Sergeant Antonio 'Poke' Espera (Jon Huertas), Sergeant Brad 'Iceman' Colbert (Alexander Skarsgard) and journalist Scribe (Lee Tergesen) get their first taste of war in the HBO miniseries Generation Kill. (Astral Media/TMN)

The late Samuel Fuller was one of the few major American filmmakers with actual combat experience. As an army infantryman in the Second World War, he saw action in Africa, Sicily, Normandy, Belgium and Czechoslovakia. Though he went on to make some of the most compelling movies we have about that conflict — especially, The Big Red One (1980), an anarchic picaresque film with an indelible performance by Lee Marvin — Fuller didn’t have any delusions about his ability to portray what he himself went through.

“The only way to make a truly realistic war movie,” he famously said, “is to fill the theatre with smoke and flames, the sound of explosions, and to have someone shoot the person sitting next to you.”

Fuller’s war movies don’t place much stock in valour, patriotism or most of the other qualities the genre has emphasized, from All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) to Saving Private Ryan (1998). Nor is there much bellyaching over politics, the rightness of war or even whether the latest conflict is different from the ones that preceded it — a recurring argument in films and TV series made about America’s current conflict in Iraq. What Fuller sought to convey was the perspective of the grunt who just wants to make it through the day but knows how little control he has over his fate. Whether these soldiers live or die has as much to do with the decisions of their superiors as with the trajectories of enemy bullets; in other words, bureaucrats can be just as deadly.

Bureaucracy is a big subject in Generation Kill, a new seven-part series by David Simon and Ed Burns. (The show begins July 13 on HBO in the U.S. and the Movie Network and Movie Central in Canada.) The series is an adaptation of Evan Wright’s account of a Marine battalion in the current war in Iraq. Reporting for Rolling Stone, Wright was embedded with the First Reconnaissance Battalion, a group of young soldiers who get their first taste of war during the often haphazard blitzkrieg that opened the war in 2003. Although trained to kill, they spend more time trying to scrounge up parts for their Humvees or batteries for their night-vision apparatus. What’s more, they are constantly at the mercy of superiors who are either incompetent, badly informed or bent on furthering the greater glory of the Marine Corps. In response, the rank and file can only kill time, crack jokes, complain, wail Avril Lavigne songs and otherwise suck it up. Oh, and try not to get killed.

Similar themes pervaded Simon and Burns’s last project, the HBO series The Wire. Over the course of five seasons between 2002 and 2008, Simon (a former crime reporter) and Burns (a former cop) built up an immensely detailed portrait of nearly every aspect of civic life in Baltimore. Whether characters toiled in the drug trade, the police department, the school system or city hall, they all contended with forces that made them feel like cogs in an unchangeable machine.

Writer Evan Wright's non-fiction book Generation Kill is the basis for the new HBO miniseries. (David Livingston/Getty Images)

Generation Kill furthers Sam Fuller’s blue-collar perspective on combat: war isn’t good or bad; it’s a system, ridden with glitches and Catch-22s. What’s more, the sheer randomness of death on the battlefield makes the very idea of heroic narratives seem absurd, even distasteful. In the words of one Marine quoted in Wright’s book, “Combat is not what I expected. How we all made it out with a scratch is beyond me.”

The “realism” proffered by Simon and Burns’s series is not the smoke-filled, bullet-ridden movie theatre imagined by Fuller, but Generation Kill nonetheless provides an authentic portrait of the Iraq invasion from the point of view of soldiers on the ground. Indeed, almost every memorable line of dialogue in the first three episodes I watched is taken directly from Wright’s book. (Wright co-wrote several episodes.) The actors play real soldiers with real names, though some of the higher-ups retain the derisive nicknames they’re given by the grunts (like the overly gung-ho souvenir hunter known as Captain America). Scenes are pretty much as Wright described them, whether it’s dramatic (like a mobile firefight in Nasiriyah), tragic (the shooting of innocent Iraqi boys and their camels by a trigger-happy Marine) or ridiculous (the rescue of Wright himself after his testicles are endangered by a chemical-weapons-proofed suit that’s several sizes too small).

David Simon has likened his and Burns’s role in Generation Kill to that of a “clinician” in charge of delivering “someone else’s vision.” Yet it’s easy to see why they were attracted to the material: Wright’s book shares The Wire’s coarse, wryly comic tone, abundance of colourful personalities and eye for detail. There may actually be too much detail. Just as The Wire could baffle viewers who didn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of preceding episodes, the significance of key lines or scenes in Generation Kill can be lost in the fog of war. Dressed in fatigues, the characters are hard to identify and tend to spout the same patois of military jargon and obscenities. (Viewers of Generation Kill may be wise to have a copy of Wright’s book at the ready.)

Given its complexity, cynicism and unbridled vulgarity, Generation Kill is likely to replicate The Wire’s combination of low ratings and high critical esteem. There’s also the persistent question of whether American audiences are interested in representations of a war that is still going on. Much has been made of the box-office failure of films such as Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs and Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss. TV producer Steven Bochco didn’t fare any better with Over There, the 2005 Fox series about an infantry unit in Iraq; it lasted only 13 episodes.

Cpl. Gabriel Garza (Rey Valentin, left) and Sgt. Antonio 'Poke' Espera (Jon Huertas) face an uncertain future in Generation Kill. (Astral Media/TMN)

Widely praised as “unflinching” at the time, Over There seems irredeemably hokey next to Generation Kill. What Simon and Burns’s series has over its predecessors is a distaste for hand-wringing. It’s also far less concerned with the support-our-troops mentality that has hamstrung filmmakers, who are worried about seeming unpatriotic. Of course, the show tackles larger issues of battlefield morality and America’s manifest destiny, but they emerge from deep inside the material. Like the human cogs in The Wire, the soldiers in Generation Kill are usually smart enough to know the score.

What the show emphasizes is the clarity these Marines get from their lowly perspective and the code of combat they alternately mock and embrace. As one motor-mouthed corporal on the show puts it, “I happen to be a death-dealing, blood-crazed warrior who wakes up every day happy for the chance to dismember my enemies and defile their civilizations.” He’s a man who knows his function, and though he’d rather not “light up” innocent Iraqis in the course of doing his job, he will perform it to the best of his ability.

A daunting and often dispiriting look at the logistics of modern warfare, Generation Kill is about what fouls the troops up — be it superiors who can’t read maps, suck-up officers who don’t command any loyalty or a military infrastructure that can’t even provide them with batteries. War isn’t just hell – it’s the job from hell, too.

Generation Kill airs on The Movie Network and Movie Central starting July 13.

Jason Anderson is a writer based in Toronto.