On HBO, The Fierce Tug of War

Alexander Skarsgard, who plays Team Leader Brad "Iceman" Colbert, looks so much like another actor here -- with the wildly appropriate name of Stark Sands (playing 1st Lt. Nathaniel Fick) -- that it's hard to tell them apart and parcel out credit. They both have a boyish look that camouflages a true believer's iron will. All the casting is fastidious, especially Chance Kelly, who plays gravelly-voiced 1st Recon Cmdr. Stephen Ferrando, whose nickname is an ominous "Godfather" and whose word is law, at least most of the time.

Everybody has a nickname, as you may have deduced, and among the most appropriate is that of Capt. Dave McGraw (Eric Nenninger), known as "Capt. America" and the most impassioned of all the fighters for truth, justice and so on. His policy is to overstate every peril and underplay every potential cause for hope; in Episode 2 (July 20), he engages and pulverizes an abandoned SUV for reasons known but to him. McGraw has many complaints, a lot of them shared by his fellow soldiers, with the most prominent being the crummy equipment, the "recycled junk" with which the Marines have been told to fight the war. The worst offenders are the clunkety Humvees, rattletraps so unreliable that men spend their own time and money trying to make them battle-ready.

Food is inadequate, supplies are inadequate (in part because one supply wagon is inadvertently blown to smithereens), the tools of the trade are inferior, but the tradesmen themselves are ready, "perfectly tuned Ferraris," as one of the men says, reduced to participating in "a demolition derby."

Whatever one's feelings on the war, the truism about supporting the troops holds up. You can't help but identify with these guys, and to pull for them, trapped as they are between a top command wracked with indecisiveness and dubious motivation and an enemy who can't be trusted to look like the enemy -- some of the bad guys take a perverse and cowardly pleasure in hiding among civilians, then parade civilian victims around when one of them is injured or killed.

Even if appropriated for crass propaganda use, these casualties are painfully tragic. Episode 4 ends with an image so wrenching as to be immeasurably sad, and all because an Iraqi in the driver's seat of a car didn't seem to recognize the warning shots fired over the car for what they were. The car keeps coming, and the Marines change their aim. Every so often there is a little burst of cruel, trenchant imagery that hits home and hard -- a human arm sticking out of the ground like a weird kind of tree; the spectacle of nighttime bombing that eerily lights up a distant vista ("Pretty, isn't it?" one soldier notes with typical irony); one soldier exiting a portable toilet with a copy of Hustler magazine in his hand; a caravan of Pizza Hut trucks arriving unexpectedly with a bounty of bliss.

Directed by Susanna White and Simon Cellan Jones, "Generation Kill" brings the world of the soldiers to vividly detailed life -- so forcefully that even initially resistant viewers might soon feel they're embedded with the troops. When they aren't talking -- about masturbation, or junk food (Charms candies are superstitiously banned from all military vehicles), or horror movies, or women -- the soldiers are singing: a falsetto "Lovin' You" a la Minnie Riperton or an old Vietnam-era protest song, even one that ends with the observation that "We're all going to die."

In an afterword to the paperback edition of his book, author Wright restates his admiration for the soldiers with whom he lived and on whom he depended for survival. "Five years into this war, I am not always confident most Americans fully appreciate the caliber of the people fighting for them, the sacrifices they have made, and the sacrifices they continue to make," Wright says. "After the Vietnam War ended, the onus of shame largely fell on the veterans. This time around, if shame is to be had when the Iraq conflict ends -- and all indications are there will be plenty of it -- the veterans are the last people in America to deserve it."

"Generation Kill" makes that point so powerfully as to stand among the truest and most trenchant war movies of all time.

Episode 1 of Generation Kill (68 minutes) debuts tonight at 9 on HBO.