Reddit reviews Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Ice Man, Captain America, and the New Face of American War
We found 18 Reddit comments about Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Ice Man, Captain America, and the New Face of American War. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Push to/Battle of Badhdad: Generation Kill (The book), written by a reporter assigned to Marine Recon: https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Kill-Captain-America-American/dp/0425224740
Honest question. Not intended to offend you.
Do you have a learning impairment of some kind?
Or are you just lazy?
If you have some kind of an issue that makes it difficult for you to grasp and embrace somewhat advanced academic topics, but you really want a college degree to help you go somewhere in life, then we can help you.
But I keep reading your responses in the thread and you come across as unmotivated, disinterested and, well, lazy.
I ain't yer daddy. I'm not here to fuss at you. Actually, I'm willing to help find you an answer to your question if I can.
But my approach to trying to help will depend on your response to my question.
Before you respond though, I have a second question.
You don't seem to have the slightest idea what you want to do with your life, but you seem fairly interested in doing it with some assistance from the military.
Please permit me to offer you a suggestion that might help you stall for time before you have to answer these questions.
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The ROTC program has strict standards and some fairly lofty requirements. The military cannot tolerate junior leaders that do not have their act together.
Junior leaders are in fantastic positions with excellent opportunities to get a lot of people killed or injured in seconds.
For a good example of good v/s not-good leadership I emphatically encourage you to consume this entire mini-series Generation Kill. It's on HBO and I think Netflix. Or just get the book from the library Generation Kill or something.
Lieutenant Fick (the real person) attended Dartmouth and later wrote the book One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer. This is what a good officer looks like.
Captain America is what a bad officer looks like. He isn't completely bad. He didn't get any of his men killed directly, but it came close from time to time.
I AM NOT suggesting you might be a bad officer. I am trying to explain why ROTC and Officer Candidate School is as tough as it is.
They are working very hard to weed out and otherwise discover good v/s bad officers.
There is another path. A path with fewer risks, that might enable you to observe personal growth and self-discovery at a different pace.
The enlisted path.
Take the SAT. Take the ACT. Keep those scores in your permanent CollegeBoard profile. But take the ASVAB and enlist in the service of your choosing. Pick a job that helps provide you some useful skills. Go see the world. Go meet some new people. Then let your GI Bill pay for college after you've had 4 years of active duty service to figure out what you want to do for a living.
The Army, Navy and Air Force will all guarantee you a specific job of your choosing in a written contract.
The Marines will guarantee only that you WILL be personally challenged by your experiences. They will assign you whatever job they want you to have.
I joined the Marines back in 1989, when I was 17 years old. My parents had to co-sign my enlistment papers since I wasn't 18 yet.
I learned a lot about myself, and I had a completely new and vastly more focused view of the world when I got out.
The GI Bill will pay for 36 months of university (which covers 4 full educational years) including room & board in most cases.
The GI Bill grants you in-state consideration for all public universities in the nation. So you can attend any school anywhere you want to go to, assuming you have the academic record to be accepted.
...Just an alternate approach to your situation for you to think about.
It's actually from the title of the book the series is based on, which is surprisingly as nonpolitical as possible. It's a rather good read, if you've got the time. It's simply a first hand account of the author when he was embedded with one of the first Marine units to enter Iraq. The only social/political commentary in it is from the Marines themselves. In fact the primary focus of the book is the Marines themselves, examining them as real people. Not so much on the war really.
Civilian casualties Iraq over 10 years: No less than 200 000
Civilian casualties Afghanistan over 10 years: No less than 60 000
Regardless of what merit Obama may have or may lack, you do not speak the truth.
Judging by your unsupportable opinions I'm going to say whatever Confederate state you hail from is a greater threat to your liberty than the federal government.
Definitely Generation Kill, to look into the dynamics of modern war. It's a seriously good, impartial, truthful and entertaining account of the first stages of the second Iraq war seen from the eyes of a battalion of first recon marines. Very well written, too.
War Nerd. Gary Brecher is a tongue-in-cheek military amateur analyst. His views on modern and past warfare are very lucid, albeit controversial and leftfield. His writing style is pretty original, kinda like the Hunter Thompson of war pundits. A backlog of his articles is also available online.
