It’s possible that if Simon had used “Generation Kill” not as a blueprint but as a jumping-off point he might have come up with something richer than he did. (That show also ran in Tony’s time slot.) “The Wire” could have been called “The Web”-each season involved a different element of life in Baltimore (the drug trade, the waterfront, the city bureaucracy, the educational system, and the press), creating, over all, an intricate picture of the way things work, and don’t work, in that city. “Generation Kill,” which airs in what I’ll always think of as the “Sopranos” time slot-Sundays at nine-was created by David Simon, whose HBO series “The Wire” recently finished its fifth and final season. Fatally, it is entirely missing from the miniseries. The third paragraph of the Rolling Stone series starts in classic field-dispatch fashion: “The war began twenty-four hours ago.” The third paragraph of the book starts with a yawn: “Their war began several days ago.” The magazine pieces are punchy in the book, the tone has been neutralized and the author’s voice is not nearly as present. His articles, which end shortly after the Marines entered Baghdad, appeared just a few months after the invasion and had an organic immediacy-although Wright wrote them after returning home to the States, you could imagine him sitting in the desert ripping pages out of a manual typewriter and sending them off with a courier. For one thing, although the title of the magazine series, “The Killer Elite,” may not be especially original, it’s more piquant, because of its very accuracy, than “Generation Kill,” which is Wright’s attempt to coin a phrase that plays off “the greatest generation.” Wright had the good fortune-reportorially speaking-to be in Iraq from the beginning of the invasion, so he was well situated to observe how the war unfolded and how the men he was ensconced with did, or didn’t, change as a result. It’s not necessarily the case that a heart beats less robustly when it’s transplanted, but Wright’s creation has become more attenuated with each step it has taken-from magazine article to book to TV miniseries. “Generation Kill,” a new miniseries on HBO, is based on a 2004 book by Evan Wright, which is an expanded version of a three-part series that was published in Rolling Stone, in 2003, about the time Wright spent embedded with a Marine battalion in Iraq.
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