Yet another one of the books to come out of the Iraq War, Generation Kill was written by an embedded journalist who observed the early days of the invasion, and it was very interesting to read at the time. I thought I’d re-read it, since I seem to be reading a lot of war books at the moment. Generation Kill was also one of the first books to be published about the war, when things were very different, and it definitely shows in parts. Sometimes it feels almost naive, and at other times eerily prescient.

Personally, I found War Reporting for Cowards a better book. In Generation Kill, it felt like Wright was trying a little too hard to be one of the boys, and it’s kind of jarring. At times, the line seems to blur, and it makes it kind of hard to respect Wright as a journalist, because it seems like any hope at neutrality was compromised when he started pointing M-4s out the windows of humvees.

That said, it was still interesting to get a sense of what the invasion was like from the front lines. One thing Wright really stressed was that the Marines in the invasion were not used very effectively; they were asked to do things they weren’t trained to do, for example, and they were used largely as an experiment in a new kind of rapid warfare. While it’s good to adapt tactics to the changing nature of war, Generation Kill illustrated some of the serious problems with trying techniques out in the battlefield without providing adequate training.

The book also discussed the issue of insurgency, although insurgent activity wasn’t quite as big of an issue when the book was published. However, there were several interesting sections on the difficulty in fighting an enemy which hides among the people, making it hard to tell the difference between combatants and civilians. Wright witnessed some definitely ethical questionable things, and I have to give him props for writing about them. Something tells me the Pentagon may not have been too happy with this book.

The marketing copy for Generation Kill makes it out to be some kind of adventure/thriller, but it’s actually a very disquieting and sad book, when one is able to look beyond Wright’s somewhat flip writing style. I think that it’s also all the more thought-provoking to read in hindsight, five years after the invasion, when all of the careless asides about roadside bombs, religious tensions, and insurgents suddenly seem much more important.

Demographics:

Generation Kill, by Evan Wright. Published 2004, 320 pages. History.