Making A Killing. It's the first person account of a British private security contractor in Iraq. I was expecting the worst when I read it, but it's actually very well written, informative and entertaining. Some of the lingo and drills described in the book actually helped me understand a lot of these videos.
Das Boot is my favourite war book, and it's an embedded reporter's account of a year in a german U-boat during the second world war.
Of these projects, I most enjoyed The Wire. But it's worth evaluating each of these projects in terms of what they were trying to accomplish, since they all had different goals.
This was adapted from Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, but I don't know how much Simon worked on the show day-to-day.
This show is much more of a crime procedural than any of the other works here. And with a few notable exceptions—e.g., Luther Mahoney or Brodie—the near-exclusive default point-of-view is that of the police.
The show was groundbreaking for network TV at the time. For one thing, at least one of the main-cast characters was a cop who was an asshole and basically corrupt. This show also demonstrated that the bosses and their subordinates do not always see eye-to-eye, and not just in the "crusty-but-benign" way described in the movie Network, either. Most cop shows at the time didn't just show cops, but they identified with the cops' perspective. (This is still pretty common today.) This is legitimate, but showing that cops have human foibles which have on-the-job repercussions was taking a chance, especially for a network show at that time. And, like The Wire, it got critical acclaim but relatively small (but devoted!) audiences.
The show's style was very different from that of, say, The Wire. For example, it had a non-diegetic score and camera moves that were more likely to draw attention to themselves. H:LotS also included collaborations with Baltimore native Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana. The latter went on to create HBO's Oz, and you can see plenty of influence there from Homicide.
H:LotS was also able to attract high-level talent throughout its run. Not only was the regular and recurring cast very strong (as you'd likely expect, even without having seen a single episode), but it attracted a number of actors best known for their film work. As just one example, Robin Williams appeared in the second season premiere, playing the husband of a crime victim. Steve Buscemi played an odious racist. Arguably, though, the most memorable guest appearance was Moses Gunn as Risley Tucker, the sole suspect in the homicide of 11-year old Adena Watson. Gunn may not be a household name, but he's been in projects from the original Shaft to Roots to stage performances.
Homicide was also remarkable, especially at the time, in that it shot on location in Baltimore. (For context, consider that Vancouver (almost) never plays itself; typically, a show at the time would be shot in New York or Los Angeles, even it it's set in another city.) It also helped establish some of the vocabulary familiar to those who've watched The Wire: "the box", "the board", etc.
This was a six-part miniseries for HBO based on David Simon's book about real-life addicts and dealers. If Homicide was primarily a show from the perspective of the cops, The Corner introduced what life was really like for those who lived in places like West Baltimore.
For me, Homicide was always more stylized in its aesthetic, but more traditional in the types of stories it tried to tell. It was groundbreaking relative to other cop shows, but it still chose the cops' vantage points as the default. The Corner inverted this.
A lot of the content from The Corner will be familiar to those who've already seen The Wire. (And, conversely, those who've seen The Corner would have some useful frame of reference for the events depicted in The Wire.) One attribute The Corner clearly focused on was authenticity. Homicide was a solid show, but The Corner felt real. Much of the cast of The Corner reappears in The Wire, too. And some of the real-life people whose lives Simon chronicled in his book played minor characters on The Wire. One of the most notable examples was the late DeAndre McCullough, who played Brother Mouzone's assistant Lamar.
Again: a killer cast. A good story, well-told. And, for a change-of-pace: even some Emmy nominations and wins!
I trust you're all familiar with this, right? :)
I think having laid some groundwork with the reporting which underlay Homicide and The Corner, The Wire had the basis to be incredibly ambitious. It told stories from the perspectives of cops and dealers and dope fiends and stevedores and City Hall and newspaper newsrooms. It also had a definite point-of-view, and it was unafraid to advocate for its argument, but by showing and not merely telling. Yes, it's about all the conflict between characters on all sides of the law. But it's also making some very important arguments: the drug war is unwinnable, and the consequences of that gratuitous futility are disastrous for countless people. Deindustrialization of big cities leaves the corner as the only employer in town. Actual reform that will have any kind of substantive effect will require something other than the standard bromides that have typically gotten politicians elected and re-elected. And so on.
