There’s a scene in the first episode of the 2006 HBO drama series Generation Kill when a Rolling Stone reporter arrives in the tent of the US marines he’s about to embed with. They haze him, his bed space filled with rats as the grunts lambast his liberal ideas.
“It could be worse,” he shrugs. “I used to write for Hustler.” And just like that, they accept him, eagerly asking questions about the porn magazine with the same reverence Bob Woodward gets at Manhattan soirees.
The journalist, played by Lee Tergesen, is Evan Wright, the Rolling Stone writer whose death, aged 59, last week was ruled as suicide by the Los Angeles County medical examiner. Wright’s eponymous 2004 book – about his time embedded with US Marine Corps’ 1st Reconnaissance Battalion during the 2003 invasion of Iraq – was adapted by David Simon and Ed Burns as they delivered the final season of The Wire. It’s one of the best TV dramas of the 21st century in its ambitious blend of scale and intimacy. It has the heart and soul of a great war movie, and came at a time when America still considered the 2003 invasion to be a success.
“It’s the piece I’ve done that most closely resembled our intentions,” David Simon explains over Zoom from a white-walled room in his Baltimore home. “We had ideas and themes rooted in Evan’s journalism, things that Ed wanted to say being a veteran of Vietnam, and things I felt about war as a flawed instrument to try to rectify wrongs. You’re always measuring the finished product against your intentions and you’re lucky you hit 90 per cent. With Generation Kill, everything was perfect.”
Simon was so obsessed with detail and mood that the show has no music soundtrack beyond the marines singing – episodes are littered with a capella versions of everything from Avril Lavigne’s Sk8er Boi to My Cherie Amour by Stevie Wonder. The closing credits play over radio chatter which he had actual recon marines re-record in the studio when they were editing the show.
Simon also asked Wright to work on the script with him, moving to Baltimore and bringing in all of his notebooks to pull out details that hadn’t made the books or his articles. There they found some of the sharpest lines in the show – including, in the final episode, where a US sniper takes out a passing civilian by mistake. “Too bad,” says one grunt. “He would have really liked democracy.”
“These guys were good at their jobs and Evan didn’t mistake that for the war being good,” he explains. “He was interested in middle management in the decisions of command – the sergeants and the lieutenants. That really corresponded to the way we worked on The Wire – how do human beings in an institution under pressure respond? That’s the drama.”
Generation Kill – named after the recon marine’s tradition of screaming “kill” when replying in the affirmative – follows Bravo Company, 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, from their restless days in Camp Matilda, Kuwait, before the invasion, through the surreal shock and awe of the advance on Baghdad to the dawning realisation that taking the capital is just the beginning of a long, drawn-out war of attrition.
As he travelled with the marines, Wright was as interested in the lack of sleep, the superstitions about specific brands of sweets, the absence of information, commanders’ petty incompetence and the carefully chosen best times to run out of the Humvee to take a dump as he was in the extreme violence they mete out.
The show captures that by cutting between handheld up-close camera work in the Humvee with controlled static shots of the vastness of the hostile landscape, the show is filled with discreet references to the history of epic war films and the epic nature of history itself. The opening few seconds where four Humvees appear out of the desert heat haze, for instance, was modelled on David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, with director Susanna White putting gas burners in front of the camera to create the blur of shimmering heat.
“I’d come out of documentaries and period drama, and this was the first action drama I’d ever done,” White explains over the phone. “When I met David and Evan the fact I’d directed Dickens made David happy. He’s a big Dickens fan. I told them I saw the lead Humvee as being like a family on a road trip, which got me the job. That was exactly the way they’d written it.”
Simon, Burns and Wright saw the lead Humvee’s crew – Alexander Skarsgård as the supremely confident sergeant Brad “Iceman” Colbert, James Ransome as mouthy driver Josh Pearson, Billy Lush as the trigger-happy Harold Trombley, Pawel Szajda’s turret gunner Walt Hasser, and Lee Tergesen as Wright – as dad, mum and the kids in the back. “We realised we had a very strange family road-trip into Baghdad,” Simon explains. “It grounded the story in something everyone knows.”
The strangest and strongest casting was sergeant Rodolfo “Rudy” Reyes, who played himself. Reyes is an orphan, the son of a marine, who joined the marines during the Kosovo war when he saw an orphanage under fire and considered it his dharma to protect them.
“When we were seeing actors to play Rudy we could not find anyone,” White recalls. “He’s like a unicorn. There is no one else in the world like him. During a sniper scene I asked what he would really do as a sniper spotter. He said, ‘It’s embarrassing, I lie almost on top of him, and we have to breathe together.’ So we shot that. I asked what he did after, and he said he prayed for what he’d just done. So we filmed that too.”
I relay her comments to Reyes – he now runs Force Blue Team, an environmental charity using special forces veterans to help protect and rebuild coral reefs (as well as being a trainer on Channel 4’s Celebrity SAS). “Amen to that brother, she is a wise woman,” he laughs. “I was not expecting to be in the show and found this completely ambivalent camera that doesn’t care about your emotions or beliefs to be really hard work. But they kept me in my natural element – leading and practising martial arts and yoga and weapons drills.”
Reyes ran a boot camp for the actors in Namibia. “It was fundamental in bringing us together,” Lush tells me from Los Angeles. “Running, wrestling, I was not in good shape, but they couldn’t make me tap out in the fighting. It ended with a mock mission – but it ended a little early because some actors were complaining it was too hard.”
Perhaps that’s why the show feels so real. It’s not, as Simon points out, an anti-war drama. “It’s about the miscalculation behind and the blunt instrument that is war,” he explains. “But it’s also about the effect of war on young men and how it always manages to entrance a certain cohort of young males. If you set off to make the most anti-war film possible it ends up being exhilarating. War is heedlessly, and maybe disastrously, romanticised in our minds, but the bonhomie of a well-trained unit, the adrenaline of fighting and surviving – there’s no way to deny the power of that.”
But darkness shows through. When the company meets its first firefight, there’s a strange, poignant scene where a dazed marine picks through reeds as high as his head. Skarsgård watches him for a while, asks how it’s going. “They shot one of my marines in the stomach.” His eyes dart back and forth. “We returned fire, blew a donkey’s head off.” He laughs. “We didn’t see much else.” He turns back and forth, like he’s looking for something but can’t remember what it is. Skarsgård asks if he needs anything. “It’s all good, bro,” the marine says, and wanders off.
Wright’s suicide shocked Simon. “Evan had a lot of demons – not necessarily from the war but he had PTSD from his life,” he says sadly. “He was a very feral cat – always wary. It’s a relationship that has so much to treasure – but the same things that made him a great reporter made him a pained person. His legacy is that book and what we made, which both stand as the most honest war reporting we have and will see for some time.”
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