They walk and swear and shoot and joke like them. The actors playing the Marines of 1st Recon Battalion don’t just look like Marines, though. In an era when popular portrayals of war like The Hurt Locker have gotten big things wrong, Generation Kill took care to get the smallest things right.

But it was there, and the message from Simon and Burns is clear: Details matter. It’s such a minuscule detail that, had it been absent, I wouldn’t have noticed or cared. Not only is this detail specific to a particular rank - I was a Marine lieutenant in the same 2003 invasion depicted in the show, and I only saw junior officers wear map pens in their flak jackets - but the fact that the map pens are upside-down means that someone on set knew that felt tips dry out in the desert heat when the pens are stored upright. At one point, Lieutenant Fick (played by Stark Sands) has map pens tucked upside-down in the loops of his modular protective vest. How detailed is the verisimilitude? More than most viewers are equipped to notice. Rudy Reyes, a sergeant during the invasion, even portrayed himself in the series. For the TV series, showrunner David Simon hired Wright to co-author the scripts, plus several of the Marines from 1st Recon Battalion to serve as advisers on set. Much of Evan Wright’s book can be verified in a memoir released around the same time: Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away, written by the lieutenant in charge of the very platoon Wright rode along with. Ten years after the miniseries aired, it is still unlikely that any show in history has been fact-checked as ruthlessly by the people who were there. If you want to know what it felt like to be a Marine during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, watch Generation Kill. A Marine who took part in the invasion depicted in the miniseries shares just how accurate the show is.

Generation Kill by Evan Wright