"Generation Kill:" Mission Accomplished

"Generation Kill" wraps things up Sunday night. You probably haven't been watching this brilliant miniseries - it received a gaudy launch but seems to have dropped off most people's radar at this point (though the response to the Rudy Reyes piece was semi-heartening and underscored LA.com's myopia in overlooking it).

Evan Wright, author of the book upon which the series is based (who also had a hand in scripting, as well), was philosophical about the show's chances at attracting a sizable audience. "If the American public tunes in, I hope they do, but on a deep philosophical level, I don't give a f@%&," he told me. He had heard all the chatter about war films not playing well in the Zeitgeist right now, that Americans suffered from war fatigue, and all he could say about that was, "War fatigue is a pretty comical term for an American public who have had no hardship generally during this war, no hardship whatsoever. Their war fatigue is ADD."

(Evan Wright thinks you can't handle the truth.)

Nonetheless, the final installment is easily absorbed even if you haven't been watching; I'll even provide a handy recap of the series for you:

Previously, on "Generation Kill:" The Marines of First Recon have been tear-@ssing around Iraq, blowing stuff up, coping with clueless superiors and being manly men in general.

With that out of the way, here's Episode 7, "Bomb in the Garden:"

First Recon rolls into Baghdad, and their mission is coming to an end. "We have rolled through this country f@%&ing things up and now we have to show these people what we've liberated them for," one Marine declares, though it turns out to be wishful thinking. They think they're going to be safe in Baghdad, but chaos is spreading. Their translator warns them, obviously prophetically, "You've taken the country apart, but you're not putting it back together. ... All this is a bomb - if it explodes, it will be bigger than the war."

The episode also includes the notorious incident in which First Recon Marine Eric Kocher - who served as the show's technical advisor - gets in trouble for saving people's lives when he ran into a minefield they were marking with chemlights in the black of night and one stepped on a mine.

"It was ridiculous to go into a mine field at nighttime," he says of the operation, and his own actions. "That was the only time I did something my mind was telling me not to do. But before I knew it, I was already in the minefield. I was thinking, 'What the f@%& am I doing?' I'm thinking, 'Wow, this wasn't the greatest idea I ever had.' But I had to get to the engineer. He was screaming me to stay out, that he would low-crawl out. He didn't have a foot, and he's concerned about us. But I got him out. It was kind of heartbreaking. My stomach kind of turned. It was the first time I saw an American casualty right in front of me.

"And then, I'm getting my rights read to me. You've got to be f@%&ing kidding me. I had to write a rebuttal to keep the officers out of trouble for sending us out there (in the first place). It fell on my shoulders when what happened happened."

(Eric Kocher learned the hard way that no good deed goes unpunished.)

Sunday's episode concludes with a powerful sequence that summarizes the series succinctly and beautifully, a scene that series co-creator David Simon, who usually doesn't toot his own horn in this way, is extremely proud of. He particularly loves the song that plays over the scene and doesn't want it given away.

The song had already been plugged into the sequence before its rights had been secured. Someone asked him what Plan B would be if they didn't get permission to use it, and Simon says he replied, "Plan B is, we use the song anyway and deal with it in court."

(I didn't have the heart to tell Simon (here, on the "GenKill" set) that the song had already been used on an episode of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.")

Like Wright, Simon believes we've been too passive in our response to what's going on in Iraq.

"If you're against the war, you should be out there in the street, because it should matter to you," he told me. "And if you're for the war, you should be asserting for the military in ways that re-incorporate them into the rest of the country, bringing them back into the sense of our own collective."

- "Generation Kill:" 9 p.m. and 12:15 a.m. Sunday, HBO. Also 8 p.m. and midnight Monday, 11 p.m. Tuesday, 8:30 p.m. and midnight Wednesday, 10 p.m. Thursday and so on and so forth.