ABSTRACT
Generation Kill 1 (GK) is a seven-episode, multi-award-winning television mini-series depicting the experiences of a United States Marine battalion during the early weeks of the military intervention in Iraq in 2003. The show, while offering a fictional representation of the events, is based on the first-hand nonfiction accounts of the period offered by Evan Wright, who travelled with First Reconnaissance Bravo Company’s 2nd Platoon as an embedded reporter. The mini-series, aired on US television channel HBO in 2008 (and on terrestrial television in the UK, Canada and Australia in 2009), is an adaptation of Wright’s book of the same name (2004), which itself is a collection of articles written for Rolling Stone magazine in 2003. HBO launched a website to accompany the mini-series, which offers a glossary of military ‘lingo’, a blog and many ‘behind the scenes’ additional features including interviews with the Marines represented in the series. The DVD collection also includes a number of special features and a hard copy glossary for those struggling to differentiate their devil dogs from their donkey dicks. There is, therefore, multimedia accessibility to the ‘world’ of GK that allows its consumption in a range of different ways from a range of locations. I base my analysis here on the television mini-series, as this is arguably the medium through which the package reached most of its consumers.
