Generation Kill

My favourite TV show of 2008 was no doubt "Generation Kill", which was a seven-part mini-series screened on HBO in the U.S. in July.  (I managed to watch it courtesy of the great sharing fraternity of the Internet)

The show was adapted from a book of the same name written by Evan Wright, a writer for Rolling Stone magazine who was embedded with the U.S. Marine 1st Reconnaissance Battalion during the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.  The show begins at the unit's forward staging area in Kuwait, and takes the viewer along for an exhilarating and terrifying ride as Marines, playing the role of the invasion's shock troops, sped north towards Baghdad in their column of Humvees.

Anyone that loved "Band of Brothers" will enjoy GK, although the characters in the two series could not have been more different.  The paratroopers in BoB were volunteers who wanted to defeat Nazi Germany, do good and go home.  The recon Marines in GK were typical young American males that had grown up surrounded by fast food, violent video games and internet porn, who had picked the military for a career and hence viewed warfighting simply as a job that needed to be done.  Not for nothing is the show sub-titled, "The New Face of American War".

As a result, the dialogue in GK is so heavily laced with profanity and trash-talking that it'll probably never be screened in Asia - by the time they bleep out all the swearing, the show would be halfway towards becoming a silent film.

Here's a trailer - there're more on the official website and on YouTube:

Here're eight and a half minutes of choice scenes (a lot of action, some trash-taking):

A fine specimen of trash-talking (talking cock, as we call it in Singapore):

One of the funniest scenes in the series : a lieutenant had called in an air strike the night before on what he had thought were enemy tanks, but all they had found the next day were craters in a barren field outside a village.  So a patrol, accompanied by their translator Mish, was sent to interrogate the villagers ... ...

The one thing in this series that I found so cool was the radio callsigns.  

Wright had spent most of his time with Bravo Company, whose callsign was HITMAN.  Alpha Company's callsign was ASSASSIN.  The battalion commander was a colonel with a raspy voice - appropriately his callsign was GODFATHER.  An artilllery battery that provided fire support was STEEL RAIN.  How cool was that !?!?

Interview with actor Chance Kelly who played GODFATHER:

If a radio operator was receiving or sending information on behalf of Bravo Company, he would use HITMAN.  But when Bravo's commander (a Captain) was on the net himself, he would use the callsign HITMAN ACTUAL.

The callsigns, used together with standard military communications protocol, made the radio chatter in the show sound like such sweet music to a military buff like me.  It was amazing how the Marines could stay focused and keep passing information to and fro in the heat of battle and under severe sleep depravation.  

Now if only I could adopt some of their best practices to keep office communications succinct and efficient ... ...