Books we're reading

By Kevin Potvin

Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the new face of American war, by Evan Wright (Putnam, 2004), and Cosa Nostra: A history of the Sicilian Mafia, by John Dickie, (Coronet, 2004), are in many ways the same book. Cosa Nostra has a theme reiterated throughout by the author: the Mafia exists as an organization devoted to the art of killing and getting away with it. Generation Kill, by a Rolling Stone magazine writer embedded with a special forces unit at the leading edge of the American invasion of Iraq all the way up to Baghdad, has an awful lot of killing in it as well, as the title of the book would indicate. But there are distinct differences in the two organizations, the Mafia and the US military: the Mafia try not to kill civilians and especially avoid women and children, while the unit we follow up to Baghdad in Generation Kill rake with devastatingly lethal ammunition villages and cars filled with women and children all the way, with some remorse, it must be noted, but as the author tells it, surprisingly little. Another difference is that the Mafia, though brutal, self-interested, and murderous, kills for honest (if unacceptable) reasons, accounting for relatively modest numbers over its 150 year history, while the US military was dispatched to Iraq for no good honest reason, and has, by some accounts, killed over 100,000 innocents, several thousand more who were legitimately resisting their completely illegal invasion, and even a few thousand of their own grunts. The purpose of a military, even the Canadian one, is to kill people—despite fuzzy commercials on TV and reassuring comments from political leaders. That’s what the mafia is for, too. A war breaks out between armies or rival outlaw gangs alike only where two killing machines disagree on who has a monopoly on violence and the ability to kill. The Mafia was finally brought to heel when the law was effectively applied. The lesson is there for us all. It can’t have been a welcome proposition for authorities in Sicily when they set out to defeat once and for all the Mafia. It almost seems easier for the world to do the same to the rogue, hazardous, and out-of-control US military—but that would begin with us taming our own Canadian military first.