This is a seven-part HBO miniseries based on the book Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Ice Man, Captain America, and the New Face of American War by Evan Wright, documenting those American Marines who were the tip-of-the-spear in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As with The Corner and The Wire, this goes out of its way to convey authenticity, especially in the context of the military jargon. Oh, and you get to see Baltimore native James Ransone, who played Ziggy, as a Marine, too.
This is Simon's love letter to the city of New Orleans, set in the immediate aftermath of Hurrican Katrina. Again: a killer cast, including everyone from Clarke Peters (who played Lester) to Khandi Alexander (who played Fran Boyd on The Corner) to New Orleans native Wendell Pierce (Bunk Moreland) to John Goodman (in damn-near EVERY movie) to Stephen Colbert's bandleader Jon Batiste (as himself).
For me, Treme was solid, but it was less compelling than The Wire. A lot of the goal of Treme was to show the importance and centrality of New Orleans to American culture, in everything from music to food. For me, that case seemed secondary to the lives of the characters themselves. Many of the themes from The Wire are familiar: indifferent institutions, crime and violence, etc. But it also has some ferociously good performances, amazing music performed live, and an important reminder that life for so many in New Orleans still wasn't really "after Katrina" yet, even years after the storm, because of just how much destruction was caused all around.
Oh, and like The Wire (among others), Treme cast a lot of local New Orleans natives who lived through the storm, as well as musicians who hadn't grown up with training as actors.
The title comes from an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: "show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy". Like The Corner, this is another six-part HBO miniseries adapted from a nonfiction book. It's about a huge fight that the city of Yonkers, NY had with federal courts by resisting efforts to remedy housing segregation.
Some of the themes should be familiar: a stellar cast including Oscar Isaac, Winona Ryder (in a role I wouldn't have expected for her), Catherine Keener, Alfred Molina, and Clarke Peters (again). As you might have guessed from the quote, this story doesn't have a happy ending for everyone. The main theme is about how to do the right thing, especially as an elected official, in the face of violent opposition from much of the city, and what cost doing the right thing will entail.
This is a forthcoming David Simon series about the world around Times Square in the 1970s: pornography, just as it was becoming legalized, HIV/AIDS, drug use, and the economic conditions of the city at the time. Even if the whole team totally dropped the ball here, I'm sure this will be better than HBO's 1970s music drama Vinyl, at a minimum.
The cast includes James Franco (playing twins), Maggie Gyllenhaal, Anwan Glover (Slim Charles), Lawrence Gilliard, Jr. (D'Angelo Barksdale), Chris Bauer (Frank Sobotka), and Gbenga Akinnagbe (Chris Partlow). Oh, and the pilot is being directed by Michelle MacLaren, whose directing credits include Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and Westworld, among others.
The essence of war is chaotic. That's why they train even the simplest things over and over again. In almost all wars there is more civilian casualties than military casualties. Especially in modern warfare.
I recommend the book Generation Kill and the TV series. It's true story. TV series is one of the best ever. They drive trough desert killing tons of civilians (including women and children) by accident and rarely meeting real enemy.
>Despite initial doubts, Marine commanders later encouraged the officers of 1st Reconnaissance to read the book and the articles to get an insight into the reality of war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Kill
http://www.amazon.com/Generation-Kill-Evan-Wright/dp/0425224740
Even Wright, an embedded combat reporter during Operation Iraqi Freedom and author of Generation Kill brandished a rifle while on patrol at the request of the marines he was riding with.
It is mentioned in a Huffington Post interview:
>Did you feel useless because you couldn't fire a gun?
EW: On a human level it would have been really exciting to shoot a gun over there. I can hit a target with a rifle generally but that very different from what they do.
There's one moment that's not in the show where they handed me a weapon in the vehicle. We were rolling through a sketchy town. Everyone was like, "You're occupying a seat; you're useless, take a gun." The enormity of the responsibility you have -- it sounds corny here back home -- but if you're really out there with these Marines and you're holding a weapon ... I was like, what if I hear an engine backfire and I pull the trigger? It wasn't [so much the fear] that I'd kill an innocent Iraqi -- that was a problem -- but if I fuck up, I'll get kicked out of the embed. That was my practical reason. When Geraldo was in Afghanistan and he was like, "I'm packing a .45," I was like, "C'mon dude."
