THE SOCIOPSYCHOLOGICAL DISSECTION OF THIS NEWEST GENERATION OF AMERICAN SOLDIER, and their experience in the War on Terror has just begun (in cultural productions), and while we may not see the most incisive examinations come to the fore for some time, the very first salvos are beginning to air. Generation Kill is the first of such offerings focusing on the second Iraq War. The HBO original program, set to air in July, is produced by a group that perhaps understands this (working-class) war generation’s world and their problems more than any creative group to date— as proven through their critically acclaimed series The Wire,  which skillfully exposed the myriad problems underlying urban crime and blight, and inadequate school systems populated with students from streets at odds with their educational goals.

Finding its origin in a series of essays featured in Rolling Stone that later became a book, Generation Kill is the work of journalist Evan Wright— written during his stint as an embedded member of the Marines’ First Reconnaissance Battalion. Wright’s Generation Kill is the first glimpse at a cohort raised on a palpable culture of violence (slickly produced war movies, gangster-rap and harder edged rock, in particular), who are street-savvy beyond any generation of soldiers prior, and how they deal with the disjunction between Hollywood war and actual war, their biographical influences and military bureaucracy. What The Wire had so successfully done in popular culture by producing a deft treatise on poor urban life and its obstacles, Generation Kill may just be able to do with popular conceptions of modern warfare. Generation Kill begins airing on HBO July 15.

Generation Kill Website (designed by Fatoe) [Here]