Deployment of Narrative

Abstract

Based on his award-winning dispatches from the Iraq invasion written for Rolling Stone magazine, Evan Wright’s Generation Kill (2005) sets itself up as the definitive document of the Iraq War, by asking an inherently fraudulent question: How does the post-Rolling Stone generation – a generation too disaffected and hip to read that magazine – behave when thrown into combat? Wright’s subjects are no Lynndie Englanders. They’re not the kids of depressed rural American towns who joined the National Guard to help pay for college and unwittingly ended up in Iraq. They are an elite, highly selfselected group of young warriors who competed for months to join an elite branch of Marines engaged in guerilla-style style combat.