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I hate the name of the series.
Some Lib picked it I guess.
I wonder if the message isn't " these crazed killers are coming home soon"
Or, it could be the name of the book the author (a former marine attached to that unit) chose...
Or...it could be the name of the book that the author, Evan Wright -- a contributing editor of /Rolling Stone/ -- came up with.
I don't believe he had any prior military experience. At one point he is handed a rifle to hold during an encounter, and has it gently but firmly taken away again due to his inexperienced handling of it (handing it back muzzle first with the safety off (p. 150, I think). Not a move a man with any military training would have pulled.
I have this book and have read it three or four times. It is excellent, for what it is. This is not an expose of the entire U.S. military, or of the USMC. It is simply the record of what Wright saw while attached to a unit from the First Recon Battalion during the invasion of Iraq. I've found the book poignant and humorous as well as ironically sensitive to the guys Wright was with. Most of them were very young (compared to most of us ;-) ) and the majority were not very highly educated or knowledgeable about many issues -- as many uneducated young guys tend to be (been there, done that!). So, surprise, surprise, sometimes the guys are portrayed as fallible, immature, or even dumb. But I'm guessing that's a pretty accurate portrayal and would be consistent with a similar interview with a front-line unit in any military just about any where, throughout history.
I haven't seen the mini-series but I can't wait to when it's out on disk.
And, truth be told, "These crazed killers are going to be coming home soon," would make a pretty decent title to a work like this -- if it was written from the correct point of view. I've read this book and a number of others with a growing appreciation for what a fighting man (or woman) *IS*-- outside of both the sterilized view of the Minuteman and the glorified view of Arnie and Stallone. We really do (have to) create killing machines to do this work effectively and "cleanly." We use many psychological techniques to turn off the moral and social guards internal to most people that prevent them from acting in the ways they will have to act to survive war and to achieve our ends. But will we ever be able to figure out how to shepherd these guys back OUT of that mode? Society and the military turn a very harsh eye on those soldiers who take things too far on or near the battlefield, or to those who escape into drug abuse when they are out of the field again, or those with various manifestations of PTSD (or whatever we're calling that plethora of symptoms now). And yet what kind of a person can walk back up over the brink and enter *humanity* again without some serious rifts and wounds?
For one very simple example, that really haunts me because of its very mundane nature, watch some of the Youtube videos of convoys just driving through Baghdad. I don't mean the ones of firefights and insurgents squashed by tanks. Just the simple, every-day, videos of the HMMWVs getting from point A to point B. Horns blaring, bumping-to-pass, crashing over medians to drive into oncoming traffic if threatened with stopping for only a second, weapons eternally at the ready to destroy whatever might slow them down and trap them in an ambush.
Now picture the driver of that HMMWV as little as even four weeks later. He's finished his enlistment, been rotated out of theater, and honorably discharged. He's wearing a button-down shirt and slacks on his way to a new job, sitting in his Honda, in bumper-to-bumper traffic on some freeway outside of Los Angeles or somewhere. You think he's feeling just a little stressed?
I'm not worried -- for a minute, really -- about what these "crazed killers" might do when unleashed on society. I'm pretty concerned about what we should be doing to help them.
Wow, that got off topic. Just read the book.
-Sam
