Stories Of Our Time
New article in the July 2009 issue of Esquire magazine.
Down & Out In Fresno And San Francisco
page 66
Saturday, June 06, 2009
New article in the July 2009 issue of Esquire magazine.
Down & Out In Fresno And San Francisco
page 66
MY WAR: KILLING TIME IN IRAQ
"My War by Colby Buzzell is nothing less than the soul of an extremely interesting human being at war on our behalf in Iraq."
- Kurt Vonnegut
“I remember reading Colby's journal entries on the internet when he was filing them from Iraq. I was amazed at how heavy the material was but what really knocked me out was how sharp and vividly intense his writing was. My War is the real deal reportage from the ground. There's no way any reporter could have brought this back. If you care about our brave soldiers in the fray and want to get an insight into what it's really like out there, My War is essential reading.”
- Henry Rollins
"Endlessly surprising…delightfully profane… an unfiltered, often ferocious expression of his boots-on-the-ground point-of-view of the Iraq war."
- Arianna Huffington
"If, in 20 years time, people want to know what it was like to fight in Iraq, they can pick up ‘My War’ and find out. It tells what it's like to be a grunt fighting in the Sunni Triangle – with more power and authority than the best ‘embedded reporter’ could manage. It is something of a triumph for blogs over traditional media."
- Nick Cohen
"My War is breathtaking. His self-awareness is total and unromantic, his instinct for what matters unrelenting, his writing lyrical, heartbreaking, hilarious, and essential. We can read a thousand dispatches from Iraq, but we will never know the war-or ourselves-like we will after reading My War."
-Robert Kurson, author of Shadow Divers
"Incredible accounts of combat from a grunt's-eye-view."
-Rolling Stone Magazine
"The most extraordinary writing yet produced by a soldier of the Iraq war"
-Esquire Magazine
"My War is perhaps the finest and most genuine writing to come so far out of the war in Iraq, uncompromising in both its criticism and its praise, willing to admit the ugliness of violence and the exhilaration that it breeds."
-War, Literature & the Arts Journal
"Buzzell's account of military life as a grunt in Mosul, My War: Killing Time In Iraq, is like no war diary written before. Blunt, brutal, foul-mouthed, and immediate.
-The Times UK
"In gutsy, sometimes profane prose, he takes you on a soldier's-eye view of the front lines of the war."
-Newsweek
"Remarkably blunt, honest and often hilarious."
-Chicago Sun-Times
"Striking....Buzzell tells the story of his year in Iraq with a steeliness that's both sincere and chilling."
-People Magazine
"Profound, profane....told with irresistible gallows humor and anger devoid of self-consciousness. Give[s] us a much deeper understanding of the war."
-Atlanta Journal Constitution
"My War" is the story of a young grunt trying to survive boredom and death in a war zone...What you soon realize about this stranger at the bar, Colby Buzzell, is that he can knock you off your barstool at a moment's notice with soul-jarring observations and darkly comedic insights into what it really means to be fighting and idling in this war."
-L.A. Times Magazine
"Funny, often surreal "What the @!%# am I doing here?" account of military life...(Grade: A-)"
-Entertainment Weekly
"Raw, sardonic, and thrashingly honest, My War is a stellar grunt's-eye view of the Iraq war."
-Mens Journal
"Buzzell’s My War, written in a style reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson and Allen Ginsberg, is fueled by an antiauthority, punk-rock attitude.”
-Poets and Writers magazine
"Military recruiters won't be handing My War to prospective soldiers, who would do well to read one grunt's account of what they could be getting into."
-USA Today
“Several other books have come out during the war… What makes "My War" stand out is the author. The way in which a punk-rock skateboarder navigated the Army gives him a compelling voice and take on the Iraq war.”
-Denver Post
"My War: Killing Time in Iraq... the most charming and funny of the memoirists"
-New York Magazine
“The war in Iraq may be far from over, but it has already produced a small crop of books by soldiers who fought in it… Colby Buzzell is perhaps the best storyteller, and without a doubt the funniest.”
-BBC News
“My War is all about immediacy, and it's an invaluable reference to the current war”
-Seattle Weekly
"Sensational book... Buzzell is in the habit of telling it like it is, a skill he uses to great effect in this tragi-comic account of 'Joe' (Infantrymen) life in Iraq... In My War, he records his experiences with a mixture of irreverence and awe, like a latter day Holden Caufield who suddenly finds himself behind enemey lines"
-The Big Issue (U.K.)
“Provid[es] more truth than CNN or the army could or would."
-Library Journal
"Captivating memoir about the year [Buzzell] spent serving as an army ‘trigger puller’ in Iraq….though the combat scenes are exciting, this book is actually more engrossing as a portrait of the day-to-day life of a young American soldier."
-Publishers Weekly
"Reminiscent of Michael Herr’s Dispatches."
-Wall Street Journal
"[A] book that stands quite tall in the literature of that conflict to date."
-Booklist
“This is a book you NEED to read."
-AMP Magazine
“A brilliant read."
-Business Standard
"Gripping memoir... My War proves that the best blogs really can become the best books."
E! online
"If military recruitment is down now, wait till the kids read this book."
-Kirkus Reviews
- Kurt Vonnegut
“I remember reading Colby's journal entries on the internet when he was filing them from Iraq. I was amazed at how heavy the material was but what really knocked me out was how sharp and vividly intense his writing was. My War is the real deal reportage from the ground. There's no way any reporter could have brought this back. If you care about our brave soldiers in the fray and want to get an insight into what it's really like out there, My War is essential reading.”
- Henry Rollins
"Endlessly surprising…delightfully profane… an unfiltered, often ferocious expression of his boots-on-the-ground point-of-view of the Iraq war."
- Arianna Huffington
"If, in 20 years time, people want to know what it was like to fight in Iraq, they can pick up ‘My War’ and find out. It tells what it's like to be a grunt fighting in the Sunni Triangle – with more power and authority than the best ‘embedded reporter’ could manage. It is something of a triumph for blogs over traditional media."
- Nick Cohen
"My War is breathtaking. His self-awareness is total and unromantic, his instinct for what matters unrelenting, his writing lyrical, heartbreaking, hilarious, and essential. We can read a thousand dispatches from Iraq, but we will never know the war-or ourselves-like we will after reading My War."
-Robert Kurson, author of Shadow Divers
"Incredible accounts of combat from a grunt's-eye-view."
-Rolling Stone Magazine
"The most extraordinary writing yet produced by a soldier of the Iraq war"
-Esquire Magazine
"My War is perhaps the finest and most genuine writing to come so far out of the war in Iraq, uncompromising in both its criticism and its praise, willing to admit the ugliness of violence and the exhilaration that it breeds."
-War, Literature & the Arts Journal
"Buzzell's account of military life as a grunt in Mosul, My War: Killing Time In Iraq, is like no war diary written before. Blunt, brutal, foul-mouthed, and immediate.
-The Times UK
"In gutsy, sometimes profane prose, he takes you on a soldier's-eye view of the front lines of the war."
-Newsweek
"Remarkably blunt, honest and often hilarious."
-Chicago Sun-Times
"Striking....Buzzell tells the story of his year in Iraq with a steeliness that's both sincere and chilling."
-People Magazine
"Profound, profane....told with irresistible gallows humor and anger devoid of self-consciousness. Give[s] us a much deeper understanding of the war."
-Atlanta Journal Constitution
"My War" is the story of a young grunt trying to survive boredom and death in a war zone...What you soon realize about this stranger at the bar, Colby Buzzell, is that he can knock you off your barstool at a moment's notice with soul-jarring observations and darkly comedic insights into what it really means to be fighting and idling in this war."
-L.A. Times Magazine
"Funny, often surreal "What the @!%# am I doing here?" account of military life...(Grade: A-)"
-Entertainment Weekly
"Raw, sardonic, and thrashingly honest, My War is a stellar grunt's-eye view of the Iraq war."
-Mens Journal
"Buzzell’s My War, written in a style reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson and Allen Ginsberg, is fueled by an antiauthority, punk-rock attitude.”
-Poets and Writers magazine
"Military recruiters won't be handing My War to prospective soldiers, who would do well to read one grunt's account of what they could be getting into."
-USA Today
“Several other books have come out during the war… What makes "My War" stand out is the author. The way in which a punk-rock skateboarder navigated the Army gives him a compelling voice and take on the Iraq war.”
-Denver Post
"My War: Killing Time in Iraq... the most charming and funny of the memoirists"
-New York Magazine
“The war in Iraq may be far from over, but it has already produced a small crop of books by soldiers who fought in it… Colby Buzzell is perhaps the best storyteller, and without a doubt the funniest.”
-BBC News
“My War is all about immediacy, and it's an invaluable reference to the current war”
-Seattle Weekly
"Sensational book... Buzzell is in the habit of telling it like it is, a skill he uses to great effect in this tragi-comic account of 'Joe' (Infantrymen) life in Iraq... In My War, he records his experiences with a mixture of irreverence and awe, like a latter day Holden Caufield who suddenly finds himself behind enemey lines"
-The Big Issue (U.K.)
“Provid[es] more truth than CNN or the army could or would."
-Library Journal
"Captivating memoir about the year [Buzzell] spent serving as an army ‘trigger puller’ in Iraq….though the combat scenes are exciting, this book is actually more engrossing as a portrait of the day-to-day life of a young American soldier."
-Publishers Weekly
"Reminiscent of Michael Herr’s Dispatches."
-Wall Street Journal
"[A] book that stands quite tall in the literature of that conflict to date."
-Booklist
“This is a book you NEED to read."
-AMP Magazine
“A brilliant read."
-Business Standard
"Gripping memoir... My War proves that the best blogs really can become the best books."
E! online
"If military recruitment is down now, wait till the kids read this book."
-Kirkus Reviews
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
San Francisco Chronicle
Since the Army was kind enough to send me an invitation to go back to Operation Iraqi Freedom, I decided to R.S.V.P. by writing a little Op-Ed piece about it for the San Francisco Chronicle.
click here to read
Return to Sender - Iraq Veteran Gets the Call Again
The article appeared on page B - 7 of the May 8, 2008 San Francisco Chronicle.
click here to read
Return to Sender - Iraq Veteran Gets the Call Again
The article appeared on page B - 7 of the May 8, 2008 San Francisco Chronicle.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
CNN - Soldier finds his voice blogging from Iraq
By Brandon Griggs
(CNN) -- Bullets were pinging off our armor, all over our vehicle, and you could hear multiple RPGs being fired, soaring through the air every which way and impacting all around us. All sorts of crazy insane Hollywood explosions were going off. I've never felt fear like this. I was like, this is it, I'm going to die.
When U.S. Army machine gunner Colby Buzzell began blogging about his combat experiences from a military base in Mosul, Iraq, he wasn't looking for attention or trouble. Buzzell just wanted a way to chronicle what he saw and did and felt during the Iraq war.
But his visceral, first-hand accounts were a bracing antidote to dry news reports and bloodless Pentagon news releases. In the first major war of the Internet age, Buzzell and other soldier bloggers in Iraq offered readers around the world unfiltered, real-time glimpses of an ongoing conflict.
"Here's a soldier in a combat zone ... writing about it and posting it on the Internet. I don't think that's ever been done in previous wars," Buzzell said.
"It just provides another perspective that no embedded journalist can ever do," said the veteran, now a freelance writer in San Francisco, California, and the author of "My War: Killing Time in Iraq." "An embedded journalist is just there observing. But a soldier writing about it -- you can't get more embedded than that." See an interview with Buzzell »
A suburban skateboarder with punk-rock sensibilities, Buzzell had no background in creative writing before he joined the Army in 2002. Inspired by a Marine buddy and burned out by a string of dead-end jobs, he signed up after a smooth-talking recruiter offered a signing bonus and sold him on the Army "like it was some [expletive] Club Med vacation."
When Buzzell arrived in Iraq in November 2003, he didn't know what a blog was. But after he read an article about a blogger in Time magazine in June 2004, he began posting anonymous journal entries on the Web under the nickname CBFTW (Colby Buzzell F--- The War).
"The only writing I knew how to do was ... like I was telling a story to the person next to me," he said. "I'd go to the Internet cafe [at the Army base], and my ears would still be ringing from whatever the experience [was] that day. There were times when I couldn't type fast enough."
Over the next six weeks, Buzzell wrote brutally frank, profanity-laced posts about the terror, tedium and misadventures of an infantryman's life in Iraq. At first, few people seemed to notice. But word spread, and before long he was getting hundreds of e-mails a day from readers.
Parents of troops in Iraq wrote to thank him for helping them understand their children's wartime perspective. One reader said they found Buzzell's blog more informative than the war coverage in The New York Times. Buzzell even heard from a sympathetic Iraqi in Baghdad who prayed for his safe return to America.
But almost nobody -- not even Buzzell's wife -- knew that he was the blogger.
Then came August 4, 2004. Mosul erupted in gunfire, and Buzzell's platoon survived an ambush by swarms of black-clad insurgents wielding rocket-propelled grenades. Buzzell witnessed his platoon sergeant survive a bullet through his helmet and narrowly missed being killed himself.
The next day, Buzzell went online and found a few brief news reports of the firefight that killed at least 22 Iraqi insurgents and civilians. In his mind, the stories didn't begin to capture what happened. So he wrote a long blog post, titled "Men in Black," about the ambush.
I observed a man, dressed all in black with a terrorist beard, jump out all of sudden from the side of a building, he pointed his AK-47 barrel right at my f------ pupils, I froze and then a split second later, I saw the fire from his muzzle flash leaving the end of his barrel and brass shell casings exiting the side of his AK as he was shooting directly at me. I heard and felt the bullets whiz literally inches from my head.
The "Men in Black" post attracted media attention, and Buzzell was flooded with e-mails and interview requests from around the world. Based on his descriptions of the Mosul attacks, his commanding officers soon figured out that he was the blog's author.
The Army confined Buzzell to the base and began monitoring his posts. Then, after he posted an anti-Iraq war rant by Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra, they ordered him to stop blogging.
Buzzell's Iraq blog lasted just 10 weeks, but it helped pave the way for others to follow. Today, according to the Army, thousands of active-duty soldiers write some form of online journal, often known as a military blog or "milblog."
Pentagon security policy forbids soldiers to publish sensitive information, such as unit locations or the timing of military operations, that might put troops in harm's way. But beyond that, soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are encouraged to blog about military life, said Army Public Affairs Spc. Lindy Kyzer.
"We're actually entering an era of transparency, where we need to have our soldiers talk. It does open up risks. Once you post something, you can't get it back. But we trust our soldiers with a lot," she said. "They are our best spokespersons. They know what the life of a soldier is like, and it's important to convey that to the American people."
Blogging also helps soldiers process traumatic combat experiences that can be hard for them to talk about, Kyzer said.
Since leaving Iraq, Buzzell collected his wartime blog posts and journal entries into "My War," which was published in 2005. Excerpts from his Iraq blog also appeared in the Oscar-nominated documentary "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience."
The war cost Buzzell his marriage and left him with post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis that helped him avoid being redeployed to Iraq last spring. Now 32, he contributes regular features to Esquire magazine and hopes to write another book, the contents of which he's not ready to discuss.
Buzzell is no fan of the Iraq conflict, although he's heartened that active-duty soldiers are still reading "My War."
"The book is being passed around over there, which is kind of surreal," he said. "I do get e-mails from soldiers over there. Guys will say, 'Thanks for getting our story out,' or 'Things haven't really changed that much since you were here.'
"Looking back now, I don't think we had any business [in Iraq]," said Buzzell, who wants to see President-elect Barack Obama end the war. "Hopefully, he gets us out of Iraq in a way that's not a disaster or that gets a lot of soldiers killed."
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/11/13/soldier.blogger/index.html
(CNN) -- Bullets were pinging off our armor, all over our vehicle, and you could hear multiple RPGs being fired, soaring through the air every which way and impacting all around us. All sorts of crazy insane Hollywood explosions were going off. I've never felt fear like this. I was like, this is it, I'm going to die.
When U.S. Army machine gunner Colby Buzzell began blogging about his combat experiences from a military base in Mosul, Iraq, he wasn't looking for attention or trouble. Buzzell just wanted a way to chronicle what he saw and did and felt during the Iraq war.
But his visceral, first-hand accounts were a bracing antidote to dry news reports and bloodless Pentagon news releases. In the first major war of the Internet age, Buzzell and other soldier bloggers in Iraq offered readers around the world unfiltered, real-time glimpses of an ongoing conflict.
"Here's a soldier in a combat zone ... writing about it and posting it on the Internet. I don't think that's ever been done in previous wars," Buzzell said.
"It just provides another perspective that no embedded journalist can ever do," said the veteran, now a freelance writer in San Francisco, California, and the author of "My War: Killing Time in Iraq." "An embedded journalist is just there observing. But a soldier writing about it -- you can't get more embedded than that." See an interview with Buzzell »
A suburban skateboarder with punk-rock sensibilities, Buzzell had no background in creative writing before he joined the Army in 2002. Inspired by a Marine buddy and burned out by a string of dead-end jobs, he signed up after a smooth-talking recruiter offered a signing bonus and sold him on the Army "like it was some [expletive] Club Med vacation."
When Buzzell arrived in Iraq in November 2003, he didn't know what a blog was. But after he read an article about a blogger in Time magazine in June 2004, he began posting anonymous journal entries on the Web under the nickname CBFTW (Colby Buzzell F--- The War).
"The only writing I knew how to do was ... like I was telling a story to the person next to me," he said. "I'd go to the Internet cafe [at the Army base], and my ears would still be ringing from whatever the experience [was] that day. There were times when I couldn't type fast enough."
Over the next six weeks, Buzzell wrote brutally frank, profanity-laced posts about the terror, tedium and misadventures of an infantryman's life in Iraq. At first, few people seemed to notice. But word spread, and before long he was getting hundreds of e-mails a day from readers.
Parents of troops in Iraq wrote to thank him for helping them understand their children's wartime perspective. One reader said they found Buzzell's blog more informative than the war coverage in The New York Times. Buzzell even heard from a sympathetic Iraqi in Baghdad who prayed for his safe return to America.
But almost nobody -- not even Buzzell's wife -- knew that he was the blogger.
Then came August 4, 2004. Mosul erupted in gunfire, and Buzzell's platoon survived an ambush by swarms of black-clad insurgents wielding rocket-propelled grenades. Buzzell witnessed his platoon sergeant survive a bullet through his helmet and narrowly missed being killed himself.
The next day, Buzzell went online and found a few brief news reports of the firefight that killed at least 22 Iraqi insurgents and civilians. In his mind, the stories didn't begin to capture what happened. So he wrote a long blog post, titled "Men in Black," about the ambush.
I observed a man, dressed all in black with a terrorist beard, jump out all of sudden from the side of a building, he pointed his AK-47 barrel right at my f------ pupils, I froze and then a split second later, I saw the fire from his muzzle flash leaving the end of his barrel and brass shell casings exiting the side of his AK as he was shooting directly at me. I heard and felt the bullets whiz literally inches from my head.
The "Men in Black" post attracted media attention, and Buzzell was flooded with e-mails and interview requests from around the world. Based on his descriptions of the Mosul attacks, his commanding officers soon figured out that he was the blog's author.
The Army confined Buzzell to the base and began monitoring his posts. Then, after he posted an anti-Iraq war rant by Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra, they ordered him to stop blogging.
Buzzell's Iraq blog lasted just 10 weeks, but it helped pave the way for others to follow. Today, according to the Army, thousands of active-duty soldiers write some form of online journal, often known as a military blog or "milblog."
Pentagon security policy forbids soldiers to publish sensitive information, such as unit locations or the timing of military operations, that might put troops in harm's way. But beyond that, soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are encouraged to blog about military life, said Army Public Affairs Spc. Lindy Kyzer.
"We're actually entering an era of transparency, where we need to have our soldiers talk. It does open up risks. Once you post something, you can't get it back. But we trust our soldiers with a lot," she said. "They are our best spokespersons. They know what the life of a soldier is like, and it's important to convey that to the American people."
Blogging also helps soldiers process traumatic combat experiences that can be hard for them to talk about, Kyzer said.
Since leaving Iraq, Buzzell collected his wartime blog posts and journal entries into "My War," which was published in 2005. Excerpts from his Iraq blog also appeared in the Oscar-nominated documentary "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience."
The war cost Buzzell his marriage and left him with post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis that helped him avoid being redeployed to Iraq last spring. Now 32, he contributes regular features to Esquire magazine and hopes to write another book, the contents of which he's not ready to discuss.
Buzzell is no fan of the Iraq conflict, although he's heartened that active-duty soldiers are still reading "My War."
"The book is being passed around over there, which is kind of surreal," he said. "I do get e-mails from soldiers over there. Guys will say, 'Thanks for getting our story out,' or 'Things haven't really changed that much since you were here.'
"Looking back now, I don't think we had any business [in Iraq]," said Buzzell, who wants to see President-elect Barack Obama end the war. "Hopefully, he gets us out of Iraq in a way that's not a disaster or that gets a lot of soldiers killed."
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/11/13/soldier.blogger/index.html
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Life After Wartime
Can medical marijuana help returning soldiers from the Iraq and Afghanistan war deal with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder?
Essay on page 158
Monday, August 06, 2007
PRI: To The Best Of Our Knowledge
Boots On the Ground - Stories From Iraq
Part Five: Coming Home
"Anne Strainchamps talked with Colby Buzzell over 4 years ago after he returned from his first tour of duty in Iraq... He and Anne talked again."
http://www.wpr.org/book/091122a.cfm
091122A Coming Home
Source: www.wpr.org
President Obama says our combat mission in Iraq will end by August 31, 2010. This leaves many unanswered questions. What was our mission in Iraq? Did we succeed? What will become of the country we invaded? Whatever the answers, our troops are coming home. But what are they coming home to? In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, we'll talk with Iraq War veterans about the challenges of coming home. And, what about us? Are WE ready for THEM?
Digging A Hole All The Way To America
New article on page 108 about Shenzhen, China in the August 2007 issue of Esquire magazine.
Inside Capitalist China: A Tour de Force Travelogue
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 7, 2007; C01
So Colby Buzzell is standing in the underwear aisle in a Wal-Mart in Shenzhen, China, one of the nine Wal-Marts in the city, minding his own business and shopping for socks, when suddenly this guy with rotting teeth taps him on the arm and shows him a cellphone picture of a cute, smiling Chinese girl.
"You like?" he says. Then he types into the cellphone the price of a night of bliss with this woman -- 1,200 yuan, or about $150.
Buzzell shoos the pimp away and chooses a five-pack of white socks, but the pimp returns with a special sale price -- 800 yuan.
"I looked around for security or maybe somebody else who thought it was a bit odd that some stranger was approaching me inside a Wal-Mart trying to pimp out this Chinese girl," Buzzell writes in his weird and hilarious article on Shenzhen in the August Esquire.
But nobody else in the packed store seemed to think pimping in Wal-Mart is the least bit odd. Perhaps that's because nearly everything in Shenzhen is completely bizarre, as Buzzell demonstrates in this deadpan comic travelogue.
Buzzell is not a China correspondent. He's not really even a reporter. He's a 31-year-old Californian, a former stoner and skate punk who joined the Army and served as a combat infantryman in Iraq in 2003. He started blogging about his experiences in Iraq. The blog attracted a lot of attention and became the basis of Buzzell's widely praised book, "My War: Killing Time in Iraq." Now, Esquire periodically sends Buzzell out to some interesting part of the world to wander around and report what he sees in a style that could be described as "chatty, with attitude."
Shenzhen is a perfect topic for Buzzell. In 1979, it was a tiny fishing village near Hong Kong. Then the Chinese Communist government decided to make Shenzhen an experiment in its new policy of no-holds-barred capitalism. Now, the place has 11 million people, many of them working in foreign-owned factories for a couple of dollars a day, and others working as hookers, dope dealers, pickpockets, beggars, McDonald's fry cooks, Starbucks baristas and the "second wives" of rich Hong Kong businessmen who still have first wives back home.
It's also "the world capital of faux merchandise," Buzzell writes, a place where "everything is bootlegged" -- clothes, sneakers, iPods, PlayStations, movies and millions of T-shirts. Many of the T-shirts bear slogans in English, sort of. Buzzell saw shirts that read, "Who The Wish Are Blackwire" and "Bizarre Must Awesome Want."
He also saw boxes of tea inexplicably decorated with a John Deere logo.
"Those Che T-shirts are made here, too," Buzzell writes. "Shirts made in a communist country by workers who make $1.50 a day, shipped to slackers in a rich country who'll pay twenty bucks they got from Dad for a T-shirt. I'll bet that's just the way Che wanted to be remembered."
Buzzell doesn't act like a reporter, interviewing officials and experts. He just sort of wanders around until he runs into people who speak a bit of English and then he asks them to show him their world. Through this method, he ends up singing a karaoke version of a Celine Dion song in the tiny high-rise apartment of a Chinese Starbucks barista, then climbing up to the roof of the building and gazing out at the Shenzhen skyline "with its hundreds of construction cranes staking the landscape like dinosaurs."
At one point, Buzzell ends up drinking beer with young businessmen, two Brits and one American, who explain the brave new world of globalization.
"Back home, there's this place that used to make these tile bricks," one of the Brits tells Buzzell. "The problem was, they lasted for 80 years. The Chinese make their bricks for cheap, and theirs last only 18 months, which means in 18 months you have to buy more bricks, thus it's good for the economy because it keeps everybody with a job."
"Is that why everything I buy from China falls apart so fast?" Buzzell asks.
"Exactly!" the Brit says. "It keeps everybody with a job."
"It's the finish of one historical cycle," adds another businessman as he chomps into some ribs, "and the start of another."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/06/AR2007080601521.html?referrer=google
San Francisco Chronicle Magazine
Getting By in the Tenderloin
by Colby Buzzell
This article appeared Sunday, August 5, 2007 on page CM - 19
2008 Oscar Nominees
A complete list of nominees for the 80th Academy Awards, announced Jan. 22:
Best Documentary Feature: "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience," "No End in Sight," "Sicko," "Taxi to the Dark Side," "War/Dance."
"Former military blogger Colby Buzzell's high-octane tale of a street shootout is accompanied by still-frame, comic-book-style animation, while Marine Lt. Col. Mike Strobl's simple story about escorting a dead Marine's remains back to his Wyoming hometown is set against peaceful, unpopulated footage of the locations, ending with the dead soldier's grave. On the evidence, I'd guess that Buzzell is a war critic and Strobl is a gung-ho patriot, but I can't be quite sure and it doesn't much matter. Hearing their stories in their own words -- something few of us, pro- or antiwar, bother to do -- is the entire point. (The material is read aloud by various actors, including Beau Bridges, Robert Duvall, Aaron Eckhart and Blair Underwood.)"
-Salon.com
"Several cinematic techniques are employed to realize these tales beyond straight-ahead re-creations. The most distinctive is “Men in Black” by Colby Buzzell, which utilizes a kind of animatic process to present a harrowing street fight, with animated bullets and spent cartridges flying out of the weapons of still illustrations. It's the most vulgar of the lot, with plenty of profanity to heighten the intensity. Most distressing, though, is that after he returned home, he stopped telling people he was in Iraq, because they didn't seem all that interested."
-the Trade, OR
"One of the best segments, a stark comic-style animation that accompanies Colby Buzzell's piece, "Men in Black," actually adds to the experience of the reading. Actually, an entire documentary about Buzzell, who wrote a popular anonymous blog from the frontlines before his commanding officers found out about it, would have been interesting. "
-Cinematical
"Some passages are more effective than others, and none is better than the one from army specialist Colby Buzzell, who discusses manning a Bradley vehicle through an ambush in Mosul; Robbins tells his tale through a series of comic-book-like graphic sketches."
-the Onion A.V. Club
Movie synopsis:
OPERATION HOMECOMING is a unique documentary that explores the firsthand accounts of American soldiers through their own words. The film is built upon a project created by the National Endowment for the Arts to gather the writing of soldiers and their families who have participated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Through interviews and dramatic readings, the film transforms selections from this collection of writing into a deep examination of the experiences of the men and women who are serving in America's armed forces. At the same time it provides depth and context to these experiences through a broader look at the universal themes of war literature.
The writing in OPERATION HOMECOMING covers the full spectrum — poetry, fiction, memoir, letters, journals and essays. The stories recounted here are sad, funny, violent and uplifting. Yet each one displays an honesty and intensity that is rarely seen in explorations of the war. Through an extraordinary group of men and women it presents a profound window into the human side of America's current conflicts.
At the core of the writing in OPERATION HOMECOMING is a deep desire by all those who have served in war to come to terms with their experiences. Throughout the film the soldiers, young and old, express a profound hope that people will listen to their stories and try to understand what they have seen.
Gloom dominates tight Oscar documentary race
By Mary Milliken
Reuters
Monday, February 18, 2008
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Viewers may think some of the nominees for best picture at next week's Academy Awards are dark, but they pale in comparison with the movies competing for the coveted Oscar for best documentary.
War, torture and sickness are some of the topics explored by the nominees. The winner will be announced on Sunday.
Unlike last year, when "An Inconvenient Truth" about Al Gore's slide show on global warming was the favorite and duly won, industry watchers say this year's contest is wide open.
Just as Oscar voters chose the Gore film to signal defense of the environment, this year they may decide the time is right to draw attention to the Iraq war.
"From the short-list to the nominees, the Academy voters were very interested in films that were about Iraq," said documentary filmmaker A.J. Schnack, who writes the film blog "All these wonderful things."
"No End in Sight" documents how the military strategy of a few powerful men led to a deepening conflict, while "Operation Homecoming" puts soldiers' poignant writings about combat and loss on film.
"Taxi to the Dark Side" laments America's use of torture in prisoner interrogations at Guantanamo Bay prison camp and in Iraq and Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore's "Sicko" looks at the failure of the United States to provide health care to millions, including one man who must decide which of two severed fingers he can afford to have reattached.
"War/Dance" follows war-weary children in northern Uganda, describing how they rebuild their lives through music and dance. This film, a favorite with audiences, may be the most upbeat of the nominees.
