The director Truffaut said it’s impossible to make an antiwar film, because war is such an exciting cinematic subject you can’t help rooting for it. HBO’s enormously ambitious, historically important Iraq War miniseries Generation Kill disproves this. Packed with state-of-the-art battle scenes — probably some of the most authentic ever filmed — it captures an untold truth about war: often, it’s boring, and usually confusing.

But even if you’re bored and confused by the first episode or two, you’ll miss out on something unique if you don’t stick with the show. More than anything else to come out of war, it gives a grunt’s-eye view of what it was really like in the first weeks of the conflict.

Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright was embedded with the Marines’ First Reconnaissance Battallion, Bravo Company, during its 40-day mission at the very tip of the spear of the invasion — often the first Americans the Iraqis saw (and, alas, sometimes the last people they’d ever see). Watching the show, you see why Wright was poorly informed to take the life-threatening assignment, and why he won all those awards for his articles and book about it.

The good and bad thing about HBO’s attempt to do for Iraq what Band of Brothers did for World War II is that it was made by David Simon and Ed Burns, auteurs of The Wire. It’s good because the characters are seamlessly real, emotionally transparent, kinetically spontaneous, and astoundingly eloquent, whether they’re insulting each other, their increasingly muddled superiors, or the Iraqis, or bemoaning the fates of all of the above. Just as you did when watching The Wire, inside of three episodes you feel like an insider. You want to join in the bitch session about the incompetent officers who rain down death on innocent civilian villages, or exhibit psychological problems, or dementedly enforce mustache-length regulations while tracer bullets zing past everybody’s heads.

But it would have been a lot better if Steven Spielberg had been at the helm. Band of Brothers imposed a firmer narrative on the WW II adventures of the Army’s Easy Company. And it was a clearer narrative to begin with: from D-Day to Hitler’s bunker in a few not-so-easy years. Bravo Company went from Afghanistan, a relatively well-planned invasion (unfortunately abandoned and undone) to the less-well-planned assault on Baghdad. As Generation Kill shows in painful, painstaking detail, the orders kept changing.

Let the bad guys escape unless they’re shooting at you. Shoot any and all Iraqis on sight if they’re between you and your goal. Kill approaching cars if they ignore your warning shots — but you seldom get access to a translator, and he’s been ordered to lie to you about what the Iraqis are saying. (Generally, he says they’re saying, “We welcome the U.S. and are happy to be liberated!”)

Bravo Company was among the first to experience the larger drama of the war: the greatest fighting machine in history thwarted by tactical and strategic folly, insanely inadequate equipment, and the fact that ridiculously few soldiers were tasked with vast missions, like 70 guys all alone, stuck between an entire hostile city and an entire enemy division. “We’re perfectly tuned Ferraris in a demolition derby,” complains one GI. He’s wrong: demolition derbies have fixed rules, and somebody wins.

Generation Kill doesn’t impose a political view on the conflict. We see why one grunt blows a camel’s rider away in the darkness — in compliance with orders — and why he gets in trouble when the victim turns out to be an unarmed farmer. We see a little girl killed, but it’s not couched in schematic moral terms, as in the war films of De Palma, Oliver Stone, or Kubrick. Tragedy doesn’t require villainy. You might’ve done the same thing without meaning to if you’d been in the killer’s boots.

Generation Kill does a superb job of putting you in those boots. Like much of the Wire guys’ work, however, it does an incompetent job of structuring their story and individuating the characters. The idea is to plunge you into battle without any explanations — you have to figure out who’s who, the heroes and screwups, the bewildering lingo, and what the heck is going on at every moment.

It was a lot easier to figure out the lay of the land when the land involved was Baltimore. Spielberg would’ve done a better job of dispelling the fog of war so that we could’ve seen Iraq more clearly.