Generation Kill. While I can’t know how accurate or biased it ultimately is, it gave me a much more visceral appreciation for the kind of decisions a combatant has to make, and how many of the seeming stupidities of war arise as a result of perfectly rational decisions from the various actors based on the information they have available. While I’ve long had an anti-war tilt, this gave me a new appreciation for how hard some goals (e.g. low civilian casualties) might be to achieve, and what some of the tradeoffs are. The psychology of the often strikingly young Marines—insightful on some subjects, simplistic on others—was also fascinating.
The book is better than the HBO series, but both are very much written from a noncombat perspective and have a number of limitations because of that. If you enjoyed it, I’d strongly recommend trying to track down a copy of One Bullet Away.
Have done so, found it much less illuminating tbh. Fick makes it all sound normal—I assume because to him it is. Wright has an outsider’s perspective and so is more able to highlight the quirks, the absurdities, the parts that make the Marines very different from your typical corporation.
Generation Kill. While I can’t know how accurate or biased it ultimately is, it gave me a much more visceral appreciation for the kind of decisions a combatant has to make, and how many of the seeming stupidities of war arise as a result of perfectly rational decisions from the various actors based on the information they have available. While I’ve long had an anti-war tilt, this gave me a new appreciation for how hard some goals (e.g. low civilian casualties) might be to achieve, and what some of the tradeoffs are. The psychology of the often strikingly young Marines—insightful on some subjects, simplistic on others—was also fascinating.
The book is better than the HBO series, but both are very much written from a noncombat perspective and have a number of limitations because of that. If you enjoyed it, I’d strongly recommend trying to track down a copy of One Bullet Away.
Have done so, found it much less illuminating tbh. Fick makes it all sound normal—I assume because to him it is. Wright has an outsider’s perspective and so is more able to highlight the quirks, the absurdities, the parts that make the Marines very different from your typical corporation.