I picked up a copy of 'Generation Kill' at the thrift store the other day.
Problem - because he focuses on the Lance Corporal war he misses the grand sweep - even when he spends a few paragraphs setting the action in context it's from the Lance Corporal point of view. This is a waste, in my opinion and the book suffers for it. Heck, forget the grand sweep of the campaign - more than a few paragraphs on the how and the why of just I MEF's operations would have been fine.
Maybe he could have channeled the ghost of Cornelius Ryan for the job: if he had he would have avoided a lot of what irks me about the book.
Like this: Reporting that FLIR stands for Forward Looking Infrared Radar. Or that Second Marine Division is based on South Carolina. Calling an AK-47 a machine-gun. Describing mortars as bombs launched with rockets. That a bit of blown-up tank flew hundreds of kilometers and clonked a guy on the head.
I could not go for more than a few pages without finding something like that. And everytime I did a little voice asked me if I could really trust the rest of what he was reporting on.
An A for effort: driving in HMMWV in Iraq with those guys took a lot of balls. C- for execution.
Generation Kill is a 2004 book written by Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright chronicling his experience as an embedded reporter with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the United States Marine Corps during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His account of life with the Marines was originally published as a three-part series in Rolling Stone in the fall of 2003. "The Killer Elite", the first of these articles, went on to win a National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting in 2004. [1]
Problem - because he focuses on the Lance Corporal war he misses the grand sweep - even when he spends a few paragraphs setting the action in context it's from the Lance Corporal point of view. This is a waste, in my opinion and the book suffers for it. Heck, forget the grand sweep of the campaign - more than a few paragraphs on the how and the why of just I MEF's operations would have been fine.
Maybe he could have channeled the ghost of Cornelius Ryan for the job: if he had he would have avoided a lot of what irks me about the book.
Like this: Reporting that FLIR stands for Forward Looking Infrared Radar. Or that Second Marine Division is based on South Carolina. Calling an AK-47 a machine-gun. Describing mortars as bombs launched with rockets. That a bit of blown-up tank flew hundreds of kilometers and clonked a guy on the head.
I could not go for more than a few pages without finding something like that. And everytime I did a little voice asked me if I could really trust the rest of what he was reporting on.
An A for effort: driving in HMMWV in Iraq with those guys took a lot of balls. C- for execution.
