The American Spectator

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One Marine tells Wright that being together with his comrades is the best part about the war. Their elite fraternity is hyper-male and joyously profane. Generation Kill's Marines will make you laugh out loud many times, sometimes against your better nature. A camp chaplain remarks at some point that the men are among the most crude and foul-mouthed he has ever ministered to. Colbert and Person supply some of the most amusing moments. Both men detest country music, and at one point Person says that when Baghdad falls, "Lee Greenwood is going to parachute in, singing 'I'm Proud to be an American.'" When the two turn to mocking Aaron Tippin's "Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagles Fly," Colbert says, "That song is straight homosexual country music, Special Olympics-gay." This is some of their more family-friendly dialogue.

IF WRIGHT'S INSTINCTS AS A REPORTER seldom fail, his insights as a writer sometimes do. At the end of the book, he suggests that the Marines lack moral qualms about the people they have killed. Yet his book, which features numerous incidents in which the Marines kill unarmed Iraqi civilians in the fog of war or confusion about the military's changing rules of engagement, also contains numerous expressions from those Marines of remorse and reflection.

"That dude I saw crawling last night, I shot him in the grape," [the head], says one Marine. "Saw the top of his head bust off. That didn't feel good. It makes me sick." Another continues to question his killing of three Iraqis who turned out to be unarmed, and a third rages over the numbers of civilians they have killed, and at George Bush "for getting us into this bitch." And many members of First Recon get involved in efforts to save a Bedouin boy they shoot accidentally. For all of the bravado the men display, maimed or dead civilians arouse consistent expressions of regret. It's odd to read Wright's suggestion that there is no remorse; it seems almost as if he wrote that sentence after he had been away from the men awhile, after his identification with them had dissipated. The civilian world has a fog of its own.

Another odd note is Wright's title, which seems to promise a book about a group of Americans unlike any other, fighting a war unlike any that preceded it. In this, and fortunately only in this, the book is reminiscent of the worst tendencies of the Vietnam literature. But what resonates again and again in Generation Kill is that the Marines are not so different from the men who have preceded them: more cynical, perhaps, more attuned to the impersonal machinations of governments, as Wright notes. Yet underneath their updated slang and hip irony, the voices of these Marines are familiar. Generation Kill sets a high standard for the growing Iraq literature, but like any worthwhile account it speaks beyond its moment to the larger theme of men in war -- any men, any war.

topics:
Books, Military, Iraq