He'll find out soon enough. The real war, when it arrives, is confusing, bloody and maddeningly oblique. After one battle, Bravo Platoon encounters a Marine wandering through a field, mourning a friend whose stomach has been blown to pieces. ''We returned fire and shot a donkey's head off,'' he says desolately. ``We didn't see much else.''

If the Marines in Generation Kill sometimes seem callow, why shouldn't they? Most of them are barely out of their teens. It's not fashionable to say so, but so was the Greatest Generation. As American troops fought another desert war 65 years ago, against the Nazis in North Africa, their commanders were horrified by an Army survey that showed the overwhelming majority had no idea what the war was about. The winning entry in an essay contest titled Why I Fight read, in its entirety: ``Because I was drafted.''

Generation Kill never condescends to its characters. It's written and produced by David Simon and Ed Burns, the team behind The Wire, HBO's morbid dissection of the criminal justice system's war on drugs, and they've retained The Wire's recurring theme of good people trapped in a bad system.

That's never more apparent than when they're dealing with the rules of engagement, or ROE, the ever-shifting regulations about when and at whom the Marines can fire their guns. In the opening hours of the invasion, the rules are so tight that when a convoy of armed Iraqis blocks the highway ahead, Bravo Platoon can only wave. ''Our ROE states uniformed soldiers only, and they should be firing at us,'' explains a headquarters officer on what it would take to authorize shooting. (It later turns out the men belonged to Saddam Hussein's death squads, hunting Iraqi army deserters.) Within a day or two, the rules have been relaxed enough that young boys tending camels are approved targets.

Even when headquarters stays out of it, the Marines learn, the war is a collection of painful uncertainties calling for split-second, life-or-death decisions. A man spotted through binoculars, 300 yards off -- is that a rifle in his hand, or a walking stick? Is that vehicle speeding toward the roadblock driven by a suicide bomber intent on mayhem or a desperate refugee fleeing Saddam?

One night, the lights of a village shimmering with the heat is mistaken for an approaching column of Iraqi armor, resulting in an air strike -- again botched by bad map coordinates. ''Eleven thousand pounds of ordnance dropped,'' muses an officer the next day, ``and we didn't hit any armor. Didn't destroy any villages, though, either. I guess that sort of goes in the win column, right?''

In the world of Generation Kill, definitely. War, Simon and Burns are reminding us, is a mighty club, powerful but also crude and -- for all our modern technology -- undiscriminating. ''Make no mistake!'' an officer bellows at the Marines as they assemble for the invasion. ''There will be no bleep-ups!'' Oh yes there will.

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