Friday, January 09, 2009

Atheists in Foxholes

Here is something posted at another site by my internet friend, Bob. It's a clip from the HBO series Generation Kill and I have to agree with Bob that it is pretty refreshing and indeed a bit more accurate about the feelings of non-believers in the military.

(The link for this clip can be found here.)

8 comments:

CyberKitten said...

Oh... My... God!

This is an AMERICAN show...? [rotflmao]

I am *so* gonna watch that sucker!

Stardust said...

We don't get HBO on cable so I never heard of this program till Bob pointed to it. Now I am going to have to download episodes online or see if the video rental store has them.

CyberKitten said...

I think its starting on one of our cable channels in a week or two. I've seen the adverts for it but its your post that has prompted me to check it out.

I sent the link to a friend of mine who will also be watching it.

Tommykey said...

What I want to know is, are there any neocons in foxholes?

Stardust said...

Tommy, that's the problem. The military is full of bible-thumping neocons. My husband was in the Air Force and most of the people he served with were evangelical christians.

Tommykey said...

No Stardust, the neocons are right wing polemicists like Jonah Goldberg, Ben Shapiro, Max Boot, and others, who extol the glories of war but who would faint if they actually had to hold a weapon.

tina FCD said...

Is this what the series is about? Mainly religion in war? Just wondering, I don't have cable, by choice, but this looks interesting.

Stardust said...

tina, the series is about the first wave of the Iraq war back in 2003 based on a first-hand account of a US Marine (liberal perspective). Here is a bit taken from a review:

the highest achievement of the miniseries is the way it unveils the disordered workings of the American military and the inevitable destruction of all objects in its path, including civilians whose only offense is to tend their sheep or drive down a road. With its $550 billion budget and 1.5 million troops, the military might seem a mechanized colossus of precision-guided violence, give or take a few bad apples and errant artillery shells. But if you have served in the military or written about it from the inside, you know that on the unit level it is filled with men and women of vastly different motivations and skills. The Marines in Generation Kill are intelligent and dimwitted, panicked, sensitive, racist, comic, homicidal, brave. It is a wonder when things go according to plan. "You know what happens when you get out of the Marine Corps?" says one of the characters. "You get your brains back."