"HITS HOME HARD"
Schnack said that "each of the topics could be something that the Academy wants to rally behind." Health care reform, for example, is a top issue in the U.S. presidential race.
"Sicko" is by far the most successful of the nominated documentaries at U.S. box offices, grossing $25 million, the third largest ever for a documentary of its kind.
But the Academy may overlook Moore since he won the Oscar for 2002's "Bowling for Columbine" about a tragic mass shooting in a Colorado high school.
"No End in Sight," directed by Charles Ferguson, is second at the box office among nominees, grossing $1.4 million.
Alex Gibney's timing with "Taxi," which has just been released, could not have been better with public debate raging over "waterboarding" -- a simulated drowning technique the CIA admits to having used during interrogations after the September 11 attacks.
Gibney persuaded several high-ranking officials to talk in his film about the use of torture in U.S. detention centers.
"I think they were motivated to speak out because they felt their voices weren't being heard in the corridors of power," said Gibney, also executive producer of "No End in Sight."
As is often the case in documentaries, normal people -- not stars -- get a platform to make themselves heard, like the soldiers in Richard Robbins' "Operation Homecoming," based on a writing project by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Colby Buzzell wrote his vignette, "Men in Black," after living through an horrific Iraqi street battle. "We watch the news and hear talking points like 'We shouldn't be there,' and people are sick of that," he said. "Richard's movie with soldiers telling stories hits home hard."
Best Documentary Feature: "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience," "No End in Sight," "Sicko," "Taxi to the Dark Side," "War/Dance."
"Former military blogger Colby Buzzell's high-octane tale of a street shootout is accompanied by still-frame, comic-book-style animation, while Marine Lt. Col. Mike Strobl's simple story about escorting a dead Marine's remains back to his Wyoming hometown is set against peaceful, unpopulated footage of the locations, ending with the dead soldier's grave. On the evidence, I'd guess that Buzzell is a war critic and Strobl is a gung-ho patriot, but I can't be quite sure and it doesn't much matter. Hearing their stories in their own words -- something few of us, pro- or antiwar, bother to do -- is the entire point. (The material is read aloud by various actors, including Beau Bridges, Robert Duvall, Aaron Eckhart and Blair Underwood.)"
-Salon.com
"Several cinematic techniques are employed to realize these tales beyond straight-ahead re-creations. The most distinctive is “Men in Black” by Colby Buzzell, which utilizes a kind of animatic process to present a harrowing street fight, with animated bullets and spent cartridges flying out of the weapons of still illustrations. It's the most vulgar of the lot, with plenty of profanity to heighten the intensity. Most distressing, though, is that after he returned home, he stopped telling people he was in Iraq, because they didn't seem all that interested."
-the Trade, OR
"One of the best segments, a stark comic-style animation that accompanies Colby Buzzell's piece, "Men in Black," actually adds to the experience of the reading. Actually, an entire documentary about Buzzell, who wrote a popular anonymous blog from the frontlines before his commanding officers found out about it, would have been interesting. "
-Cinematical
"Some passages are more effective than others, and none is better than the one from army specialist Colby Buzzell, who discusses manning a Bradley vehicle through an ambush in Mosul; Robbins tells his tale through a series of comic-book-like graphic sketches."
-the Onion A.V. Club
Movie synopsis:
OPERATION HOMECOMING is a unique documentary that explores the firsthand accounts of American soldiers through their own words. The film is built upon a project created by the National Endowment for the Arts to gather the writing of soldiers and their families who have participated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Through interviews and dramatic readings, the film transforms selections from this collection of writing into a deep examination of the experiences of the men and women who are serving in America's armed forces. At the same time it provides depth and context to these experiences through a broader look at the universal themes of war literature.
The writing in OPERATION HOMECOMING covers the full spectrum — poetry, fiction, memoir, letters, journals and essays. The stories recounted here are sad, funny, violent and uplifting. Yet each one displays an honesty and intensity that is rarely seen in explorations of the war. Through an extraordinary group of men and women it presents a profound window into the human side of America's current conflicts.
At the core of the writing in OPERATION HOMECOMING is a deep desire by all those who have served in war to come to terms with their experiences. Throughout the film the soldiers, young and old, express a profound hope that people will listen to their stories and try to understand what they have seen.
Gloom dominates tight Oscar documentary race
By Mary Milliken
Reuters
Monday, February 18, 2008
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Viewers may think some of the nominees for best picture at next week's Academy Awards are dark, but they pale in comparison with the movies competing for the coveted Oscar for best documentary.
War, torture and sickness are some of the topics explored by the nominees. The winner will be announced on Sunday.
Unlike last year, when "An Inconvenient Truth" about Al Gore's slide show on global warming was the favorite and duly won, industry watchers say this year's contest is wide open.
Just as Oscar voters chose the Gore film to signal defense of the environment, this year they may decide the time is right to draw attention to the Iraq war.
"From the short-list to the nominees, the Academy voters were very interested in films that were about Iraq," said documentary filmmaker A.J. Schnack, who writes the film blog "All these wonderful things."
"No End in Sight" documents how the military strategy of a few powerful men led to a deepening conflict, while "Operation Homecoming" puts soldiers' poignant writings about combat and loss on film.
"Taxi to the Dark Side" laments America's use of torture in prisoner interrogations at Guantanamo Bay prison camp and in Iraq and Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore's "Sicko" looks at the failure of the United States to provide health care to millions, including one man who must decide which of two severed fingers he can afford to have reattached.
"War/Dance" follows war-weary children in northern Uganda, describing how they rebuild their lives through music and dance. This film, a favorite with audiences, may be the most upbeat of the nominees.
"HITS HOME HARD"
Schnack said that "each of the topics could be something that the Academy wants to rally behind." Health care reform, for example, is a top issue in the U.S. presidential race.
"Sicko" is by far the most successful of the nominated documentaries at U.S. box offices, grossing $25 million, the third largest ever for a documentary of its kind.
But the Academy may overlook Moore since he won the Oscar for 2002's "Bowling for Columbine" about a tragic mass shooting in a Colorado high school.
"No End in Sight," directed by Charles Ferguson, is second at the box office among nominees, grossing $1.4 million.
Alex Gibney's timing with "Taxi," which has just been released, could not have been better with public debate raging over "waterboarding" -- a simulated drowning technique the CIA admits to having used during interrogations after the September 11 attacks.
Gibney persuaded several high-ranking officials to talk in his film about the use of torture in U.S. detention centers.
"I think they were motivated to speak out because they felt their voices weren't being heard in the corridors of power," said Gibney, also executive producer of "No End in Sight."
As is often the case in documentaries, normal people -- not stars -- get a platform to make themselves heard, like the soldiers in Richard Robbins' "Operation Homecoming," based on a writing project by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Colby Buzzell wrote his vignette, "Men in Black," after living through an horrific Iraqi street battle. "We watch the news and hear talking points like 'We shouldn't be there,' and people are sick of that," he said. "Richard's movie with soldiers telling stories hits home hard."
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Soldier-reporters rewrite the rules
August 11, 2007
by DANIEL DALE
TORONTO STAR STAFF REPORTER
In August 2004, one of former U.S. Army Specialist Colby Buzzell's superiors scolded a reporter for "endangering operational security."
In a vivid dispatch from Mosul the correspondent had described the confusion and horror of a fierce Iraq firefight between black-clad insurgents and Buzzell's besieged battalion. To the commander's dismay, he had mentioned that the Americans ran low on water during the fight and detailed the steps soldiers took to find new ammunition.
Now, in his base office, the commander held a printout of the story – heavily marked with red pen – and demanded an explanation from the offending journalist.
U.S. Army Specialist Colby Buzzell.
Embedded reporter? Try combatant-reporter. To national acclaim and his superior's fury, Buzzell had chronicled the battle on his blog, CBFTW.
That is: Colby Buzzell F--- The World.
"I heard and felt the bullets whiz literally inches from my head, hitting all around my hatch making a `Ping' `Ping' `Ping' sound," Buzzell wrote. "All of the (sic) sudden all hell came down around us, all these guys, wearing all black, a couple dozen on each side of the street, on rooftops, alleys, edge of buildings, out of windows, everywhere, and started unloading on us..."
The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you want to frighten the mightiest military in the world, try wielding both at the same time.
Using the Internet-enabled laptops that are now as common on their bases as cigarettes, dozens of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq have become war correspondents themselves. Few Canadians have done the same (see sidebar). In the sleepy on-base hours between missions, they share their stories directly with the world, unfiltered by the biases of the "mainstream media" many of them distrust.
In turn, the Pentagon appears to have developed a distrust of its own – subjecting soldier-writers to strict new regulations and unwanted scrutiny that will get worse, some of them complained, after the Army concluded this week that a private writing for The New Republic had invented three stories of soldier misbehaviour.
Buzzell, 30, was one of the first soldier-correspondents to face the military's wrath. In the world of military blogs, he is both typical and atypical.
He joined the Army in 2002, served in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, and left the Army in 2005.
Typical: He started his blog, in part, because he was bored when he wasn't out fighting; he started his blog, in part, because he was unhappy with the way professional journalists were covering the war.
Atypical: He thought those journalists were being too friendly to the not-always-honest military.
"I saw that a lot of times they would just cut and paste what the Army press releases would say," he says from his home in San Francisco. "And sometimes the Army press releases aren't accurate – and from what I saw, the media wasn't too interested in finding out whether they were true or not."
Buzzell is a rare military-blogging brid, though.
Only a "really, really, really, really small" percentage of military blogs are anti-war, prominent "Blackfive" blogger Matthew Currier Burden says.
Burden, a veteran of the first Gulf War and the editor of The Blog of War, a book of blog posts from Iraq and Afghanistan, says blogging soldiers don't necessarily support the Bush administration. But the 39-year-old, who left the Army Reserve in 2001, says "they're proud of what they do" – and they're dismayed when they don't see their accomplishments noted in the mainstream press.
"I was in Ramadi in 2005, which was clearly pretty violent, but typically when we went out it was totally not violent at all," says former Sgt. Steve Bogucki, 23, who served in Iraq in 2003, 2004 and 2005 and blogs as "Educated Soldier." "We just went around and talked to the people. And that's really what you didn't see in the media."
"We were in northern Iraq, and you would think from watching the news that the entire war was going on in Baghdad, and it was a complete disaster, there were dead bodies everywhere, that it was a slaughter," says current Army medic Sgt. Ernesto Haibi, 40, who served in Iraq in 2004 and who blogs at "A Candle In the Dark." "But a lot of people didn't realize there were things going on in other places – there were worse things going on in other places, and there were better things going on. Regardless, there were things going on all over the country, and they weren't being reported."
Michael Hedges, a long-time war correspondent who made four trips to Iraq for the Houston Chronicle, says most media outlets have essentially abandoned the country. In recent months, he says, the number of U.S. reporters there has sometimes dwindled "into single digits."
"The consequences of too few voices spread too thin: There's an imposition of too few views on what the American public is seeing," says Hedges, now the managing editor of the Washington, D.C., Examiner. "You've got a few organizations driving the perception of the war. That's never been healthy."
The U.S. military, he says, is itself frustrated that so few reporters are reporting from Iraq. "I've had top commanders say to me, `We want you over here. We want other reporters over here.' I've had them say to me, `There are only 11 American reporters here right now. What's the problem?' I think the Pentagon would be delighted if 100 reporters landed in Baghdad tomorrow."
But the Pentagon hasn't appeared delighted with the appearance of more than 100 soldier-reporters from its own ranks.
New Army "operational security" rules, issued in April, say no blog entry can be posted before it is checked for sensitive information by soldiers' superiors.
One thing on which pro-war Burden and skeptical Buzzell can agree: The rules are ridiculous.
"If I want to say, `Hey Mom, I had a great meatball sandwich today,' my commander's going to read it? That's not going to happen," Burden says.
In comments to the media – after a "big stink" raised by Burden, whose site receives more than 10,000 visits a day, and other military bloggers – Army public affairs officials have since backed away from the new rules. But they continue to be formal policy, and they continue to be mocked by current and former blogging members of the military.
"We write, `We went on a raid last night,'" Haibi says. "That's what we write: `We went on a raid last night.' We don't say who `we' is, we don't say where it is. It's not like we say, `Yesterday we hid in Echo Tango 12345 on the second floor looking for Abdul bin-Hassan, but we didn't find him.' If what we write is op-sec, then we all need to stop breathing."
The Army did not respond to a request for comment on its policy – but its detractors are happy to explain it. Buzzell thinks the Pentagon believes no Iraq news is good Iraq news. If it can stifle military blogs, it can better control the flow of information to the public. Haibi says military commanders fear a negative public reaction to the harsh men-at-war truths that military blogs depict.
Plus, if you don't let soldiers write anything without your approval, you don't let them write about the cruelties they claim to have witnessed or perpetrated. Last month – and continuing into this week – military bloggers raised another big stink when Scott Thomas Beauchamp, an Army private writing as a "Baghdad Diarist" for The New Republic, a liberal magazine, claimed to have seen fellow troops deliberately running over dogs in their fighting vehicles, wearing the skull of a child for laughs, and mocking an Iraqi woman whose face was disfigured by an explosive device
Nonsense, military bloggers responded. Soldiers in Iraq would never laugh at a woman wounded by the same bombs that have wounded so many of them; the child's bones could not have had "rotting flesh" on them; those vehicles aren't manoeuvrable enough to do what Beauchamp said they did.
The Army investigated. While The New Republic still stands by the article, the Army said Wednesday that each of the three stories is false.
And so it was: Active-duty soldiers defended the honour of the military, in writing, while refuting the writings of another active-duty soldier – while they were all violating military rules for writing anything in the first place.
It was a distinctly 21st century internecine battle. But, like many old-style firefights, this episode came at a cost to its (apparent) victors: even more critical scrutiny, from the Pentagon, the public, and from the mainstream media.
"It's that guy, Beauchamp, that makes my life difficult trying to tell truth," says Haibi. "It's that guy, a shameless media whore trying to get himself a $25,000 $30,000 advance on a book deal, telling lies, that makes our lives even harder."
As if that were possible.
by DANIEL DALE
TORONTO STAR STAFF REPORTER
In August 2004, one of former U.S. Army Specialist Colby Buzzell's superiors scolded a reporter for "endangering operational security."
In a vivid dispatch from Mosul the correspondent had described the confusion and horror of a fierce Iraq firefight between black-clad insurgents and Buzzell's besieged battalion. To the commander's dismay, he had mentioned that the Americans ran low on water during the fight and detailed the steps soldiers took to find new ammunition.
Now, in his base office, the commander held a printout of the story – heavily marked with red pen – and demanded an explanation from the offending journalist.
U.S. Army Specialist Colby Buzzell.
Embedded reporter? Try combatant-reporter. To national acclaim and his superior's fury, Buzzell had chronicled the battle on his blog, CBFTW.
That is: Colby Buzzell F--- The World.
"I heard and felt the bullets whiz literally inches from my head, hitting all around my hatch making a `Ping' `Ping' `Ping' sound," Buzzell wrote. "All of the (sic) sudden all hell came down around us, all these guys, wearing all black, a couple dozen on each side of the street, on rooftops, alleys, edge of buildings, out of windows, everywhere, and started unloading on us..."
The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you want to frighten the mightiest military in the world, try wielding both at the same time.
Using the Internet-enabled laptops that are now as common on their bases as cigarettes, dozens of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq have become war correspondents themselves. Few Canadians have done the same (see sidebar). In the sleepy on-base hours between missions, they share their stories directly with the world, unfiltered by the biases of the "mainstream media" many of them distrust.
In turn, the Pentagon appears to have developed a distrust of its own – subjecting soldier-writers to strict new regulations and unwanted scrutiny that will get worse, some of them complained, after the Army concluded this week that a private writing for The New Republic had invented three stories of soldier misbehaviour.
Buzzell, 30, was one of the first soldier-correspondents to face the military's wrath. In the world of military blogs, he is both typical and atypical.
He joined the Army in 2002, served in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, and left the Army in 2005.
Typical: He started his blog, in part, because he was bored when he wasn't out fighting; he started his blog, in part, because he was unhappy with the way professional journalists were covering the war.
Atypical: He thought those journalists were being too friendly to the not-always-honest military.
"I saw that a lot of times they would just cut and paste what the Army press releases would say," he says from his home in San Francisco. "And sometimes the Army press releases aren't accurate – and from what I saw, the media wasn't too interested in finding out whether they were true or not."
Buzzell is a rare military-blogging brid, though.
Only a "really, really, really, really small" percentage of military blogs are anti-war, prominent "Blackfive" blogger Matthew Currier Burden says.
Burden, a veteran of the first Gulf War and the editor of The Blog of War, a book of blog posts from Iraq and Afghanistan, says blogging soldiers don't necessarily support the Bush administration. But the 39-year-old, who left the Army Reserve in 2001, says "they're proud of what they do" – and they're dismayed when they don't see their accomplishments noted in the mainstream press.
"I was in Ramadi in 2005, which was clearly pretty violent, but typically when we went out it was totally not violent at all," says former Sgt. Steve Bogucki, 23, who served in Iraq in 2003, 2004 and 2005 and blogs as "Educated Soldier." "We just went around and talked to the people. And that's really what you didn't see in the media."
"We were in northern Iraq, and you would think from watching the news that the entire war was going on in Baghdad, and it was a complete disaster, there were dead bodies everywhere, that it was a slaughter," says current Army medic Sgt. Ernesto Haibi, 40, who served in Iraq in 2004 and who blogs at "A Candle In the Dark." "But a lot of people didn't realize there were things going on in other places – there were worse things going on in other places, and there were better things going on. Regardless, there were things going on all over the country, and they weren't being reported."
Michael Hedges, a long-time war correspondent who made four trips to Iraq for the Houston Chronicle, says most media outlets have essentially abandoned the country. In recent months, he says, the number of U.S. reporters there has sometimes dwindled "into single digits."
"The consequences of too few voices spread too thin: There's an imposition of too few views on what the American public is seeing," says Hedges, now the managing editor of the Washington, D.C., Examiner. "You've got a few organizations driving the perception of the war. That's never been healthy."
The U.S. military, he says, is itself frustrated that so few reporters are reporting from Iraq. "I've had top commanders say to me, `We want you over here. We want other reporters over here.' I've had them say to me, `There are only 11 American reporters here right now. What's the problem?' I think the Pentagon would be delighted if 100 reporters landed in Baghdad tomorrow."
But the Pentagon hasn't appeared delighted with the appearance of more than 100 soldier-reporters from its own ranks.
New Army "operational security" rules, issued in April, say no blog entry can be posted before it is checked for sensitive information by soldiers' superiors.
One thing on which pro-war Burden and skeptical Buzzell can agree: The rules are ridiculous.
"If I want to say, `Hey Mom, I had a great meatball sandwich today,' my commander's going to read it? That's not going to happen," Burden says.
In comments to the media – after a "big stink" raised by Burden, whose site receives more than 10,000 visits a day, and other military bloggers – Army public affairs officials have since backed away from the new rules. But they continue to be formal policy, and they continue to be mocked by current and former blogging members of the military.
"We write, `We went on a raid last night,'" Haibi says. "That's what we write: `We went on a raid last night.' We don't say who `we' is, we don't say where it is. It's not like we say, `Yesterday we hid in Echo Tango 12345 on the second floor looking for Abdul bin-Hassan, but we didn't find him.' If what we write is op-sec, then we all need to stop breathing."
The Army did not respond to a request for comment on its policy – but its detractors are happy to explain it. Buzzell thinks the Pentagon believes no Iraq news is good Iraq news. If it can stifle military blogs, it can better control the flow of information to the public. Haibi says military commanders fear a negative public reaction to the harsh men-at-war truths that military blogs depict.
Plus, if you don't let soldiers write anything without your approval, you don't let them write about the cruelties they claim to have witnessed or perpetrated. Last month – and continuing into this week – military bloggers raised another big stink when Scott Thomas Beauchamp, an Army private writing as a "Baghdad Diarist" for The New Republic, a liberal magazine, claimed to have seen fellow troops deliberately running over dogs in their fighting vehicles, wearing the skull of a child for laughs, and mocking an Iraqi woman whose face was disfigured by an explosive device
Nonsense, military bloggers responded. Soldiers in Iraq would never laugh at a woman wounded by the same bombs that have wounded so many of them; the child's bones could not have had "rotting flesh" on them; those vehicles aren't manoeuvrable enough to do what Beauchamp said they did.
The Army investigated. While The New Republic still stands by the article, the Army said Wednesday that each of the three stories is false.
And so it was: Active-duty soldiers defended the honour of the military, in writing, while refuting the writings of another active-duty soldier – while they were all violating military rules for writing anything in the first place.
It was a distinctly 21st century internecine battle. But, like many old-style firefights, this episode came at a cost to its (apparent) victors: even more critical scrutiny, from the Pentagon, the public, and from the mainstream media.
"It's that guy, Beauchamp, that makes my life difficult trying to tell truth," says Haibi. "It's that guy, a shameless media whore trying to get himself a $25,000 $30,000 advance on a book deal, telling lies, that makes our lives even harder."
As if that were possible.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Winner of the 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize
Overall Winner and Non-Fiction Winner
My War: Killing Time In Iraq by Colby Buzzell
http://lulublookerprize.typepad.com/
My War: Killing Time In Iraq by Colby Buzzell
http://lulublookerprize.typepad.com/
Iraq veteran wins blog prize as US military cuts web access
Ed Pilkington in New York
Tuesday May 15, 2007
Guardian
· Literary award for former soldier's online dispatches
· Critics brand Pentagon's new rules 'self-defeating'
The timing of the award is almost as striking as the writing which it honours. A former American machine gunner's memoir of a year's tour of duty in Iraq based on his blog has just won a major accolade at precisely the moment when the US military high command is clamping down on blogs among the rank and file.
Colby Buzzell was awarded the £5,000 Lulu Blooker prize for My War: Killing Time in Iraq, which was voted the best book of the year based on a blog. It triumphed over 110 entries from 15 countries.
The memoir was drawn from a blog he kept while in Mosul, in northern Iraq, in 2004, in which he portrayed the texture of daily life there, from listening to Metallica on his iPod to watching his fellow "grunts" surf the web for pornography.
The paradox of Buzzell's victory is that it quickly follows the revelation that the Pentagon has introduced new rules restricting blogs among soldiers, fuelling speculation that live and unadorned combat writing from the field such as Buzzell's may be the last of its kind.
The new rules require all would-be "milbloggers", as soldier-publishers are called, to submit blog entries to supervising officers before posting them. That turns on its head the existing rules which allowed soldiers to post freely, with the onus on them to register their blogs and to alert officers to any material that might compromise security.
Yesterday the defence department went further and announced it was blocking access "worldwide" to 13 communal websites, including YouTube and MySpace from military computers and networks. General BB Bell said the move was to protect operations from the drain on computer capacity caused by soldiers downloading videos on these sites.
But prominent military bloggers said this was another move by commanders to try and regain control over ue of the internet. Matthew Burden, a former major in the US army who runs the most popular milblog, Blackfive, with 3 million unique users a year, said he had been contacted by several serving soldiers who said they were going to stop posting. "They are all putting their hands in the air and saying, 'That's it, I've had enough.'"
He said the rules were self-defeating and would deter blogs such as acutepolitics@blogspot.com, which is written by a specialist who defuses roadside bombs. "Take that down and you are removing one of the most positive messages for what the army is doing in Iraq," Mr Burden said.
Mr Buzzell, now 30, was sent to Iraq in November 2003. He had joined the army at a time, he said, when "I was living off Top Ramen [pot noodles] in a suburb of San Francisco and my life was going nowhere". He discovered blogging by reading a Time article while in Iraq, and started posting eight months into his tour.
He rapidly built up a huge following and was profiled in the media. After six weeks an order came down that his blog should be stopped, without any explanation; but by then he already had 10 different publishers clamouring after him.
Buzzell said the new restrictions would hurt combat soldiers and their families. "It's hard for them out there, and this will make it harder. It will lower soldier morale for troops who are on their second or even third tour." He also regrets the tightening grip over blogging on a personal level because without it, he said, he would now be "washing dishes in a restaurant somewhere, back to eating Top Ramen".
As it is, his book has been translated into seven languages, and he has embarked on a freelance writing career for Esquire magazine, among others. "This is a totally screwed up policy," he said. "The commanders are just really nervous because they can't keep control any more."
· Biography: Colby Buzzell
Age: 30
From: now lives in San Francisco
Hobbies: skateboarding and hard rock
Job: machine gunner turned author
Started blogging because: 'It sounded like a good way for me to kill some time out here in Iraq, post a little diary stuff, maybe some rants, links to some cool shit, thoughts, experiences, garbage, crap, whatever.'
Literary idols: Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S Thompson
Favourite sounds before a mission: the Cure, the Smiths "and a little bit of the old school U2"
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2079899,00.html
Tuesday May 15, 2007
Guardian
· Literary award for former soldier's online dispatches
· Critics brand Pentagon's new rules 'self-defeating'
The timing of the award is almost as striking as the writing which it honours. A former American machine gunner's memoir of a year's tour of duty in Iraq based on his blog has just won a major accolade at precisely the moment when the US military high command is clamping down on blogs among the rank and file.
Colby Buzzell was awarded the £5,000 Lulu Blooker prize for My War: Killing Time in Iraq, which was voted the best book of the year based on a blog. It triumphed over 110 entries from 15 countries.
The memoir was drawn from a blog he kept while in Mosul, in northern Iraq, in 2004, in which he portrayed the texture of daily life there, from listening to Metallica on his iPod to watching his fellow "grunts" surf the web for pornography.
The paradox of Buzzell's victory is that it quickly follows the revelation that the Pentagon has introduced new rules restricting blogs among soldiers, fuelling speculation that live and unadorned combat writing from the field such as Buzzell's may be the last of its kind.
The new rules require all would-be "milbloggers", as soldier-publishers are called, to submit blog entries to supervising officers before posting them. That turns on its head the existing rules which allowed soldiers to post freely, with the onus on them to register their blogs and to alert officers to any material that might compromise security.
Yesterday the defence department went further and announced it was blocking access "worldwide" to 13 communal websites, including YouTube and MySpace from military computers and networks. General BB Bell said the move was to protect operations from the drain on computer capacity caused by soldiers downloading videos on these sites.
But prominent military bloggers said this was another move by commanders to try and regain control over ue of the internet. Matthew Burden, a former major in the US army who runs the most popular milblog, Blackfive, with 3 million unique users a year, said he had been contacted by several serving soldiers who said they were going to stop posting. "They are all putting their hands in the air and saying, 'That's it, I've had enough.'"
He said the rules were self-defeating and would deter blogs such as acutepolitics@blogspot.com, which is written by a specialist who defuses roadside bombs. "Take that down and you are removing one of the most positive messages for what the army is doing in Iraq," Mr Burden said.
Mr Buzzell, now 30, was sent to Iraq in November 2003. He had joined the army at a time, he said, when "I was living off Top Ramen [pot noodles] in a suburb of San Francisco and my life was going nowhere". He discovered blogging by reading a Time article while in Iraq, and started posting eight months into his tour.
He rapidly built up a huge following and was profiled in the media. After six weeks an order came down that his blog should be stopped, without any explanation; but by then he already had 10 different publishers clamouring after him.
Buzzell said the new restrictions would hurt combat soldiers and their families. "It's hard for them out there, and this will make it harder. It will lower soldier morale for troops who are on their second or even third tour." He also regrets the tightening grip over blogging on a personal level because without it, he said, he would now be "washing dishes in a restaurant somewhere, back to eating Top Ramen".
As it is, his book has been translated into seven languages, and he has embarked on a freelance writing career for Esquire magazine, among others. "This is a totally screwed up policy," he said. "The commanders are just really nervous because they can't keep control any more."
· Biography: Colby Buzzell
Age: 30
From: now lives in San Francisco
Hobbies: skateboarding and hard rock
Job: machine gunner turned author
Started blogging because: 'It sounded like a good way for me to kill some time out here in Iraq, post a little diary stuff, maybe some rants, links to some cool shit, thoughts, experiences, garbage, crap, whatever.'
Literary idols: Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S Thompson
Favourite sounds before a mission: the Cure, the Smiths "and a little bit of the old school U2"
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2079899,00.html
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
U.S. soldier's blog offers firsthand look at war in Iraq from the
BYLINE: John Jerney, Special to The Daily Yomiuri, Yomiuri
The Daily Yomiuri(Tokyo)
On Aug. 4, 2004, downtown Mosul, Iraq, exploded with violence. U.S. Army Specialist Colby Buzzell, an M240 Bravo machine gunner in the Stryker Brigade, was among the men called to respond.
Buzzell and his fellow soldiers were aware of the risks as they rolled out of Forward Operating Base Marez. By mid-2004, the Iraqi insurgency was already well under way.
Sniper and mortar attacks were commonplace and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) had transformed one-time routine patrols into life-and-death missions.
But with the entire battalion called to roll out, Buzzell sensed that something was up.
For the next several hours, Buzzell found himself in the crosshairs of a massive, all-day firefight combating masked men-in-black equipped with a plethora of weapons ranging from AK-47s and mortars, to IEDs and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs).
Recounting the event later, Buzzell would write that he had never experienced fear as he did that day. The next morning, searching for news about the event on the Web, Buzzell found a scant few paragraphs on the CNN Web site under the heading "Mosul Clashes Leave 12 Dead."
Buzzell instinctively logged into his blog, cut-and-paste the CNN article, and began recounting his own version of the events of that day, starting with the sentence "Now here's what really happened?"
In posting to his blog, Buzzell was just doing something that millions of others had already been engaged in for years: telling his personal story to the online world.
But Buzzell's blog, one of the first and most popular run by a soldier in active combat, raised at least three significant issues. First, who should report the news during a war when the reporters have all gone home? Second, how are we to judge the veracity and accuracy of news reports prepared by individuals not formally bound to a code of ethics?
And third, what free speech rights are guaranteed to nonprofessional journalists, especially those that may have a conflict of interest in the subject about which they are reporting?
Buzzell is a good-natured person, conscientious and quick to laugh. Sitting across the table from me as we chatted over lunch at a Thai restaurant in San Francisco's Tenderloin district not far from his apartment, Buzzell simultaneously projected shyness and incredible intensity, even through his dark sunglasses.
