Generation Kill is about the young men sent to fight their nation's first open-ended war since Vietnam. Despite the flurry of media images to come of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, you have never really met any of these people, who serve as front-line troops. For whatever reason, the media simply doesn't get them. As we all know, news accounts of the last two wars focused almost exclusively on battlefield imagery of high-tech weapons wreaking astounding destruction, comply with analysis from retired army grandees and other experts, punctuated by the odd heart-warming patriotic sound-bite. The troops themselves play a role in the media's presentation of recent wars rather like extras in The Triumph of the Will. They are everywhere yet somehow invisible. When they speak you get the sense that what they are saying has been carefully scripted. Now Generation Kill tells the soldiers' story in their own words.The narrative focuses on a platoon of 23 marines, many of them veterans of Afghanistan, whose elite reconnaissance unit spearheaded the blitzkrieg on Iraq. This is the story of young men that have been trained to become ruthless killers. It's about surviving death. It's about taking part in a war many questioned before it even began.Evan Wright was the only reporter with First Recon, which operated well ahead of most other forces, usually behind enemy lines. They were among the first marines sent into the fight and one of the last units still engaged on the outskirts of Iraq, even after the city centre fell. Generation Kill is not just a combat chronicle but an inside look at how people fighting in war actually experience it. It is both an action narrative like Black Hawk Down and a detailed portrait of a generation at war along the lines of Band of Brothers. It is not a book you are going to forget in a hurry...
Another nameless town, another target for First Recon.It's only five in the afternoon, but a sandstorm has plunged everything into a hellish twilight of murky, red dust.On rooftops, in alleyways lurk militiamen with machine guns, AK rifles and the odd rocket-propelled grenade.Artillery bombardment has shattered the town's sewers and rubble is piled up in lagoons of human excrement.It stinks.Welcome to Iraq...
First Recon are the special forces of the US Marine Corps, a lean, mean fighting machine trained to perfection and spoiling for action.This is their story as they spearhead the blitzkrieg on Iraq - a story of extreme bravery, borderline lunacy, touching camaraderie and breathtaking violence on the road to Baghdad.
First Recon's thankless task is to race ahead of the main coalition forces to spring enemy ambushes, earning them the nickname 'First Suicide Battalion'.Generation Kill allows an intimate look at how people fighting in war actually experience it, as the voices of soldiers on the front line are heard for the first time.
'Easily the best book on the Iraq war so far. A deeply disturbing, compulsively readable narrative offering profound insights into the lives of America's young soldiers'
New Statesman
