#gk-cast

It was a big week for Alaska reality TV: Baby Kilcher was born, "Hotel Impossible" was at the Alaskan Hotel & Bar in Juneau, and Rudy Reyes (Military Team) was forced to leave "Ultimate Survival Alaska" after he fell out of a tree and broke his ankle.

Though there was foreshadowing throughout the episode, I didn't see Reyes' departure coming and it devastated me. Near the very end of the challenge, he climbed up a tree to scout the finish line through his sniper scope, and while he was rushing down the tree, a branch snapped and he fell directly onto his ankle. The Military Team still made it first to the extraction point to win the challenge, and since they still finished, the remaining two military guys will stay on the show.

Generation Kill - 1x04 - Combat Jack

«It often feels like I wrote Generation Kill four times. I wrote it first in the contemporaneous notes I made while rolling with the platoon. The second writing came when I returned from Iraq in May, 2003 and turned these notes into the three-part Rolling Stone series, "The Killer Elite." I wrote the book Generation Kill through the Spring of 2004. Though the book followed the same arc as the magazine articles I started it from scratch, going back to my notes and conducting new interviews. By the time I was finished with the book, I was ready to move on to something new.

HBO purchased the option for the rights to the book in the Fall of 2003, and in the original deal I was not to be involved in the mini-series as a screenwriter. I was happy with this arrangement, since I was tired of writing it.

But in early 2005 an HBO executive named Kary Antholis called me to his office and asked me if I would meet with David Simon and his partner Ed Burns, then shooting The Wire in Baltimore.  Simon had read Generation Kill and liked it but told Antholis he would only adapt it if we could meet and find some arrangement in which I could be involved in the writing. For this I would have to fly to Baltimore.

My agent was very exited about my trip to Baltimore. He believed that Simon lived in an eccentric but lavish compound, with whimsical guest houses for visiting dignitaries such as I considered myself to be. Based on my agent's expectations I pictured I would be staying at sort of Baltimore version of San Simeon.

When I arrived Simon put me up in what was basically a garret above his office in a row house. We had our first meeting while driving around the city in his car, a Ford Explorer nearly as old as and perhaps even more beat up than the Humvees used by the Marines. The radio knobs had fallen off. Simon had jammed a broken Bic pen into the radio to function as the volume knob. When Ed Burns showed up for the first story meeting, he carried a dog-eared copy of my book, blank note cards and pens in a rumpled grocery bag he was using that day in lieu of a briefcase. So much for my agent's visions of grandeur. And so much for my plan to be done with Generation Kill.

We spent about four months writing the scripts together in Baltimore. Burns's preference was to work in a Wire production office with defective air-conditioning that insured the room became stifling hot by lunch time. It was his theory that we would better focus on turning out lines for the scripts if we knew an extended afternoon session would be torture. Often we worked into the afternoon anyway. Burns did not mind the heat. What did bother him was my habit -- which I'd never been aware of until he informed me -- of striking the keys way too hard on the keyboard when I type. The crashing of keys drove him to distraction. So, a lot of the work on the Burns scripts was done with me sweating profusely, Burns gnashing his teeth. The only thing that could have enhanced our morale was if we'd worked in MOPP suits.

Simon's approach to writing was to focus on finding the best lunch -- whether the catering on set, at a nearby restaurant or one across the city -- and then to spend as much time as possible trading stories about our experiences as reporters until one of us broke down and decided to actually work on the job at hand.