Evan Wright on Misconceptions and Missing the Mark
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Evan Wright explains common misconceptions held by the public and offers his insight regarding American missteps and future implications.
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Evan Wright:
Evan Wright was a journalist embedded in the lead Humvee of First Recon's Bravo Company's Second Platoon and based his book Generation Kill on the experience. HBO has turned the book into a miniseries that is a precise retelling of the early weeks of the military campaign from the point of view of the guys on the ground: the non-commissioned officers and platoon-level commanders who led the way to Baghdad.
His new book Hella Nation, was recently released in April of 2009. From his work as a reporter at Hustler magazine, to his National Magazine Award-winning writing for Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, Evan Wright has always had an affinity for outsiders-what he calls "the lost tribes of America." The previously published pieces in this collection chart a deeply personal journey, beginning with his stark but sympathetic portrayals of sex workers in Porn Valley, through his raw portrait of a Hollywood überagent-turned-war documentarian and hero of America's far right. His subjects are people for whom the American dream is either just out of grasp, or something they've chosen to reject altogether.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Question: In your opinion, where are we missing the mark in fighting this war?
Evan Wright: Sure, and I think we’re using less artillery today but the... it’s just kind of a weird...It also is about the media as I analyzed it that because so much of our news comes from television and television is image driven TV editors like to do shows about the air force because they always have stock footage of planes taking off, it looks cool, and as you’re competing as a news program on cable with all other forms of entertainment and you want to stop... get viewers to stop on your channel it helps to show sexy images of like Top Gun pictures of planes flying. So TV news coverage of the war focuses a lot on what the air force does and the reality is... when we were invading Iraq is for the marine corps especially through the march up through Mesopotamia they used artillery heavily. And artillery is not as sexy to film as aircraft and so one of the examples I cite is when we got to Nasiriyah marines took fire there, the army had some soldiers captured and killed, and so it turned in to this kind of cluster fuck. But.. and the marines responded. It was tactically sound. The dumped I think... I’m citing from memory of my book which was based on interviews of the artillery battalion. I think we dropped- the Americans dropped two to three thousand rounds of artillery into Nasiriyah in a very short period of time. That’s an enormous amount of ordnance to be dropping into a city of four hundred thousand people and that those stories were never covered as far as I know by the... or never adequately covered by the television news reporters.
Question: What are other misperceptions that Americans have about our military?
Evan Wright: Yeah. Well, first of all, there are several misperceptions and in a way the title of the mini series, Generation Kill, almost... the title itself would perpetuate some of those misconceptions and one of the misconceptions is that the soldiers or marines who are there willingly are psychopaths who just want to kill people. And if you listen to marines, as viewers would in the first episode of Generation Kill, all they talk about is killing and how it’d be fun to have been the pilot that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima ‘cause he killed a lot of people, etc., but that’s all talk. What I actually found is that many of the soldiers, and I found this in my multiple trips to the Middle East, they’re... they view themselves as professionals and they actually... they’re stoked to go in to combat often but they actually don’t want to kill civilians. And so when you read about the Hadithas and the Abu Ghraibs where they’re abusing troops, captives, I actually believe that those are the aberrations of the U.S. military. I’ve actually found that most of the troops at the troop level, the trigger pullers, they take a lot of care to avoid killing civilians, but the other reality is no matter how careful the military is in warfare that’s what happens.
Question: Regarding Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, were you there?
Evan Wright: No. I went back afterwards but not at the time.
Question: How did it affect marine morale?
Read the full transcript at bigthink.com/videos/evan-wrig...