The experience of producing the miniseries has left Ed Burns "incredibly impressed"- with the First Recon vets he's met, and he asserts that while they're "the cream of the cream,"- the men are also "just fantastic individuals"- who are "very, very caring"- and "very soft underneath all of that armament."- As a fellow combat veteran, Burns recognizes the solid work ethic of the Marines, as well as their desire to do what's right""and this has reinforced his feeling that their toughness and talents were tragically wasted "in the wrong war, on a make-up war."- He justly predicts that "as time wears on, it'll become more evident, just like it was in Vietnam, that it wasn't the right cause."-
In an interview for his hometown public radio station, David Simon expressed empathy with Sgt. Brad Colbert's compulsion to fulfill the promise of modern "surgical"- warfare""the expectation that sold the majority of Americans on the invasion of Iraq. The problem encountered by Colbert and the country he fought for, Simon argues, is that war "carves out its own place in the firmament, and there's very little to be said for clinical violence. Once it's unleashed, a lot of people die""and many of them are not the intended people."- Simon contends that Generation Kill's reflection of this reality might constitue the project's sole "political sentiment"-""that we should "make no mistake, this isn't laser-guided weapons hitting exactly the right bad guy straight in the ass. A lot of people in Iraq are dead in the wake of this decision to go to war."-
The ripples of that wake are still rocking the sea of public opinion in the nation that sent the men of Recon Battalion One into combat. The launching of their fact-buoyed story has allowed all sides of the Iraq war debate to "acknowledge who these Marines are and what they went through,"- as Simon has said, "without having to strain it through politics."- For him and his cohorts, the production of Generation Kill was obviously a labor of love and, incidentally, an act of cinematic emancipation that has transcended arguments as to the war's validity while taking battlefield dramatization to the next precipitous level.
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