![]() It’s not about anything else, really, for the guys, or for the participants on the ground. So Generation Kill is a play on that myth, because what war is really about is killing. In fact, a lot of their work is very anti-war. I never read Tom Brokaw’s book, but if you go back and look at the actual greatest generation writers, people like Kurt Vonnegut-who wrote Slaughterhouse Five-and Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and their contemporaries, who actually fought in World War II and wrote about it, there’s no romance at all. ![]() But now they’re grown up, and as they’ve gotten older I think many of them have grown tired of the ambiguities and the lack of moral clarity of Viet Nam, and they’ve started to cling to this myth of World War II, the good war. I really think it’s important as a society to be reminded of this, because you now have a generation of baby boomers, a lot of whom didn’t serve in Viet Nam. They’ve forgotten that war is about killing. They tend to remember it from the Life magazine images of the sailor coming home and kissing his fiancé. For the past decade we’ve been steeped in the lore of The Greatest Generation, the title of Tom Brokaw’s book about the men who fought in World War II, and a lot of people have developed this romanticism about that war. The other reason was more important to me. Trombley, the machine gunner who was next to me in that ambush, he’d even been sort of ecstatic, comparing it to Grand Theft Auto, the video game. For instance, Fick remarked after a firefight, “Did you see what they did to that town, they fucking destroyed it.” Cpl. Fick and I were discussing this book and how today’s guys have no problem firing their weapons. Dave Grossman, which showed that in past generations only 15 to 20% of combat infantry were willing to fire their weapons. The first reason had to do with a book called On Killing by Lt. GODSPY: Why did you name the book Generation Kill?Įvan Wright: There were a couple of reasons. ![]()
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