Popular Culture and the Iraq War Part 1

While reading Evan Wright's Generation Kill, one theme that occurred throughout the first half of the book was how young most of the men are. In the prologue Wright states, "These young men represent what is more or less America's first generation of disposable children." (Wright, 5) To me this clearly paints a picture of how young these men are. Wright refers to them as "children" even though the youngest man, Trombley, is nineteen. There are other points where the men can be seen as children as well, but Trombley is an amazing example. Later on, he declares he is going to leave food out for wild dogs, so he can shoot it (Wright, 65). This goes on to show how some men are still so young. Personally, I would not feel comfort with someone my age being in possession of a gun, no matter the circumstance. Trombley has the mind of a teenager. He is of age to go into combat, but, from what he has said, it is as if his mind was not. To branch off the idea of some men being children, team leader Sergeant Colbert acts as the adult or parent of the team. He makes sure Trombley is drinking water and having clear urine (Wright, 61). He yells at Person to be quiet when he won't stop talking but sometimes has to apologize because Person's driving becomes unstable from Colbert hurting his feelings (Wright, 62). These are prime examples of just how young, mentally, emotionally, and age-wise, some Marines are. I guess a question I have is, are some of these young men actually prepared to go to war and be a generation of killers, or are they too young to take this war seriously?

Another topic I noticed was Fick saying, "Don't be a trusting American... Think like a devious motherfucker. Be suspicious. Be aggressive." (Wright, 32) This sentence seems to bother me because of "trusting American." Is this saying Americans trust people too easily? However, after the attacks on 9/11, America became a nation of fear. With a distrust in people who weren't American, among other religions, origins, etc. I feel as though this point in time, Americans were not trustful of others. In fact, America as a nation was being aggressive just by invading Iraq because of oil. An example of a trusting American can be seen on page 60, where Garza shouts "Hey!" at an Iraqi man, the man waves back to him, and he thinks that was cool. Here it can be seen that an American is being trusting of an Iraqi man. Whereas Colbert replies, "Good Garza. Keep making friends. As long as they're not doing anything where we have to shoot them." (Wright, 60) Colbert discards the trusting American for the suspicious and aggressive. Which relates back to some men being fairly young, with Garza being twenty-two.