “The Wire,” which just completed a five-year run. While not a huge ratings success for the network, “The Wire” was one of the most critically acclaimed shows in television history.

Simon confirmed that HBO will film the first episode of “Treme,” possibly sometime later this year. If HBO gives the green light for more episodes, production would resume in 2009.

Yessssssssssss.

UPDATE: Simon says Bunk’s in.