Talking to Buzzell, you learn several things quickly. He's extremely bright and uncommonly well read--quotes and literal references are within easy reach for him. But when it comes to talking about the war, his feelings
sometimes overrun his thoughts. His best form of expression is undoubtedly the written word.
Which is why his 2004 blog from the front lines in Iraq drew so much attention. Written without an overt political point of view, Buzzell started the blog, entitled simply enough My War, during his eighth month of deployment in Iraq to share his experiences and get his story recorded.
Buzzell recounted, "When I first got to Iraq, I kept a journal and I would write about what I was seeing and experiencing. Then, I saw a brief article in Time magazine about blogs. At that time, I had never heard the word blog before. And I was like, what the heck is this? So I read the article and it described how everyday people with no real journalism experience were
writing about their experiences on the Internet."
Buzzell continued, "There was also a brief mention in the article about soldiers in Iraq doing these things. I said, whoa, no way, that can't be possible. There's no way that the military would allow soldiers to write about what's going on and to post these entries on the World Wide Web for anybody to read."
Buzzell rushed to the Internet cafe on base, and searched for blogs by soldiers. He found that some did exist, as the Time article had mentioned, but as Buzzell explained, "I didn't see any blogs that were written by soldiers in combat arms, soldiers that went out actively on combat missions on a daily basis."
Buzzell noticed that most of the blogs seemed to be written by soldiers who stayed on base all day. "That's fine," noted Buzzell, "but a person that leaves the base might have a different perspective on what's going on out there. So I don't know why, I just said the hell with it, I'm going to do it."
Buzzell set about to write down exactly what he saw, to capture the kind of experiences that used to be recorded during previous wars, such as Vietnam, when reporters stayed with the troops throughout their deployment and
beyond.
"At the beginning of the war," Buzzell explained, "there were embedded reporters. But I was there during the second year of the war and all these embeds and reporters were gone, they were back home."
Buzzell continued, "So I just decided to write about what I was seeing. And then, I don't know, it just sort of took on a life of its own."
At first, only a few emails arrived each day. That quickly turned into a dozen, then two and three dozen, and then hundreds of emails per day.
"And the comments just kept coming," recalled Buzzell. "It felt good because honestly I never once got anything negative in an email. Most of it was thanks, none of us really know what's going on over there and you're telling
your story. Thank you."
Posting under the anonymous name CBFTW, Buzzell kept writing his reports in between missions, giving his growing number of readers a behind-the-scenes look at the war in a way that many weren't used to seeing.
Buzzell soon attracted the attention of Esquire, and subsequently turned some of his experiences into articles for the magazine. More importantly, Buzzell used his blog entries as the foundation for perhaps the most highly
acclaimed book about the Iraq war written by a soldier, "My War: Killing Time in Iraq," winner of the 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize.
In the next edition of my column, I'll describe the military's reaction to Buzzell's blog, and comment on the relevance of soldiers' blogs and the role that non-journalists can play in disseminating information otherwise bypassed by conventional sources.
The Daily Yomiuri(Tokyo)
On Aug. 4, 2004, downtown Mosul, Iraq, exploded with violence. U.S. Army Specialist Colby Buzzell, an M240 Bravo machine gunner in the Stryker Brigade, was among the men called to respond.
Buzzell and his fellow soldiers were aware of the risks as they rolled out of Forward Operating Base Marez. By mid-2004, the Iraqi insurgency was already well under way.
Sniper and mortar attacks were commonplace and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) had transformed one-time routine patrols into life-and-death missions.
But with the entire battalion called to roll out, Buzzell sensed that something was up.
For the next several hours, Buzzell found himself in the crosshairs of a massive, all-day firefight combating masked men-in-black equipped with a plethora of weapons ranging from AK-47s and mortars, to IEDs and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs).
Recounting the event later, Buzzell would write that he had never experienced fear as he did that day. The next morning, searching for news about the event on the Web, Buzzell found a scant few paragraphs on the CNN Web site under the heading "Mosul Clashes Leave 12 Dead."
Buzzell instinctively logged into his blog, cut-and-paste the CNN article, and began recounting his own version of the events of that day, starting with the sentence "Now here's what really happened?"
In posting to his blog, Buzzell was just doing something that millions of others had already been engaged in for years: telling his personal story to the online world.
But Buzzell's blog, one of the first and most popular run by a soldier in active combat, raised at least three significant issues. First, who should report the news during a war when the reporters have all gone home? Second, how are we to judge the veracity and accuracy of news reports prepared by individuals not formally bound to a code of ethics?
And third, what free speech rights are guaranteed to nonprofessional journalists, especially those that may have a conflict of interest in the subject about which they are reporting?
Buzzell is a good-natured person, conscientious and quick to laugh. Sitting across the table from me as we chatted over lunch at a Thai restaurant in San Francisco's Tenderloin district not far from his apartment, Buzzell simultaneously projected shyness and incredible intensity, even through his dark sunglasses.
Talking to Buzzell, you learn several things quickly. He's extremely bright and uncommonly well read--quotes and literal references are within easy reach for him. But when it comes to talking about the war, his feelings
sometimes overrun his thoughts. His best form of expression is undoubtedly the written word.
Which is why his 2004 blog from the front lines in Iraq drew so much attention. Written without an overt political point of view, Buzzell started the blog, entitled simply enough My War, during his eighth month of deployment in Iraq to share his experiences and get his story recorded.
Buzzell recounted, "When I first got to Iraq, I kept a journal and I would write about what I was seeing and experiencing. Then, I saw a brief article in Time magazine about blogs. At that time, I had never heard the word blog before. And I was like, what the heck is this? So I read the article and it described how everyday people with no real journalism experience were
writing about their experiences on the Internet."
Buzzell continued, "There was also a brief mention in the article about soldiers in Iraq doing these things. I said, whoa, no way, that can't be possible. There's no way that the military would allow soldiers to write about what's going on and to post these entries on the World Wide Web for anybody to read."
Buzzell rushed to the Internet cafe on base, and searched for blogs by soldiers. He found that some did exist, as the Time article had mentioned, but as Buzzell explained, "I didn't see any blogs that were written by soldiers in combat arms, soldiers that went out actively on combat missions on a daily basis."
Buzzell noticed that most of the blogs seemed to be written by soldiers who stayed on base all day. "That's fine," noted Buzzell, "but a person that leaves the base might have a different perspective on what's going on out there. So I don't know why, I just said the hell with it, I'm going to do it."
Buzzell set about to write down exactly what he saw, to capture the kind of experiences that used to be recorded during previous wars, such as Vietnam, when reporters stayed with the troops throughout their deployment and
beyond.
"At the beginning of the war," Buzzell explained, "there were embedded reporters. But I was there during the second year of the war and all these embeds and reporters were gone, they were back home."
Buzzell continued, "So I just decided to write about what I was seeing. And then, I don't know, it just sort of took on a life of its own."
At first, only a few emails arrived each day. That quickly turned into a dozen, then two and three dozen, and then hundreds of emails per day.
"And the comments just kept coming," recalled Buzzell. "It felt good because honestly I never once got anything negative in an email. Most of it was thanks, none of us really know what's going on over there and you're telling
your story. Thank you."
Posting under the anonymous name CBFTW, Buzzell kept writing his reports in between missions, giving his growing number of readers a behind-the-scenes look at the war in a way that many weren't used to seeing.
Buzzell soon attracted the attention of Esquire, and subsequently turned some of his experiences into articles for the magazine. More importantly, Buzzell used his blog entries as the foundation for perhaps the most highly
acclaimed book about the Iraq war written by a soldier, "My War: Killing Time in Iraq," winner of the 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize.
In the next edition of my column, I'll describe the military's reaction to Buzzell's blog, and comment on the relevance of soldiers' blogs and the role that non-journalists can play in disseminating information otherwise bypassed by conventional sources.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
San Francisco Chronicle
Punk. Soldier. Blogger. And now author. A young veteran shares his war stories.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Colby Buzzell had little time to hunt for an apartment in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon, what with appearances scheduled for both NPR's "Talk of the Nation" and CNN's "Paula Zahn Now."
It was a surreal week for the 28-year-old soldier-turned-author. On Sunday he learned he was the second recipient of the $10,000 LuLu Blooker Prize for his "blook" (book based on a blog), "My War: Killing Time in Iraq," and on Monday, the Defense Department announced that it would cut off access to file-sharing sites such as YouTube and MySpace on 5 million Pentagon-issued computers -- an apparent reaction to bloggers reporting from the front lines. (Soldiers still have access to the sites on their personal computers and can log on to them at privately owned Internet cafes on their bases.)
Buzzell, who still posts at cbftw.blogspot.com, has been out of the Army for two years, and his book was published more than a year ago, but suddenly -- and despite his current dread of talking about war and blogs -- he's fielding dozens of interview requests for his thoughts on both. Still, he's glad to take the ride.
"Every time I think my 15 minutes is up," Buzzell said, "someone else calls me."
Before his NPR appointment, Buzzell sat outside a Starbucks cafe, chain-smoking and working on his third cup of coffee. With his mesh cap, tattooed arms and loose wallet chain, he looked more like a Mission District hipster than a war veteran.
"I don't know what people expect me to be," he said. "Because I ride skateboards and wear Vans, I'm not supposed to join the Army? Maybe I'm supposed to be from Alabama, because people seem to think you have to be from the South to sign up."
Buzzell grew up in San Ramon, the son of a housewife and a Silicon Valley software engineer. As a teenager he took BART to Berkeley to catch punk shows at 924 Gilman; on his iPod in Iraq he kept an East Bay playlist that included local acts such as Rancid, Swinging Utters, Screw 32 and A.F.I.
"Whenever I'd want to really make myself feel homesick and slit my wrists," Buzzell recalled, "I'd listen to that playlist."
In his book, Buzzell describes a familiar tale of war: soldiers bored to tears, upset with commanders' hypocrisies and terrified to death when in battle.
But in this war, unlike all those that came before, the Army specialist also observes that his fellow soldiers are strangely tech savvy, constantly noodling on their laptops, making personal "war videos" for kicks ("I saw guys shooting their rifle with one hand and clicking their digital camera with the other") and surfing the Web for a window to the outside world.
Buzzell often bristles at the notion that American troops are nothing more than country hicks; when his radio interviewer joked that Buzzell must have been the only soldier carrying a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" in his back pocket, Buzzell responded tersely: "There's a lot of literate people in the Army."
Buzzell joined after a string of temp jobs left him feeling unfulfilled. "I figured I'd join, see if I could make something of myself."
He started his blog in 2003 after he read about the trend in Time magazine, as a measure to fight boredom. Since he was a pioneer in the soldier-blog genre, he was also one of the first to run afoul of superiors wary of his online comments. After Buzzell e-mailed Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra, the singer posted a message on the blog that called out "the unelected gangsters and scam artists who started this war." Buzzell was confined to the base and forced to submit his entries to a platoon sergeant for review. His blog lasted only 10 weeks during the 2004 summer while stationed in Mosul. The writing and the ensuing fallout caught the eye of the Wall Street Journal and Esquire magazine. Buzzell, while still serving in Iraq, began entertaining offers from New York publishers for a book.
"They say Vietnam was the first televised war, brought into the homes of Americans," Buzzell said. "Maybe Iraq is the first war that's online, shown by the soldiers.
"It'd be a shame if guys stopped using it," he added, referring to the Defense Department's recent restrictions on Web use. "One of the few escapes of the war is the Internet cafes. They gave you a sense of normalcy, what's going on away from it. ... If you take that away, morale can only go lower."
After he completed his NPR interview, Buzzell returned to the details of his civilian life. His four-year marriage had recently ended. He'd moved out of his Los Angeles home and back in with his parents in San Ramon. Earlier that morning, his father had driven him to the BART station so he could get to San Francisco. "It's kind of come full circle," he noted.
He still needed to find an apartment, but the LuLu prize money would make it easier to make the security deposit. He needed to find an Internet cafe so he could log on and check out Craigslist.
"I'm just going to walk toward the Mission," he said.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/19/DDGO4PT7281.DTL
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Colby Buzzell had little time to hunt for an apartment in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon, what with appearances scheduled for both NPR's "Talk of the Nation" and CNN's "Paula Zahn Now."
It was a surreal week for the 28-year-old soldier-turned-author. On Sunday he learned he was the second recipient of the $10,000 LuLu Blooker Prize for his "blook" (book based on a blog), "My War: Killing Time in Iraq," and on Monday, the Defense Department announced that it would cut off access to file-sharing sites such as YouTube and MySpace on 5 million Pentagon-issued computers -- an apparent reaction to bloggers reporting from the front lines. (Soldiers still have access to the sites on their personal computers and can log on to them at privately owned Internet cafes on their bases.)
Buzzell, who still posts at cbftw.blogspot.com, has been out of the Army for two years, and his book was published more than a year ago, but suddenly -- and despite his current dread of talking about war and blogs -- he's fielding dozens of interview requests for his thoughts on both. Still, he's glad to take the ride.
"Every time I think my 15 minutes is up," Buzzell said, "someone else calls me."
Before his NPR appointment, Buzzell sat outside a Starbucks cafe, chain-smoking and working on his third cup of coffee. With his mesh cap, tattooed arms and loose wallet chain, he looked more like a Mission District hipster than a war veteran.
"I don't know what people expect me to be," he said. "Because I ride skateboards and wear Vans, I'm not supposed to join the Army? Maybe I'm supposed to be from Alabama, because people seem to think you have to be from the South to sign up."
Buzzell grew up in San Ramon, the son of a housewife and a Silicon Valley software engineer. As a teenager he took BART to Berkeley to catch punk shows at 924 Gilman; on his iPod in Iraq he kept an East Bay playlist that included local acts such as Rancid, Swinging Utters, Screw 32 and A.F.I.
"Whenever I'd want to really make myself feel homesick and slit my wrists," Buzzell recalled, "I'd listen to that playlist."
In his book, Buzzell describes a familiar tale of war: soldiers bored to tears, upset with commanders' hypocrisies and terrified to death when in battle.
But in this war, unlike all those that came before, the Army specialist also observes that his fellow soldiers are strangely tech savvy, constantly noodling on their laptops, making personal "war videos" for kicks ("I saw guys shooting their rifle with one hand and clicking their digital camera with the other") and surfing the Web for a window to the outside world.
Buzzell often bristles at the notion that American troops are nothing more than country hicks; when his radio interviewer joked that Buzzell must have been the only soldier carrying a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" in his back pocket, Buzzell responded tersely: "There's a lot of literate people in the Army."
Buzzell joined after a string of temp jobs left him feeling unfulfilled. "I figured I'd join, see if I could make something of myself."
He started his blog in 2003 after he read about the trend in Time magazine, as a measure to fight boredom. Since he was a pioneer in the soldier-blog genre, he was also one of the first to run afoul of superiors wary of his online comments. After Buzzell e-mailed Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra, the singer posted a message on the blog that called out "the unelected gangsters and scam artists who started this war." Buzzell was confined to the base and forced to submit his entries to a platoon sergeant for review. His blog lasted only 10 weeks during the 2004 summer while stationed in Mosul. The writing and the ensuing fallout caught the eye of the Wall Street Journal and Esquire magazine. Buzzell, while still serving in Iraq, began entertaining offers from New York publishers for a book.
"They say Vietnam was the first televised war, brought into the homes of Americans," Buzzell said. "Maybe Iraq is the first war that's online, shown by the soldiers.
"It'd be a shame if guys stopped using it," he added, referring to the Defense Department's recent restrictions on Web use. "One of the few escapes of the war is the Internet cafes. They gave you a sense of normalcy, what's going on away from it. ... If you take that away, morale can only go lower."
After he completed his NPR interview, Buzzell returned to the details of his civilian life. His four-year marriage had recently ended. He'd moved out of his Los Angeles home and back in with his parents in San Ramon. Earlier that morning, his father had driven him to the BART station so he could get to San Francisco. "It's kind of come full circle," he noted.
He still needed to find an apartment, but the LuLu prize money would make it easier to make the security deposit. He needed to find an Internet cafe so he could log on and check out Craigslist.
"I'm just going to walk toward the Mission," he said.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/19/DDGO4PT7281.DTL
The Red-Hot, Pork-Stuffed, Corn-Wrapped, Blues-Flavored Enigma
New article on page 68 in the May 2007 issue of Esquire Magazine.
A trip down Mississippi's tamale trail.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Commonwealth Club
FOUR YEARS LATER | TUESDAY MARCH 20
CAMILLE EVANS, Army Sergeant
BRETT MILLER, National Guard Sergeant; Resident, Traumatic Brain Injury Center, VA Palo Alto Hospital
COLBY BUZZELL, Army Specialist; Author, My War
JOHN KOOPMAN, Reporter, San Francisco Chronicle – Moderator
AMERICAN SOLDIERS SHARE THEIR STORIES ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE IRAQ WAR
After four years at war in Iraq, more than 150,000 troops have been deployed and more than 3,000 American men and women have lost their lives. But the fallout of the war goes beyond casualties, touching returning soldiers, their families and fellow Americans. Hear young veterans share their experiences on the ground in Iraq and coming home. No news program or article can offer this amount of insight into the reality of being a soldier.
6:00 p.m., Check-in | 6:30 p.m., Program | 7:30 p.m., Reception | Club office, 595 Market St., 2nd Floor, San Francisco | $12 for Members, $20 for Non-Members, $7 for Students (with valid ID; to reserve student tickets )
About The Commonwealth Club:
The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum, bringing together its 16,000 members for over 400 annual events on topics ranging across politics, culture, society and the economy.
Founded in 1903, The Commonwealth Club has played host to a diverse and distinctive array of speakers, from Teddy Roosevelt in 1911 to Erin Brockovich in 2001. Along the way, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Bill Gates have all given landmark speeches at The Club.
As a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization, The Commonwealth Club relies on the support of its membership, the Business Council and foundation grants to continue its role in fostering open public discussion in the San Francisco Bay Area and throughout the nation via radio, Internet and television.
The Club has offices in San Francisco and San Jose, with regular events in both cities, as well as programs in the East and North Bay.
For members outside the Bay Area, The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations. Our web site archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history.
Mission:
The mission of The Commonwealth Club of California is to be the leading national forum open to all for the impartial discussion of public issues important to the membership, community and nation.
more info: http://www.commonwealthclub.org/featured/..soldiersfromiraq
CAMILLE EVANS, Army Sergeant
BRETT MILLER, National Guard Sergeant; Resident, Traumatic Brain Injury Center, VA Palo Alto Hospital
COLBY BUZZELL, Army Specialist; Author, My War
JOHN KOOPMAN, Reporter, San Francisco Chronicle – Moderator
AMERICAN SOLDIERS SHARE THEIR STORIES ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE IRAQ WAR
After four years at war in Iraq, more than 150,000 troops have been deployed and more than 3,000 American men and women have lost their lives. But the fallout of the war goes beyond casualties, touching returning soldiers, their families and fellow Americans. Hear young veterans share their experiences on the ground in Iraq and coming home. No news program or article can offer this amount of insight into the reality of being a soldier.
6:00 p.m., Check-in | 6:30 p.m., Program | 7:30 p.m., Reception | Club office, 595 Market St., 2nd Floor, San Francisco | $12 for Members, $20 for Non-Members, $7 for Students (with valid ID; to reserve student tickets )
About The Commonwealth Club:
The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum, bringing together its 16,000 members for over 400 annual events on topics ranging across politics, culture, society and the economy.
Founded in 1903, The Commonwealth Club has played host to a diverse and distinctive array of speakers, from Teddy Roosevelt in 1911 to Erin Brockovich in 2001. Along the way, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Bill Gates have all given landmark speeches at The Club.
As a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization, The Commonwealth Club relies on the support of its membership, the Business Council and foundation grants to continue its role in fostering open public discussion in the San Francisco Bay Area and throughout the nation via radio, Internet and television.
The Club has offices in San Francisco and San Jose, with regular events in both cities, as well as programs in the East and North Bay.
For members outside the Bay Area, The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations. Our web site archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history.
Mission:
The mission of The Commonwealth Club of California is to be the leading national forum open to all for the impartial discussion of public issues important to the membership, community and nation.
more info: http://www.commonwealthclub.org/featured/..soldiersfromiraq
Penthouse Magazine
New article on page 138 of the April 2007 Penthouse Magazine.
FEELING A DRAFT
by Colby Buzzell
The 2007 Blooker Prize Short-List
Fifteen blooks, from a total of five different countries, have made this year's shortlist - six each in the Fiction and Non-Fiction categories and three in Comics. They cover topics ranging from a Zombie invasion of New York to the Iraq war, life in the South of France, the intimate secrets of teenagers and the doorbells of Florence. See the official contest blog for the list in full. The winners of each category and the overall prize will be announced on Monday, May 14.
The 2007 Short-List
Non-Fiction:
Crashing The Gate
by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas
My Secret: A PostSecret Book
by Frank Warren
My War: Killing Time In Iraq
by Colby Buzzell
Small Is the New Big: and 183 other riffs, rants, and remarkable business ideas
by Seth Godin
So Close: Infertile and Addicted To Hope
by Tertia Albertyn
Words in a French Life: Lessons in Love and Language From the South of France
by Kristin Espinasse
The Lulu Blooker Prize is the world's first literary prize devoted to "blooks"-books based on blogs or other websites, including webcomics
The 2007 Short-List
Non-Fiction:
Crashing The Gate
by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas
My Secret: A PostSecret Book
by Frank Warren
My War: Killing Time In Iraq
by Colby Buzzell
Small Is the New Big: and 183 other riffs, rants, and remarkable business ideas
by Seth Godin
So Close: Infertile and Addicted To Hope
by Tertia Albertyn
Words in a French Life: Lessons in Love and Language From the South of France
by Kristin Espinasse
The Lulu Blooker Prize is the world's first literary prize devoted to "blooks"-books based on blogs or other websites, including webcomics
Saturday, February 10, 2007
PENTHOUSE Magazine - Warrior Wire
New article on page 100 of the March 2007 Penthouse Magazine "Pet Of The Year" Issue.
THE WITHDRAWL METHOD
by Colby Buzzell
OPERATION HOMECOMING: WRITING THE WARTIME EXPERIENCE
"Former military blogger Colby Buzzell's high-octane tale of a street shootout is accompanied by still-frame, comic-book-style animation, while Marine Lt. Col. Mike Strobl's simple story about escorting a dead Marine's remains back to his Wyoming hometown is set against peaceful, unpopulated footage of the locations, ending with the dead soldier's grave. On the evidence, I'd guess that Buzzell is a war critic and Strobl is a gung-ho patriot, but I can't be quite sure and it doesn't much matter. Hearing their stories in their own words -- something few of us, pro- or antiwar, bother to do -- is the entire point. (The material is read aloud by various actors, including Beau Bridges, Robert Duvall, Aaron Eckhart and Blair Underwood.)"
-Salon.com
"Several cinematic techniques are employed to realize these tales beyond straight-ahead re-creations. The most distinctive is “Men in Black” by Colby Buzzell, which utilizes a kind of animatic process to present a harrowing street fight, with animated bullets and spent cartridges flying out of the weapons of still illustrations. It's the most vulgar of the lot, with plenty of profanity to heighten the intensity. Most distressing, though, is that after he returned home, he stopped telling people he was in Iraq, because they didn't seem all that interested."
-the Trade, OR
"One of the best segments, a stark comic-style animation that accompanies Colby Buzzell's piece, "Men in Black," actually adds to the experience of the reading. Actually, an entire documentary about Buzzell, who wrote a popular anonymous blog from the frontlines before his commanding officers found out about it, would have been interesting. "
-Cinematical
from The Onion - A.V. Club Review:
The stories and poems comprising the simple, artful documentary Operation Homecoming were assembled as part of a National Endowment Of The Arts program to collect the writings of soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just hearing their words read aloud has a bracing effect, mainly because those voices are rarely heard over the din of political stump speeches or the gasbags on talk radio or cable news networks. The question is, what makes this a movie? Wouldn't a well-edited anthology of these pieces paint all the necessarily vivid pictures on their own? Remarkably, director Richard E. Robbins appears to have taken such doubts to heart, because each of the 11 passages featured in the film attempts a different stylistic approach, and not one could be labeled a typical staged reenactment. Though it doesn't quite stretch to the artistic lengths of Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, Operation Homecoming provides enough visual support to bring these writings to life.
Pushed through by a voice cast of celebrity narrators—Robert Duvall, Beau Bridges, Josh Lucas, Aaron Eckhart, and Blair Underwood, among others—the featured selections cover a range of styles (short stories, poems, letters, et al.) and experiences, from ground-level skirmishes to MedEvac airlifts to escorting bodies back home. There's even a bleakly comic sequence about the excruciating grind of life in the tents, with the same bad breakfast every day, the desert sand embedded in every pore, and latrines so foul that the author felt like immolating himself to get the filth off his body. Offering support for the soldiers' testimonials are author-veterans from other wars, such as Tobias Wolff, Tim O'Brien, Anthony Swofford, and John Salter; no matter the specific conflict and no matter their political persuasion, their feelings about warfare are harmonious.
Some passages are more effective than others, and none is better than the one from army specialist Colby Buzzell, who discusses manning a Bradley vehicle through an ambush in Mosul; Robbins tells his tale through a series of comic-book-like graphic sketches. Another beautiful sequence follows a Marine officer who accompanies the body of a fallen private back to his Montana hometown for burial. Robbins' cameras follow in his footsteps, but rather than recreating the event, they move through the empty spaces of the town, the soldiers' school, and the cemetery like ghosts, with no living thing entering the frame. There are a couple of duds, like a hummingbird-fast photo montage to honor the dead, but the cumulative effect of Operation Homecoming is to bring to light the soldiers' collective experiences and the enduring nightmares they suffer in our place.
A.V. Club Rating: B+
Movie synopsis:
OPERATION HOMECOMING is a unique documentary that explores the firsthand accounts of American soldiers through their own words. The film is built upon a project created by the National Endowment for the Arts to gather the writing of soldiers and their families who have participated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Through interviews and dramatic readings, the film transforms selections from this collection of writing into a deep examination of the experiences of the men and women who are serving in America's armed forces. At the same time it provides depth and context to these experiences through a broader look at the universal themes of war literature.
The writing in OPERATION HOMECOMING covers the full spectrum — poetry, fiction, memoir, letters, journals and essays. The stories recounted here are sad, funny, violent and uplifting. Yet each one displays an honesty and intensity that is rarely seen in explorations of the war. Through an extraordinary group of men and women it presents a profound window into the human side of America's current conflicts.
At the core of the writing in OPERATION HOMECOMING is a deep desire by all those who have served in war to come to terms with their experiences. Throughout the film the soldiers, young and old, express a profound hope that people will listen to their stories and try to understand what they have seen.
More info about "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience" :
http://kcet.org/explore-ca/web-stories/iraq/operation/
http://www.pbs.org/weta/crossroads/about/show_operation_homecoming.html
-Salon.com
"Several cinematic techniques are employed to realize these tales beyond straight-ahead re-creations. The most distinctive is “Men in Black” by Colby Buzzell, which utilizes a kind of animatic process to present a harrowing street fight, with animated bullets and spent cartridges flying out of the weapons of still illustrations. It's the most vulgar of the lot, with plenty of profanity to heighten the intensity. Most distressing, though, is that after he returned home, he stopped telling people he was in Iraq, because they didn't seem all that interested."
-the Trade, OR
"One of the best segments, a stark comic-style animation that accompanies Colby Buzzell's piece, "Men in Black," actually adds to the experience of the reading. Actually, an entire documentary about Buzzell, who wrote a popular anonymous blog from the frontlines before his commanding officers found out about it, would have been interesting. "
-Cinematical
from The Onion - A.V. Club Review:
The stories and poems comprising the simple, artful documentary Operation Homecoming were assembled as part of a National Endowment Of The Arts program to collect the writings of soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just hearing their words read aloud has a bracing effect, mainly because those voices are rarely heard over the din of political stump speeches or the gasbags on talk radio or cable news networks. The question is, what makes this a movie? Wouldn't a well-edited anthology of these pieces paint all the necessarily vivid pictures on their own? Remarkably, director Richard E. Robbins appears to have taken such doubts to heart, because each of the 11 passages featured in the film attempts a different stylistic approach, and not one could be labeled a typical staged reenactment. Though it doesn't quite stretch to the artistic lengths of Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, Operation Homecoming provides enough visual support to bring these writings to life.
Pushed through by a voice cast of celebrity narrators—Robert Duvall, Beau Bridges, Josh Lucas, Aaron Eckhart, and Blair Underwood, among others—the featured selections cover a range of styles (short stories, poems, letters, et al.) and experiences, from ground-level skirmishes to MedEvac airlifts to escorting bodies back home. There's even a bleakly comic sequence about the excruciating grind of life in the tents, with the same bad breakfast every day, the desert sand embedded in every pore, and latrines so foul that the author felt like immolating himself to get the filth off his body. Offering support for the soldiers' testimonials are author-veterans from other wars, such as Tobias Wolff, Tim O'Brien, Anthony Swofford, and John Salter; no matter the specific conflict and no matter their political persuasion, their feelings about warfare are harmonious.
Some passages are more effective than others, and none is better than the one from army specialist Colby Buzzell, who discusses manning a Bradley vehicle through an ambush in Mosul; Robbins tells his tale through a series of comic-book-like graphic sketches. Another beautiful sequence follows a Marine officer who accompanies the body of a fallen private back to his Montana hometown for burial. Robbins' cameras follow in his footsteps, but rather than recreating the event, they move through the empty spaces of the town, the soldiers' school, and the cemetery like ghosts, with no living thing entering the frame. There are a couple of duds, like a hummingbird-fast photo montage to honor the dead, but the cumulative effect of Operation Homecoming is to bring to light the soldiers' collective experiences and the enduring nightmares they suffer in our place.
