Anyone else ever been in Thailand or Vietnam? You ever do any shopping over there, in the street markets or anywhere, you're gonna hear this phrase: "same same but different." Meaning "This is basically like the thing you were just looking at, except it's more like what you want," -- even, of course, if it's not.
We've come to the conclusion that Generation Kill is kinda like that: each successive episode a broad recapitulation of the themes and predicaments and characterizations of the previous one -- waiting on bridges, waiting for supplies, waiting for the brass to do something idiotic -- but with each successive episode the pattern is tweaked a bit, the stakes are raised higher, the hole is dug a little deeper, bringing the series closer and closer to... Well, to the end that we've come to simultaneously fear and desire, and a moment that only truly works if the story is told by slow degrees: the moment that one of the men of the First Reconnaissance Battalion realizes that the war in Iraq has been a mistake.
We fear seeing this moment, of couse, because we've grown to admire the men of the First Reconnaissance Battalion, and the hundreds of thousands of manhours they've put into their effort; and yet we want to see this moment because, it's increasingly clear, it might well be the only cathartic thing possible in this story.
Are we gonna ever actually get a moment like that? Who can say. (We could, perhaps, if we'd ever gotten around the reading the book! It's been sitting on our shelf for months...) Sure, Iceman, Fick, and the rest have demonstrated their dissension, even derision, of their commanding officers and the orders they give. But no one's implied yet that the entire effort was a bad idea. That is, until last night, with the discovery of an insurgent who had come to Iraq only days after the invastion to fight the Americans. The looks on Fick's face as he realized the war was attracting terror, not vanquishing it, or in Iceman's as another innocent Iraqi was killed at a roadblock, were in their small way, the first time that any of these guys have to come to know (or perhaps admit) what we already know about those days in March 2003.
It's a canny strategy, one that confounds and rewards our narrative expectations all at once -- and, we're sure you've noticed, very similar to the approach writer/producers David Simon and Ed Burns used in The Wire: noble, hardworking, flawed people, working towards an impossible goal and, in ways over which they have no control, failing. Whether it's the war on drugs or the war in Iraq, if there's a better way to illustrate the whole "love the soliders, hate the war" scenario, we've never seen it.
Generation Kill ends two weeks from last night. In our minds, we've pictured its final few moments unspooling like Kids or The Candidate: the off-hand, candid question that brings the whole enterprise into sharp, tragic focus. But that's in our mind, in the part of our brain that likes neat endings. The rest of our brain just wants to know that all those kids got out of there OK, because in terms of a happy ending, that's pretty much the most we could hope for.
