Generation Kill is dead.

US journalist Even Wright, whose book on US Marines in Iraq was adapted into the celebrated HBO series "Generation Kill," took his own life last Friday.

Evan Wright was 59 years old. The Los Angeles County Coroner's Office classified his death as suicide, as confirmed by his family in a statement released on Monday evening. Wright was known for his direct journalism, which often focused on topics outside of mainstream media.

At Rolling Stone magazine, Wright was able to experience war and military culture - first during a deployment in Afghanistan in 2002 with the 101st Airborne Division of the Army and then in 2003 with the First Reconnaissance Battalion of the Marines in Iraq. He secured a spot in the lead vehicle during the advance from Kuwait to Baghdad and eventually wrote a three-part series in Rolling Stone titled "The Killer Elite," which won the National Magazine Award for outstanding reporting in 2004.

With the Recon Marines in Iraq

Building on this, he wrote his best-selling book "Generation Kill," a nuanced look at young Marines in Iraq, whom he referred to as members of the "throwaway generation" - coming from broken families, raised on video games and the internet, and trained to be killers. He was fascinated by what the men "thought about the world when they weren't firing their weapons," he told the New York Times in 2004 when the book was published.

"The young combat troops I covered in the Middle East represented a new kind of subculture, often as misunderstood by the civilian population back home as by the military leadership," wrote Wright in the introduction to his 2009 book "Hella Nation."

"Generation Kill" was later adapted into an HBO miniseries, written by Wright alongside David Simon and Ed Burns, the team behind "The Wire," and it contains many details about the Marines and their dark humor of war. HERE you can watch "Generation Kill" directly on HBO.

Seeing things as they are

Evan Wright was born on December 12, 1964, in Cleveland. His father Alan was the deputy prosecutor of Lake County, a district near Cleveland, and later became a lawyer and lobbyist for companies. His mother, Nina (Wonderlich) Wright, also a lawyer, was a park commissioner in Lake County. He graduated from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., with a degree in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He is survived by his wife, Kelli Wright, and three young children, Carter, Evan, and Kennedy, as well as a sister, Nora, and a brother, Walter.

Wright said his goal as a reporter was to see things as they are and to immerse himself in the worlds of the people he reported on. "It's a powerful experience to merge with someone." HERE you can find all books by Evan Wright.