A.V. Club Rating: B+
Movie synopsis:
OPERATION HOMECOMING is a unique documentary that explores the firsthand accounts of American soldiers through their own words. The film is built upon a project created by the National Endowment for the Arts to gather the writing of soldiers and their families who have participated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Through interviews and dramatic readings, the film transforms selections from this collection of writing into a deep examination of the experiences of the men and women who are serving in America's armed forces. At the same time it provides depth and context to these experiences through a broader look at the universal themes of war literature.
The writing in OPERATION HOMECOMING covers the full spectrum — poetry, fiction, memoir, letters, journals and essays. The stories recounted here are sad, funny, violent and uplifting. Yet each one displays an honesty and intensity that is rarely seen in explorations of the war. Through an extraordinary group of men and women it presents a profound window into the human side of America's current conflicts.
At the core of the writing in OPERATION HOMECOMING is a deep desire by all those who have served in war to come to terms with their experiences. Throughout the film the soldiers, young and old, express a profound hope that people will listen to their stories and try to understand what they have seen.
More info about "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience" :
http://kcet.org/explore-ca/web-stories/iraq/operation/
http://www.pbs.org/weta/crossroads/about/show_operation_homecoming.html
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Drink, Joke, Woman
New article in Esquire Magazine on page 216.
The Best and Brightest 2006
December 2006, Volume 146, Issue 6
Sunday, October 29, 2006
The New York Review Of Books
Volume 55, Number 5 · April 3, 2008
The Volunteer Army: Who Fights and Why?
By Michael Massing
1.
In 2003, Colby Buzzell, then twenty-six, was living in a small room in a renovated Victorian house in the Richmond district of San Francisco, doing data entry for financial companies. Raised in the suburbs of the Bay Area, Buzzell had hated high school and, deciding against college, ended up in a series of low-paying jobs—flower deliverer, valet parker, bike messenger, busboy, carpet cutter, car washer. Data entry paid somewhat better—about $12 an hour—but even so he was barely able to get by. At one point, he ran into an old friend who had joined the Marines, and, in his telling, military life sounded like one big frat party, but with weapons and paychecks. After nearly a year of feeling stuck, Buzzell decided to visit an Army recruiter. He describes his state of mind in My War: Killing Time in Iraq,[1] an uproarious account of his life in the military:
"I was sick of living my life in oblivion where every fucking day was the same fucking thing as the day before, and the same fucking routine day in and day out. Eat, shit, work, sleep, repeat.
At the time, I saw no escape from this. I was in my mid-twenties and I still had no fucking idea what the hell I wanted to do with myself....
I figured if I joined the military it might be a quick-fix solution to my problems, it would add some excitement to my life, and at the same time give me the sense that I had finally done something with myself. And who knows? A trip to the Middle East could be one hell of an adventure."
Buzzell had a long rap sheet and a history of drug use, but, with his recruiter's help, he made it through the application process, and before long he was off to boot camp.
Many of the other recent books written by soldiers about their experiences in Iraq offer similarly frank accounts of their paths into the military. In Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the US Army,[2] Kayla Williams, who joined the punk scene when she was thirteen and loved to drop acid, writes that she joined in part to get away from one boyfriend who turned out to have been married and to prove wrong another who had taunted her about her lack of toughness. The promise of a regular paycheck did not hurt. "There are many reasons to join the Army," she writes. "But without a doubt it's a great way—leaving aside the whole prospect of getting maimed or killed—to better your career prospects."
Joshua Key, in The Deserter's Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq,[3] describes growing up in rural Oklahoma in a two-bedroom trailer with his mother and alcoholic stepfather and working at a series of minimum-wage jobs. At eighteen he got married and quickly had two sons but few prospects of providing for them. "I had no money, I had dreams of getting formal training as a welder, I needed to get my teeth fixed, and I wanted to have my kidney stone removed," he writes. In the recruiting office, the posters suggested that if he joined the military,
I would be on easy street. The armed forces were offering money for college tuition, health insurance, and even a cash bonus for signing up. To top it all off, military service would give me a chance to travel and discover a new way of life.
In these books, the idea of joining the military to defend America or uphold its values is largely absent. Rather, these soldiers signed up to escape dead-end jobs, failed relationships, broken families, bills, toothaches, and boredom. The armed forces offered a haven from the struggles and strains of life in modern-day America, a place to gain security and skills, discipline and self-esteem.
Reading these accounts, I wondered how representative they were. Had the all-volunteer force become a giant holding tank for slackers and misfits, for working stiffs and small-town Charlies who felt stifled and stymied? What about the surge in patriotism that had occurred after September 11? Did today's soldiers tend more to resemble Pat Tillman, the NFL star who gave up a lucrative career to fight terrorists, or Lynndie England, the Appalachian hellraiser who helped bring us Abu Ghraib? In Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore showed military recruiters prowling the boarded-up streets of Flint, Michigan, urging hard-up African-Americans to enlist. Yet as recruitment figures show, the numbers of blacks joining the Army has declined sharply, from 23.5 percent of all enlistees in 2000 to just 13 percent in 2006—a result of the deep unpopularity of the Iraq war in the black community.
Full article go to:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21201
The Volunteer Army: Who Fights and Why?
By Michael Massing
1.
In 2003, Colby Buzzell, then twenty-six, was living in a small room in a renovated Victorian house in the Richmond district of San Francisco, doing data entry for financial companies. Raised in the suburbs of the Bay Area, Buzzell had hated high school and, deciding against college, ended up in a series of low-paying jobs—flower deliverer, valet parker, bike messenger, busboy, carpet cutter, car washer. Data entry paid somewhat better—about $12 an hour—but even so he was barely able to get by. At one point, he ran into an old friend who had joined the Marines, and, in his telling, military life sounded like one big frat party, but with weapons and paychecks. After nearly a year of feeling stuck, Buzzell decided to visit an Army recruiter. He describes his state of mind in My War: Killing Time in Iraq,[1] an uproarious account of his life in the military:
"I was sick of living my life in oblivion where every fucking day was the same fucking thing as the day before, and the same fucking routine day in and day out. Eat, shit, work, sleep, repeat.
At the time, I saw no escape from this. I was in my mid-twenties and I still had no fucking idea what the hell I wanted to do with myself....
I figured if I joined the military it might be a quick-fix solution to my problems, it would add some excitement to my life, and at the same time give me the sense that I had finally done something with myself. And who knows? A trip to the Middle East could be one hell of an adventure."
Buzzell had a long rap sheet and a history of drug use, but, with his recruiter's help, he made it through the application process, and before long he was off to boot camp.
Many of the other recent books written by soldiers about their experiences in Iraq offer similarly frank accounts of their paths into the military. In Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the US Army,[2] Kayla Williams, who joined the punk scene when she was thirteen and loved to drop acid, writes that she joined in part to get away from one boyfriend who turned out to have been married and to prove wrong another who had taunted her about her lack of toughness. The promise of a regular paycheck did not hurt. "There are many reasons to join the Army," she writes. "But without a doubt it's a great way—leaving aside the whole prospect of getting maimed or killed—to better your career prospects."
Joshua Key, in The Deserter's Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq,[3] describes growing up in rural Oklahoma in a two-bedroom trailer with his mother and alcoholic stepfather and working at a series of minimum-wage jobs. At eighteen he got married and quickly had two sons but few prospects of providing for them. "I had no money, I had dreams of getting formal training as a welder, I needed to get my teeth fixed, and I wanted to have my kidney stone removed," he writes. In the recruiting office, the posters suggested that if he joined the military,
I would be on easy street. The armed forces were offering money for college tuition, health insurance, and even a cash bonus for signing up. To top it all off, military service would give me a chance to travel and discover a new way of life.
In these books, the idea of joining the military to defend America or uphold its values is largely absent. Rather, these soldiers signed up to escape dead-end jobs, failed relationships, broken families, bills, toothaches, and boredom. The armed forces offered a haven from the struggles and strains of life in modern-day America, a place to gain security and skills, discipline and self-esteem.
Reading these accounts, I wondered how representative they were. Had the all-volunteer force become a giant holding tank for slackers and misfits, for working stiffs and small-town Charlies who felt stifled and stymied? What about the surge in patriotism that had occurred after September 11? Did today's soldiers tend more to resemble Pat Tillman, the NFL star who gave up a lucrative career to fight terrorists, or Lynndie England, the Appalachian hellraiser who helped bring us Abu Ghraib? In Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore showed military recruiters prowling the boarded-up streets of Flint, Michigan, urging hard-up African-Americans to enlist. Yet as recruitment figures show, the numbers of blacks joining the Army has declined sharply, from 23.5 percent of all enlistees in 2000 to just 13 percent in 2006—a result of the deep unpopularity of the Iraq war in the black community.
Full article go to:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21201
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Oklahoma Gazette
Broadband of Brothers
Wednesday, September 20, 2006 - Rob Collins
"Combat is nothing like television. What is seen with the eye may appear the same. An explosion in a movie is no different than an explosion seen by the naked eye, but it’s the other four senses that truly define combat. The smells of gunfire. The loud ping of bullets bouncing off of metal. The vibrations of grenades exploding nearby. The taste of your own fear climbing up into your throat. This is combat. And no matter how many times you experience it, you learn one more thing about yourself and you’re always happy to be walking away."
—Sminklemeyer, a.k.a. former Staff Sergeant Fred Minnick, on his blog “In Iraq for 365”
Combat photographer Fred Minnick tried to count how many car bombs he’d documented in the past two months. He honestly couldn’t say. The Oklahoma native arrived at the scene with three or four Humvees to seal off an area of Mosul, Iraq.
En route, Minnick snapped the terror casualties.
“Debris everywhere,” Minnick wrote. “Puddles of blood. It was an image I had become all too familiar with.”
Located 150 yards from the fighting, Minnick needed to photograph enemy fire “to avoid an international incident of attacking a mosque,” he wrote. Coalition forces sought definitive proof that insurgents had fired at them from the mosque since that hadn’t happened before in northern Iraq, Minnick said.
“It was hard to keep my camera in focus—you’ve got bullets literally pinging off feet away from you and you’re trying to cover it,” Minnick said.
“After that fighting kind of subsided, there was a white van that pulled up real quickly. The side doors opened up and a couple of guys got out and one guy was holding an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] and pointing it right toward me and my buddy. And he shot it right at me.”
The RPG, which aurally resembled a really lame techno song, dangled overhead like a baseball bat with a tail of fire. Minnick thought he was going to die as the grenade bounced off the cement 10 feet in front of him.
“I just stood there watching it, and was fascinated by how non-ominous the RPG was now,” Minnick wrote. “It was a dud.”
What happened to the attackers?
“Each one of them died by American soldier bullets,” Minnick wrote. “Their deaths were dramatic. The first man to fall must have died instantly. Even from 75 meters away, we could see volumes of blood leaving his body. The others tried to run, but they all fell. Just in case their car was a bomb, we lit it up, too. And after 100 spent rounds, into five men, we left.”
Minnick, then a staff sergeant with the 139th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment, wrote about the events of June 24, 2004, with the pseudonym Sminklemeyer on his blog, “In Iraq for 365” (http://desert-smink.blogspot.com/). This article’s account of his near-death experience comes from his blog postings, interviews and a provided excerpt from his unpublished book, Camera Boy: How I Sold the Truth (And the Lies) About Iraq. Minnick’s literary agent is currently shopping his book around to publishers.
Minnick’s blog is a new combat-reporting phenomenon making waves in publishing circles. Historically, war correspondents have filed news reports directly from the field while the Department of Defense issued approved press releases. But soldiers’ written accounts, subjected to military censorship, wouldn’t surface until the letters arrived home much later, according to Matthew Currier Burden, a former US Army major and author of The Blog of War.
“Today, with digital cameras, Web cams, cell phones and Internet access readily available, the letter home has taken on an entirely new form, with a new honesty and urgency,” Burden wrote. “The soldiers are telling their stories through blogging, instantly publishing expert on-the-ground accounts from the war zones.”
Engaging a mosque
"Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I’m actually shooting at a holy place of worship."
—former Army Specialist Colby Buzzell of the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, from his book My War: Killing Time in Iraq
Colby Buzzell of the Stryker Brigade Combat Team didn’t know the US Army was allowed to fire on a mosque. In the fog of war, he also didn’t realize Minnick was photographing him taking fire from the mosque while his group was providing security. Both Buzzell and Minnick would live to blog about the intense events that occurred in Mosul on June 24, 2004. Their unique, firsthand accounts differ greatly from a military press release issued about the incident.
Here is Buzzell’s version: Earlier that day, the machine gunner had heard car bombs detonate. He now sat locked and loaded behind an M240 as his military vehicle rolled out of the operating base onto the main route in Mosul and arrived at the Sheikh Fatih police station. It was under siege.
The 1st Platoon sat to the right of Buzzell’s Stryker, joined by the 3rd Platoon and fortified by a missile guidance set and mortars. “They were all engaging the police station and the huge mosque that was located right next door to it with .50-cals and small-arms fire as soon as we got there,” Buzzell wrote.
“While this was going on I was in total disbelief that we were actually engaging a mosque. Like isn’t this against some kind of Geneva Convention thing?”
Locked and loaded
"The day following the ambush, I went directly over to the Internet café to check my e-mail and to search the Internet for any information and/or press about what happened. I found little to no press about the firefight, just a couple paragraphs here and there, just stuff along the lines of what CNN wrote on their Web site. It kinda made me wonder what else goes on here in Iraq that never gets reported to the people back home."
—Colby Buzzell, My War: Killing Time in Iraq
Buzzell had no plans to author a book when he started writing in his journal about his Iraq experiences. He learned about blogs in a Time magazine article and viewed them as an alternative form of media reminiscent of the ’zines he read in the 1990s. He discovered an Internet café located nearby to surf for blogs emanating from Iraq.
“But I didn’t end up spending too much time reading these soldier-written blogs, because some of them had been shut down and most of the ones that weren’t shut down were just saying a bunch of brainwashed rhetoric, like, ‘Oh, the Iraqi people love us, we’re doing the right thing. I love the Army, I love my job, I love my country, I love our president.’ That gets old after a while, and if I wanted to read stuff like that I’d go to the official US Army recruiting Web site,” Buzzell wrote.
“I looked around and I couldn’t find a single blog out there that was written by somebody who locked and loaded their weapon every day, went out on missions, and saw for themselves up close and personal what it was really like out there.”
Buzzell, a skateboarder turned soldier, started posting under the name of CBFTW—a reference to his initials and the “Fuck the World” tattoo on his arm—in June 2004 during his eighth months of deployment.
As icing on the cake, Buzzell said he added a disclaimer to his “My War” military blog (http://cbftw.blogspot.com/) that he copied and pasted without permission from an officer’s blog. It said, in part, that the opinions on the site belonged to him and not the US military. Buzzell thought it would protect him, but it didn’t.
Soldiers don’t have freedom of speech
"If it weren’t for Colby Buzzell and “My War,” milblogs may have never taken off. People can say what they want about who was…the first milblogger, but “My War” was so raw and real that it made New York gay Democrats and Montana goat farmers care about Iraq."
—Sminklemeyer, “In Iraq for 365” blog
Buzzell’s blog attracted more eyes. One reader e-mailed the soldier to announce cancellation of a New York Times subscription because his free blog was more informative. The blogger also was contacted by an Iraqi reader living in Baghdad.
“I think many countries are willing to put Iraq in this situation so they can go on with their plans and this is all part of a big game in which you and me are just players,” the Iraqi wrote.
The war games continued. An insurgent firefight in August 2004 received scant media coverage. However, a newspaper report from Washington state covering Buzzell’s Fort Lewis, Washington-based detachment later noted the disconnect between the “My War” blog and the Pentagon’s claim that Buzzell’s brigade wasn’t involved in the fighting, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.
Buzzell had an idea.
“I noticed there were some media reports and the Army was saying, ‘We’re not trying to censor soldiers and they have freedom of speech,’” Buzzell said. “And I was like, ‘No, they don’t. That’s full of crap. Soldiers don’t have freedom of speech.’
“I wanted to test what the Army was saying. [Punk musician] Jello Biafra is someone I always highly respected and he’s a strong freedom of speech advocate. So I contacted him and told him what I was going through and asked him if he could do a guest post on my blog, and he did, and the Army totally blew a head gasket after that. At that time, the Army was saying soldiers could say whatever they wanted unless it jeopardized the mission, and I knew that was a lie.”
Although Buzzell was never demoted, he said Army officials were breathing down his neck because they couldn’t control soldiers sending unfiltered digital dispatches from the front lines. Eventually, he pulled the plug on his blog when his chain of command started previewing his comments for operational security concerns before posting.
“Once Colby kind of got in trouble, it was a very sad deal,” said Minnick, who considers Buzzell the Rosa Parks of military blogging. “Nobody wanted to see that happen—everybody even within the ranks. I was there, I heard the meetings and things that were said about him. Everybody thought what he was doing was good for the Army and was especially good for people back home. He brought a side of war that people didn’t get to see. The way he wrote was so present tense and it was so free from editing or censorship.
“The only thing that kept him from being able to continue was the Army’s fear. The Army feared that he would say too much, say inappropriate things. They didn’t know how to contain him, so they just stopped him. It was a sad day for the Army.”
Sometimes the facts get skewed
"A car bomb went off in Iraq, 30 dead, 100 injured, two soldiers killed, three wounded. That’s it. A little small blurb, you know, AP-style journalism. We become desensitized to that over a period of time. We just look at it as numbers or sentences and words on paper. It doesn’t hit close to home. But when you read a soldier’s blog that’s over there and he’s writing about his fears, his concerns, his hopes and what he’s going through, then it’s like the war becomes way real to the reader."
—Colby Buzzell
When Minnick wasn’t working at his desk, the combat photographer would join infantry, special forces or support units in the field. Officially, he would take photos and provide coverage with military approval but couldn’t always tell the full story through press releases. Minnick said he continued to blog surreptitiously by avoiding red flags and censoring himself to stay in touch with his family in eastern Oklahoma County.
“I learned now that I was [censored],” said Minnick, who was honorably discharged after nine years in the military. “I was being read, but no one came to me. Even when I thought it was [incognito], I was being read. People have come back and told me. I’ve had captains come back and tell me. Centcom [United States Central Command] kind of like goes through all the blogs.
“They’re trying to figure out a way to use them to their advantage. I’ve had people from Centcom tell me they’re trying to figure out a way to use them. They went as far as thinking about having people do that as their job: to blog.”
Minnick said blogging is important because the human side of the story is lost in a time when events are reported and debated literally minutes after they occur.
“Sometimes the facts get skewed,” said Minnick, who now lives in Louisville, Kentucky and works as managing editor for two food service trade publications. “Nearly most of the time, someone doesn’t hear all the story.
“I’m a journalist; I work my ass off to try to be objective. But it’s hard to say that CNN is objective, the New York Times is objective, when I have been there and observed the same thing come out as a totally different story. It’s hard to say the national media is always objective.”
Minnick said one news agency hired an English-speaking Middle Eastern resident as a reporter to get “in quick with the insurgents” in Iraq.
“We’ll be driving through on a convoy,” Minnick said. “We’ll see two photographers up here and suddenly, boom, one of our Humvees or Strykers gets blown up. And that happened a lot. They would get the information from the insurgents of when they were going to plan the attack. They were waiting in advance.”
Minnick also blogged about a Fox News cameraman making him drive slowly in a dangerous area—twice—to get the perfect pan of a building.
And don’t mention Geraldo Rivera.
“If you ask me, Geraldo is a piece of crap not worthy of a roll of toilet paper when he’s taking a number 2,” Minnick wrote. “That’s a horrible feeling and by the way, we have to place our paper in the trash can because Iraqi toilets can’t handle toilet paper in their sewage lines.”
Most embedded journalists cut and paste Army press releases without checking facts, Buzzell said. Instead of slumming with the grunts for a lengthy time like war correspondent Ernie Pyle, current embeds want a quick Iraq tour so they can write a little report and then hawk a book.
“We were looking for weapons,” Buzzell said about a routine checkpoint covered by an embedded journalist. “And this reporter wrote about it like it was World War III. I remembered that day and we were all bored out of our minds. Nothing happened that day.”
“There is so much rage in me”
"In my mind, I’m still in Iraq, looking for the cowards behind the black masks…I feel like I’m in a dream where I tell myself everything is fine and nobody here wants to kill me, but I can’t stop myself as if I am simply programmed to be suspicious and alert. My eyes automatically look at everybody as if they’re touting an AK-47. I scan for cover at every turn and am nervous when I see objects on the roadsides."
—Sminklemeyer, “In Iraq for 365” blog
Two weeks after Minnick returned home from Iraq, he camped out in the backyard of his parents’ home in Jones, Oklahoma. The Iraq war veteran blogged about loving the Oklahoma country, where the bullfrogs were boisterous and the moon was bright.
“As a kid, I slept outside all the time,” wrote Minnick, who is one-sixteenth Cherokee. “This time I fell asleep in the back yard within a matter of minutes.
“My little bro said he was looking for me in the back yard when I started yelling ‘Get down, mother-f-----! Get down, or I’ll shoot!’ I was chasing him with my arms at the ready. I chased him to the house and I was yelling for my friend ‘Sammy,’ telling him to get his weapon and that Haji is everywhere. I then proceeded into the house at 3 a.m., pounding on doors, telling everybody that Haji is everywhere and that we need to go. At first, they thought I was playing a joke until they looked into my eyes…they knew I was dreaming.”
Minnick awoke crying, yelling and hugging a defoliated crape myrtle in the front yard, according to his blog.
“I was relieved I was just dreaming… as the experience felt real,” Minnick wrote. “In the dream, I manned a guard tower at my parent’s house. We had a strong perimeter set up and somehow black man dresses surrounded the area.”
As he returns to civilian life, Minnick said blogging is helping him readjust to American society.
“It is so hard coming back,” said Minnick, age 28. “Even though people are supportive, there is so much rage in me.”
Buzzell, who is now hanging out in Los Angeles after being honorably discharged two years ago, said he drinks heavily since returning from Iraq.
“I don’t know, it seems nobody here really gives a shit about what’s going on over there, about the guys over there,” said Buzzell, now 30. “We keep on hearing all this rah-rah about ‘support the troops.’ But that rah-rah all dies once the troops come home. We kind of forget about our veterans…"
“No one really gives a fuck about you and no one’s out to really help you. A yellow magnet on the back of the car, a handshake, a pat on the back. It’s bullshit, you know? But then again, I don’t really know what people can do.”
Wednesday, September 20, 2006 - Rob Collins
"Combat is nothing like television. What is seen with the eye may appear the same. An explosion in a movie is no different than an explosion seen by the naked eye, but it’s the other four senses that truly define combat. The smells of gunfire. The loud ping of bullets bouncing off of metal. The vibrations of grenades exploding nearby. The taste of your own fear climbing up into your throat. This is combat. And no matter how many times you experience it, you learn one more thing about yourself and you’re always happy to be walking away."
—Sminklemeyer, a.k.a. former Staff Sergeant Fred Minnick, on his blog “In Iraq for 365”
Combat photographer Fred Minnick tried to count how many car bombs he’d documented in the past two months. He honestly couldn’t say. The Oklahoma native arrived at the scene with three or four Humvees to seal off an area of Mosul, Iraq.
En route, Minnick snapped the terror casualties.
“Debris everywhere,” Minnick wrote. “Puddles of blood. It was an image I had become all too familiar with.”
Located 150 yards from the fighting, Minnick needed to photograph enemy fire “to avoid an international incident of attacking a mosque,” he wrote. Coalition forces sought definitive proof that insurgents had fired at them from the mosque since that hadn’t happened before in northern Iraq, Minnick said.
“It was hard to keep my camera in focus—you’ve got bullets literally pinging off feet away from you and you’re trying to cover it,” Minnick said.
“After that fighting kind of subsided, there was a white van that pulled up real quickly. The side doors opened up and a couple of guys got out and one guy was holding an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] and pointing it right toward me and my buddy. And he shot it right at me.”
The RPG, which aurally resembled a really lame techno song, dangled overhead like a baseball bat with a tail of fire. Minnick thought he was going to die as the grenade bounced off the cement 10 feet in front of him.
“I just stood there watching it, and was fascinated by how non-ominous the RPG was now,” Minnick wrote. “It was a dud.”
What happened to the attackers?
“Each one of them died by American soldier bullets,” Minnick wrote. “Their deaths were dramatic. The first man to fall must have died instantly. Even from 75 meters away, we could see volumes of blood leaving his body. The others tried to run, but they all fell. Just in case their car was a bomb, we lit it up, too. And after 100 spent rounds, into five men, we left.”
Minnick, then a staff sergeant with the 139th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment, wrote about the events of June 24, 2004, with the pseudonym Sminklemeyer on his blog, “In Iraq for 365” (http://desert-smink.blogspot.com/). This article’s account of his near-death experience comes from his blog postings, interviews and a provided excerpt from his unpublished book, Camera Boy: How I Sold the Truth (And the Lies) About Iraq. Minnick’s literary agent is currently shopping his book around to publishers.
Minnick’s blog is a new combat-reporting phenomenon making waves in publishing circles. Historically, war correspondents have filed news reports directly from the field while the Department of Defense issued approved press releases. But soldiers’ written accounts, subjected to military censorship, wouldn’t surface until the letters arrived home much later, according to Matthew Currier Burden, a former US Army major and author of The Blog of War.
“Today, with digital cameras, Web cams, cell phones and Internet access readily available, the letter home has taken on an entirely new form, with a new honesty and urgency,” Burden wrote. “The soldiers are telling their stories through blogging, instantly publishing expert on-the-ground accounts from the war zones.”
Engaging a mosque
"Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I’m actually shooting at a holy place of worship."
—former Army Specialist Colby Buzzell of the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, from his book My War: Killing Time in Iraq
Colby Buzzell of the Stryker Brigade Combat Team didn’t know the US Army was allowed to fire on a mosque. In the fog of war, he also didn’t realize Minnick was photographing him taking fire from the mosque while his group was providing security. Both Buzzell and Minnick would live to blog about the intense events that occurred in Mosul on June 24, 2004. Their unique, firsthand accounts differ greatly from a military press release issued about the incident.
Here is Buzzell’s version: Earlier that day, the machine gunner had heard car bombs detonate. He now sat locked and loaded behind an M240 as his military vehicle rolled out of the operating base onto the main route in Mosul and arrived at the Sheikh Fatih police station. It was under siege.
The 1st Platoon sat to the right of Buzzell’s Stryker, joined by the 3rd Platoon and fortified by a missile guidance set and mortars. “They were all engaging the police station and the huge mosque that was located right next door to it with .50-cals and small-arms fire as soon as we got there,” Buzzell wrote.
“While this was going on I was in total disbelief that we were actually engaging a mosque. Like isn’t this against some kind of Geneva Convention thing?”
Locked and loaded
"The day following the ambush, I went directly over to the Internet café to check my e-mail and to search the Internet for any information and/or press about what happened. I found little to no press about the firefight, just a couple paragraphs here and there, just stuff along the lines of what CNN wrote on their Web site. It kinda made me wonder what else goes on here in Iraq that never gets reported to the people back home."
—Colby Buzzell, My War: Killing Time in Iraq
Buzzell had no plans to author a book when he started writing in his journal about his Iraq experiences. He learned about blogs in a Time magazine article and viewed them as an alternative form of media reminiscent of the ’zines he read in the 1990s. He discovered an Internet café located nearby to surf for blogs emanating from Iraq.
“But I didn’t end up spending too much time reading these soldier-written blogs, because some of them had been shut down and most of the ones that weren’t shut down were just saying a bunch of brainwashed rhetoric, like, ‘Oh, the Iraqi people love us, we’re doing the right thing. I love the Army, I love my job, I love my country, I love our president.’ That gets old after a while, and if I wanted to read stuff like that I’d go to the official US Army recruiting Web site,” Buzzell wrote.
“I looked around and I couldn’t find a single blog out there that was written by somebody who locked and loaded their weapon every day, went out on missions, and saw for themselves up close and personal what it was really like out there.”
Buzzell, a skateboarder turned soldier, started posting under the name of CBFTW—a reference to his initials and the “Fuck the World” tattoo on his arm—in June 2004 during his eighth months of deployment.
As icing on the cake, Buzzell said he added a disclaimer to his “My War” military blog (http://cbftw.blogspot.com/) that he copied and pasted without permission from an officer’s blog. It said, in part, that the opinions on the site belonged to him and not the US military. Buzzell thought it would protect him, but it didn’t.
Soldiers don’t have freedom of speech
"If it weren’t for Colby Buzzell and “My War,” milblogs may have never taken off. People can say what they want about who was…the first milblogger, but “My War” was so raw and real that it made New York gay Democrats and Montana goat farmers care about Iraq."
—Sminklemeyer, “In Iraq for 365” blog
Buzzell’s blog attracted more eyes. One reader e-mailed the soldier to announce cancellation of a New York Times subscription because his free blog was more informative. The blogger also was contacted by an Iraqi reader living in Baghdad.
“I think many countries are willing to put Iraq in this situation so they can go on with their plans and this is all part of a big game in which you and me are just players,” the Iraqi wrote.
The war games continued. An insurgent firefight in August 2004 received scant media coverage. However, a newspaper report from Washington state covering Buzzell’s Fort Lewis, Washington-based detachment later noted the disconnect between the “My War” blog and the Pentagon’s claim that Buzzell’s brigade wasn’t involved in the fighting, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.
Buzzell had an idea.
“I noticed there were some media reports and the Army was saying, ‘We’re not trying to censor soldiers and they have freedom of speech,’” Buzzell said. “And I was like, ‘No, they don’t. That’s full of crap. Soldiers don’t have freedom of speech.’
“I wanted to test what the Army was saying. [Punk musician] Jello Biafra is someone I always highly respected and he’s a strong freedom of speech advocate. So I contacted him and told him what I was going through and asked him if he could do a guest post on my blog, and he did, and the Army totally blew a head gasket after that. At that time, the Army was saying soldiers could say whatever they wanted unless it jeopardized the mission, and I knew that was a lie.”
Although Buzzell was never demoted, he said Army officials were breathing down his neck because they couldn’t control soldiers sending unfiltered digital dispatches from the front lines. Eventually, he pulled the plug on his blog when his chain of command started previewing his comments for operational security concerns before posting.
