Survive the apocalypse with Rudy Reyes

I flipped on the TV this morning and, after watching that terrific opening 20 minutes of “Le Mans” - Lee H. Katzin’s 1971 film was playing on Turner Movie Classics - ended up catching something called “Apocalypse Man” on the History Channel.

I was intrigued from the first. It’s a reality show, kind of in the vein of “Survivorman” or “Man Vs. Wild,” in which a guy shows you how to survive in a post-holocaust world. It’s kind of like “The Road” meets “Real World.”

As I watched the star make a grappling hook out of a tire iron, scramble up a makeshit rope ladder over a bridge, hotwire a car and improvise a radio transmitter, I began to think that he looked familiar. Hmmmm, I thought, Rudy Reyes. Where have I heard that name before.

Then I remembered: “Generation Kill.” Reyes is one of the guys who starred in the HBO movie who played himself. A former Marine who was with the first Americans to invade Baghdad in 2003, he was a character both in Lee Tergesen’s nonfiction book and in the miniseries codirected by Susanna White and Simon Cellan Jones.

Always nice to know that there is a future after the service.

Below : Get to know Rudy Reyes.