In “Operation Homecoming,” one returning Marine, who takes to drinking heavily in an effort to cope with the crushing guilt and revulsion he feels over how many people he’s seen killed, fumes about how “you can’t talk to them [ordinary Americans] about the horror of a dead child’s lifeless mutilated body staring back at you from the void, knowing you took part in that end.” Writing of her return home, Kayla Williams notes that the things most people seemed interested in were “beyond my comprehension. Who cared about Jennifer Lopez? How was it that I was watching CNN one morning and there was a story about freaking ducklings being fished out of a damn sewer drain — while the story of soldiers getting killed in Iraq got relegated to this little banner across the bottom of the screen?” In “Generation Kill,” by the journalist Evan Wright, a Marine corporal confides his anguish and anger over all the killings he has seen: “I think it’s bullshit how these fucking civilians are dying! They’re worse off than the guys that are shooting at us. They don’t even have a chance. Do you think people at home are going to see this — all these women and children we’re killing? Fuck no. Back home they’re glorifying this motherfucker, I guarantee you.””Generation Kill” recounts Wright’s experiences traveling with a Marine platoon during the initial invasion. The platoon was at the very tip of the spear of the invasion force, and Wright got a uniquely close-up view of the fighting. In most U.S. news accounts, the invasion was portrayed as a relatively bloodless affair, with few American casualties and not many more civilian ones. Wright offers a starkly different tale. While expressing admiration for the Marines’ many acts of valor and displays of compassion, he marvels at the U.S. military’s ferocious fire-power and shudders at the startling number of civilians who fell victim to it. He writes of neighborhoods being leveled by mortar rounds, of villages being flattened by air strikes, of innocent men, women, and children being mowed down in free-fire zones. At first, Wright notes, the Marines found it easy, even exciting, to kill, but as the invasion progressed and the civilian toll mounted, many began to recoil, and some even broke down. “Do you realize the shit we’ve done here, the people we’ve killed?” one Marine agonizes. “Back home in the civilian world, if we did this, we would go to prison.”

More by Michael Massing in “We are the Thought Police,” at Salon.