eelsmac 's review for:

Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War by Evan Wright

3.0

adventurous challenging dark emotional informative tense fast-paced

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Wright's writing does get better once he gets past some of the early explainations of the marines and his early days embedded with them. Mostly I just find the sort of way that male journalists who embed with the military, and not always, but it seems like a tendency to be over performative in describing the exceptional masculinity of particular military units and the way Wright talks about how he sees himself as more daring than other journalists and wanting to fit in with the marines...like if you're writing a book about marines there is already going to be enough immature posturing and chest thumping, we don't need a journalist who either has gone native or desperately wants to go native joining in. 
But I will say that after the first part of the book that does sort of fall away and we get some very real, raw and conflicted portraits of the experience of the marines and the early days of the Iraq War. So the book did end up redeeming itself.