Good men, bad war

There are obviously some cases in the series where an overly aggressive attitude is involved in civilian deaths.

Well, these guys are trained to be overly aggressive. These are not policemen. That's what makes what happened after those 21 days so much more of a bloodbath, because these guys can't transition into being cops. They're taught to kill, and they're taught to deal death. You take the roadblocks. Even though, to their credit, they try to figure out ways of not blowing up these cars, the officers weren't happy with that, because all it takes is one car with a suicide bomber and you've got yourself a bunch of American casualties. So they were between a rock and a hard place.

You served in Vietnam. Did this project make you anxious in any way?

No, I just felt very old. I'm just incredibly impressed with these guys that I've met. They might be the cream of the cream, but they're just fantastic individuals. They're very, very caring; they're very soft underneath all of that armament. They want to do the right thing, they're incredibly well trained, they're tough, they have a great work ethic. When I was in Fort Dix, N.J., in basic training, I shoveled snow to get ready for Vietnam. We were just a drafted Army. The training was horrible. The equipment was OK, but it's nothing [compared with today]. What's happened even in Iraq in the last five years, it's astounding what they can do now.

If this miniseries followed regular enlisted guys in the Army serving in Iraq, would the picture be different?

Yeah, I think if you looked at any grunts, either Marine grunts or Army grunts, they're going to be rawer, younger, less disciplined. And these guys, remember, they've got their fingers on a lot of triggers. You saw the first five episodes, so you didn't see when Delta Company came in during Episode 6. Delta Company is the reservists. They hook up with Recon when they're going north to Baquba. When there's a night firefight, these guys just dump everything. That's the difference in training. When you listen to [military advisor] Eric Kocher, he believes that the people in the battlefield should be in their 30s, not in their 20s or their teens, because then you'd have guys who are smart, are highly trained and could wait that half-second and make decisions, rather than just pull triggers.

How did working on this series affect your perspective on the war?

It didn't. I still hate it. It just makes it more of a tragedy to know that we sent these guys into combat in the wrong war, on a make-up war. We wasted such talent on a lie. I know from Vietnam, when these guys are injured -- guys who are really injured, the guy who steps on a mine or gets hit with an IED [improvised explosive device] -- you know, he wants to believe that he gave it for the right cause. And you know, as time wears on, it'll become more evident, just like it was in Vietnam, that it wasn't the right cause. Yet that doesn't bring his foot back or his arms back.

From my point of view, we should try those people responsible for putting us to war. Put them in a courtroom, because what they did was a crime.

So you take these honorable men, and send them into a dishonorable situation.

Right. First of all, they're volunteers, so they're going to go where they're told to go, and it's up to the American people to be very cognizant of that decision. I don't think Bush has any idea of the suffering he's caused. In fact, E.L. Doctorow wrote an Op-Ed piece about that. We don't see the coffins coming home. We're disconnected from the war. And that's wrong -- we should all be in it together. If we're going to be in it, we should all be in it together, and we're not. And I think that in a larger sense, we're ashamed that we're not involved. At some level we know that it's wrong to have done this.

Do you think that this series highlights the arbitrary nature of the whole conflict? Because I think people will have trouble understanding the job of killing, the notion that that individual could be a good person who's been sent into the wrong situation.

I don't know if it's that kind of a vehicle. I think it's more of a vehicle that lets you see into this world. We don't know these people. Particularly the upper middle class, we don't know these people. These are the working-class guys who're doing this. The disconnect is profound. I just read that Congress passed another bill for the Iraq war, and it doubled the amount of money for college. That's great, but a lot of these guys don't go to college; that's not who they are. The guys who passed the law, that's who they are. They think they're doing a wonderful thing but they don't know these guys. These are the guys who are carpenters, or electricians, or cops, or paramedics. They're the backbone of our country, but most of them don't want to sit in the classroom. If that's what you're offering, you don't understand them.

I think that by looking at these guys, you get an understanding that there are a lot of good guys out there. And this is their world.