Blindspot & Generation Kill

Thank goodness for them both, as I've been down with a nasty flu since Friday. Which means I've been missing so much good music with all the artists in town for APAP for the last few days, and for Globalfest, which has been this weekend. Tonight the musicians from New Orleans are killing everybody for the second time at Sullivan Hall. First a reception with New Orleans pies and gumbo. Vaquero was given a table for his friends -- and our 15-year-old friend's dad already wrote the note of excuse for school tomorrow, because no way is either musician dad or his son gonna miss this chance to hear Big Sam's Funky Nation in person. Vaquero sent 15-year-old friend some MP3s of Big Sam's a while back and the guy's not stopped listening ever since. But I? I am reduced to sniveling in bed with my heating pad and bed tray, and the magic chicken-vegetable-New Mexico chili stew that make and which cures everyone else except me almost instantly. Waaaaa.

Blindspot (2008) is a first novel, an historical, written by two historians, who both are deeply cognizant of 18th C America, Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore (her history, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2005) is also in the house, though Vaquero is reading it first). Kamensky is chair of the Brandeis History Dept., while Lepore is Chair of the History and Literature program at Harvard. The novel looks delicious. The back jacket where all the blurbs are aggregated, include blurbs from everyone who is Anyone in the 18th century, from Samuel Johnson to "John PUFF, the prolific author of very many eighteenth century blurbs." The authors are in no way lacking in a sense of the comic, nay, even the absurd, when that sentiment is called for.

Another form of history: Evan Wright's Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War (2004). Wright was the Rolling Stone journalist embedded with the 1st Recon Marines battalion. He mounted up with Bravo Company's second platoon, riding in Team One's Humvee, behind Team Leader, the Iceman (Brad Colbert). Their previous tour was Afghanistan.

1st Recon was the spearhead of the March 2003 invasion in many ways, and the first to enter Baghdad. Generation Kill is the story of that as seen from the unarmored Humvee Wright rode in, sitting behind Colbert, for a month, on their way, as well as in their holes, the mud, the sandstorms, the firestorms, and all the rest these elite legal killers need to put up with for the joy of killing (I'm only sayin' what they say). 1st Recon is the Marine elite, or -- the U.S. military's shock troops, 374 marines all together, are all men -- women aren't allowed into this. The three companies we are following consist of 160 men (Alpha, Bravo and Charlie platoons). They are in their late teens, early 20's. Plus all the service, supply and others support sectors.

Wright's dedication reads: "To The Warriors of Hitman-2 and Hitman-3: "The strength of the Pack is the Wolf." This second line is from Kipling, of course, The Jungle Books, whose human center is a feral boy brought up by wolves in the Indian jungle. These marines are boys too. Sort of. Or maybe, as they like to believe at least, they are pure distilled men-- yes, male, not humanity including women, but men.

This was published initially in 3 parts in Rolling Stone. The Simon-Burns team made it into a mini series for HBO. There are some significant differences between Wright's book and the HBO Generation Kill. I spent some time a while back trying to learn what others who were part of the invasion of Iraq, other marines, other military, thought of the book and of the series.

Despite criticism, which seems to come mostly from people who were not there, were not marines, or are retired, as far as I can discern, Wright is an excellent journalist and the reader can trust his reporting of what he saw. One sign of his excellence is how he's hardly in the book, and though he's a character in the series (not played by himself, though a couple of the guys from the platoon play themselves), he so effaces himself, that though you see him on the screen he's hardly there.

Others, elsewhere in the line, sometimes saw something else, or saw what was seen differently.

Wars and battles are chaos, by definition. Wright saw only what he could see, just as the warriors in Bravo saw only what they saw, knew only what they were told -- and they weren't told much, it appears, both by f*ck-up and by design. Also, in any operation in the Iraq desert, the conditions of the geography and the weather, made seeing most of the time as limited as it was in battle of the Napoleonic era. High tech devices that are supposed to transcend such limitations didn't work because of atmospheric conditions, because the supply chief didn't bring the right batteries or any batteries, because the necessary lube wasn't brought (even for the weapons! -- and wtf! sending these guys out in forward ops with unarmed Humvees, which they had not been trained to drive and had never driven before -- the gunner stands in the open -- sheee-it!), because every group has their own encryption codes, and their com devises were all mutually inpenetrable (like what happened at the Two Towers with the cops and the firefighters -- and that still isn't fixed, anymore than this was fixed in the military). Much friendly fire.

The HBO series was brilliiant television -- with one caveat -- they filmed in Africa, and fellas, you cannot substitute Africans for the inhabitants of Iraq and not have an audience notice that these people are not Iraqis, but indeed, they are Africans. I noticed and went wtf? before I learned that indeed this wasn't the Middle East, as I suspected from some of the landscapes and the urban area architecture, and then by looking at the people, I knew this wasn't the Middle East. Really, no one would have expected them to film in Iraq. But I'd assumed initially this was in Kuwait or at least North Africa somewhere. Nope, very far from there. At least I know when what I'm told I'm seeing isn't what I am seeing. That's reassuring. That's why the neocons and such ilk hate me so much, no doubt. Dawg, I'm hard to fool.

However brilliant as television, the HBO series is a fictionalized version of Wright's book. The differences sometimes are subtle, and sometimes broad. If you watch the series you owe it to First Recon to read Wright's book too.