Infinite In All Directions: An Essay On “Generation Kill”

The war is real, the ultimate reality show, and we don’t get to watch it, because we forgot to create checks and balances on the cooption of the fourth estate, because in the days of the framers we didn’t have journalism, we had a half-crazy nudist vegetarian with a printing press and illegitimate children all over the place. Fast-forward a few centuries, and you have a war that’s been going on since my college graduate sister was in junior high, without a single body on TV, because reporters can’t ask or tell about the war, or else they won’t get access to anything else. You’ve got Evan Wright, for whom this enterprise is a career-maker, and… that’s about it. Half the guys in the original article got discharged for talking about real shit. But there’s the filter of memory, and then the next filter, of Evan Wright telling about this. And then the filter of words on paper, into a book, which is taken and filtered through the dramatic sensibility into a TV show whose only mandate is to match up to the original Xerox as well as possible. From all accounts, it feels the same even if the facts are different, which is the only important thing if you’re the original article, the book, the script, or the performance of the show itself.

And then there’s me, trying to recap the drama of the book of the story of the story of the thing that happened. Postmodernity is all well and good, but I think the point where you actually masturbate to the idea ends somewhere around sophomore year of your finer liberal arts universities and institutions. It’s an infection you eventually burn out because Eco and Foucault and Calvino and Baudrillard are not the story: they’re the story about the story. At the end of that particular hall of mirrors, there’s beautiful Rudy who is either dead or alive, in a second you can point to with your finger and say: that is real. I mean, I triangulated on Nate by reading his book, and I do love Brad Colbert, but all that is just looking through a lot of layers of obfuscation that’s not even purposeful: we’re all trying to tell the real story, all down the line. Not often you could say that about something that’s come through this many hands. So imagine what it would be like if one of the people along that line, from Evan to David Simon to me to you, who had an agenda that wasn’t at least trying to be about telling a greater truth? I’m not setting myself up as a storyteller at all, that’s not my intention: I’m saying my intentions are to say what I think honestly happened, based on looking at what somebody else thinks honestly happened. But if it got dirty administration hands on it? Even one layer? Much less all the ones we casually accept now?

My point is, there have been a few moments throughout that made me feel like we were seeing something real: Doc Bryan’s line to Brad a while back, when he asked what he could do. That hit me in the face. “November Juliet” and Evan’s total adrenal breakdown this week. That wandering shellshock guy that Brad tried to feed. Trombley’s… everything about Trombley. It’s scary shit. But looking at actual Rudy looking through that hole in the fictional windshield, and seeing superimposed over it the well-rehearsed image of actual Rudy looking through the actual hole in the actual windshield? I’ve been trying to ignore the weirdness of this assignment, because I don’t really feel up to grasping the fact that those little fictional kids were very real and are very dead. They didn’t get married or have kids or join the army or have a job or anything little kids get to do. They just died.

~Jacob, recapping Generation Kill for Television Without Pity

There has never been any television show like HBO’s Generation Kill.  It is almost impossible to imagine how there could have been.  But of course, there has never been a war like ours in Iraq either.

But it is hard to talk about.  Part of me wants to grab everyone I know and literally beg them to watch it; to explain that this story of 270 men (most of them boys really), sent on a road trip through Iraq in broken down Humvees which they had never been trained to operate, in forest camouflage because the Corps couldn’t figure out to order MOPP suits in desert colors for a war that every American schoolchild knew was coming for a year before it arrived, tells the story of every single thing that went wrong in this whole foolish adventure.  Fractals are rough or fragmented geometric shapes that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole.  They are too irregular to be described in traditional Euclidean geometric language, and appear similar at all levels of magnification.  Their shapes appear throughout nature; in clouds, in snowflakes, in mountain ranges and lightning bolts.  No one knows why they exist.  That is what Generation Kill is; a fractal of this war.  The story of any single Marine in First Recon, of the entire Battalion, of the entire war – it stays the same regardless of magnification.

But for the same reason, I can’t explain why you really ought to care about understanding.  I don’t know why I bother, for that matter.  This war started because someone, somewhere, said it was going to no matter what happened, and everyone accepted it.  This war cannot end because someone, somewhere, said that it cannot be stopped.  And everyone accepted it.  The children who really died, who the mannequins which I watch on the television are simulacra of, died because someone, somewhere, gave an order to bomb that grid location, and everyone accepted it.  And I watch the simulacra, and have my own shadow image of the sentiments which occurred to the men who witnessed it, and I believe that my bearing witness, my understanding of the horrors that happened and how they came about are important.  Because someone, somewhere, told people like me that bearing witness to the horrors that the world holds is important, and meaningful, and I accepted it.  The pattern remains the same; like life, infinite in all directions.

Fundamentally, I should be able to comprehend this.  One form of fractals are random fractals, which are fractals which are defined as being created by stochastic rather than deterministic processes.  Perhaps the most famous of these fractals is Brownian motion, the device by which the existence of atoms and molecules first were indirectly confirmed.  Drop some small particles such as bits of pollen into a glass of water, and you can observe it for yourself: the bits of pollen will remain in continuous motion in the water, pushed to and fro by the movement of the molecules which make up the water.  Although there is no comprehensible reason why the pollen will move in any particular pattern, observed long enough and repeatable random patters will occur.  Human beings have very little understanding as to why the very small things which make up everything in our world act how they do.  Why should our understanding of these patterns on a larger scale, a human scale, be more comprehensible?  What prevents me from being able to understand that I cannot possibly understand?

The thing about atoms, about quarks and bosons and the other tiny bits of matter which make up our world is that while we do not and cannot yet understand the things that they do, we keep watching.  In lieu of understanding the stuff that our world is made of, we settle for observing it.  For cataloging and recording what we can see.  What the ultimate purpose of all this recording will be, we cannot know.  There was a time, early in the last century, when scientists believed that most of the great mysteries had been solved.  Then, Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and others discovered Quantum mechanics, and we learned that everything science had been certain of since Newton wasn’t as absolute as anyone had thought.  At the end of the frontier is yet another frontier, as barren of maps to guide us as our continent was to the Clovis people who first beheld it with human eyes.

Patterns upon patters; without understanding why, what makes us human is the need to keep looking.  Whether that is good or bad, I can’t say.  Without Bohr and Heisenberg looking at the world of the atom and recording what they saw, perhaps Oppenheimer would never have learned how to release that power over Hiroshima.  We all might be better off not knowing, not even daring to peek at the unknown.  There are infinite other options of what you could watch rather than Generation Kill; the ridiculous pissing contests of who can run or swim arbitrary distances the fastest, or who can contort through the air and land within the boundaries of a balance beam or a mat of some pointless dimensions, for example.  You can watch yet another dreary send-up of the movies by plunking yourself into a movie theater for Tropic Thunder.  Instead of struggling with the postmodernist implication of pretend bullets reenacting the travel of real bullets in Generation Kill, we can indulge in the far more comprehensible foolishness of movie stars in a Hollywood movie pretending to be different movie stars in a different movie.

Or, we can tune in this Sunday to watch the final episode of Generation Kill, and observe and record a part of human history which is happening now, which we cannot hope to understand.  To try and learn something about our world which we cannot presently even understand, and the understanding of which might be every bit as horrible as what we did with the protons and electrons we discovered were pushing around bits of pollen in a glass.  We can bear witness.