A Book Report On Evan Wright's 'Generation Kill'

Evan Wright's 'Generation Kill'
Rolling Stone journalist's account of his time embedded with US marines during the 2003 Iraq invasion - NOW A MAJOR HBO SERIES OR WHATEVER

Hyped on the cover as operating on the same level as Micheal Herr's Vietnam War record 'Dispatches' - pretty much the highest accolade anybody could apply to any work of art as far as I'm concerned - I was, perhaps inevitably, sorta disappointed with Wright's book. The publishers are right - 'Dispatches' is the bench-mark for this book, I just don't think it meets that bench-mark. It's a good book, but it ain't a permenant brainscape demolisher like 'Dispatches'.

Wright had a much tougher war to write about than Herr did, no doubt about it. Both literally and figuratively Iraq is a much drier war than Vietnam, with a much smaller palette of colour and experience for a writer to draw on. I'm not a war-freak, so when I read about 'Nam I'm reading about it in terms of social history, in terms of having some sense of what the war meant both for those fighting it in the jungle, and against it America. You cannot understand Muhammad Ali, James Brown, the Chicago riots, Kent State, the MC5, The Wild Bunch etc etc without understanding the Vietnam war. It defined the tone of western popular culture, and western popular culture defined the tone of the war. As Fancis Ford Coppolla says, 'Nam was "a rock and roll war."

The Iraq war, on the other hand, is not a 'rock and roll war' on any level - WW2 was clearly way more rock and roll than Iraq, and Richard Hooker's wonderful and vastly underrated 'M*A*S*H' makes a strong case for Korea as a pretty swinging scene. This lack of rock and rollness simply makes a story about the young men fighting the war a harder sell, particularly to somebody with my particular dumb, low-brow sensibilities. There just ain't enough kicks here - and I guess that's the point. Wright's combat troops aren't hunkered out in the field for months on end smoking drugs, preparing for the black power revolution back home and grooving to Jimi Hendrix. The troops of Wright's novel have no access to alchohol even, radical politics are nowhere to be found, and the major pop music touchstone is Avril Lavigne. Instead of actual Playboy Bunnies to entertain them, they have one copy of Playboy. Clearly the lack of an energised popular culture back home, and the political vaccum the troops appear to be operating within, is kind of the point. Like - 'at least the guys out in 'Nam had The Temptations; these guys have to make do with Avril Lavigne. It's a bunkrupt culture - what are they even fighting to defend - MTV?" There's a real blankness here, and while I appreciate this is precisely Wright's point, it doesn't make it any more satisfying to read about.

The Vietnam War has been dangerously over-fetishised in books, pop songs and movies, I suppose to an ultimately unhelpful degree...but godammit, I woulda just dug it if Wright had decided to do a little myth-making of his own. He is a Rolling Stone journalist afterall. Perhaps there just isn't the latitude, the freedom, for any journalist to do this now, and moreover, perhaps the material simply isn't there, and military-press relations are just very different today etc etc. I guess I was just left thinking...how would ol' Hunter S have faired out in Iraq? That's the story I was hoping for. Fear And Loathing In Baghdad.

"We were somewhere around Basra on the edge of the desert when the drugs started to take hold..."

The bottom line is that Iraq is either still waiting for its 'Dispatches', or else it is simply not possible to write a 'Dispatches' about Iraq, it having been fought and lived so fundementally differently to previous international conflicts invloving US troops. I'm still hoping for the former, and in the meantime, 'Generation Kill' makes for an adequate stop-gap.