Evan Wright

Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the new face of American war

Generation kill

Vin 

I think this is a hard book to rate. 

I wanted to read this as the show adaption is one of my favourite series and it was really impressive to see how much the show stuck with the actual accounts of this book. 

On one hand, it’s first accounts of a journalist writing his experience with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the United States Marine Corps, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but on the other hand, it’s really hard not get angry at the content of this memoir and how childish marines can be. 

• It instilled my hate for war further and showed how racist and homophobic marines are. I sometimes had to put the book down just so I could vent out my frustrations because I was livid at how dense the marines could be. There was only so many slurs I could take before I was having to tap out and cool off. 

• my mind was boggled that they weren’t even trained for this type of invasion, Person didn’t even have training or a license to drive his platoons vehicle, they weren’t trained to be sitting in a vehicle for 15+ hours a day. 

• As I read on further, the difference of the opinions, how things slowly started to change for the marines and how war really affected them by the end was quite surprising. It also really shocked me at how idiotic and stupid higher ups could be, especially when their men’s lives are on the line. 

The truthfulness, the intense details and dedication Wright took to write this is the reason I’m giving this four stars.

Cyrus Yochim

Max L

Michael Cowell

Peter Read

Morgan Holland

Patrick Ruster

Puneeth Uttla

Evan Huang

Amanda Gilson

Giovanni Garcia-Fenech 

Jeremy Warren Mills

Generation Kill is about the young men sent to fight their nation's first open-ended war since Vietnam. Despite the flurry of media images to come of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, you have never really met any of these people, who serve as front-line troops. For whatever reason, the media simply doesn't get them. As we all know, news accounts of the last two wars focused almost exclusively on battlefield imagery of high-tech weapons wreaking astounding destruction, comply with analysis from retired army grandees and other experts, punctuated by the odd heart-warming patriotic sound-bite. The troops themselves play a role in the media's presentation of recent wars rather like extras in The Triumph of the Will. They are everywhere yet somehow invisible. When they speak you get the sense that what they are saying has been carefully scripted. Now Generation Kill tells the soldiers' story in their own words. The narrative focuses on a platoon of 23 marines, many of them veterans of Afghanistan, whose elite reconnaissance unit spearheaded the blitzkrieg on Iraq. This is the story of young men that have been trained to become ruthless killers. It's about surviving death. It's about taking part in a war many questioned before it even began. Evan Wright was the only reporter with First Recon, which operated well ahead of most other forces, usually behind enemy lines. They were among the first marines sent into the fight and one of the last units still engaged on the outskirts of Iraq, even after the city centre fell. Generation Kill is not just a combat chronicle but an inside look at how people fighting in war actually experience it. It is both an action narrative like Black Hawk Down and a detailed portrait of a generation at war along the lines of Band of Brothers. It is not a book you are going to forget in a hurry...

Living Dangerously on the Road to Baghdad with the Ultraviolent Marines of Bravo Company

Generation Kill

Stijn C

Emily

Sean McGilvray

A narrative on the lives of twenty-three First Recon marines who led the blitzkrieg on Iraq describes their training, their dangerous entry into suspected ambush points, and the physical and psychological challenges they faced in skirmishes leading to the fall of Baghdad. 125,000 first printing.

Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War

Lloyd Dalton

Generation kill Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the new face of American war

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