Generation Kill
by Evan Wright · first published 2004
12mentions
4recommended by
12HN commenters
2013–2025first – last mentioned
33% recommend67% neutral
They were called a generation without heroes. Then they were called upon to be heroes. Within hours of 9/11, America's war on terrorism fell to those like the twenty-three Marines of the First recon Battalion, the first generation dispatched into open-ended combat since Vietnam. They were a new pop-culture breed of American warrior unrecognizable to their forebears - soldiers raised on hip hop, video games and The Real World. Cock, brave, headstrong, wary and mostly unprepared for the physical, emotional and moral horrors ahead, the "First Suicide Battalion" would spearhead the blitzkrei
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It's not directly related to General Mattis, but I would recommend reading Evan Wright's book "Generation Kill". Which recounts his time being embedded with the 1st Recon Battalion, which was under the command of Mattis (Callsign Chaos) during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The book even goes briefly into a famous…
on “Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism” ↗Here's a reply[0] to a question that asked about directory structure. Ignore the programming/technology part. Military books (such as "One Bullet Away" by Nathaniel Fick or "Generation Kill" by Evan Wright which was turned into a mini-series on HBO). Field manuals can be interesting and you can learn a lot from them. Knot books. "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War" by Robert Gates is…
on “Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions” ↗IMO, war is nowhere near as clinical as it would need to be for remote controlled tanks, helicopters and other vehicles to be effective. I've just finished reading Generation Kill for the second time - I highly recommend it for an idea of what things are actually like.
on “Empty F-16 jet tested by Boeing and US Air Force” ↗One Bullet Away is great. It gives another perspective of the popular book Generation Kill.
on “Military Reading List” ↗Generation Kill, Evan Wright "As for the lights that the Marines saw six kilometers away, Shoup believes they were actually seeing lights from a town seventeen kilometers distant. They had misread the lights of a distant…
on “Tucson copter cop says mysterious, ‘sophisticated’ super-drone ‘like no other’” ↗Reading Generation Kill by Evan Write does not give this impression of the US military...
on “Top officers of a Navy nuclear sub have lost their jobs over undersea collision” ↗I'm sure there are lots of fascinating details, unexpected side-effects, and counterintuitive observations to be found in a moral accounting of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. I've watched (and read) "Generation Kill," which examines similar situations in the Iraq War. I have friends and relatives who fought in Afghanistan. I've also read a number of books on the subject. I can appreciate the twisty-turny nature of…
on “Julian Assange arrested in London” ↗…Meanwhile, the insurgents issue a bounty on Kyle." How this disproves that "Hollwood is unable to record a movie depicting modern US millitary in any critical or non-heroic manner"? If you have mentioned Generation Kill I would have given you props but it is not an accident that many people in US have not heard about that series (and the book).
on “Apple told some Apple TV+ show developers not to anger China” ↗Between Generation Kill[1], See No Evil[2] and The Afghan Nightmare[3] (and other sources, other wars, other regions), it's hard to see how intelligence is working at all. In particular [3], which deals with a NATO commander…
on “Section 215 Expires For Now” ↗…that I went one level deeper and read Nathaniel Fick’s book, “One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer”. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Fick’s description of events fit pretty well with Generation Kill. You don’t see that very often.
on “Tucson copter cop says mysterious, ‘sophisticated’ super-drone ‘like no other’” ↗…Afghanistan" (eng "Warriors") [1] by Johanne Hildebrandt[2]. A book about the FS19 deployment of Swedish soldiers in Afghanistan in 2010, written by an experienced war reporter. Some chapters reminded me about Generation Kill, with regards to lack of proper equipment (wrong colour, missing etc...) or purpose of deployment (too much bodyguarding of politicians visiting etc). 1. ISBN: 9789143510737, ISBN-10: 9143510736 https://books.google.se/books/about/Krigare.html?id=LpJjAgAA...…
on “Ask HN: What are you reading Feb 2024” ↗Not sure if you read Generation Kill or watched the miniseries, but that is one of the main points. In there, there were two platoon commanders, Lieutenant Fick and Captain America(The book never reveals its name, and I think the series…
on “When Not to Obey Orders (2019)” ↗