NEW YORK -- Evan Wright had no idea what he was getting into when he was assigned to travel with the Marine's 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in the first weeks of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
When Wright, then a correspondent for Rolling Stone, was picked to ride with the special forces unit, the other reporters gathered at the Kuwait Hilton to find out where they would be embedded "looked at me with sheer hatred and envy," he said.
"I didn't know what 1st Recon was, but if all of these reporters look so jealous, it must be a good spot," Wright recalled thinking.
As it turned out, he had an upfront view of some of the most perilous fighting in the early days of the war as 1st Recon traversed Iraq's Fertile Crescent and reached Baghdad, usually the northernmost American military unit in the country.
Along the way, Wright documented the mixture of excitement, self-doubt and disillusionment that buffeted the group of young Marines as they confronted hidden enemy fighters and inflicted civilian causalities, a story he told first in Rolling Stone and then in his 2004 book "Generation Kill."
His ground-level reporting resonated with another pair of writers: David Simon and Ed Burns, who produced "The Wire," HBO's urban street crime drama. When the cable network decided to make a miniseries out of Wright's book, Simon and Burns signed on to produce it.
"I thought it was some of the best war reporting I'd read," Simon said. "If you watch 'The Wire,' you know I have a natural affinity for middle management and labor, as opposed to upper management. And that's the POV of this book -- [the military] is just another institution."
In "Generation Kill," a seven-part miniseries that premieres Sunday on HBO, the camera remains trained on the young Marines of 1st Recon's Bravo Company, elite fighters who specialize in sneaking behind enemy lines.
But 1st Recon was assigned a role for which the battalion had little preparation: leading the charge through the most dangerous terrain in Iraq to divert attention from the main invasion. They drove lightly armored Humvees that many of the Marines didn't even have a license to operate. They lacked basic supplies such as batteries for their night vision goggles and lubricant for heavy guns.
The result was a chaotic and treacherous push through Iraqi towns brimming with enemy fighters cloaked in civilian clothes.
