YMMV / Generation Kill

• Alternate Character Interpretation: According to Eric Kocher, Trombley is the most misunderstood figure in the Generation Kill canon. Trombley's reason for wanting to shoot his gun was, according to Kocher, his eager desire to prove his skills and contribute to the mission.
• Fountain of Memes: Pretty much everything Ray says is a meme, it seems being high on ripped fuel does that to a person…
• Ho Yay:
  • Sergeant Espera wonders if anyone else notices how homoerotic the Marines are. In one DVD commentary, Stark Sands and Evan Wright spend some time discussing how Colbert and Fick gel with each other extremely well, down to their eye contact. Rudy Reyes, who is fully aware of how he comes off to the others, plays into it with Sergeant Patrick at one point, to the amusement of everyone else.
    Colbert: Rudy, when are you going to realize you're fucking gay?
  • Espera even suggests to Lilley that shooting gay porn starring Rudy would be more profitable than trying to shoot footage to compile a documentary of the invasion.
  • Lilley's only response is to use his camcorder to zoom in on Rudy's backside while he gets dressed.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Castle fans may recognise Jon Huertas (AKA Detective Javier Esposito) as Sergeant Espera.
  • True Blood fans may recognise Alexander Skarsgård (AKA Eric Northman) as Sergeant Colbert.
  • Michael Mosley has a blink and you'll miss it cameo in a late episode playing a Marine who rejoined the main cast by hitching a ride with Delta company. His other major role was as Drew in the last season of Scrubs.
  • Fruity Rudy himself would star (more specifically, provide the likeness) as two separate operators (Shane Sparks and Enzo Reyes) in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II respectively.
  • Speaking of Call of Duty, Rich McDonald would 4 years later play LCDR David Mason, the protagonist of “Call of Duty: Black Ops II''.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Most of the Marines are haunted by the horrors of war, by their own mistakes and frustrated by their incompetent command. Many genuinely want to help the Iraqi people and do as little harm to civilians as humanly possible. This being war, it doesn't work out nearly as well as they had hoped. Adding to this grim picture, many of them are fully aware that they will take these horrors home with them and carry that weight.
  • Colbert's Heroic BSoD when Trombley shoots the "camels"; also a real-life tearjerker for Colbert himself when he saw the injured child, according to the book.
  • Colbert kneeling down and rocking a sick baby, looking helpless and overwhelmed as more Iraqi mothers hand him their children, perhaps thinking he was a doctor. All he can do is dab water on them. Doc Bryan says that about a quarter of the babies will die soon. They were in the middle of a heart-wrenching humanitarian crisis and there was nothing they could do.
  • Doc trying to treat and protect the little boy when they start to get overwhelmed by the crowd.
  • Evan Wright saying goodbye at the end.
  • All the men in Bravo watching the movie at the end. And all of them walking away at different points when it becomes too hard to bear. Except Trombley.
    • Judging by Trombley’s face at the end, it seems that even he was affected by the video in the end.
  • The Iraqi man who got too close to the checkpoint, which resulted in his daughter's death. When he walks away, cradling her body, in near-silence....damn.
  • Walt Hasser, sleep deprived and on edge, accidentally shoots a man through the eye. Even worse, in the book the man doesn't die instantly and is instead essentially lobotomized, and the convoy is forced to drive by to his car. Quietly devastated, Walt stares resolutely ahead, hearing the man's death rattles. Doc Bryan tries to perform a Mercy Kill on the poor man but fails because the vehicle he is in hits a bump on the road. A corpsman does eventually stop by and upon seeing that there is nothing he can do to save the man, injects him with a moderate dose of valium and morphine, to keep the pain under control. Later, they find out that the man died the next day, unclaimed.
  • In the book, one Marine sees an exhausted Iraqi mother nearly drop her baby as she heads to the next checkpoint. He is so affected by the sight that he offers to hold the baby and escorts both of them, crying his eyes out.
  • One of the facts discussed in the book is that many Marines reenlist because sometimes, it's the least painful option. Many of them, when they return to civilian life, realize that they don't have the skills and patience for normal jobs and marriage, and feel terrible knowing that some of their brothers are out there fighting and dying. They also go from the emotional safety of a community with incredibly strong bonds of brotherhood to a society where they cannot replicate the same kind of connections. As a result, many of them suffer from acute loneliness and alienation and reenlist just to recapture that feeling of trust and camaraderie.
• The Woobie:
  • In the miniseries: Fick, whenever he has to deal with his superiors being incompetent. Person near the end after Rudy pounds his face in while triangle choking him as seen at 5:49.
  • In the book, after First Recon more or less stands down towards the end, Person comes down hard off the ridiculous combat and ephedrine-induced high he was on, and almost loses the ability to speak. Colbert, Garza and Wright all try to figure out what's wrong with him, until they realize he wasn't able to process everything that happened over the last four weeks and is now deep in the throes of (temporary) PTSD.