“Once Colby kind of got in trouble, it was a very sad deal,” said Minnick, who considers Buzzell the Rosa Parks of military blogging. “Nobody wanted to see that happen—everybody even within the ranks. I was there, I heard the meetings and things that were said about him. Everybody thought what he was doing was good for the Army and was especially good for people back home. He brought a side of war that people didn’t get to see. The way he wrote was so present tense and it was so free from editing or censorship.
“The only thing that kept him from being able to continue was the Army’s fear. The Army feared that he would say too much, say inappropriate things. They didn’t know how to contain him, so they just stopped him. It was a sad day for the Army.”
Sometimes the facts get skewed
"A car bomb went off in Iraq, 30 dead, 100 injured, two soldiers killed, three wounded. That’s it. A little small blurb, you know, AP-style journalism. We become desensitized to that over a period of time. We just look at it as numbers or sentences and words on paper. It doesn’t hit close to home. But when you read a soldier’s blog that’s over there and he’s writing about his fears, his concerns, his hopes and what he’s going through, then it’s like the war becomes way real to the reader."
—Colby Buzzell
When Minnick wasn’t working at his desk, the combat photographer would join infantry, special forces or support units in the field. Officially, he would take photos and provide coverage with military approval but couldn’t always tell the full story through press releases. Minnick said he continued to blog surreptitiously by avoiding red flags and censoring himself to stay in touch with his family in eastern Oklahoma County.
“I learned now that I was [censored],” said Minnick, who was honorably discharged after nine years in the military. “I was being read, but no one came to me. Even when I thought it was [incognito], I was being read. People have come back and told me. I’ve had captains come back and tell me. Centcom [United States Central Command] kind of like goes through all the blogs.
“They’re trying to figure out a way to use them to their advantage. I’ve had people from Centcom tell me they’re trying to figure out a way to use them. They went as far as thinking about having people do that as their job: to blog.”
Minnick said blogging is important because the human side of the story is lost in a time when events are reported and debated literally minutes after they occur.
“Sometimes the facts get skewed,” said Minnick, who now lives in Louisville, Kentucky and works as managing editor for two food service trade publications. “Nearly most of the time, someone doesn’t hear all the story.
“I’m a journalist; I work my ass off to try to be objective. But it’s hard to say that CNN is objective, the New York Times is objective, when I have been there and observed the same thing come out as a totally different story. It’s hard to say the national media is always objective.”
Minnick said one news agency hired an English-speaking Middle Eastern resident as a reporter to get “in quick with the insurgents” in Iraq.
“We’ll be driving through on a convoy,” Minnick said. “We’ll see two photographers up here and suddenly, boom, one of our Humvees or Strykers gets blown up. And that happened a lot. They would get the information from the insurgents of when they were going to plan the attack. They were waiting in advance.”
Minnick also blogged about a Fox News cameraman making him drive slowly in a dangerous area—twice—to get the perfect pan of a building.
And don’t mention Geraldo Rivera.
“If you ask me, Geraldo is a piece of crap not worthy of a roll of toilet paper when he’s taking a number 2,” Minnick wrote. “That’s a horrible feeling and by the way, we have to place our paper in the trash can because Iraqi toilets can’t handle toilet paper in their sewage lines.”
Most embedded journalists cut and paste Army press releases without checking facts, Buzzell said. Instead of slumming with the grunts for a lengthy time like war correspondent Ernie Pyle, current embeds want a quick Iraq tour so they can write a little report and then hawk a book.
“We were looking for weapons,” Buzzell said about a routine checkpoint covered by an embedded journalist. “And this reporter wrote about it like it was World War III. I remembered that day and we were all bored out of our minds. Nothing happened that day.”
“There is so much rage in me”
"In my mind, I’m still in Iraq, looking for the cowards behind the black masks…I feel like I’m in a dream where I tell myself everything is fine and nobody here wants to kill me, but I can’t stop myself as if I am simply programmed to be suspicious and alert. My eyes automatically look at everybody as if they’re touting an AK-47. I scan for cover at every turn and am nervous when I see objects on the roadsides."
—Sminklemeyer, “In Iraq for 365” blog
Two weeks after Minnick returned home from Iraq, he camped out in the backyard of his parents’ home in Jones, Oklahoma. The Iraq war veteran blogged about loving the Oklahoma country, where the bullfrogs were boisterous and the moon was bright.
“As a kid, I slept outside all the time,” wrote Minnick, who is one-sixteenth Cherokee. “This time I fell asleep in the back yard within a matter of minutes.
“My little bro said he was looking for me in the back yard when I started yelling ‘Get down, mother-f-----! Get down, or I’ll shoot!’ I was chasing him with my arms at the ready. I chased him to the house and I was yelling for my friend ‘Sammy,’ telling him to get his weapon and that Haji is everywhere. I then proceeded into the house at 3 a.m., pounding on doors, telling everybody that Haji is everywhere and that we need to go. At first, they thought I was playing a joke until they looked into my eyes…they knew I was dreaming.”
Minnick awoke crying, yelling and hugging a defoliated crape myrtle in the front yard, according to his blog.
“I was relieved I was just dreaming… as the experience felt real,” Minnick wrote. “In the dream, I manned a guard tower at my parent’s house. We had a strong perimeter set up and somehow black man dresses surrounded the area.”
As he returns to civilian life, Minnick said blogging is helping him readjust to American society.
“It is so hard coming back,” said Minnick, age 28. “Even though people are supportive, there is so much rage in me.”
Buzzell, who is now hanging out in Los Angeles after being honorably discharged two years ago, said he drinks heavily since returning from Iraq.
“I don’t know, it seems nobody here really gives a shit about what’s going on over there, about the guys over there,” said Buzzell, now 30. “We keep on hearing all this rah-rah about ‘support the troops.’ But that rah-rah all dies once the troops come home. We kind of forget about our veterans…"
“No one really gives a fuck about you and no one’s out to really help you. A yellow magnet on the back of the car, a handshake, a pat on the back. It’s bullshit, you know? But then again, I don’t really know what people can do.”
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Radio Allegro
RA206-Life After War: Colby Buzzell, Killing Time in Iraq
Survival. It's a natural instinct and sometimes it's not always about life or death situations.
There are as many ways to survive as there are ways to live -- but it takes a special kind of person to show a whole nation how to survive. On today's episode of Radio Allegro we meet Colby Buzzell, blogger, soldier, and American Hero. He plays his favourite music and discusse blogging in a war zone and coming home to a America. His new book is My War: Killing Time in Iraq and it's available on Amazon and at bookstores everywhere.
Produced, hosted, written, and edited by Ashley Foot
original music by Geoff Smith
go to:
http://www.radio-allegro.com/Radio-Allegro/Home/E4DE678A-A423-476B-9FB0-18EDE912E81C.html
*Please note there is profanity on this episode so parental discretion is advised
Survival. It's a natural instinct and sometimes it's not always about life or death situations.
There are as many ways to survive as there are ways to live -- but it takes a special kind of person to show a whole nation how to survive. On today's episode of Radio Allegro we meet Colby Buzzell, blogger, soldier, and American Hero. He plays his favourite music and discusse blogging in a war zone and coming home to a America. His new book is My War: Killing Time in Iraq and it's available on Amazon and at bookstores everywhere.
Produced, hosted, written, and edited by Ashley Foot
original music by Geoff Smith
go to:
http://www.radio-allegro.com/Radio-Allegro/Home/E4DE678A-A423-476B-9FB0-18EDE912E81C.html
*Please note there is profanity on this episode so parental discretion is advised
Monday, July 17, 2006
CSPAN BOOKTV
Book TV Programs
A Weekly Look at Selected Book TV Programs
On Sunday, July 16 at 10:00 pm
On the Ground in Iraq
Colby Buzzell and Yasmine El-Shamayleh
Description: Discussion of the Iraq War featuring Iraq War veteran Colby Buzzell (author of "My War: Killing Time in Iraq") and activist Yasmine El-Shamayleh (who is there to present Iraqi blogger Riverbend's book "Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq"). Mr. Buzzell, who started a blog while serving in Iraq, and Ms. El-Shamayleh, a graduate student at New York University, read selections from "My War" and "Baghdad Burning," respectively, and then answer questions from the audience. Peter Lems, American Friends Service Committee national representative for Iraq, moderates the discussion. Portions of this program contain language that viewers may find offensive.
Author Bio: Colby Buzzell, who served with the U.S. Army in Iraq for one year (1st Battalion, 23rd Regiment), is the author of a blog titled "My War," which he started in 2004. For more information, visit cbftw.blogspot.com. Riverbend, the pseudonym of a Baghdad-based computer programmer in her twenties, began reporting on the war in August 2003. Her blog, "Baghdad Burning," can be found at riverbendblog.blogspot.com.
more intel at: http://www.booktv.org/feature/index.asp?segID=7213&schedID=441
A Weekly Look at Selected Book TV Programs
On Sunday, July 16 at 10:00 pm
On the Ground in Iraq
Colby Buzzell and Yasmine El-Shamayleh
Description: Discussion of the Iraq War featuring Iraq War veteran Colby Buzzell (author of "My War: Killing Time in Iraq
") and activist Yasmine El-Shamayleh (who is there to present Iraqi blogger Riverbend's book "Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq"). Mr. Buzzell, who started a blog while serving in Iraq, and Ms. El-Shamayleh, a graduate student at New York University, read selections from "My War" and "Baghdad Burning," respectively, and then answer questions from the audience. Peter Lems, American Friends Service Committee national representative for Iraq, moderates the discussion. Portions of this program contain language that viewers may find offensive.Author Bio: Colby Buzzell, who served with the U.S. Army in Iraq for one year (1st Battalion, 23rd Regiment), is the author of a blog titled "My War," which he started in 2004. For more information, visit cbftw.blogspot.com. Riverbend, the pseudonym of a Baghdad-based computer programmer in her twenties, began reporting on the war in August 2003. Her blog, "Baghdad Burning," can be found at riverbendblog.blogspot.com.
more intel at: http://www.booktv.org/feature/index.asp?segID=7213&schedID=441
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Thursday, November 17, 2005
THIS AMERICAN LIFE
302: Strangers in a Strange Land
Show synopsis:
Someone once said, "if you're not willing to be changed by a place, there's no point in going." This week, stories about what happens when you land in a whole new world. We hear from including Colby Buzzell, reading from his war memoir, My War: Killing Time in Iraq, and Trueman Muhrer-Irwin who blogged under the name "Rebel Coyote." Broadcast the weekend of November 18-20 in most places.
Act Two. Johnny Get Your Mouse.
Lots of soldiers in Iraq are writing about their experiences online. Producer Amy O'Leary has read through dozens of them and talks about what the soldiers are writing. Then, we hear from three bloggers, reading their own journals, telling their stories from Iraq about the fighting, the locals, and why you subscribe to Details magazine. We hear from Captain Chuck Ziegenfuss, Trueman Muhrer-Irwin, and Colby Buzzell, who has recently compiled a book of his war writing called My War: Killing Time in Iraq. (32 minutes)
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=302
Show synopsis:
Someone once said, "if you're not willing to be changed by a place, there's no point in going." This week, stories about what happens when you land in a whole new world. We hear from including Colby Buzzell, reading from his war memoir, My War: Killing Time in Iraq
, and Trueman Muhrer-Irwin who blogged under the name "Rebel Coyote." Broadcast the weekend of November 18-20 in most places.Act Two. Johnny Get Your Mouse.
Lots of soldiers in Iraq are writing about their experiences online. Producer Amy O'Leary has read through dozens of them and talks about what the soldiers are writing. Then, we hear from three bloggers, reading their own journals, telling their stories from Iraq about the fighting, the locals, and why you subscribe to Details magazine. We hear from Captain Chuck Ziegenfuss, Trueman Muhrer-Irwin, and Colby Buzzell, who has recently compiled a book of his war writing called My War: Killing Time in Iraq. (32 minutes)
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=302
Monday, November 14, 2005
Thursday, October 06, 2005
ESQUIRE
Earlier in the year I wrote two peices for Esquire magazine, Out now: The Making of the Twenty-First-Century Soldier, Part Three
"it's totally unlike any peice of nonfiction war writing I've ever seen. To find its literary ancestors, you'd have to go back to triumphs of comedic absudism like the novels MASH and Catch-22."
-David Granger
Esquire Editor in Cheif
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Newsweek Books
WEB EXCLUSIVE
Newsweek
Updated: 8:21 p.m. PT Oct 27, 2006
Oct. 27, 2006 - Just one of the frightening things about Iraq is how fast the publishing industry has responded with a ballooning shelf of books on the war and related subjects. To help you cut through the chaff and get to the truly essential books on the subject, here’s a selection suggested by NEWSWEEK staffers.
My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell (Putnam) A first-person account from a young soldier (and self admitted skate punk and wise ass) who was based in Mosul with a Stryker brigade. This book pulls together dispatches from Buzzell's blog, also called My War, which got him into a lot of trouble with Army superiors. A gritty, obnoxious and often hilarious account of what many soldiers go through on a daily basis in Iraq
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15450893/site/newsweek/?nav=slate
Newsweek
Updated: 8:21 p.m. PT Oct 27, 2006
Oct. 27, 2006 - Just one of the frightening things about Iraq is how fast the publishing industry has responded with a ballooning shelf of books on the war and related subjects. To help you cut through the chaff and get to the truly essential books on the subject, here’s a selection suggested by NEWSWEEK staffers.
My War: Killing Time in Iraq
by Colby Buzzell (Putnam) A first-person account from a young soldier (and self admitted skate punk and wise ass) who was based in Mosul with a Stryker brigade. This book pulls together dispatches from Buzzell's blog, also called My War, which got him into a lot of trouble with Army superiors. A gritty, obnoxious and often hilarious account of what many soldiers go through on a daily basis in Iraqhttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15450893/site/newsweek/?nav=slate
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Soldiers Weigh In on Iraq
By JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 17, 2005; Page P4
The Iraq War is coming to your local bookstore.
Readers who scooped up political fare last year are now being offered
accounts of the Iraq conflict by soldiers who were recently on the
battlefield.
Their memoirs offer a range of experience and perspective on the war, from
reformed slacker Colby Buzzell, who worries there's no end in sight, to
Dartmouth alumnus Nathaniel C. Fick, who sees peace on the horizon if more
troops are mobilized.
The tone in each is blunt. "The world hears war stories told by reporters
and retired generals who keep extensive notebooks and journals," writes
former National Guardsman John Crawford. "They carry pens as they walk,
whereas I carried a machine gun."
Publishers say these soldier memoirs complement books penned by journalists
about the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. "They put you further inside the
soldier's head and tell you what it's like to shoot at somebody, what it's
like to be shot at, and how they got there," says Ivan Held, president of
G.P. Putnam's Sons. "These books take you into Iraq and give you a
first-hand look."
Part of the appeal of the new battlefield memoirs is that they feature
ordinary people performing in extraordinary ways under pressure. "There are
significant numbers of readers out there who want to know what the
experience is really like," says David Steinberger, CEO of Perseus Books
LLC, a unit of Washington private-equity firm Perseus LLC.
These authors are little-known, but their stories are extraordinary. Below,
culled from interviews with five new writers, are descriptions of their
books and a taste of what they contain.
***
THE BOOK: "My War: Killing Time in Iraq," publishing in October.
The Author: A 26-year-old slacker feeling that life was passing him by,
Colby Buzzell was rejected by the Marines. He waited a couple of weeks to
ensure that he could pass an Army drug test.
The Plot: The inside story as told by Everyman. Mr. Buzzell arrived in Iraq
November 2003 and left the following October.
Behind the Scenes: In his eighth month in Iraq, Mr. Buzzell, now 29, started
www.cbftw.blogspot.com.
Worst Moment: Getting his first leave canceled.
Take on the War: Mr. Buzzell is concerned that there is no end in sight.
"What is winning? Is it winning the global war on terrorism? Eliminating all
the insurgents in Iraq?"
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 17, 2005; Page P4
The Iraq War is coming to your local bookstore.
Readers who scooped up political fare last year are now being offered
accounts of the Iraq conflict by soldiers who were recently on the
battlefield.
Their memoirs offer a range of experience and perspective on the war, from
reformed slacker Colby Buzzell, who worries there's no end in sight, to
Dartmouth alumnus Nathaniel C. Fick, who sees peace on the horizon if more
troops are mobilized.
The tone in each is blunt. "The world hears war stories told by reporters
and retired generals who keep extensive notebooks and journals," writes
former National Guardsman John Crawford. "They carry pens as they walk,
whereas I carried a machine gun."
Publishers say these soldier memoirs complement books penned by journalists
about the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. "They put you further inside the
soldier's head and tell you what it's like to shoot at somebody, what it's
like to be shot at, and how they got there," says Ivan Held, president of
G.P. Putnam's Sons. "These books take you into Iraq and give you a
first-hand look."
Part of the appeal of the new battlefield memoirs is that they feature
ordinary people performing in extraordinary ways under pressure. "There are
significant numbers of readers out there who want to know what the
experience is really like," says David Steinberger, CEO of Perseus Books
LLC, a unit of Washington private-equity firm Perseus LLC.
These authors are little-known, but their stories are extraordinary. Below,
culled from interviews with five new writers, are descriptions of their
books and a taste of what they contain.
***
THE BOOK: "My War: Killing Time in Iraq
," publishing in October.The Author: A 26-year-old slacker feeling that life was passing him by,
Colby Buzzell was rejected by the Marines. He waited a couple of weeks to
ensure that he could pass an Army drug test.
The Plot: The inside story as told by Everyman. Mr. Buzzell arrived in Iraq
November 2003 and left the following October.
Behind the Scenes: In his eighth month in Iraq, Mr. Buzzell, now 29, started
www.cbftw.blogspot.com.
Worst Moment: Getting his first leave canceled.
Take on the War: Mr. Buzzell is concerned that there is no end in sight.
"What is winning? Is it winning the global war on terrorism? Eliminating all
the insurgents in Iraq?"
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Library Journal Review
At age 25, Buzzell had already led a life that embraced alcohol, drugs, a minor criminal record, and a series of dead-end jobs. Enlisting in the U.S. Army, he set his focus on "Being All That You Can Be" as an infantryman, spending most of 2003 in Iraq assigned to the Stryker Brigade Combat Team. He began sharing his experiences through a blog, thus providing more truth than CNN or the army could or would. Here, Buzzell cleverly prepares a text that is part memoir, part diary entries, and part email messages. War veterans will understand the episodic nature of his narrative, the confusion of described battle, the brutality of his life, and the rawness of his prose. With Buzzell's return to the States and the close of an effective soldier's life, neither he nor the reader is sure that he has not come full circle and returned to his civilian life of loss. Recommended for public libraries.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Reuters
US soldiers' Iraq books show humor, horror and anger
Sep 22, 2005 — By Claudia Parsons
Exerts from article:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Journalists, generals, historians, Iraqis and a former hostage have told their stories about Iraq, but now more than two years after American troops invaded, the flood of books by U.S. soldiers has arrived.
From Roman emperor Julius Caesar to World War I poets, soldiers have written books, poems, diaries and letters home
Colby Buzzell recalls in "My War: Killing Time in Iraq" (published on October 20 by Putnam) how a recruiter gave him tips on passing a drugs test to enter the military.
...he is candid about soldiers' reactions to war: "I've developed that really disturbing, warped, sick war humor about everything," he writes in an August 2004 blog entry which appears in his book, describing how a gruesome photograph of a dead Iraqi prompted laughter.
DIFFERENT ACCOUNTS
His book also juxtaposes his own confused account of a dramatic clash with insurgents in Mosul with a CNN report and a military statement about the same event —the latter both dry and with no hint of the severity and extent of the fighting.
"It kinda made me wonder what else goes on here in Iraq that never gets reported to the people back home," he writes.
Buzzell said he was never punished for what he wrote, though he was "counseled" several times, and he made a point of changing names and details to avoid endangering other U.S. forces by giving away their tactics or location.
"A lot of my chain of command had never even heard of a blog," Buzzell told Reuters. "They were a little nervous about it … they didn't know quite how to handle it."
Buzzell said going to Iraq was the best thing he had ever done. "I do believe we were doing a lot of good but ... I have a lot of questions about what we're doing," he said.
Sep 22, 2005 — By Claudia Parsons
Exerts from article:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Journalists, generals, historians, Iraqis and a former hostage have told their stories about Iraq, but now more than two years after American troops invaded, the flood of books by U.S. soldiers has arrived.
From Roman emperor Julius Caesar to World War I poets, soldiers have written books, poems, diaries and letters home
Colby Buzzell recalls in "My War: Killing Time in Iraq
" (published on October 20 by Putnam) how a recruiter gave him tips on passing a drugs test to enter the military. ...he is candid about soldiers' reactions to war: "I've developed that really disturbing, warped, sick war humor about everything," he writes in an August 2004 blog entry which appears in his book, describing how a gruesome photograph of a dead Iraqi prompted laughter.
DIFFERENT ACCOUNTS
His book also juxtaposes his own confused account of a dramatic clash with insurgents in Mosul with a CNN report and a military statement about the same event —the latter both dry and with no hint of the severity and extent of the fighting.
"It kinda made me wonder what else goes on here in Iraq that never gets reported to the people back home," he writes.
Buzzell said he was never punished for what he wrote, though he was "counseled" several times, and he made a point of changing names and details to avoid endangering other U.S. forces by giving away their tactics or location.
"A lot of my chain of command had never even heard of a blog," Buzzell told Reuters. "They were a little nervous about it … they didn't know quite how to handle it."
Buzzell said going to Iraq was the best thing he had ever done. "I do believe we were doing a lot of good but ... I have a lot of questions about what we're doing," he said.
'My War' -- a soldier's wild ride
by C.W. Nevius
San Francisco Chronicle
To say that Colby Buzzell was at loose ends when he left high school is an affront to the concept of loose ends.
At 26, he sat down and wrote out a list of the jobs he'd held: "flower delivery guy, valet guy, cash register at Orchard Supply guy, car washer guy, gift shop sales guy, telemarketing guy, 7-Eleven guy, record store guy, towel guy at the gym guy, and I worked seasonally at Toys 'R' Us."
"And that's not even a complete list," he said in a phone interview last week.
So it will be a bit of a surprise to his high school buddies to learn that he has a book -- "My War: Killing Time in Iraq" -- coming out Oct. 20. Even bigger if you add that he's working with a major publisher (Putnam) and that literary lion Kurt Vonnegut calls the book "... nothing less than the soul of an extremely interesting human being at war ..."
Good luck trying to figure it all out. Buzzell is still trying to decide if he is thrilled or mystified.
"I don't know what to make out of all of it," Buzzell says. "It just sort of happened. I'm just going to jump on the ride for a while."
The simple explanation is that one day Buzzell was sitting on a bar stool and the next he was behind an M240 Bravo machine gun in Iraq. Somewhere along the way he went over to the Internet café at his Army base camp in Mosul and posted his experiences on a blog.
And then all hell broke loose.
Buzzell's blog was discovered, and word spread. His blog began to get as many as 10,000 hits a day. His Army commanding officers began to take an interest, unable to decide if he was telling it like it was or undermining the American effort.
But by then, he was a sensation, and controlling his blog was proving to be very difficult. Interview requests began to come in from PBS and the Wall Street Journal. Pretty impressive for someone who wasn't clear on exactly where his words went when he shipped them out on the World Wide Web.
"I had never even heard the word, blog, before," he says now. "I didn't tell my parents about it because I was swearing and cussing and stuff and I didn't want them to trip out."
Buzzell's entries, which form the basis for his book, have moments that are too surreal to be anything but true. When his platoon drives up to a mosque in Mosul and they start to take fire, everyone opens up with automatic weapons -- except for the guys who pull out their new digital cameras for some authentic photos of combat. With the mosque covered in a cloud of dust kicked up from hundreds of rounds of fire, Buzzell looks over to see a machine-gunner "hysterically throwing up the heavy-metal devil horn hand signal like it was an Ozzy Osbourne concert."
But the centerpiece, called "Men in Black," is vivid enough to make you smell the gunpowder -- and the fear. Buzzell starts with a copy of the three paragraph wire service account of a "clash" between American troops and Iraqi insurgents. Then he says, "Now here's what really happened."
The account of the firefight that follows has become an Internet cult classic, linked and passed from reader to reader. It was eventually published in Esquire magazine and turned out to be the perfect pitch for a book deal. Not that he had anything like that in mind when he came back from the patrol, still amped.
"I didn't even think what I was doing," Buzzell says. "I remember I sat down and I closed my eyes for a second and then I thought, 'just go from the beginning.' The words just poured out. I couldn't type fast enough. I finished, posted up the blog, walked out, lit up a cigarette and had no idea what I had done."
Again the Army had conflicted feelings. Some of his commanding officers thought he'd captured the events to perfection and was providing a service. Some, even higher up, were uneasy.
His battalion commander, Lt. Col. Buck James, wrote in an e-mail that is quoted in the book that there was an inquiry "to determine if there was a breach of operational security anywhere in his blog."
Buzzell, no fool, got the message and eventually took down the blog and the "Men in Black" entry on his own.
"It was getting really crazy," he says now. "I was getting hammered with hundreds and hundreds of e-mails. It was a little overwhelming. I didn't join the Army to cause problems."
"My War" has bits like "Men in Black," but it isn't a print version of TV's "Over There." (Buzzell, by the way, watched one episode of the FX channel's show and hated it.) Beneath the layer of bravado and dust is the story of a young guy who was lost and looking for something to change his life.
"They say war is the great adventure," Buzzell says. "I just wanted to go on the great adventure. I thought I'll join the Army and if nothing else I can say I did something."
You have to wonder how many Colby Buzzell's there are, a lost generation of kids who don't buy into the route to college and no longer see the honor in a blue-collar job. Buzzell was a lost soul, waiting for a thunderbolt to blast him out of his dead-end existence. To his astonishment, it happened.
Today, he is well aware of how many writers struggle to get their work published and are unable to find an outlet. And here he is thinking about a book tour and a national release of his first effort.
"I guess," he shrugs, "the trick is not to try."
San Francisco Chronicle
To say that Colby Buzzell was at loose ends when he left high school is an affront to the concept of loose ends.
At 26, he sat down and wrote out a list of the jobs he'd held: "flower delivery guy, valet guy, cash register at Orchard Supply guy, car washer guy, gift shop sales guy, telemarketing guy, 7-Eleven guy, record store guy, towel guy at the gym guy, and I worked seasonally at Toys 'R' Us."
"And that's not even a complete list," he said in a phone interview last week.
So it will be a bit of a surprise to his high school buddies to learn that he has a book -- "My War: Killing Time in Iraq
" -- coming out Oct. 20. Even bigger if you add that he's working with a major publisher (Putnam) and that literary lion Kurt Vonnegut calls the book "... nothing less than the soul of an extremely interesting human being at war ..." Good luck trying to figure it all out. Buzzell is still trying to decide if he is thrilled or mystified.
"I don't know what to make out of all of it," Buzzell says. "It just sort of happened. I'm just going to jump on the ride for a while."
The simple explanation is that one day Buzzell was sitting on a bar stool and the next he was behind an M240 Bravo machine gun in Iraq. Somewhere along the way he went over to the Internet café at his Army base camp in Mosul and posted his experiences on a blog.
And then all hell broke loose.
Buzzell's blog was discovered, and word spread. His blog began to get as many as 10,000 hits a day. His Army commanding officers began to take an interest, unable to decide if he was telling it like it was or undermining the American effort.
But by then, he was a sensation, and controlling his blog was proving to be very difficult. Interview requests began to come in from PBS and the Wall Street Journal. Pretty impressive for someone who wasn't clear on exactly where his words went when he shipped them out on the World Wide Web.
"I had never even heard the word, blog, before," he says now. "I didn't tell my parents about it because I was swearing and cussing and stuff and I didn't want them to trip out."
Buzzell's entries, which form the basis for his book, have moments that are too surreal to be anything but true. When his platoon drives up to a mosque in Mosul and they start to take fire, everyone opens up with automatic weapons -- except for the guys who pull out their new digital cameras for some authentic photos of combat. With the mosque covered in a cloud of dust kicked up from hundreds of rounds of fire, Buzzell looks over to see a machine-gunner "hysterically throwing up the heavy-metal devil horn hand signal like it was an Ozzy Osbourne concert."
But the centerpiece, called "Men in Black," is vivid enough to make you smell the gunpowder -- and the fear. Buzzell starts with a copy of the three paragraph wire service account of a "clash" between American troops and Iraqi insurgents. Then he says, "Now here's what really happened."
The account of the firefight that follows has become an Internet cult classic, linked and passed from reader to reader. It was eventually published in Esquire magazine and turned out to be the perfect pitch for a book deal. Not that he had anything like that in mind when he came back from the patrol, still amped.
"I didn't even think what I was doing," Buzzell says. "I remember I sat down and I closed my eyes for a second and then I thought, 'just go from the beginning.' The words just poured out. I couldn't type fast enough. I finished, posted up the blog, walked out, lit up a cigarette and had no idea what I had done."
Again the Army had conflicted feelings. Some of his commanding officers thought he'd captured the events to perfection and was providing a service. Some, even higher up, were uneasy.
His battalion commander, Lt. Col. Buck James, wrote in an e-mail that is quoted in the book that there was an inquiry "to determine if there was a breach of operational security anywhere in his blog."
Buzzell, no fool, got the message and eventually took down the blog and the "Men in Black" entry on his own.
"It was getting really crazy," he says now. "I was getting hammered with hundreds and hundreds of e-mails. It was a little overwhelming. I didn't join the Army to cause problems."
"My War" has bits like "Men in Black," but it isn't a print version of TV's "Over There." (Buzzell, by the way, watched one episode of the FX channel's show and hated it.) Beneath the layer of bravado and dust is the story of a young guy who was lost and looking for something to change his life.
"They say war is the great adventure," Buzzell says. "I just wanted to go on the great adventure. I thought I'll join the Army and if nothing else I can say I did something."
You have to wonder how many Colby Buzzell's there are, a lost generation of kids who don't buy into the route to college and no longer see the honor in a blue-collar job. Buzzell was a lost soul, waiting for a thunderbolt to blast him out of his dead-end existence. To his astonishment, it happened.
