GENERATION KILL
'Itâs horrible, but at the time you donât feel nothing," Rudy Reyes tells me. It feels strange to be discussing killing another human being so casually, stranger still to be doing so in a smart London hotel. "At the time you are engaging and security means that you must use extreme violence. You can never assume security, you can only establish it, so we establish it by killing all threats.
âI had to kill up very close, as close as you and I are right now, seeing their fear and horror in their eyes, knowing thatâs the last thing theyâre going to see.â How many people has Reyes killed, I wonder? âYou know, a lot,â he says, with just a tinge of regret.
Reyes, a likable and extremely buff Texan of Mexican extraction, plays Sgt Rodolfo âRudyâ Reyes - himself - in Generation Kill, an extraordinary TV mini-series from HBO which will be broadcast in Britain (on FX) next week. Based on the book by Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright, who spent the beginning of the current Iraq conflict embedded with a unit of marines, it takes the viewer along for the invasion, by Humvee. The programme is up close and personal - very close and very personal - with the marines of 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, or 1st Recon, one of whom is Reyes.
The team behind Generation Kill is David Simon and Ed Burns, creators of The Wire, the Baltimore cop show that is rarely mentioned without the word âgrittyâ and has caused a critical swoonathon, sometimes even called the best television ever. Burns - Vietnam veteran, teacher, policeman turned writer of the best television ever - is with me too, to talk about the new project. As so much of Generation Kill is about the taking of human life, I wonder if he too has killed, in Vietnam, perhaps.
âI did.â
Hell, Iâm the only person around here who hasnât killed someone. And did the experience affect Burns? âErm ⌠killing is almost fair. Itâs what warfare actually should be, in the sense that theyâre shooting at you, youâre shooting at them. Where it breaks down, and becomes a different type of thing is when the enemy is a bomb, or an IED [an improvised explosive device, often used as roadside bombs], or a mine, and youâre stepping on it, or itâs blowing you up, and you canât retaliate. When that starts to happen then the anger in the unit starts to build, and God help anybody who steps in front of that anger.â
Most of the killing you see in Generation Kill - and you see a lot - is the first kind, the almost fair sort, because this is about the first 21 days of the war, the invasion in 2003, not the years of mess that have followed. Thatâs not to say there isnât anger about the place, but it sometimes has to be self-generated, at least to start with. One of the characters, Cpl Josh Ray Person, puts it nicely: âThe marine corps is like Americaâs little pit bull. They beat us, starve us, and once in a while they let us out to attack somebody.â
Person, played by James Ransone (the equally out-of-control Ziggy in series two of The Wire), a terrifying little nut who is permanently off his head on some horrible stimulant drink called Ripped Fuel, has all the best lines. As the Humvees rumble north over the border from Kuwait, Person, charged up to the eyeballs, spews out his theories about gays, South Park and why Saddam Husseinâs ill-thought-through âpussy policyâ is the real reason for the conflict. And he has a complaint: âHow come we canât invade a cool country with, like, chicks in bikinis?â
This is what Generation Kill is really, a bunch of guys doing their jobs, albeit in an extraordinary workplace. That and the family-like bond they form. Reyes talks about this, and the one fear he had - letting down his team. âThey count on me because I come from a background with no stability and no family, and this is the best family I ever had and I wouldnât do anything to endanger them.â
His background, he says, is typical of the men he went to war with. Dad left, mum shacked up with someone else, there were more kids, and Reyes was more or less forgotten. So he found a new family with the marines. When he left the corps a couple of years ago, he got depressed. Is that common? âVery common, bro, very, very common. Itâs a natural part of mourning. Itâs mourning the loss of your unit, and your team, and your family, and your identity. Mourning the loss of yourself. I was hurting, bro. Iâd never had a family before. Iâd never had what I had in the marine corps.â
This show came along at the right time for Reyes. He was originally hired - along with a couple of the other guys who were there with him - to train the actors, make sure they got everything right, that it was all authentic. Then he got a part, playing himself, reliving it all.
There are an awful lot of characters in Generation Kill, and to begin with I had no idea who was who, or what was going on. This is something people who have watched The Wire may identify with. âYes, there are quite a few characters,â says Burns. âI donât see that as a problem. HBO were worried about it - how are they going to figure out who is who, stuff like that. But that comes with just sitting up and watching the show. If you want a show that you sprawl back in the couch and sort of let wash over you then this is probably not the show.â
Sit-up TV, thatâs what Burns (and David Simon) do. âYou want the person leaning in to the punch so it requires them to try to figure something out,â he says.
It may appear arrogant, to make television with such a vast cast of characters that unfolds so randomly, chaotically even, with no narrative signposts, no help for the viewer and a lot of jargon and military acronyms. Itâs almost as if theyâre sticking a finger up at the viewer, saying, âHey, this isnât about you, or entertainment, itâs for the people itâs about - the marines - and itâs about being authentic.â The same could also be said about The Wire, whose viewing figures didnât live up to the glowing reviews. But, as with The Wire, a bit of effort pays massive dividends.
I had to do more than sit up, even more than lean in to the punch: I actually needed to watch episode one of Generation Kill twice, and only in the second sitting did I really start to get a grip of who was who and what was going on (even, and most proudly, figuring out that âoscar mikeâ means on the move). By then I was snared, involved, and by the second episode it was clear that this was very good television, an astounding portrait of modern warfare, and of an extreme job.
Aficionados of The Wire will see many parallels. Itâs about race, and class, and the workplace (though the street corner has been traded for the inside of a Humvee). Itâs about the disconnect between levels of command and is much more sympathetic to the worker than to higher levels of management, in this case the officers and their often ludicrous decisions. It isnât sanitised, or cliched. Neither is it heroic (as, say Steven Spielbergâs second world war epic Band of Brothers is, though it will inevitably draw comparisons). Most of all it is about people - a bunch of guys. At times you admire them, other times they appal you. Often theyâre very, very funny.
It amuses and shocks, confuses and thrills. But it doesnât preach. âI think itâs something you can look at and find what you want to see,â says Burns. âSo if you are very pro-war, and you see the military as incapable of doing wrong, and the heroics of these guys, then itâs very easy to see who they are. If you are more conflicted, there is an opportunity [to see] that conflict - you know, this is not what we signed up for. So I think it serves both sides, because neither side is honest with themselves ⌠I mean, I donât give a fuck to tell you the truth. I know where I stand on it.â Burns is as anti the war as he is admiring of the men who went to fight it.
I wonder if it will appeal only to men, as it is entirely about men. But he talks about the emergence of a feminine side in combat. âBecause of the fear and the fact that youâre walking with the possibility of injury and death, the feminine side comes out. So it takes these professional robots almost and turns them into human beings. So one man is caring for another manâs foot and stuff like that, you know, they help each other, and thatâs the complexity of human nature.â
And what about that authenticity? It looks more real than anything Iâve seen. But what do I know? Iâve never even killed anyone. Reyes, who dismisses almost every other portrayal of war on screen, big or small, as cartoonish, can help out here. âMy brother, of course Iâm a little bit biased, but itâs better than almost anything thatâs been done before, because of the honesty and integrity of it. No good guy, no bad guys: ambiguity. Frank and sometimes vile dialogue, because this is what you gotta do when youâre in the freakinâ battlefield, and you are in the muck and the mire, the gore, the horror, the hatred. You are using hatred energy against each other, because it summons this power, and you have to summon it or maybe you donât make itâ.