Comrades in Chaos, Invading Iraq

The mini-series “Generation Kill” documents the profane, and sometimes profound, experiences of an elite Marine reconnaissance battalion leading the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

Restraint can be as important to a serious television drama as it is to art collecting or the dinner table. Particularly when the subject is as raw as war, sentimentality or florid emotionalism can offend and even repel viewers. Its exercise can be a sign of respect and sensitivity, but it can also seem smug, a veiled form of one-upmanship.

“Generation Kill,” an HBO seven-part mini-series about the invasion of Iraq that begins on Sunday, is bold, uncompromising and oddly diffident. It maintains impeccable dignity even as it tracks a group of shamelessly and engagingly profane, coarse and irreverent marines, members of an elite reconnaissance battalion that spearheaded the invasion. The odyssey of these men from training tents in Kuwait to occupied Baghdad is laid out with brutal candor and without the aid of maudlin cinematography or emotive music. The closest thing to a thematic score is the starched, staticky clatter of radio traffic: “Roger that” and “This is Hit Man II, over.”

It is a true story of combat and male bonding, but it is told disjointedly and atonally, perhaps because it pursues clashing goals. “Generation Kill” tries to honor the ordeal — and the humanity — of its heroes while exposing the futility of their quest. It was written by David Simon and Ed Burns, the team behind “The Wire,” and was adapted from the prizewinning book by Evan Wright, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone who was embedded with Bravo Company for the duration of the assault.

The script is faithful to Mr. Wright’s account, respectful of the soldiers he befriended and as opaque and ascetic as “The Wire,” an opus that forced viewers to parse multiple plots and a huge cast of characters without directions or subtitles.

The main people in “Generation Kill” are numerous and hard to distinguish, and even the most basic story lines are blurry and difficult to follow. It’s as if the creators wanted to resist any comparison to HBO’s classic World War II series “Band of Brothers,” by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. That could stem from a desire to stake out a different kind of wartime storytelling. But it is also a way to avoid condoning or romanticizing a war that most Americans no longer view as necessary, or even wise.

Yet no matter how flat or diffuse its affect, “Generation Kill” is at its best a tale of battle-forged camaraderie, a “Band of Brothers” set not at Agincourt or Normandy, but Iraq in 2003.

Mr. Wright’s opening conceit in the book, and it is an understandable one, is that these highly trained troops, raised on hip-hop, video games and “South Park,” are somehow a different species from the men who fought in World War II and even Vietnam. He describes them as the disenfranchised orphans of a post-Monicagate society, a generation desensitized to violence, captive to pop culture and more disaffected from authority. “Culturally, these marines would be virtually unrecognizable to their forebears in the ‘Greatest Generation,’ ” Mr. Wright wrote in his prologue.

It’s a different war, but warriors don’t change that much from one conflict to the next. The men who fought at Guadalcanal and the Battle of the Bulge would probably feel right at home.

The first episode opens with marines training in the desert of Kuwait, practicing martial arts, insulting one another with crude, lewd racial slurs and gay-bashing jokes, mocking pious letters from schoolchildren, reading skin magazines and waiting restlessly for war to start. They are preoccupied not with the latest BBC reports, but with rumors that Jennifer Lopez, or as they refer to her, J. Lo, has been killed. Mostly they grouse about idiocy up the ranks, the generals and politicians who sent them into combat with shortages and inappropriate equipment (including woodland camouflage for a desert war) and absurd grooming standards — basically an updated version of Bill Mauldin’s World War II grunts and dogfaces.

It takes a while, but two men in First Recon’s Bravo Company emerge as the Willie and Joe of “Operation Iraqi Freedom”: Sgt. Brad Colbert (Alexander Skarsgard), known as Iceman, a lean, tautly disciplined and laconic team leader, and his driver, Cpl. Josh Ray Person (James Ransone), who is small, wiry and relentlessly chatty. Amped up on the ephedra-based stimulant Ripped Fuel, Ray entertains — and irritates — his comrades with nonstop George Carlin-like riffs about their mission, the Iraqi people and the real instigators of the war. (Starbucks is one. The North American Man/Boy Love Association, Nambla, is another.) The men sarcastically sing Avril Lavigne songs, and read Hustler and Noam Chomsky.

Brad and Ray, veterans of Afghanistan, remain cool and even sardonic under fire and show contempt for less sanguine officers who panic and holler.

Mostly they and their brethren pride themselves on being professional killers, eager to fire their weapons and in their Marine-barracks parlance, “get some.” They complain about their deprivations and boast about the Recon marine’s ability to make do without. “See, the Marine Corps is like America’s little pit bull,” Ray explains to the Rolling Stone reporter (Lee Tergesen). “They beat us, starve us, and once in a while they let us out to attack somebody.”

It is in keeping with the series’s sense of propriety that Mr. Wright’s tale is never about Mr. Wright. The reporter is in the lead Humvee on all the missions but remains a self-effacing minor character, not a star.

“Generation Kill” avoids cheesy cinematic clichés, but some are unavoidable simply because they are true. As in every platoon in every classic war movie, this one is a cultural collision of archetypes: the Southern hick, the Los Angeles gangbanger, the Dartmouth graduate and even a New Age and fitness nut who wants to move to San Francisco because he says there are no fat people there.

Under the leadership of Lt. Nathaniel Fick (Stark Sands), a courteous platoon commander who gets in trouble for questioning inane orders from his superiors, Bravo fights the enemy while dodging the mistakes and personality disorders of officers. The worst include Captain America, a souvenir-obsessed hysteric, and Encino Man, a huge and dangerously dimwitted former football star favored by the battalion’s ambitious and at times reckless commander, Lt. Col. Stephen Ferrando (Chance Kelly), known as Godfather because of his raspy voice, a result of throat cancer.

Brad and his team are intent on avoiding civilian casualties, but they abound: a shepherd and his camel, shot by a trigger-happy 19-year-old lance corporal; an Iraqi driver who didn’t understand the warning shots fired from a Marine checkpoint; a hamlet of women and children obliterated by a bomb.

Avoidable civilian casualties are unavoidable in any war. “Generation Kill” also highlights the collateral wrongs that are specific to this conflict — early harbingers of a quagmire yet to come.

Marines look on helplessly as Baghdad is looted and children succumb to disease and chaos. The men find a wallet on an enemy fighter that identifies the man as a young Syrian who wrote the word “jihad” on his entry papers. “This is the opposite of what we want,” Lieutenant Fick tells the reporter. “Two weeks ago he was still a student in Syria. He wasn’t a jihadist until we came to Iraq.”

“Generation Kill,” which has a superb cast and script, provides a searingly intense, clear-eyed look at the first stage of the war, and it is often gripping. But like a beautiful woman who swathes herself in concealing clothes and distracting hats, the series fights its own intrinsic allure.

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