HBO has greenlit Generation Kill

Y’all keep it up! I really liked the first episode and you guys’ respective commentaries are making me dig it even more.

-Tom

I think the show is off to a great start. Nice to see James Ransone again, too. Anybody catch Benjamin Busch? He played Colicchio in The Wire, and is/was an actual Marine.

Lizard, keep writing please.

The post-credits radio talk is the real stuff, right?

Huh, that thought never occurred to me, but it makes sense I suppose. Incidentally, there is a good glossary on HBO’s site that has definitions for all the obscure Marine vocabulary. Over five seasons of The Wire I became thoroughly acquainted with the language of West Baltimore, and in true David Simon style authenticity takes precedent over comprehensibility here as well.

EDIT: Gah, there are spoilers in the fucking glossary! Be warned.

I’ll concede the pornography point. Maybe such things were more commonplace during the current conflict.

And I was referring to how the Sgt Major sounds as opposed to his actions. Every Sgt. Major I knew did the type of enforcement you describe, but none sounded so high pitched and shrill to me in my experience.

I am referring to the HBO version of Band of Brothers and how it depicted combat. I found it to be a pretty good series in dealing with being shelled by artillery and the randomn nature of combat. Sort of on a grander scale than the Tom Hanks WWII movie.

Forgot to mention - the use of smokeless tobacco is so accurate that it caused chills, hehe. When I left the USMC and moved into my current occupation in health care, I participated in the clinical trial for the nicotene patch in order to break my smokeless tobacco habit. The tobacco is dirt cheap in the military. Too expensive for a poor graduate student in the civilian world. Plus my wife appreciated the change!

I also learned the same lesson about “dip” and gas masks that the reporter learned. Spit it out!

Just like pornography (apparently), I wrote to Coppenhagen and asked for some free dip and they sent me a case of it.

Agreed.

Thanks a ton for the post LK. Can you or someone else share/link to more chronicles of returned vets being viewed as murderous psychos?

Really? In my experience, senior enlisted (both competent and otherwise) fell into two main categories. There was the fairly reserved and outwardly professional type (not that they weren’t possibly so on the inside…you know what I mean). Then there were the kind who for whatever reason had embraced becoming caricatures of human beings, so eccentric and institutionalized that they were almost mystical phenomena, like encountering an alien. It was a testament to Marine Corps traditions, for better or worse, how those more colorful types could often flourish in senior billets.

To give you an example on the positive end, our battalion gunner (the senior enlisted “expert” on infantry weapons systems and tactics in a technical sense) had been in the Marines for going on 3 decades, and the an absurd percentage (given the Corp’s emphasis on work rotation) of that was spent deployed and in the infantry in some capacity. The phrase “going native” didn’t even apply anymore, as he’d gone native in so many places that in his fully expressed form he really only belonged in the machine that made him.

Sure, he could be found doing some of those same dick things I described before, or simply being an enforcer. But it came from a place that any Marine worth a shit would recognize was worth listening to, and you were able to draw the “attention to detail” type lesson that sort of thing is supposed to teach. It stemmed from leadership by example: you couldn’t be more Marine than that tough bastard, and his combination of experience and knowledge was the basis for the respect that allowed him to be viewed almost as a force of nature on our side. You didn’t want to be him, necessarily, but you were absolutely positive you were going to listen when he opened his mouth.

And you were going to have to, because it was likely to be an expletive-ridden, obscure turn of phrase experience that was almost a dialect apart from standard Marine jargon.

Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was different for you. No two deployments and no two units are alike.

I am referring to the HBO version of Band of Brothers and how it depicted combat. I found it to be a pretty good series in dealing with being shelled by artillery and the randomn nature of combat. Sort of on a grander scale than the Tom Hanks WWII movie.

Oh, I see. I just have a strong knee jerk to what I see as Ambrose’s lower quality works.

I wish I could be more informative on my own experiences, but most of it is the product of conjecture and I’m not really comfortable with going further than I have. From what I’ve seen, Fick’s and my experiences may not have been the larger trend, but I don’t have much of a data set to draw from.

As far as my peers who were seeking undergraduate degrees, I would say their experiences were almost the opposite. They often found schools with specifically adjusted admissions processes for their needs, particularly one of my friends who was seriously injured in the war. While the student populations were the same mixed bag they are for everyone (well, maybe a little more extreme due to what some veterans bring with them), the schools went to great lengths to accommodate them in my opinion.

So I probably should have said that at first, to avoid making it seem that I was indicting the system as a whole on those grounds. And, in the end, I’m still where I wanted to be, and Fick’s illustrious post military resume would tend to support that it works.

That’s a pretty nice description. I just never met a Sgt Major as outwardly non-professional sounding as depicted in the series. I was also an officer, so I imagine my interactions with our senior enlisted was probably different and less personal, hehe. The only caveat to that would be first my platoon sgt, then my company GYSGT, and then my company 1st SGT. That sort of interpersonal officer/senior enlisted dynamic plays out in the series when the LT and his PLT SGT both exchange advice about not using nicknames of other officers in front of the LT.

Well, that would certainly account for some of the discrepancy. It would likely play into your broader perception of what “normal” senior enlisted Marines are like. Also, some of them never leave the drill field, so to speak…that’s probably a category I’d add to the ones I listed above, since they are a pretty specific brand of the mad hatter type I described above. But that’s probably enough E9 taxonomy for today…that show temporarily shut down enough of my brain to get back into some nostalgia. At least, it had better be temporary.

Alan, you were right, it came up on On Demand the next day.

I really like what we’ve seen so far, although I wonder where the Sergeant Major thing is going. David Simon likes to point out how authority figures are incompetent and out of touch. The Sgt Maj reminds me of the editorial staff in season 5 of The Wire, and I’m not sure if that’s fair.

It was full of great lines. “I’d shoot a fuckin’ farmer.”

You are aware that while David Simon has the creative interpretation under control, the results for each character and what they say are still going to be guided by the nonfiction book on which it was based?

Of course, but the writers will be able to make the point without changing the facts of the story. I mean it probably won’t go anywhere but I was curious, given the way it reminded me of the Wire, whether they were going to frame this as another individuals vs. institutions, labour vs. management type struggle. Who knows at this point how much creative license they’re going to take?

There are some thematic similarities; both shows are about futile and misguided wars. But I give David Simon enough credit to know that he’ll tell the story that is there to be told.

I read the book last week in preparation for this mini-series. And as far as the first episode is concerned Simon/HBO have stuck very close to what’s in the book as far as scenes and dialogue - practically verbatim.

My memories are a little fuzzier since I read it like a year ago, but yeah, that’s what I was getting at. Similarities in perspective may have guided Simon’s choice of project in the first place, but I didn’t really see much in the first episode that seemed altered from what I’d imagined in the book.

Please keep up the military commentary ~!

Good second episode. Excellent use of military jargon throughout. I love how they captured the disdain front line troops have for the “rear echelon pogues (sp?)” and the stupid pro-America songs. I was at sea and a Navy supply ship played one of these songs as their breakaway song (tradition - supply ships blast a very loud song when they break away from the ship they are supplying). We were all very unimpressed at the time.

If you want to see what modern combat is like, I can’t think of a better example captured on film/video so far (other than the real thing of course).

Also, then Major Mattis was second in command of the Naval Academy Prep School when I was there, and then Colonel Mattis was in charge of infantry officer course when I was there. The actor playing General Mattis looks nothing like him, but does capture his leadership style, hehe. My brother-in-law worked for him when he was at the Pentagon before the Iraq war and has some great stories about him.