YOU half expect to hear Jimi Hendrix singing “All Along the Watchtower” in this Iraq War miniseries that takes pains to equate the current war with the quagmire of Vietnam.
The producers – David Simon and Ed Burns, who made “The Wire” for HBO – would argue that they weren’t going for a Vietnam comparison at all.
They insist that all they did was make a miniseries that adheres closely to the reportage contained in a journalist’s book – “Generation Kill” by Evan Wright – about his experiences while embedded with a unit of US Marines in the opening days of the Iraq War.
And if anyone who watches the miniseries comes to the conclusion that the Iraq War it depicts resembles the Vietnam War (or, at least, the Vietnam War from movies and TV shows), then so be it.
Well, I couldn’t help myself, especially when a group of grunts in a dusty Humvee rolling toward battle in Episode 4 began singing the Country Joe and the Fish song, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” the Vietnam-era protest anthem from Woodstock with its lyrics, “And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam . . . [blah blah blah].”
Whether these marines really sang this song or not (and I suppose the producers of miniseries would insist that they did), the song is a cliché. And clichés should be avoided like the plague, as the old saying goes.
Not that I was exactly enjoying the experience of watching “Generation Kill” up to that point. (HBO provided five out of the mini’s seven episodes for preview.)
“Generation Kill” tells the story of a Marine unit – maybe a half-dozen men – and the units they traveled with in convoys toward Baghdad.
They are young men, barely out of their teens who are depicted as racists and sadists.
As for the American military, it is depicted as bureaucratic, incompetent and ill-prepared.
Believe it or not, the Iraqis fare much worse. Most of the time, they are simply cannon fodder for the Americans. They are blown up in their homes and murdered in their cars. On the other hand, an Iraqi general looks comically (and probably unintentionally) like Borat.
“Generation Kill” cost more than $50 million to make and took seven months to film in Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique.
The end result of all that effort, however, is a miniseries that’s as dull and throbbing as a severe headache.
“Generation Kill”
Sunday night at 9 on HBO