Today, he is well aware of how many writers struggle to get their work published and are unable to find an outlet. And here he is thinking about a book tour and a national release of his first effort.
"I guess," he shrugs, "the trick is not to try."
Monday, August 22, 2005
The New Ernie Pyles
By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 12, 2005; Page A01
At least one former military blogger, however, is channeling the publicity his blog earned in Iraq into a new career. Colby Buzzell, a soldier who during his 12-month tour of duty started a blog called "My War" ( http://www.cbftw.blogspot.com/ , which stands for his initials plus an antiwar epithet), was eight months into his deployment when he read a magazine article about blogs and decided to give it a try. Within weeks, he said, his blog was receiving thousands of hits a day, and literary agents began peddling their services.
"It all happened at an alarming rate, basically overnight, after I wrote about a firefight. I have no idea how the heck people found out about it, they just did," said Buzzell, who got out of the military six months ago.
His book about his time in Iraq comes out in October. He has also written two articles for Esquire magazine. Now 29 and living in Los Angeles, he called blogging from the war zone "therapeutic."
"You go out on a mission or patrol, come back and sit down at a computer, and it was kind of a release," he said in a telephone interview. "I wasn't writing for a book deal, I was writing for myself. It was a way to deal with the madness and made the days go by a little faster."
Soldiers' Web sites vary from multimedia presentations of digital photos and videos to simple text written in journal form. Many bloggers say they do it to keep friends and family up to date or to counter what they consider the biases of the mainstream media.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 12, 2005; Page A01
At least one former military blogger, however, is channeling the publicity his blog earned in Iraq into a new career. Colby Buzzell, a soldier who during his 12-month tour of duty started a blog called "My War
" ( http://www.cbftw.blogspot.com/ , which stands for his initials plus an antiwar epithet), was eight months into his deployment when he read a magazine article about blogs and decided to give it a try. Within weeks, he said, his blog was receiving thousands of hits a day, and literary agents began peddling their services."It all happened at an alarming rate, basically overnight, after I wrote about a firefight. I have no idea how the heck people found out about it, they just did," said Buzzell, who got out of the military six months ago.
His book about his time in Iraq comes out in October. He has also written two articles for Esquire magazine. Now 29 and living in Los Angeles, he called blogging from the war zone "therapeutic."
"You go out on a mission or patrol, come back and sit down at a computer, and it was kind of a release," he said in a telephone interview. "I wasn't writing for a book deal, I was writing for myself. It was a way to deal with the madness and made the days go by a little faster."
Soldiers' Web sites vary from multimedia presentations of digital photos and videos to simple text written in journal form. Many bloggers say they do it to keep friends and family up to date or to counter what they consider the biases of the mainstream media.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL
Battle Blogs: My Life in Combat
Fed up with the coverage in Iraq, soldiers are penning their own blogs. Hollywood can't be far behind.
By Tara Pepper
Newsweek International
Dec. 5, 2005 issue - Colby Buzzell had spent nearly nine months as a U.S. infantry soldier based in Mosul, Iraq, when his battalion was involved in a ferocious gun battle that engulfed the city. Scrolling through news Web sites the next day, Buzzell found just four brief paragraphs about the siege on CNN, highlighting that Mosul would soon return to normal. The report, he said, looked like it had been lifted straight from a press release. Amazed, Buzzell copied the CNN report into the top of a blog entry, then began an 8,000-word essay describing the horror of what had happened that day. "I cannot put into words how scared I was ... My [platoon] was stuck right smack dab in the middle of the ambush ... We shot our way out of it and drove right through the ambush. The street we were driving down to escape, had 3 to 4 story high buildings all along each side, as we were driving away all you could see were 100's and 100's of bullets impacting all over these buildings." Word started to spread after that Aug. 4, 2004, entry, called "Men in Black," and soon Buzzell's two- month-old Web diary was getting 10,000 hits a day. And his wasn't the only one. Over the past year, the number of soldiers writing Internet diaries of their war experiences has mushroomed, with hundreds of eyewitness accounts transforming what we know about the war and undermining the efforts of the Pentagon and White House to manage information about the conflict. Buzzell's new book, "My War: Killing Time in Iraq," based on his blog, is one of nearly a dozen snapped up by publishers and released this fall. More are on the way. Over the past year, the U.S. Endowment for the Arts held writing workshops for returning soldiers and collected stories from 1,700 troops, some of which will be published in an anthology next year.
Since the Iliad, the heightened emotion of war and the compelling battlefield themes of courage, loyalty and comradeship have inspired great reportage. Journalists like Edward R. Murrow built their careers on eyewitness dispatches from the front. But soldiers themselves rarely wrote about their experiences. When they did, their accounts—like Anthony Swofford's best-selling "Jarhead," about the first Gulf War, recently released as a feature film starring Jake Gyllenhaal—were not published until years after the conflict. Now soldiers log accounts with gunshots still ringing in their ears; their stories hit bookstores while the conflict is still in the news. "You're getting an immediate, unedited take, a very raw feed of what's going on," says Mark Glaser, a columnist at the Online Journalism Review. "And you're not getting a journalist's report, you're seeing the personal aspect of it. That can't be overstated. It resonates with people."
Like Buzzell, many bloggers were inspired to provide a fresh perspective on the war because they found mainstream media reports inadequate. Writer Michael Yon went to Iraq in January 2005, after seeing a discrepancy between what he heard from soldier friends, and what he read in the newspapers. Speaking on the phone from Iraq, Yon says that since reporters often dip in and out of the country, they miss slower, more profound changes. "I've stayed long enough to see patterns [of interaction] emerge," says Yon. Nonetheless, Glaser cautions that, as many bloggers air their personal complaints anonymously, news consumers should be wary. "You have to read [the blog] on a regular basis, correspond with the blogger and learn who you can trust."
As the popularity of soldiers' blogs grows, the U.S. Army is keeping a close eye on this new information channel. Buzzell's "Men in Black" entry was later published in Esquire magazine, and became the pitch for his current book. But his blog also won him an official warning for compromising operations security.
Future entries, he was told, would have to be read and cleared by a platoon sergeant. "In this day and age where the enemy can get a great deal of information through open sources, commanders need to do everything they can to safeguard their information because lives and missions are at stake," explained Department of Defense spokesperson Lt. Col. Chris Conway. Despite the dangers, says Glaser, "military bloggers are offering a view that I don't think we've ever had of warbefore." And from these fresh-from-combat narratives, a Homer or a Hemingway might emerge for the Internet age.
Fed up with the coverage in Iraq, soldiers are penning their own blogs. Hollywood can't be far behind.
By Tara Pepper
Newsweek International
Dec. 5, 2005 issue - Colby Buzzell had spent nearly nine months as a U.S. infantry soldier based in Mosul, Iraq, when his battalion was involved in a ferocious gun battle that engulfed the city. Scrolling through news Web sites the next day, Buzzell found just four brief paragraphs about the siege on CNN, highlighting that Mosul would soon return to normal. The report, he said, looked like it had been lifted straight from a press release. Amazed, Buzzell copied the CNN report into the top of a blog entry, then began an 8,000-word essay describing the horror of what had happened that day. "I cannot put into words how scared I was ... My [platoon] was stuck right smack dab in the middle of the ambush ... We shot our way out of it and drove right through the ambush. The street we were driving down to escape, had 3 to 4 story high buildings all along each side, as we were driving away all you could see were 100's and 100's of bullets impacting all over these buildings." Word started to spread after that Aug. 4, 2004, entry, called "Men in Black," and soon Buzzell's two- month-old Web diary was getting 10,000 hits a day. And his wasn't the only one. Over the past year, the number of soldiers writing Internet diaries of their war experiences has mushroomed, with hundreds of eyewitness accounts transforming what we know about the war and undermining the efforts of the Pentagon and White House to manage information about the conflict. Buzzell's new book, "My War: Killing Time in Iraq
," based on his blog, is one of nearly a dozen snapped up by publishers and released this fall. More are on the way. Over the past year, the U.S. Endowment for the Arts held writing workshops for returning soldiers and collected stories from 1,700 troops, some of which will be published in an anthology next year. Since the Iliad, the heightened emotion of war and the compelling battlefield themes of courage, loyalty and comradeship have inspired great reportage. Journalists like Edward R. Murrow built their careers on eyewitness dispatches from the front. But soldiers themselves rarely wrote about their experiences. When they did, their accounts—like Anthony Swofford's best-selling "Jarhead," about the first Gulf War, recently released as a feature film starring Jake Gyllenhaal—were not published until years after the conflict. Now soldiers log accounts with gunshots still ringing in their ears; their stories hit bookstores while the conflict is still in the news. "You're getting an immediate, unedited take, a very raw feed of what's going on," says Mark Glaser, a columnist at the Online Journalism Review. "And you're not getting a journalist's report, you're seeing the personal aspect of it. That can't be overstated. It resonates with people."
Like Buzzell, many bloggers were inspired to provide a fresh perspective on the war because they found mainstream media reports inadequate. Writer Michael Yon went to Iraq in January 2005, after seeing a discrepancy between what he heard from soldier friends, and what he read in the newspapers. Speaking on the phone from Iraq, Yon says that since reporters often dip in and out of the country, they miss slower, more profound changes. "I've stayed long enough to see patterns [of interaction] emerge," says Yon. Nonetheless, Glaser cautions that, as many bloggers air their personal complaints anonymously, news consumers should be wary. "You have to read [the blog] on a regular basis, correspond with the blogger and learn who you can trust."
As the popularity of soldiers' blogs grows, the U.S. Army is keeping a close eye on this new information channel. Buzzell's "Men in Black" entry was later published in Esquire magazine, and became the pitch for his current book. But his blog also won him an official warning for compromising operations security.
Future entries, he was told, would have to be read and cleared by a platoon sergeant. "In this day and age where the enemy can get a great deal of information through open sources, commanders need to do everything they can to safeguard their information because lives and missions are at stake," explained Department of Defense spokesperson Lt. Col. Chris Conway. Despite the dangers, says Glaser, "military bloggers are offering a view that I don't think we've ever had of warbefore." And from these fresh-from-combat narratives, a Homer or a Hemingway might emerge for the Internet age.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Army Times
Blogs of War
March 04, 2005
Soldiers are trying to make sure their version of the truth from Iraq gets out.
Even though for many, that truth doesn’t include revealing their identities, their online diaries are becoming an increasingly popular way for anyone with an Internet connection to “listen in” on the war zone.
Blogs provide a vehicle for soldiers to speak their minds and tell their personal stories. But the information medium also poses new dangers that the Army is still trying to come to terms with.
Some soldiers have found that blogging can have great benefits, and others have discovered the hard way that there can be consequences for posting things their commanders don’t approve of. Nonetheless, the number of soldiers who blog continues to grow.
Read more about the military blogosphere in the March 14 issue of Army Times.
Here are links to some of the most-read, military-related blogs:
• My War: Killing Time in Iraq
A site often credited with jump-starting the “MilBlog revolution.” Colby Buzzell, who recently left the Army as a specialist, built a fan base that ranges from soccer moms and truck drivers to Jello Biafra, the leader of a punk band called The Dead Kennedys. His uncomplicated accounts of his time in Iraq continue to garner him attention as he works on a book due out in the fall. Esquire Magazine wrote of Buzzell’s work: “The most extraordinary writing yet produced by a soldier of the Iraq war.”
March 04, 2005
Soldiers are trying to make sure their version of the truth from Iraq gets out.
Even though for many, that truth doesn’t include revealing their identities, their online diaries are becoming an increasingly popular way for anyone with an Internet connection to “listen in” on the war zone.
Blogs provide a vehicle for soldiers to speak their minds and tell their personal stories. But the information medium also poses new dangers that the Army is still trying to come to terms with.
Some soldiers have found that blogging can have great benefits, and others have discovered the hard way that there can be consequences for posting things their commanders don’t approve of. Nonetheless, the number of soldiers who blog continues to grow.
Read more about the military blogosphere in the March 14 issue of Army Times.
Here are links to some of the most-read, military-related blogs:
• My War: Killing Time in Iraq
A site often credited with jump-starting the “MilBlog revolution.” Colby Buzzell, who recently left the Army as a specialist, built a fan base that ranges from soccer moms and truck drivers to Jello Biafra, the leader of a punk band called The Dead Kennedys. His uncomplicated accounts of his time in Iraq continue to garner him attention as he works on a book due out in the fall. Esquire Magazine wrote of Buzzell’s work: “The most extraordinary writing yet produced by a soldier of the Iraq war.”
Thursday, May 12, 2005
USA Today, today.
'Milbloggers' are typing their place in history
By Mark Memmott, USA TODAY
Imagine some of the soldiers who survived the Battle of Gettysburg stopping the next day to write their dramatic tales — and people around the world instantly reading them. If that battle had been fought today, no imagination would be necessary.
The number of Internet Web logs — or "blogs," as online diaries are known — by American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is soaring, giving people everywhere unprecedented windows into servicemembers' lives.
From 50 or so a year ago, the number of their online journals is now about 200 and is expected to be near 1,000 by the year's end, say the bloggers themselves and experts who track the Web.
The growth means a historic phenomenon is gaining momentum: Anyone with access to the Internet can read many first-hand accounts of life in a war zone within seconds after they're finished.
And the blogs are "full of real substance and depth," says Jon Peede, director of the National Endowment for the Arts' Operation Homecoming program, which helps troops and their families write about their wartime experiences. "They're raw, powerful reflections on the war."
They also could be among a troop's last words. At least one "soldier blogger," Army Spc. Francisco G. Martinez, has been killed in action.
From the front lines
Many of the stories troops tell in the blogs are about everyday life at their bases. But some also show how terrifying, confusing and chaotic battle can be. Among the most gripping stories told so far: Army Spc. Colby Buzzell's Aug. 5, 2004, account in his blog My War of a battle in Mosul, Iraq, the day before. "I saw 2 guys creeping around this corner ... (and) hiding behind a stack of truck tires," he wrote. "I saw another guy come out of that corner with an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) in his hands. I freaked ... I gathered my composure as fast as I could, put the cross hairs (of a gun) on them and engaged them. ... I didn't see anybody move from behind those tires after that."
Buzzell is now home in Brooklyn, N.Y. He says the number of people reading My War, which he'd only started a few weeks before that entry and was writing anonymously as "cbftw," soared to several thousand a day after that account.
About a month later, he was done blogging. Commanders had figured out who the writer was and ordered him to have his entries reviewed by an officer before he posted them. There was some concern his detailed reports might have divulged too much information about Army tactics. Buzzell stopped blogging and removed most of his stories from the site.
But his writing hasn't disappeared. Since being discharged in December, Buzzell has published two stories about his experiences in Esquire magazine. G.P. Putnam's Sons will publish a book by Buzzell, also about his experiences, this fall.
By Mark Memmott, USA TODAY
Imagine some of the soldiers who survived the Battle of Gettysburg stopping the next day to write their dramatic tales — and people around the world instantly reading them. If that battle had been fought today, no imagination would be necessary.
The number of Internet Web logs — or "blogs," as online diaries are known — by American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is soaring, giving people everywhere unprecedented windows into servicemembers' lives.
From 50 or so a year ago, the number of their online journals is now about 200 and is expected to be near 1,000 by the year's end, say the bloggers themselves and experts who track the Web.
The growth means a historic phenomenon is gaining momentum: Anyone with access to the Internet can read many first-hand accounts of life in a war zone within seconds after they're finished.
And the blogs are "full of real substance and depth," says Jon Peede, director of the National Endowment for the Arts' Operation Homecoming program, which helps troops and their families write about their wartime experiences. "They're raw, powerful reflections on the war."
They also could be among a troop's last words. At least one "soldier blogger," Army Spc. Francisco G. Martinez, has been killed in action.
From the front lines
Many of the stories troops tell in the blogs are about everyday life at their bases. But some also show how terrifying, confusing and chaotic battle can be. Among the most gripping stories told so far: Army Spc. Colby Buzzell's Aug. 5, 2004, account in his blog My War of a battle in Mosul, Iraq, the day before. "I saw 2 guys creeping around this corner ... (and) hiding behind a stack of truck tires," he wrote. "I saw another guy come out of that corner with an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) in his hands. I freaked ... I gathered my composure as fast as I could, put the cross hairs (of a gun) on them and engaged them. ... I didn't see anybody move from behind those tires after that."
Buzzell is now home in Brooklyn, N.Y. He says the number of people reading My War, which he'd only started a few weeks before that entry and was writing anonymously as "cbftw," soared to several thousand a day after that account.
About a month later, he was done blogging. Commanders had figured out who the writer was and ordered him to have his entries reviewed by an officer before he posted them. There was some concern his detailed reports might have divulged too much information about Army tactics. Buzzell stopped blogging and removed most of his stories from the site.
But his writing hasn't disappeared. Since being discharged in December, Buzzell has published two stories about his experiences in Esquire magazine. G.P. Putnam's Sons will publish a book by Buzzell, also about his experiences, this fall.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Kirkus Review
A slacker goes to war and returns no more fit for the workaday world than before, but with tales to tell.
The recruiter didn't have to sell him hard: Buzzell, a young punk skateboarder, clearly bright but clearly unmotivated, was still living with his parents and doing data-entry temp work at the age of 26. The promise of a signing bonus and whatever job he wanted was enough for Buzzell, who wasn't alone in seeing the military as an escape from the doldrums; as he writes, "I was sick of living my life in oblivion where every fucking day was the same fucking thing as the day before, and the same fucking routine day in and day out." There's no end of routine in the Army, of course, but Buzzell's days were made interesting when he was put to work fighting the Iraqi insurgency. Buzzell is fond of quoting Full Metal Jacket, evidently the coin of the realm among his fellow soldiers, and if his narrative doesn't come close to matching the work of Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford, on which that movie was based, he does a good job of capturing the daily absurdities and occasional terrors of life on the front, where even a trip to the mess hall is likely to result in a wound. Some of the sharpest writing comes from the author's blog, which earned him celebrity beyond Iraq (and the chance to write this book) and got him in plenty of trouble with the brass. Without blog and book, his options would have been narrow: Toting a machine gun for a year didn't prepare him for much in the postwar world, and as for "having a boss yell at me for showing up to work five minutes late or tell me that I'm not smiling enough at the customers"—well, impossible.
If military recruitment is down now, wait till the kids read this book.
The book will be published in October in the USA and November in the UK. It can be pre-ordered via Amazon
By Kirkus Jul 15, 2005
The recruiter didn't have to sell him hard: Buzzell, a young punk skateboarder, clearly bright but clearly unmotivated, was still living with his parents and doing data-entry temp work at the age of 26. The promise of a signing bonus and whatever job he wanted was enough for Buzzell, who wasn't alone in seeing the military as an escape from the doldrums; as he writes, "I was sick of living my life in oblivion where every fucking day was the same fucking thing as the day before, and the same fucking routine day in and day out." There's no end of routine in the Army, of course, but Buzzell's days were made interesting when he was put to work fighting the Iraqi insurgency. Buzzell is fond of quoting Full Metal Jacket, evidently the coin of the realm among his fellow soldiers, and if his narrative doesn't come close to matching the work of Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford, on which that movie was based, he does a good job of capturing the daily absurdities and occasional terrors of life on the front, where even a trip to the mess hall is likely to result in a wound. Some of the sharpest writing comes from the author's blog, which earned him celebrity beyond Iraq (and the chance to write this book) and got him in plenty of trouble with the brass. Without blog and book, his options would have been narrow: Toting a machine gun for a year didn't prepare him for much in the postwar world, and as for "having a boss yell at me for showing up to work five minutes late or tell me that I'm not smiling enough at the customers"—well, impossible.
If military recruitment is down now, wait till the kids read this book.
The book will be published in October in the USA and November in the UK. It can be pre-ordered via Amazon
By Kirkus Jul 15, 2005
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Review
With this relentlessly cynical volume, Buzzell converts his widely read 2004 blog into an episodic but captivating memoir about the year he spent serving as an army "trigger puller" in Iraq. Posted to Mosul in late 2003, Buzzell's platoon was ordered "to locate, capture and kill all non compliant forces." Accordingly, his entries describe experiences pursuing elusive guerrillas (aka "men in black"); enduring sniping, rocket and mortar attacks; and witnessing the occasional car bomb. Face-to-face fighting almost never occurs. No matter: though the combat scenes are exciting, this book is actually more engrossing as a portrait of the day-to-day life of a young American soldier who has "read, and re-read, countless times, every single one of [Bukowski's] books." Like Bukowski, Buzzell appears to be a sentimental misanthrope; he pours scorn on everyone from cooks to generals to President Bush. He also despises the media, the antiwar movement and everyone who thinks they understand what's happening in Iraq. That his superiors kept their hands off his blog for several months, however, shows they understood that;despite its foul language, griping, insults directed at higher officers and occasional exposure of dirty linen;Buzzell's work never really wavers in its portrayal of American forces as the good guys in a dirty war.
-Publishers Weekly
-Publishers Weekly
Friday, February 04, 2005
Sunday's Atlanta Journal Constitution
BOOKS: WORD FROM THE FRONT
Urgency hits like never before as soldiers fight, then write
Teresa K. Weaver - Staff
WAR IS A STORY that never gets old.
Told from every possible perspective --- by the triumphant, by the vanquished or by the merely observant --- wartime feats of heroism and acts of inhumanity have captured the imagination of every generation, long before and since the greatest.
The war on terrorism is unique in one immediate respect: Soldiers --- mostly 20-somethings --- are telling their own stories, in profound, profane books that are hitting the shelves within months of their return from what passes nowadays as the front line.
Colby Buzzell, a 26-year-old skateboarding, pot-smoking California slacker who joined the Army in an effort to find some purpose, offers one of the most effective counterpoints to officialdom in his popular blog-turned-book, "My War: Killing Time in Iraq." In one particularly gripping section subtitled "Men in Black," he provides a three-paragraph account from CNN's Web site about a "clash" between American troops and Iraqi insurgents in Mosul.
"Now," Buzzell writes, "here's what really happened. ..."
His account is dramatic and confused --- presumably much like combat itself --- told with irresistible gallows humor and anger devoid of self-consciousness.
"It kinda made me wonder what else goes on here in Iraq that never gets reported to the people back home," he writes.
During its 10-week run, Buzzell's Web site attracted some 10,000 hits a day and got the attention of mainstream media. The fledgling blogger was "counseled" several times by officers, but his blog was never officially shut down or censored.
The age of instant communication has changed the writing landscape for good. Other factors also may help explain the new bounty of books by soldiers: The military is more educated, and every generation since the baby boomers seems more and more comfortable expressing itself.
When Buzzell's two years of service were up, he felt the first twinge of the difficult transition to come: "When I turned over my weapon, and for the first time in almost eleven months I was without a firearm by my side, I felt completely defenseless and vulnerable. It was the weirdest [expletive] feeling in the world."
Urgency hits like never before as soldiers fight, then write
Teresa K. Weaver - Staff
WAR IS A STORY that never gets old.
Told from every possible perspective --- by the triumphant, by the vanquished or by the merely observant --- wartime feats of heroism and acts of inhumanity have captured the imagination of every generation, long before and since the greatest.
The war on terrorism is unique in one immediate respect: Soldiers --- mostly 20-somethings --- are telling their own stories, in profound, profane books that are hitting the shelves within months of their return from what passes nowadays as the front line.
Colby Buzzell, a 26-year-old skateboarding, pot-smoking California slacker who joined the Army in an effort to find some purpose, offers one of the most effective counterpoints to officialdom in his popular blog-turned-book, "My War: Killing Time in Iraq
." In one particularly gripping section subtitled "Men in Black," he provides a three-paragraph account from CNN's Web site about a "clash" between American troops and Iraqi insurgents in Mosul. "Now," Buzzell writes, "here's what really happened. ..."
His account is dramatic and confused --- presumably much like combat itself --- told with irresistible gallows humor and anger devoid of self-consciousness.
"It kinda made me wonder what else goes on here in Iraq that never gets reported to the people back home," he writes.
During its 10-week run, Buzzell's Web site attracted some 10,000 hits a day and got the attention of mainstream media. The fledgling blogger was "counseled" several times by officers, but his blog was never officially shut down or censored.
The age of instant communication has changed the writing landscape for good. Other factors also may help explain the new bounty of books by soldiers: The military is more educated, and every generation since the baby boomers seems more and more comfortable expressing itself.
When Buzzell's two years of service were up, he felt the first twinge of the difficult transition to come: "When I turned over my weapon, and for the first time in almost eleven months I was without a firearm by my side, I felt completely defenseless and vulnerable. It was the weirdest [expletive] feeling in the world."
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
WARRIORS - Program 06-02-05-A
To The Best of Our Knowledge
from Wisconsin Public Radio
General Patton wrote in 1943 that, "War is very simple, direct, and ruthless. It takes simple direct, and ruthless men to wage it." In this hour of To The Best Of Our Knowledge, simple and direct conversations with the ruthless men who wage war. We'll talk with a machine gunner stationed in Iraq, an Army Intelligence interrogator, an international arms dealer, and an American mercenary.
SEGMENT 3:
Colby Buzzell is an Iraq War veteran whose blog and book is called "My War: Killing Time in Iraq," and he tells Anne Strainchamps why he joined up and how he got past the drug test. Also, Richard Marcinko is CEO of a private security firm which trains mercenaries and he candidly tells Steve Paulson about waging war and interrogating prisoners from a mercenary's point of view. Marcinko was a decorated Navy SEAL with over 30 years combat service who commanded two of the SEAL's most elite Special Ops forces.
http://www.wpr.org/book/060205a.html
from Wisconsin Public Radio
General Patton wrote in 1943 that, "War is very simple, direct, and ruthless. It takes simple direct, and ruthless men to wage it." In this hour of To The Best Of Our Knowledge, simple and direct conversations with the ruthless men who wage war. We'll talk with a machine gunner stationed in Iraq, an Army Intelligence interrogator, an international arms dealer, and an American mercenary.
SEGMENT 3:
Colby Buzzell is an Iraq War veteran whose blog and book is called "My War: Killing Time in Iraq
," and he tells Anne Strainchamps why he joined up and how he got past the drug test. Also, Richard Marcinko is CEO of a private security firm which trains mercenaries and he candidly tells Steve Paulson about waging war and interrogating prisoners from a mercenary's point of view. Marcinko was a decorated Navy SEAL with over 30 years combat service who commanded two of the SEAL's most elite Special Ops forces.http://www.wpr.org/book/060205a.html
Columbia News Service
Soldiers' online journals come under increased scrutiny
by Mike Spector 2006/05/02
The Department of Defense is clamping down on military blogs, causing growing resentment among soldiers in Iraq who use them to communicate with loved ones.
Army Spc. Colby Buzzell returned from a firefight in Mosul, Iraq, on Aug. 4, 2004, and collapsed on his bed, drained from the most intense combat of his tour.
The next day, Buzzell headed to his base’s Internet cafe and posted the latest entry on his personal Web log:
“Bullets were pinging off our armor, all over our vehicle, and you could hear multiple RPGS being fired, soaring through the air every which way,” Buzzell wrote. “All sorts of crazy insane Hollywood explosions were going off. I’ve never felt fear like this. I was like, this is it, I’m going to die. I cannot put into words how scared I was.”
Buzzell had posted entries anonymously up until the Mosul battle. But The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., published an article about the skirmish and quoted extensively from Buzzell’s Web log. That drew attention from the Pentagon’s internal clip service. Eventually, the article made its way to Buzzell’s commanders.
Buzzell’s battalion commander, Lt. Col. Buck James, lectured him on the inappropriateness of revealing operational details--how he loaded weapons, what kind of weapons his Stryker brigade used and specific combat locations. From now on, Buzzell’s platoon sergeant would read his entries before they were posted. After another troublesome post, a different commander confined Buzzell to the base and for a time he was forbidden to go on missions.
Buzzell, who is now 29 and lives in Los Angeles, is known among military bloggers as the “Blogfather,” one of the first soldiers to write a candid, regularly updated Web log from a combat zone. Such online journals, or blogs, began as unfiltered portals into the day-to-day travails of American troops, a 21st-century version of a soldier’s letter home.
But as the visibility and popularity of the blogs have increased, so, too, has the watchful eye of military officials. The Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force have all recently issued directives related to blogs, reminding soldiers and their commanders what information is unsuitable for posting.
In the last year, for example, the Army released specific blogging guidelines, requiring soldiers to register their online journals with commanders and establishing units to monitor Web sites for information that might violate Army policy.
The Pentagon itself has no official blogging policies, leaving the determination of what’s suitable and what’s not to commanders in the field. That increased scrutiny has troubled some soldiers, who have accused superiors of using operational security violations as a blanket excuse to mask disagreement with a blog’s politics or sense of humor. In any case, the new atmosphere has caused soldiers to think twice before they post.
“Now, as you look at the blogs ... they’re much more self-conscious,” said Jon Peede, director of Operation Homecoming, a National Endowment for the Arts program that will soon release an anthology of soldiers’ blogs, letters and e-mail messages. “That wasn’t the case a couple of years ago.”
The opinions on military blogs range from the patriotic to the anti-war. And many soldiers post anonymously to avoid trouble.
One blogger, identified as “Outlaw 13,” complained about the recent controversy over retired generals calling for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The blogger wrote that the debate “will accomplish nothing other than give the politicians something else to scrap about and maybe give [the enemy] hope that we are about to fall apart and quit.”
Blogging represents a quantum leap forward in wartime communications, according to Peede, the Operation Homecoming director.
He compared current military blogs to the famous Matthew Brady photos taken during the Civil War, which changed the way people viewed armed conflicts.
“The most powerful blogs, they are doing the same thing,” Peede said. They move beyond the mainstream media to provide “authentic, raw stories of death.”
That creates two natural tensions, Peede said. First, bloggers can accidentally reveal operational methods--how a gun is loaded, for example--that can tip off the enemy and endanger troops. Second, a blog discussing casualties can inadvertently unnerve families back home who read the posting and wonder about the fate of a loved one.
