Unlike previous depictions of the US in Iraq ‘Generation Kill’s ability to capture the dilemmas of modern soldiering stands out

Erasmus once wrote that “dulce bellum inexpertis” - war is delightful to those who have no experience of it. Former President George Bush’s now somewhat moribund ‘Global War on Terror’ was experienced largely by volunteer soldiers and the civilians of Afghanistan and Iraq. Generation Kill is the dramatization of these soldier stories as they fight their way into Iraq in 2003.

As with the excellent ‘Blackwatch’ production, ‘Generation Kill’ is translated to western audiences through the reporting of embedded ‘Rolling Stones’ magazine correspondent Evan Right. The use of a journalist as a storyteller and the casting of former soldiers as characters in the drama highlight how the military fraternity have a culture and customs that are considerably distinct from their civilian counterparts.

 At its core Generation Kill is a story about young men entering a country they know little to nothing about. As one Marine takes pot shots at a suspected Iraqi RPG team another ponders how ‘old’ Iraq is. Indeed as Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter also embedded with the US invasion force, described in his book “The Forever War”; “for many Iraqis, the typical nineteen-year-old army corporal from South Dakota was not a youthful innocent carrying America’s goodwill; he was a terrifying combination of firepower and ignorance”.

Generation Kill’s Marine Battalion had only one interpreter who was instructed to put a positive spin on all conversations with Iraqis. With no ability to properly communicate with Iraqis, inaccurate intelligence as to who was and was not the enemy and loose rules of engagement set by a commander looking to obtain kudos for his unit – deadly mistakes were guaranteed to occur. Generation Kill is very clear that the issue was not with the Marines being bad people or bad soldiers, but the very basic contradiction in that they were there to fight a war and what they got was a counterinsurgency.

The recently released ‘US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual’ states on its back cover that in 2003 ‘most Army officers knew more about the US Civil War than they did about counterinsurgency.

As General Petraeus regularly explained within a counterinsurgency winning the population is critical. The new field manual instructs that “the civilian population is the center of gravity – the deciding factor in the struggle”. Generation Kill shows how the invasion got this very wrong by focusing on destroying an enemy that had already largely fled. At one point after coming under sporadic fire from a town the Marine commander orders in artillery strikes much to the disgust of his men. As the all too familiar pillars of smoke started to billow from the town a Marine mused – “I don’t know if this is good karma – that could have been the bad guys or it could have been a school”.

Another episode sees an assault on an airport where in a bid to get there quickly the area is designated a ‘free fire zone’ and all Iraqis in it hostile – tragedy quickly occurs when a family of Bedouin and their camels are raked with machine gun fire.

At a Chatham House talk in 2008 Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski outlined how we live in an era where it is easier to kill a million people than to control them. Generation Kill shows how the military has to accept a modicum of imperfect security in order to win the hearts and minds of the civilian population from which an insurgency grows its strength. Prefect security from opponents who fight with asymmetrical weapons – i.e weapons of the weak whether they may be homemade rockets, suicide attacks or improvised explosive devices is impossible. This is simply because seeking absolute security for one almost always comes at the expense of the other whose reaction in turn once again jeopardizes that security.