I read his book and if I remember correctly it was a short lived occurrence as the author did not maintain proper gun discipline. He unintentionally swept the barrel of the rifle at the marines which is a big no no. The author never fired a weapon while embedded, but I don't recall if the gun was loaded or not. I don't think that it was.
I can think of a few off the top of my head but in the interest of keeping this short:
Generation Kill by Evan Wright. If you're even remotely interested in military-type things, this is a really great read.
I'm a 19-year-old boy from Ottawa, Canada (you may have heard of our little country :P ). While I was not homeschooled per se during my public school years (I went to regular English schools), I definitely learned more quickly, more thoroughly and more widely due to my parents' constant efforts to teach me things that went way above and beyond what I was "learning" at my high school.
My parents are both high school teachers, and have each spent roughly 30 years teaching their respective subjects.
My dad actually just retired last year, but he taught most of the Social Studies curriculum during the course of his career (History, Philosophy, Psychology, World Religions, etc.). He is a bilingual Francophone from Ottawa, so he taught at one of the French Catholic high schools in our area. He also happens to be somewhat skeptical of religion (not an atheist, but damned close). Odd combination, yes, but it has resulted in him introducing me to
military history, everything from the Roman legions to the Knights Templar to the Taliban.
My mother was born in Ottawa, to Greek parents who had left Greece after the Second World War; my grandparents are from a village about 20 minutes away from the modern city of Sparti (Sparta). During the war, the village was at some point occupied by Axis forces (I'm not sure when or to what extent, because my grandparents' English is not great and only my mother speaks Greek).
I decided to include a list (below) of works that I've found particularly interesting (I've never actually written down a list of my favs before, so this may be somewhat... sprawling and will be in no particular order :P ). Depending on the ages of your kids, some of this stuff might be inappropriate for them right now, but they can always check it out when they're older. It's mostly military/wartime history that interests me (it's what I plan on studying in university), but I've learned so many little tidbits about other things as well from having access to these works. Since your kids are all boys, I hope they'll find at least some of this stuff to be interesting :) .
Books
Movies and TV
This is all non-fiction. If you like this list, let me know, and I can expand on it further, and also include my favourite works from other genres, as well as my favourite fiction books as well :) . I left out tons of stuff that I'm too much of a lazy teenager to type in here, lol.
Band of Brothers and Generation Kill were both good books that made for great mini series, I'd check them out.
Yeah it's pretty good.
Here's the Rolling Stone article by Evan Wright that started it all.
Here's the book Wright wrote.
FYI, the guy that plays Rudy, is the actual Rudy in real life. Other core members of the story also worked as consultants on the TV series. There was also some controversy later as several other people involved wrote of their own experiences and points of view.
Generation Kill. Its an HBO mini-series based on the book by Evan Wright.
I highly recommend it.
It's a miniseries by HBO IMDb here it based on a real story about a Rolling Stone Magazine reporter who goes with the First Reconnaissance Battalion of the US Marines while they invade Iraq.
And it is one of my favourite TV series. I hope you have fun watching it.
If you liked the series read the related books:
https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Kill-Captain-America-American/dp/0425224740
https://www.amazon.com/One-Bullet-Away-Making-Officer/dp/0618773436/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=9REQB2ZFA33Y0R7C9F58
Into the Fire is a good book, I recommend Generation Kill as well if you haven't read it, I liked it more than the HBO miniseries.
I have a few books collecting dust if you're interested...
Hunting the Jackal
http://www.amazon.com/Hunting-Jackal-Soldiers-Frontlines-Terrorism/dp/0060564105/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1293764592&sr=8-1
Brotherhood of Warriors
http://www.amazon.com/Brotherhood-Warriors-Behind-Commando-Counterterrorism/dp/0061236160/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1293764614&sr=1-1
Generation Kill
http://www.amazon.com/Generation-Kill-Evan-Wright/dp/0425224740/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1293764637&sr=1-1
Legion of the Lost
http://www.amazon.com/Legion-Lost-Experience-American-Foreign/dp/0425210154/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1293764668&sr=1-1
I'll mail em to you if you want em... I didn't participate in the secret santa so think of it as a late gift. Let me know if you want any of em.
Requisite, The book is amazing.