Policies regulating such potential hazards are nothing new. Although the Pentagon leaves policing blogs to individual commanders, longstanding Defense Department rules govern what a soldier can and cannot share.
“There are limitations to the kind of information that can be posted on a military blog,” said Cmdr. Gregory Hicks, a Pentagon spokesman. Information that soldiers gather during the course of their Iraq deployment is “sensitive” by definition, according to Pentagon policy, and may not be publicly disclosed without proper clearance.
The “sensitive” umbrella covers all military information that isn’t publicly available, including operation details, unit morale and equipment status.
“You don’t tell people the location of your unit, details of the kind of equipment you’re using,” said J.P. Borda, 31, who runs milblogging.com, a Web site that links to more than 1,300 military blogs worldwide. “It’s nothing new to anybody. It’s pretty commonsense stuff.”
Borda, a veteran who blogged from Afghanistan in 2004 and 2005, said his commanders supported his online postings and that he made a point of showing them entries to make sure he wasn’t breaking any rules.
“Go to the chain of command and ask them,” Borda said. “It’s that simple.”
Jason Hartley, a national guardsman from New Paltz, N.Y., caught the wrath of his command when he described his flight route to Iraq on his blog, justanothersoldier.com. He also posted a photo of a prisoner and wrote biting, satiric comments in which he said he loved dead civilians and wished he could shoot children.
He said the comments were purposefully over the top in an effort to address what he viewed as the military’s blase attitude toward civilian casualties. “So many civilians get killed every day. We must love ’em, because we sure as hell don’t stop doing it,” he said.
His commander wasn’t amused. He lectured Hartley about undermining the Army’s mission and hinted that the prisoner photo might violate the Geneva Convention. That charge was later dropped, but Hartley was punished for disobeying a direct order and conduct unbecoming a soldier. He was docked $1,000 in pay and demoted from sergeant to specialist.
“It’s hogwash,” said Hartley, who still serves in the National Guard once a month in New York City. “It’s a knee-jerk reaction to not knowing how to react to a person who had a sardonic blog.”
The ordeal left Hartley with the impression that commanders don’t scrutinize noncritical, patriotic blogs.
But Borda, the milblogging.com founder, disputed that claim. “It’s not like every military blogger is telling the military’s story,” he said, adding that he had come across several critical blogs, “and they’re not getting shut down.”
If Buzzell felt stymied overseas, the return home offered a quick remedy. His blog postings caught the eye of editors at Esquire magazine. He started writing firsthand accounts of his time in Mosul in March 2005. By November, he had completed the last installment of a three-part series titled, “The Making of the Twenty-First-Century Soldier.”
And during those assignments, Buzzell finished his first book, “My War: Killing Time in Iraq,” which drew on his Esquire articles and blog postings. While Buzzell’s Web site no longer houses the posts that drew the Army’s ire, his book reprints several of the posts he wrote to clear his mind in the Middle East.
Eager to distance himself from his controversial Iraq tour, Buzzell continues to take on new assignments for Esquire. He’s also working on another book, but is mum on the details.
“It’s going to be way different than the last book I wrote,” he said as he sat in traffic on the Los Angeles freeway. “I just want to be a civilian for awhile.”
by Mike Spector 2006/05/02
The Department of Defense is clamping down on military blogs, causing growing resentment among soldiers in Iraq who use them to communicate with loved ones.
Army Spc. Colby Buzzell returned from a firefight in Mosul, Iraq, on Aug. 4, 2004, and collapsed on his bed, drained from the most intense combat of his tour.
The next day, Buzzell headed to his base’s Internet cafe and posted the latest entry on his personal Web log:
“Bullets were pinging off our armor, all over our vehicle, and you could hear multiple RPGS being fired, soaring through the air every which way,” Buzzell wrote. “All sorts of crazy insane Hollywood explosions were going off. I’ve never felt fear like this. I was like, this is it, I’m going to die. I cannot put into words how scared I was.”
Buzzell had posted entries anonymously up until the Mosul battle. But The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., published an article about the skirmish and quoted extensively from Buzzell’s Web log. That drew attention from the Pentagon’s internal clip service. Eventually, the article made its way to Buzzell’s commanders.
Buzzell’s battalion commander, Lt. Col. Buck James, lectured him on the inappropriateness of revealing operational details--how he loaded weapons, what kind of weapons his Stryker brigade used and specific combat locations. From now on, Buzzell’s platoon sergeant would read his entries before they were posted. After another troublesome post, a different commander confined Buzzell to the base and for a time he was forbidden to go on missions.
Buzzell, who is now 29 and lives in Los Angeles, is known among military bloggers as the “Blogfather,” one of the first soldiers to write a candid, regularly updated Web log from a combat zone. Such online journals, or blogs, began as unfiltered portals into the day-to-day travails of American troops, a 21st-century version of a soldier’s letter home.
But as the visibility and popularity of the blogs have increased, so, too, has the watchful eye of military officials. The Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force have all recently issued directives related to blogs, reminding soldiers and their commanders what information is unsuitable for posting.
In the last year, for example, the Army released specific blogging guidelines, requiring soldiers to register their online journals with commanders and establishing units to monitor Web sites for information that might violate Army policy.
The Pentagon itself has no official blogging policies, leaving the determination of what’s suitable and what’s not to commanders in the field. That increased scrutiny has troubled some soldiers, who have accused superiors of using operational security violations as a blanket excuse to mask disagreement with a blog’s politics or sense of humor. In any case, the new atmosphere has caused soldiers to think twice before they post.
“Now, as you look at the blogs ... they’re much more self-conscious,” said Jon Peede, director of Operation Homecoming, a National Endowment for the Arts program that will soon release an anthology of soldiers’ blogs, letters and e-mail messages. “That wasn’t the case a couple of years ago.”
The opinions on military blogs range from the patriotic to the anti-war. And many soldiers post anonymously to avoid trouble.
One blogger, identified as “Outlaw 13,” complained about the recent controversy over retired generals calling for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The blogger wrote that the debate “will accomplish nothing other than give the politicians something else to scrap about and maybe give [the enemy] hope that we are about to fall apart and quit.”
Blogging represents a quantum leap forward in wartime communications, according to Peede, the Operation Homecoming director.
He compared current military blogs to the famous Matthew Brady photos taken during the Civil War, which changed the way people viewed armed conflicts.
“The most powerful blogs, they are doing the same thing,” Peede said. They move beyond the mainstream media to provide “authentic, raw stories of death.”
That creates two natural tensions, Peede said. First, bloggers can accidentally reveal operational methods--how a gun is loaded, for example--that can tip off the enemy and endanger troops. Second, a blog discussing casualties can inadvertently unnerve families back home who read the posting and wonder about the fate of a loved one.
Policies regulating such potential hazards are nothing new. Although the Pentagon leaves policing blogs to individual commanders, longstanding Defense Department rules govern what a soldier can and cannot share.
“There are limitations to the kind of information that can be posted on a military blog,” said Cmdr. Gregory Hicks, a Pentagon spokesman. Information that soldiers gather during the course of their Iraq deployment is “sensitive” by definition, according to Pentagon policy, and may not be publicly disclosed without proper clearance.
The “sensitive” umbrella covers all military information that isn’t publicly available, including operation details, unit morale and equipment status.
“You don’t tell people the location of your unit, details of the kind of equipment you’re using,” said J.P. Borda, 31, who runs milblogging.com, a Web site that links to more than 1,300 military blogs worldwide. “It’s nothing new to anybody. It’s pretty commonsense stuff.”
Borda, a veteran who blogged from Afghanistan in 2004 and 2005, said his commanders supported his online postings and that he made a point of showing them entries to make sure he wasn’t breaking any rules.
“Go to the chain of command and ask them,” Borda said. “It’s that simple.”
Jason Hartley, a national guardsman from New Paltz, N.Y., caught the wrath of his command when he described his flight route to Iraq on his blog, justanothersoldier.com. He also posted a photo of a prisoner and wrote biting, satiric comments in which he said he loved dead civilians and wished he could shoot children.
He said the comments were purposefully over the top in an effort to address what he viewed as the military’s blase attitude toward civilian casualties. “So many civilians get killed every day. We must love ’em, because we sure as hell don’t stop doing it,” he said.
His commander wasn’t amused. He lectured Hartley about undermining the Army’s mission and hinted that the prisoner photo might violate the Geneva Convention. That charge was later dropped, but Hartley was punished for disobeying a direct order and conduct unbecoming a soldier. He was docked $1,000 in pay and demoted from sergeant to specialist.
“It’s hogwash,” said Hartley, who still serves in the National Guard once a month in New York City. “It’s a knee-jerk reaction to not knowing how to react to a person who had a sardonic blog.”
The ordeal left Hartley with the impression that commanders don’t scrutinize noncritical, patriotic blogs.
But Borda, the milblogging.com founder, disputed that claim. “It’s not like every military blogger is telling the military’s story,” he said, adding that he had come across several critical blogs, “and they’re not getting shut down.”
If Buzzell felt stymied overseas, the return home offered a quick remedy. His blog postings caught the eye of editors at Esquire magazine. He started writing firsthand accounts of his time in Mosul in March 2005. By November, he had completed the last installment of a three-part series titled, “The Making of the Twenty-First-Century Soldier.”
And during those assignments, Buzzell finished his first book, “My War: Killing Time in Iraq
,” which drew on his Esquire articles and blog postings. While Buzzell’s Web site no longer houses the posts that drew the Army’s ire, his book reprints several of the posts he wrote to clear his mind in the Middle East.Eager to distance himself from his controversial Iraq tour, Buzzell continues to take on new assignments for Esquire. He’s also working on another book, but is mum on the details.
“It’s going to be way different than the last book I wrote,” he said as he sat in traffic on the Los Angeles freeway. “I just want to be a civilian for awhile.”
Monday, January 24, 2005
Private Murphy
Here are a couple cartoons that artist Mark Baker e-mailed to me which he said was inspired by this blog, for his Pvt Murphy's Law comic.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Blogs offer view of soldiers' lives
By Ellen Simon
The Associated Press
Spc. Colby Buzzell's squad was on a mission in a poor neighborhood in Mosul when two Iraqi boys ran up carrying old artillery shells. "Give me dollar!" they said.
Another came carrying bullets and demanding money.
"Then, all of a sudden, this really skinny Iraqi kid comes running up to us with a ... HAND GRENADE in his hand," Buzzell wrote on his war blog. " 'Drop the ... hand grenade! Drop it now!' We all started yelling. The little kid, still with this proud smile on his face that said, 'Look what I just found' just dropped the grenade on the ground, and walked over to my squad leader and said, 'Give me money!' "
The grenade didn't go off.
The squad leader explained to his men that an Army division that had been in the area earlier had paid children for weapons or unexploded ordnance.
For Buzzell, it was grist for his online war diary, cbftw.blogspot.com, whose fans range from soccer moms and truck drivers to punk band leader Jello Biafra.
Before the Internet traffic counter dropped off the site, Buzzell said, he was getting 5,000 hits a day.
Iraq war blogs, or Web diaries, are as varied as the soldiers who write them. Some sites feature practical news, pictures and advice. Some are overtly political, with more slanting to the right than the left. Some question the war, and some cheer it.
Buzzell and a handful of others write unvarnished war reporting. A few of these blogs have been shut down. Buzzell, an infantryman in an Army Stryker brigade, says he was banned from missions for five days because of the blog and has stopped adding narrative entries.
For the folks back home, the soldier blogs offer details of war that don't make it into most news dispatches: The smell of rotten milk lingering in a poor neighborhood. The shepherd boys standing at the foot of a guard tower yelling requests for toothbrushes and sweets. The giant camel spiders. The tedium of long walks to get anything from a shower to a meal. A burning oil refinery a hundred miles away blocking the sun. A terrifying night raid surprised by armed enemies dressed in black.
On the blogs, soldiers complain, commiserate and celebrate their victories and ingenuity.
What do you do if the electricity goes out while you're sitting in the latrine, leaving you in complete darkness with a dead flashlight? Blog answer: Reach into your cargo pocket and crack open a Chemlight.
The blogs offer more than war stories. They offer images from Iraq not seen elsewhere, like a sign in an office with no air conditioning: "We're in the desert. The desert is hot. Now quit your whining."
Sean Dustman, a 32-year-old Navy corpsman from Prescott, Ariz., who worked alongside the Marines in Iraq, started writing his blog, docinthebox.blogspot.com, after reading other war blogs.
"I was entranced with their stories," said Dustman, who recently returned from six months in Iraq. "This was where the real news that mattered to me was coming from, unlike what you saw through the regular media. Reading them [the blogs] helped me and my Marines prepare for the trip."
A recurring theme is the flashes of military absurdity, such as the hurried martial arts training some Marines undergo before they leave Iraq.
The Pentagon has "no specific guidelines on blogging per se," said Cheryl Irwin, a Defense Department spokeswoman. "Generally, they can do it if they are writing their blogs not on government time and not on a government computer.
The Associated Press
Spc. Colby Buzzell's squad was on a mission in a poor neighborhood in Mosul when two Iraqi boys ran up carrying old artillery shells. "Give me dollar!" they said.
Another came carrying bullets and demanding money.
"Then, all of a sudden, this really skinny Iraqi kid comes running up to us with a ... HAND GRENADE in his hand," Buzzell wrote on his war blog. " 'Drop the ... hand grenade! Drop it now!' We all started yelling. The little kid, still with this proud smile on his face that said, 'Look what I just found' just dropped the grenade on the ground, and walked over to my squad leader and said, 'Give me money!' "
The grenade didn't go off.
The squad leader explained to his men that an Army division that had been in the area earlier had paid children for weapons or unexploded ordnance.
For Buzzell, it was grist for his online war diary, cbftw.blogspot.com, whose fans range from soccer moms and truck drivers to punk band leader Jello Biafra.
Before the Internet traffic counter dropped off the site, Buzzell said, he was getting 5,000 hits a day.
Iraq war blogs, or Web diaries, are as varied as the soldiers who write them. Some sites feature practical news, pictures and advice. Some are overtly political, with more slanting to the right than the left. Some question the war, and some cheer it.
Buzzell and a handful of others write unvarnished war reporting. A few of these blogs have been shut down. Buzzell, an infantryman in an Army Stryker brigade, says he was banned from missions for five days because of the blog and has stopped adding narrative entries.
For the folks back home, the soldier blogs offer details of war that don't make it into most news dispatches: The smell of rotten milk lingering in a poor neighborhood. The shepherd boys standing at the foot of a guard tower yelling requests for toothbrushes and sweets. The giant camel spiders. The tedium of long walks to get anything from a shower to a meal. A burning oil refinery a hundred miles away blocking the sun. A terrifying night raid surprised by armed enemies dressed in black.
On the blogs, soldiers complain, commiserate and celebrate their victories and ingenuity.
What do you do if the electricity goes out while you're sitting in the latrine, leaving you in complete darkness with a dead flashlight? Blog answer: Reach into your cargo pocket and crack open a Chemlight.
The blogs offer more than war stories. They offer images from Iraq not seen elsewhere, like a sign in an office with no air conditioning: "We're in the desert. The desert is hot. Now quit your whining."
Sean Dustman, a 32-year-old Navy corpsman from Prescott, Ariz., who worked alongside the Marines in Iraq, started writing his blog, docinthebox.blogspot.com, after reading other war blogs.
"I was entranced with their stories," said Dustman, who recently returned from six months in Iraq. "This was where the real news that mattered to me was coming from, unlike what you saw through the regular media. Reading them [the blogs] helped me and my Marines prepare for the trip."
A recurring theme is the flashes of military absurdity, such as the hurried martial arts training some Marines undergo before they leave Iraq.
The Pentagon has "no specific guidelines on blogging per se," said Cheryl Irwin, a Defense Department spokeswoman. "Generally, they can do it if they are writing their blogs not on government time and not on a government computer.
Thursday, September 23, 2004
MESSAGE FROM JELLO BIAFRA
Here is an e-mail I recieved from legendary DEAD KENNEDYS frontman, and political activist Jello Biafra.
Hey Colby,
Thanks a lot for alerting us about what's going on with you. Thanks also for the respect. Believe me, it's mutual. You have a lot of guts. No pun intended, but stick to your guns. Don't believe the hype - we are the real patriots here, not the unelected gangsters and scam artists who started this war. Real patriots care enough about our country - and the world - to speak up, stand up and fight backwhen the government breaks the law, lies, steals and gets innocent people killed. Real patriots do their buddies and the people back home a huge favor when they bypass our censored corporate media and become the media themselves - telling us from a real person perspective what war and agrunt's life are really like. History is important. As long as people in the field speak up we have a chance of preserving the truth. Otherwise it's the bullshit gospel according to Fox News and The Bush-Croft regime and people'sown memory being erased even more than we've got now. To all the troops: I and Alternative Tentacles support you. We support you by saying, "Bring The Troops Home!" as loud and as often as we can.
Stay Safe
Don't Give Up,
JELLO BIAFRA
Hey Colby,
Thanks a lot for alerting us about what's going on with you. Thanks also for the respect. Believe me, it's mutual. You have a lot of guts. No pun intended, but stick to your guns. Don't believe the hype - we are the real patriots here, not the unelected gangsters and scam artists who started this war. Real patriots care enough about our country - and the world - to speak up, stand up and fight backwhen the government breaks the law, lies, steals and gets innocent people killed. Real patriots do their buddies and the people back home a huge favor when they bypass our censored corporate media and become the media themselves - telling us from a real person perspective what war and agrunt's life are really like. History is important. As long as people in the field speak up we have a chance of preserving the truth. Otherwise it's the bullshit gospel according to Fox News and The Bush-Croft regime and people'sown memory being erased even more than we've got now. To all the troops: I and Alternative Tentacles support you. We support you by saying, "Bring The Troops Home!" as loud and as often as we can.
Stay Safe
Don't Give Up,
JELLO BIAFRA
Saturday, September 11, 2004
Article In Defence Today Magazine
Soldier Blog Shutdown? Stryker Diarist Stops Posting
By Nathan Hodge
Sometimes success can spoil a good thing.
A soldier with the Stryker brigade in Iraq who posted riveting online accounts of combat in Iraq has apparently made his last post, abruptly closing a Website that drew an untold number of readers.
CBFTW—the pseudonym of the online diarist, an enlisted soldier with the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division Stryker Brigade Combat Team—won a following for his frank, profane and often funny take on the life of a soldier in Iraq. He chronicled the tedium of a lengthy deployment and the occasional moments of sheer terror, including a vicious, but largely unpublicized, firefight the Fort Lewis-based unit was involved in earlier this month.
His intense, first-person account of that battle was quoted extensively in an article by Tacoma, Wash., News Tribune reporter Michael Gilbert, who traveled with the Stryker Brigade to Iraq and has closely followed their deployment. More recently, CBFTW was profiled in a story on NPR's "Day to Day" radio program.
Visitors to CBFTW's Weblog (cbftw.blogspot.com), however, can now find only one entry, posted Friday, that quotes Johnny Rotten, front man for the legendary punk act the Sex Pistols: "Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Cheated?"
The caption on the main page (posted over a black-and-white image of of Picasso's Guernica) reads: "OVER AND OUT."
In recent posts, CBFTW had hinted that he was under threat of reprimand from his superiors; the NPR story noted that he had been lectured by his commanders for possible violations of operational security, or OPSEC. A spokesman for CBFTW's unit told NPR his blog entries would be reviewed by a platoon sergeant and superior officer before they were posted.
Before the NPR story, CBFTW posted a note that cryptically advised readers to "stay tuned," followed with the full text of the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ...").
If his commanders indeed have ordered him to shut down his blog, it won't be the first time. In October 2002, Defense Week reported on a Website run by soldiers of a medical logistics battalion stationed in Afghanistan. They launched the blog to keep friends and family informed, but enthusiastic strangers linked to the site; when the members of the battalion were swamped with fan mail, they decided to shut the site down.
Blogs are, in some way, a defining cultural phenomenon of the war in Iraq, much as psychedelic music provided the soundtrack to the Vietnam War. There are dozens of Iraq blogs, posted by ordinary Iraqis, civilian administrators living in the Green Zone, rear-echelon soldiers and combat infantrymen. One Iraqi blogger, known by the nom de plume Salam Pax, even saw his Web diary published as a book, The Baghdad Blog.
Families of deployed soldiers maintain their own informal support networks through blogs, and soldiers—who have access to Internet cafes—kill the boredom of deployment by posting their own thoughts online.
Some blogs are patriotic, others are personal rants. CBFTW—a native of the San Francisco Bay Area who listed his interests, variously, as "drinking, skateboarding, reading, [and] 7.62 fully automatic weapons" along with punk rock and barroom poet Charles Bukowski—favored the rant, his long posts unencumbered by spelling and standard punctuation. He was also an avid reader, peppering his posts with literary allusions as well as references to punk and metal classics (the title of his blog—"My War"—comes from a Black Flag song). In some respects, CBFTW's irreverent blog echoed the spirit of Dave Rabbit, an enlisted man who ran a pirate radio in South Vietnam called Radio First Termer.
CBFTW is not the only military blogger who has won notoriety. Army Capt. Eric Magnell, an Army lawyer in Iraq, also was profiled in the NPR story. On Thursday, he posted a few thoughts on the interview, as well as on the case of CBFTW, on his blog (daggerjag.blogspot.com).
It's worth quoting at length:
"On Monday I spoke with Eric Niiler from NPR about my blog and how the army is treating bloggers. ... I think the story perfectly illustrates one of the reasons why soldiers may want to tell their story on their own blog rather than leaving it to the mainstream media. I don't think that Eric was misleading or twisted our words but he definitely wanted to give the impression that soldiers are being persecuted by their leaders over blogs and that their free speech rights are being infringed by a command that doesn't want their stories told. I would disagree with this thesis on several grounds.
"As I said in the story, the information environment has changed so much and is so different than in any previous war or conflict. Here in Iraq we have access to so much new communications capabilities it really is mind-boggling when you think about it. When my father was in Vietnam he wrote letters and mailed home cassettes or reel-to-reel tapes to keep in touch with my mom and his family. Even thirteen years ago, during Desert Storm, the soldiers still wrote letters and had very, very few opportunities to call their families in the States. With these new capabilities come some very real concerns over operational security. ... We know that our enemies are computer `savvy' and may have the ability to intercept e-mails or other communications over the Internet. Every soldier has to be aware and concerned about saying or writing anything that could potentially give our enemies information. Even potentially innocent statements which, by themselves, mean nothing can provide intelligence for our opponents when matched with other innocuous open source information."
Magnell, however, puts in a word of support for CBFTW:
"I've read SPC Buzzell's blog and, while I'm not a security manager, I haven't seen anything that clearly is prohibited but I can understand his chain of command's concerns."
The Army, Magnell concludes, "isn't a sinister organization looking to trample invidivual freedoms but, as any large bureaucracy, it can be slow to react to new situations and changes in the environment."
An e-mail to CBFTW went unanswered.
Monday, September 06, 2004
LA TIMES
The View From on the Ground
With American bloggers reporting on life in Iraq, the war is only a mouse click away
"Other wars produced poetry and novels and memoirs. But the war in Iraq has brought a new kind of literature. In real time, on the Internet, officers and enlisted men and women are chronicling the war on weblogs — better known as blogs. Two weeks ago, one of the most popular war bloggers, a soldier stationed near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul who identified himself only as CBFTW, was disciplined by the Army for violating "operational security." His gritty postings described both the terror and boredom of war. Last week, he removed them from his "My War" website. But the journals of many other military bloggers remain on the Web. Here are edited excerpts from the blogs of Americans serving with the U.S. military in Iraq."
With American bloggers reporting on life in Iraq, the war is only a mouse click away
"Other wars produced poetry and novels and memoirs. But the war in Iraq has brought a new kind of literature. In real time, on the Internet, officers and enlisted men and women are chronicling the war on weblogs — better known as blogs. Two weeks ago, one of the most popular war bloggers, a soldier stationed near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul who identified himself only as CBFTW, was disciplined by the Army for violating "operational security." His gritty postings described both the terror and boredom of war. Last week, he removed them from his "My War" website. But the journals of many other military bloggers remain on the Web. Here are edited excerpts from the blogs of Americans serving with the U.S. military in Iraq."
Friday, August 27, 2004
Army Blogger's Tales Attract Censors' Eyes
By CHRISTOPHER COOPER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 9, 2004; Page B1
Army specialist Colby Buzzell figured he'd cap his yearlong deployment to Iraq by mustering out of the service this winter and easing into a new career. "I was thinking about maybe driving a cab," he says.
But that was before he launched My War, an Internet-based chronicle of his life as an infantry soldier in Mosul, where he mans a gun in a Stryker brigade. Written under the nom de guerre of CBFTW (Colby Buzzell F -- This War), the blog is a mixture of gripping accounts of caffeine-driven battle maneuvers and amusing vignettes from the dusty grind of life in Iraq's third-largest city.
CBFTW's writings are a hit in the blogosphere, with his Web page logging 10,000 hits on a recent day.
But Spc. Buzzell's writing aspirations may prove his undoing as a professional soldier. Recently, shortly after his commanders discovered My War on the Web, Spc. Buzzell found himself banned from patrols and confined to base. His commanders say Spc. Buzzell may have breached operational security with his writings. "My War" went idle as he pondered the consequences of pursuing his craft while slogging through five nights of radio guard duty, a listless detail for an infantryman. More recently, the pages again went blank, as he chafed under a prepublication vetting regime imposed by his command.
Army Spc. Colby Buzzell, a.k.a. CBFTW on his Web log, flew under military radar -- until recently.
Such prepublication censorship is rare in the modern military: Soldiers' missives haven't been routinely expurgated since World War II and the days of "Loose Lips Sink Ships." The Pentagon doesn't prescreen soldiers' communications, whether print or electronic, assigning the job of policing soldier-journalists to commanders in the field. There are restrictions against divulging references to specific troop locations, patrol schedules or anything that might help the enemy predict how U.S. troops might react to an attack. But commanders in Iraq rely on the honor system and soldiers' common sense to enforce restrictions. Infractions are in the eye of the beholder, difficult to define but easy to recognize in practice.
Censorship that does occur usually comes after the fact. Earlier this year, Army investigators were forced to go stateside to track down reams of snapshots of Iraqi prisoner abuse that Abu Ghraib guards disseminated by e-mail or sent home on computer disk. In July, an Army captain was reassigned and stripped of his leave home after writing an opinion piece published in the Washington Post.
Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, says blogs, like other forms of communication, are tolerated so long as they don't violate operational or informational security. "We treat them the same way we would if they were writing a letter or speaking to a reporter: It's just information," he says. "If a guy is giving up secrets, it doesn't make much difference whether he's posting it on a blog or shouting it from the rooftop of a building."
Still, many bloggers, some operating in obscure corners of Iraq where traditional reporters are scarce, appear to be flying under the Pentagon's radar. There's "American Soldier," a diary compiled by an Army reservist currently preparing for his second call-up, who describes himself in an e-mail as "p -- ed, frustrated, happy and sad at the same time." A site called "Boots on the Ground" is heavy on detail about U.S. armaments. "Just Another Soldier," a National Guardsman's account, is available only by e-mail request, the author says, after his command, citing security concerns, asked him to dismantle the site.
In the age of Web cams, instant messaging and Internet telephone service, widespread censorship simply isn't possible, military officials say. "I don't see how you could censor with the instantaneous flow of information we have now," says one Army officer, "unless you're standing over someone's shoulder while they're typing. And who's got time to do that when the bullets are flying?"
Security violations are rare, says Spc. Buzzell's top commander, Brig. Gen. Carter Ham. "The commander does have a responsibility to ensure no inappropriate information is released," Gen. Ham says in an e-mail, noting that among the 8,000 men under him, only Spc. Buzzell has come under scrutiny. "While [operational security] is a very real everyday concern for us, I do not see potential violations as widespread," he says.
Spc. Buzzell's blog, riddled with misspellings and larded with obscenities, conveys the kind of raw honesty that prompts military mothers to write weepy e-mails by the score. Soldiers have told Spc. Buzzell they sometimes strip out the curse words and send his writings home as their own.
He credits as his inspiration the author Hunter S. Thompson, whose first-person articles and books about politics and drug use were popular in the 1970s. But My War probably is more reminiscent of Michael Herr's "Dispatches," a bleak, first-person account of the Vietnam War widely regarded as one of the best examples of military journalism. Mr. Herr's book took years to arrive on the mass market, but Spc. Buzzell's accounts offer near-instantaneous immediacy. And as his case demonstrates, a casual detail -- that his unit had run low on water during a maneuver, for instance -- can easily get a soldier into trouble.
The blog entry at the root of Spc. Buzzell's difficulties was an Aug. 4 piece called "Men in Black." Opening with a bland, four-paragraph squib about a Mosul firefight that he snatched from CNN's Web site, Spc. Buzzell spins a riveting account of a nasty, hours-long firefight with scores of black-clad snipers. It begins with an enemy mortar attack and a testosterone-driven scramble to arms. "People were hooting and hollering, yelling their war cries and doing the Indian yell thing as they drove off and locked and loaded their weapons," he writes. He describes a harrowing ambush. "Bullets were pinging off our armor all over our vehicle, and you could hear multiple RPG's [rocket-propelled grenades] being fired and flying through the air and impacting all around us," he writes. "I've never felt fear like this. I was like, this is it, I'm going to die."
Spc. Buzzell's account caught the attention of the News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., the newspaper that covers Spc. Buzzell's home base of Fort Lewis. Noting that the attack got scant coverage by bigger media, the local paper drew heavily from Spc. Buzzell's anonymous account. The Pentagon's internal clip service picked up the News Tribune story and it landed in the hands of commanders in Iraq.
Within hours, Lt. Col. Buck James, the battalion commander, ordered Spc. Buzzell to his office. Spc. Buzzell quickly shaved and grabbed fresh fatigues to see the colonel he had never met. As he later recounted on his blog, he arrived to find Col. James leafing through a massive printout of his Web writings, which someone had marked up with a yellow pen. The colonel, whom Spc. Buzzell described as a cross between George Patton and Vince Lombardi, opened with a question: " 'Youre [sic] a big Hunter S Thompson Fan, arnt [sic] you?'"
Spc. Buzzell says he was called to account for two details: the observation that his unit ran low on water during the hours-long standoff and a description of the steps he took to get more ammunition as the firefight waxed on. Both were excised from his online archives.
In an e-mail exchange, Col. James says the Army was concerned about a possible security breach on Spc. Buzzell's blog, but had no desire to muzzle him. "I counseled SPC Buzzell along with his Platoon Sergeant on these points and ensured that he understood that anything he was unsure about should be reviewed by his chain of command," Col. James says. Spc. Buzzell has "performed gallantly" as a soldier, he says.
But Spc. Buzzell's trouble with the command continued. A few days later, after leaving a mocking message on his blog to the military intelligence officers he now assumed were reading along, Spc. Buzzell was ordered confined to camp. He was returned to regular duty and posted a few more times, but he recently removed all of his archives from the site, and new postings are now sporadic. He says it just isn't as fun to write, now that he has to submit everything to his platoon sergeant prior to publication. "I was never edited before," he says. "Now I am."
Spc. Buzzell said he hasn't decided whether to permanently stop posting. He says he received scores of e-mails when "My War" went silent and even got some subtle nudges from his command to continue. Indeed, Col. James seems nostalgic for Internet accounts of his men. "To be candid, I believe the widespread popularity of his writing came as a bit of a shock to him and he was uncomfortable with the attention," Col. James said in an e-mail. "Personally, I think he is a talented writer and a gifted storyteller and should pursue his talent."
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 9, 2004; Page B1
Army specialist Colby Buzzell figured he'd cap his yearlong deployment to Iraq by mustering out of the service this winter and easing into a new career. "I was thinking about maybe driving a cab," he says.
But that was before he launched My War, an Internet-based chronicle of his life as an infantry soldier in Mosul, where he mans a gun in a Stryker brigade. Written under the nom de guerre of CBFTW (Colby Buzzell F -- This War), the blog is a mixture of gripping accounts of caffeine-driven battle maneuvers and amusing vignettes from the dusty grind of life in Iraq's third-largest city.
CBFTW's writings are a hit in the blogosphere, with his Web page logging 10,000 hits on a recent day.
But Spc. Buzzell's writing aspirations may prove his undoing as a professional soldier. Recently, shortly after his commanders discovered My War on the Web, Spc. Buzzell found himself banned from patrols and confined to base. His commanders say Spc. Buzzell may have breached operational security with his writings. "My War" went idle as he pondered the consequences of pursuing his craft while slogging through five nights of radio guard duty, a listless detail for an infantryman. More recently, the pages again went blank, as he chafed under a prepublication vetting regime imposed by his command.
Army Spc. Colby Buzzell, a.k.a. CBFTW on his Web log, flew under military radar -- until recently.
Such prepublication censorship is rare in the modern military: Soldiers' missives haven't been routinely expurgated since World War II and the days of "Loose Lips Sink Ships." The Pentagon doesn't prescreen soldiers' communications, whether print or electronic, assigning the job of policing soldier-journalists to commanders in the field. There are restrictions against divulging references to specific troop locations, patrol schedules or anything that might help the enemy predict how U.S. troops might react to an attack. But commanders in Iraq rely on the honor system and soldiers' common sense to enforce restrictions. Infractions are in the eye of the beholder, difficult to define but easy to recognize in practice.
Censorship that does occur usually comes after the fact. Earlier this year, Army investigators were forced to go stateside to track down reams of snapshots of Iraqi prisoner abuse that Abu Ghraib guards disseminated by e-mail or sent home on computer disk. In July, an Army captain was reassigned and stripped of his leave home after writing an opinion piece published in the Washington Post.
Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, says blogs, like other forms of communication, are tolerated so long as they don't violate operational or informational security. "We treat them the same way we would if they were writing a letter or speaking to a reporter: It's just information," he says. "If a guy is giving up secrets, it doesn't make much difference whether he's posting it on a blog or shouting it from the rooftop of a building."
Still, many bloggers, some operating in obscure corners of Iraq where traditional reporters are scarce, appear to be flying under the Pentagon's radar. There's "American Soldier," a diary compiled by an Army reservist currently preparing for his second call-up, who describes himself in an e-mail as "p -- ed, frustrated, happy and sad at the same time." A site called "Boots on the Ground" is heavy on detail about U.S. armaments. "Just Another Soldier," a National Guardsman's account, is available only by e-mail request, the author says, after his command, citing security concerns, asked him to dismantle the site.
In the age of Web cams, instant messaging and Internet telephone service, widespread censorship simply isn't possible, military officials say. "I don't see how you could censor with the instantaneous flow of information we have now," says one Army officer, "unless you're standing over someone's shoulder while they're typing. And who's got time to do that when the bullets are flying?"
Security violations are rare, says Spc. Buzzell's top commander, Brig. Gen. Carter Ham. "The commander does have a responsibility to ensure no inappropriate information is released," Gen. Ham says in an e-mail, noting that among the 8,000 men under him, only Spc. Buzzell has come under scrutiny. "While [operational security] is a very real everyday concern for us, I do not see potential violations as widespread," he says.
Spc. Buzzell's blog, riddled with misspellings and larded with obscenities, conveys the kind of raw honesty that prompts military mothers to write weepy e-mails by the score. Soldiers have told Spc. Buzzell they sometimes strip out the curse words and send his writings home as their own.
He credits as his inspiration the author Hunter S. Thompson, whose first-person articles and books about politics and drug use were popular in the 1970s. But My War probably is more reminiscent of Michael Herr's "Dispatches," a bleak, first-person account of the Vietnam War widely regarded as one of the best examples of military journalism. Mr. Herr's book took years to arrive on the mass market, but Spc. Buzzell's accounts offer near-instantaneous immediacy. And as his case demonstrates, a casual detail -- that his unit had run low on water during a maneuver, for instance -- can easily get a soldier into trouble.
The blog entry at the root of Spc. Buzzell's difficulties was an Aug. 4 piece called "Men in Black." Opening with a bland, four-paragraph squib about a Mosul firefight that he snatched from CNN's Web site, Spc. Buzzell spins a riveting account of a nasty, hours-long firefight with scores of black-clad snipers. It begins with an enemy mortar attack and a testosterone-driven scramble to arms. "People were hooting and hollering, yelling their war cries and doing the Indian yell thing as they drove off and locked and loaded their weapons," he writes. He describes a harrowing ambush. "Bullets were pinging off our armor all over our vehicle, and you could hear multiple RPG's [rocket-propelled grenades] being fired and flying through the air and impacting all around us," he writes. "I've never felt fear like this. I was like, this is it, I'm going to die."
Spc. Buzzell's account caught the attention of the News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., the newspaper that covers Spc. Buzzell's home base of Fort Lewis. Noting that the attack got scant coverage by bigger media, the local paper drew heavily from Spc. Buzzell's anonymous account. The Pentagon's internal clip service picked up the News Tribune story and it landed in the hands of commanders in Iraq.
Within hours, Lt. Col. Buck James, the battalion commander, ordered Spc. Buzzell to his office. Spc. Buzzell quickly shaved and grabbed fresh fatigues to see the colonel he had never met. As he later recounted on his blog, he arrived to find Col. James leafing through a massive printout of his Web writings, which someone had marked up with a yellow pen. The colonel, whom Spc. Buzzell described as a cross between George Patton and Vince Lombardi, opened with a question: " 'Youre [sic] a big Hunter S Thompson Fan, arnt [sic] you?'"
Spc. Buzzell says he was called to account for two details: the observation that his unit ran low on water during the hours-long standoff and a description of the steps he took to get more ammunition as the firefight waxed on. Both were excised from his online archives.
In an e-mail exchange, Col. James says the Army was concerned about a possible security breach on Spc. Buzzell's blog, but had no desire to muzzle him. "I counseled SPC Buzzell along with his Platoon Sergeant on these points and ensured that he understood that anything he was unsure about should be reviewed by his chain of command," Col. James says. Spc. Buzzell has "performed gallantly" as a soldier, he says.
But Spc. Buzzell's trouble with the command continued. A few days later, after leaving a mocking message on his blog to the military intelligence officers he now assumed were reading along, Spc. Buzzell was ordered confined to camp. He was returned to regular duty and posted a few more times, but he recently removed all of his archives from the site, and new postings are now sporadic. He says it just isn't as fun to write, now that he has to submit everything to his platoon sergeant prior to publication. "I was never edited before," he says. "Now I am."
Spc. Buzzell said he hasn't decided whether to permanently stop posting. He says he received scores of e-mails when "My War" went silent and even got some subtle nudges from his command to continue. Indeed, Col. James seems nostalgic for Internet accounts of his men. "To be candid, I believe the widespread popularity of his writing came as a bit of a shock to him and he was uncomfortable with the attention," Col. James said in an e-mail. "Personally, I think he is a talented writer and a gifted storyteller and should pursue his talent."
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
RADIO NPR
NPR (National Public Radio) featured this website on its Day To Day show. Here is a link to the article which has a link to the radio show: http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3867981
Soldiers' Iraq Blogs Face Military Scrutiny
Day to Day, August 24, 2004 · Military officials are cracking down on blogs written by soldiers and Marines in Iraq, saying some of them reveal sensitive information. Critics say it's an attempt to suppress unflattering truths about the U.S. occupation. NPR's Eric Niiler reports.
A blogger with the pen name CBFTW, stationed near Mosul with the First Battallion, 23rd Regiment, says he began his My War Web log to help combat boredom. "I'm just writing about my experiences," the soldier says. "I'm pretty much putting my diary on the Internet -- that's all it is."
CBFTW says he has avoided describing sensitive information, such as U.S. weapons capabilities, weaknesses and scheduling. But earlier this month, CBFTW was lectured by commanders about violating operational security. Two other popular blogs run by soldiers have been shut down recently.
Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, a spokesman for unit CBFTW belongs to, said the soldier's blog now has to be reviewed by his platoon sergeant and a superior officer. In an e-mail to NPR, Hastings said the popularity of blogging has increased the chance that soldiers may inadvertently give away information to Internet-savvy enemies.
But some critics worry that military officials are trying to muffle dissent from troops in the field. "I really think it has much less to do with operational security and classified secrets and more to do with American politics and how the war is seen by a public that is getting increasingly shaky about the overall venture," says Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Soldiers' Iraq Blogs Face Military Scrutiny
Day to Day, August 24, 2004 · Military officials are cracking down on blogs written by soldiers and Marines in Iraq, saying some of them reveal sensitive information. Critics say it's an attempt to suppress unflattering truths about the U.S. occupation. NPR's Eric Niiler reports.
A blogger with the pen name CBFTW, stationed near Mosul with the First Battallion, 23rd Regiment, says he began his My War Web log to help combat boredom. "I'm just writing about my experiences," the soldier says. "I'm pretty much putting my diary on the Internet -- that's all it is."
CBFTW says he has avoided describing sensitive information, such as U.S. weapons capabilities, weaknesses and scheduling. But earlier this month, CBFTW was lectured by commanders about violating operational security. Two other popular blogs run by soldiers have been shut down recently.
Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, a spokesman for unit CBFTW belongs to, said the soldier's blog now has to be reviewed by his platoon sergeant and a superior officer. In an e-mail to NPR, Hastings said the popularity of blogging has increased the chance that soldiers may inadvertently give away information to Internet-savvy enemies.
But some critics worry that military officials are trying to muffle dissent from troops in the field. "I really think it has much less to do with operational security and classified secrets and more to do with American politics and how the war is seen by a public that is getting increasingly shaky about the overall venture," says Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Sunday, August 22, 2004
Thursday, August 19, 2004
Stay Tuned
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
story developing...
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
story developing...
Sunday, August 15, 2004
Saturday, August 14, 2004
The New Yorker
OVER THERE
BLAM
by Lauren Collins
The New Yorker June 29, 2009
IIn the winter of 2004, Jonathan Pieslak, a composer and an associate professor of music at City College, was researching a paper on heavy metal when he stumbled on a Web site devoted to the death-metal band Slayer. (Their songs include “The Antichrist,” “Mandatory Suicide,” and one, written from the perspective of a terrorist, called “Jihad”: “Fuck your God erase his name /A lady weeps insane with sorrow.”) On the site, a fan had written that, during the Gulf War, the band received forty per cent of its fan mail from soldiers in the Middle East. The claim turned out to be an exaggeration, but Pieslak became interested. In April, Indiana University Press published his book “Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War,” which examines the role of music in military recruiting, combat, interrogations, and morale, and explains many things about Slayer’s appeal.
First of all: listening to heavy metal, with its double-pedal bass drums and tremolo-style guitars, Pieslak writes, is a good way to prepare mentally for a mission, because it “sounds considerably like the consistent discharge of bullets fired from an automatic gun.” Colby Buzzell, an M240 Bravo machine gunner who did a yearlong tour in Iraq, told Pieslak, “I’d listen to Slayer to get all into it.” Once, Buzzell said, a guy on his patrol rigged up his MP3 player to a Humvee, and the patrol blasted theme songs from old movies—a modern-day drum-and-fife brigade. He said, “Sometimes your motivation is down and you’re like, ‘I don’t want to play soldier today.’ . . . But then you hear ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’ theme song and you’re like, ‘Fuck yeah, hell yeah, I’ll go out on a mission today.’ ” For some in the Fourth Infantry Division, Lil Jon’s “I Don’t Give a Fuck” was an anthem—soldiers called it their “getting crunked” song, and they would chant its refrain until they were ready to leave the base.
At the Borders store in the Time Warner Center on a recent afternoon, Pieslak said that in another unit “Metallica was the group of choice. Then, when they got to Falluja, it switched to ‘Go to Sleep,’ by Eminem: ‘Die, motherfucker, die! / Unh, time’s up, bitch, close ya eyes.’ ” Pieslak, wearing Pumas, a T-shirt, and camouflage cargo shorts (no significance—just “what was clean”), had agreed to poke around the music section. Passing Classic Crooners, New Age, and Jazz (“You’re probably not going to see too many guys over there with George Winston CDs,” he said), he led the way to Rock, where he riffled through the “D”s. Dropkick Murphys. Drowning Pool. “Their song ‘Bodies’ is interesting,” he said, pulling out a CD that featured a woman holding a hand across her face, the word “SINNER” written across her knuckles. “It kept popping up.” Soldiers would use it both to get pumped up for battle and “to induce irritation and frustration among detainees.” (The detainees, apparently, preferred ’N Sync and Michael Jackson.) Pieslak said that a group of soldiers had made a music video in which they set their own footage and photographs to the song. They called it “Taliban Bodies.” A pair of Arkansas National Guardsmen, Pieslak writes, recorded an album in Iraq. One track, with apologies to Jimmy Buffett, was called “Mortaritaville”: “Wasted away again in Baghdad / One weekend a month, yeah, my ass / I’d like to kick my recruiter straight square in the teeth / But I know, ‘It’s my own damn fault.’ ”
Music, Pieslak writes, has always been a part of the military experience, from training cadences (“Soldier, Soldier Have You Heard”) to battle cries (Joshua’s trumpets, “Hakkaa päälle”) and “thunder runs,” in which troops descend in force upon a given area (in Baghdad, one team blasted Wagner, in homage to “Apocalypse Now”). In the book’s fourth chapter, “Music as a Psychological Tactic,” Pieslak examines a “sonic battle” between American troops—who blasted “Welcome to the Jungle,” by Guns N’ Roses, and “Hell’s Bells,” by AC/DC—and Iraqi mullahs, who tried to drown out the metal with chants of “Allahu Akbar” and Arabic music. Standing near the “J”s, he said, “Plato thought that different musical scales could have different effects on the human condition. We tend to have a misconception about music—that it is this thing that delights the senses, elevates the spirit. While I like that idea, it is only part of what music has been.” ♦
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/06/29/090629ta_talk_collins?printable=true#ixzz0X8LgppMq
BLAM
by Lauren Collins
The New Yorker June 29, 2009
IIn the winter of 2004, Jonathan Pieslak, a composer and an associate professor of music at City College, was researching a paper on heavy metal when he stumbled on a Web site devoted to the death-metal band Slayer. (Their songs include “The Antichrist,” “Mandatory Suicide,” and one, written from the perspective of a terrorist, called “Jihad”: “Fuck your God erase his name /A lady weeps insane with sorrow.”) On the site, a fan had written that, during the Gulf War, the band received forty per cent of its fan mail from soldiers in the Middle East. The claim turned out to be an exaggeration, but Pieslak became interested. In April, Indiana University Press published his book “Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War,” which examines the role of music in military recruiting, combat, interrogations, and morale, and explains many things about Slayer’s appeal.
First of all: listening to heavy metal, with its double-pedal bass drums and tremolo-style guitars, Pieslak writes, is a good way to prepare mentally for a mission, because it “sounds considerably like the consistent discharge of bullets fired from an automatic gun.” Colby Buzzell, an M240 Bravo machine gunner who did a yearlong tour in Iraq, told Pieslak, “I’d listen to Slayer to get all into it.” Once, Buzzell said, a guy on his patrol rigged up his MP3 player to a Humvee, and the patrol blasted theme songs from old movies—a modern-day drum-and-fife brigade. He said, “Sometimes your motivation is down and you’re like, ‘I don’t want to play soldier today.’ . . . But then you hear ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’ theme song and you’re like, ‘Fuck yeah, hell yeah, I’ll go out on a mission today.’ ” For some in the Fourth Infantry Division, Lil Jon’s “I Don’t Give a Fuck” was an anthem—soldiers called it their “getting crunked” song, and they would chant its refrain until they were ready to leave the base.
At the Borders store in the Time Warner Center on a recent afternoon, Pieslak said that in another unit “Metallica was the group of choice. Then, when they got to Falluja, it switched to ‘Go to Sleep,’ by Eminem: ‘Die, motherfucker, die! / Unh, time’s up, bitch, close ya eyes.’ ” Pieslak, wearing Pumas, a T-shirt, and camouflage cargo shorts (no significance—just “what was clean”), had agreed to poke around the music section. Passing Classic Crooners, New Age, and Jazz (“You’re probably not going to see too many guys over there with George Winston CDs,” he said), he led the way to Rock, where he riffled through the “D”s. Dropkick Murphys. Drowning Pool. “Their song ‘Bodies’ is interesting,” he said, pulling out a CD that featured a woman holding a hand across her face, the word “SINNER” written across her knuckles. “It kept popping up.” Soldiers would use it both to get pumped up for battle and “to induce irritation and frustration among detainees.” (The detainees, apparently, preferred ’N Sync and Michael Jackson.) Pieslak said that a group of soldiers had made a music video in which they set their own footage and photographs to the song. They called it “Taliban Bodies.” A pair of Arkansas National Guardsmen, Pieslak writes, recorded an album in Iraq. One track, with apologies to Jimmy Buffett, was called “Mortaritaville”: “Wasted away again in Baghdad / One weekend a month, yeah, my ass / I’d like to kick my recruiter straight square in the teeth / But I know, ‘It’s my own damn fault.’ ”
Music, Pieslak writes, has always been a part of the military experience, from training cadences (“Soldier, Soldier Have You Heard”) to battle cries (Joshua’s trumpets, “Hakkaa päälle”) and “thunder runs,” in which troops descend in force upon a given area (in Baghdad, one team blasted Wagner, in homage to “Apocalypse Now”). In the book’s fourth chapter, “Music as a Psychological Tactic,” Pieslak examines a “sonic battle” between American troops—who blasted “Welcome to the Jungle,” by Guns N’ Roses, and “Hell’s Bells,” by AC/DC—and Iraqi mullahs, who tried to drown out the metal with chants of “Allahu Akbar” and Arabic music. Standing near the “J”s, he said, “Plato thought that different musical scales could have different effects on the human condition. We tend to have a misconception about music—that it is this thing that delights the senses, elevates the spirit. While I like that idea, it is only part of what music has been.” ♦
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/06/29/090629ta_talk_collins?printable=true#ixzz0X8LgppMq
Friday, August 13, 2004
STRYKER BRIGADE SLAMMED BY INSURGENTS
MICHAEL GILBERT;
The News Tribune
It didn't get much media coverage, but troops from the Fort Lewis-based Stryker brigade say fighting last Wednesday in Mosul was the heaviest and most sustained combat they've seen in their nine months in Iraq.
Insurgents with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47s and improvised bombs fought a series of coordinated, running attacks against Stryker and Iraqi troops. One estimate put the number of attackers at 30 to 40, another at more than 100.
Either way, U.S. and Iraqi forces killed an undetermined number of them - the official estimate is at least a dozen - while suffering no losses themselves.
About a dozen Stryker troops were wounded; all but two returned to duty, said Lt. Col. Kevin Hyneman, the brigade's deputy commander.
The two more seriously wounded include Lt. Damon Armeni, 25, of Tacoma, a Wilson High School and Pacific Lutheran University graduate, who is reported in critical condition and is awaiting surgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for shrapnel wounds, his family said Monday. There was no information available Monday about the other wounded soldier.
A soldier in Armeni's company - Blackhawk Company of the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment - said the lieutenant was injured by a rocket-propelled grenade blast after maneuvering his Stryker in to protect five infantrymen under fire.
"Needless to say, we are proud of our son's actions but hurt so very much for what he is going through, praying that he'll pull through," said his father, Dan Armeni.
In an interview Monday, Hyneman said the fighting took place on the east and west sides of the Tigris River, which bisects the city, and at a hotel near the northernmost of the city's five major bridges. The insurgents also attacked a hospital and a power plant, and ambushed Stryker convoys as they rolled past multistory buildings on the way to the fight, according to other sources.
Insurgents in Mosul typically attack Iraqi authorities and American troops with car bombs, sporadic mortar fire into U.S. camps and small-scale ambushes with small arms and RPGs.
"Anti-Iraqi forces tried a pretty widespread offensive action, uncharacteristically," Hyneman said. "I think they were surprised by how the Iraqi National Guard and the coalition fought together as a team."
The official version as reported that evening in a news release by Task Force Olympia, the Fort Lewis-based command for northern Iraq, said "multinational forces served in a supporting role, providing additional support where and when the Iraqi leaders involved in the attacks requested it."
Hyneman and the task force spokesman, Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, said the fighting drew in virtually all the troops in the brigade's two infantry battalions in Mosul, as well as elements from other brigade units in the city.
One soldier described what it was like on his Web log on the Internet. The soldier, who identifies himself as CBFTW, is attracting readers with his absorbing, personal account of Army life in Mosul.
"We were driving there on that main street, when all of the sudden all hell came down all around on us, all these guys wearing all black ... a couple dozen on each side of the street, on rooftops, alleys, edge of buildings, out of windows, everywhere just came out of ... nowhere and started firing RPGs and AK-47s at us," he wrote.
CBFTW described how a bullet passed in one side of his buddy's helmet and out the other without hitting his buddy - he suffered a concussion, is all.
"Bullets were pinging off our armor all over our vehicle, and you could hear multiple RPGs being fired and flying through the air and impacting all around us. All sorts of crazy insane Hollywood explosions ... going on all around us," he wrote. "I've never felt fear like this. I was like, this is it, I'm going to die. I cannot put into words how scared I was."
"My platoon was stuck right smack dab in the middle of the ambush and we were in the kill zone," CBFTW wrote. "We shot our way out of it and drove right through the ambush."
Hyneman said about a dozen Strykers were damaged, mostly the tires and some sections of slat armor that protects the vehicles from RPGs. All were repaired and returned to service within two days, he said.
Chaplains and mental health counselors were sent around to check with soldiers the next day.
CBFTW said he and his buddies also spent much of the next day cleaning up the brass shell casings out of their vehicle, fixing broken parts and cleaning their weapons.
"I discovered the remains of a smashed up impacted 7.62 (mm) bullet that had my name on it by my hatch. I put that in my pocket," he wrote. "If I ever have kids, and I get all old and have grandkids, I could show them the bullet that al-Qaida tried to kill me with. Have them bring that in for show and tell at school."
• To read CBFTW's account of last week's Stryker brigade battle in Mosul, go to cbftw.blogspot.com
The News Tribune
It didn't get much media coverage, but troops from the Fort Lewis-based Stryker brigade say fighting last Wednesday in Mosul was the heaviest and most sustained combat they've seen in their nine months in Iraq.
Insurgents with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47s and improvised bombs fought a series of coordinated, running attacks against Stryker and Iraqi troops. One estimate put the number of attackers at 30 to 40, another at more than 100.
Either way, U.S. and Iraqi forces killed an undetermined number of them - the official estimate is at least a dozen - while suffering no losses themselves.
About a dozen Stryker troops were wounded; all but two returned to duty, said Lt. Col. Kevin Hyneman, the brigade's deputy commander.
The two more seriously wounded include Lt. Damon Armeni, 25, of Tacoma, a Wilson High School and Pacific Lutheran University graduate, who is reported in critical condition and is awaiting surgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for shrapnel wounds, his family said Monday. There was no information available Monday about the other wounded soldier.
A soldier in Armeni's company - Blackhawk Company of the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment - said the lieutenant was injured by a rocket-propelled grenade blast after maneuvering his Stryker in to protect five infantrymen under fire.
"Needless to say, we are proud of our son's actions but hurt so very much for what he is going through, praying that he'll pull through," said his father, Dan Armeni.
In an interview Monday, Hyneman said the fighting took place on the east and west sides of the Tigris River, which bisects the city, and at a hotel near the northernmost of the city's five major bridges. The insurgents also attacked a hospital and a power plant, and ambushed Stryker convoys as they rolled past multistory buildings on the way to the fight, according to other sources.
Insurgents in Mosul typically attack Iraqi authorities and American troops with car bombs, sporadic mortar fire into U.S. camps and small-scale ambushes with small arms and RPGs.
"Anti-Iraqi forces tried a pretty widespread offensive action, uncharacteristically," Hyneman said. "I think they were surprised by how the Iraqi National Guard and the coalition fought together as a team."
The official version as reported that evening in a news release by Task Force Olympia, the Fort Lewis-based command for northern Iraq, said "multinational forces served in a supporting role, providing additional support where and when the Iraqi leaders involved in the attacks requested it."
Hyneman and the task force spokesman, Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, said the fighting drew in virtually all the troops in the brigade's two infantry battalions in Mosul, as well as elements from other brigade units in the city.
One soldier described what it was like on his Web log on the Internet. The soldier, who identifies himself as CBFTW, is attracting readers with his absorbing, personal account of Army life in Mosul.
"We were driving there on that main street, when all of the sudden all hell came down all around on us, all these guys wearing all black ... a couple dozen on each side of the street, on rooftops, alleys, edge of buildings, out of windows, everywhere just came out of ... nowhere and started firing RPGs and AK-47s at us," he wrote.
CBFTW described how a bullet passed in one side of his buddy's helmet and out the other without hitting his buddy - he suffered a concussion, is all.
"Bullets were pinging off our armor all over our vehicle, and you could hear multiple RPGs being fired and flying through the air and impacting all around us. All sorts of crazy insane Hollywood explosions ... going on all around us," he wrote. "I've never felt fear like this. I was like, this is it, I'm going to die. I cannot put into words how scared I was."
"My platoon was stuck right smack dab in the middle of the ambush and we were in the kill zone," CBFTW wrote. "We shot our way out of it and drove right through the ambush."
Hyneman said about a dozen Strykers were damaged, mostly the tires and some sections of slat armor that protects the vehicles from RPGs. All were repaired and returned to service within two days, he said.
Chaplains and mental health counselors were sent around to check with soldiers the next day.
CBFTW said he and his buddies also spent much of the next day cleaning up the brass shell casings out of their vehicle, fixing broken parts and cleaning their weapons.
"I discovered the remains of a smashed up impacted 7.62 (mm) bullet that had my name on it by my hatch. I put that in my pocket," he wrote. "If I ever have kids, and I get all old and have grandkids, I could show them the bullet that al-Qaida tried to kill me with. Have them bring that in for show and tell at school."
• To read CBFTW's account of last week's Stryker brigade battle in Mosul, go to cbftw.blogspot.com
Thursday, August 12, 2004
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Saturday, August 07, 2004
"Green" Gunner
I recieved an e-mail from B Abell Jurus, the author of the book Men In Green Faces, which is about Navy Seals in Vietnam, and she forwarded me an e-mail she recieved from Ed Fitzgerald, one of the Original Green Berets. He read my Men In Black blog entry, and said some really interesting things, and double taps on the confusion that happens in a situation like that. Check out what he said about the blog:
That "green" gunner captured vividly the total confusion, the terror of that situation he was suddenly thrown into. He shows us clearly something that is very true--the fact that in the middle of a firefight like that, you only can track about 1/40th of what is happening.(Maybe 1/10th of what is going on for the most experienced and coolest guyson the scene, those with many previous firefights). So often in fiction (and in the bullshit tales told by people who were never in a real firefight) we read these accounts where the "hero" both "sees" andtells you you step by step in minute detail every single thing that is taking place--in a situation where he could easily be killed or horribly maimed. Mostly, that's just crap. The way this guy described it (with all the warts--not sure what he is hitting most of the time, shooting too closeto his own men, etc.)--that is indeed how it is in a situation like that.
Too often, even in otherwise very well-written action books, there is no hint of that confused desperation which hits people when they are suddenly in it up to their eyebrows, with death or serious injury an all too real possibility. Loved the way that "green" gunner captured the reality of that kind of firefight--he nailed it right on the money. Ed
That "green" gunner captured vividly the total confusion, the terror of that situation he was suddenly thrown into. He shows us clearly something that is very true--the fact that in the middle of a firefight like that, you only can track about 1/40th of what is happening.(Maybe 1/10th of what is going on for the most experienced and coolest guyson the scene, those with many previous firefights). So often in fiction (and in the bullshit tales told by people who were never in a real firefight) we read these accounts where the "hero" both "sees" andtells you you step by step in minute detail every single thing that is taking place--in a situation where he could easily be killed or horribly maimed. Mostly, that's just crap. The way this guy described it (with all the warts--not sure what he is hitting most of the time, shooting too closeto his own men, etc.)--that is indeed how it is in a situation like that.
Too often, even in otherwise very well-written action books, there is no hint of that confused desperation which hits people when they are suddenly in it up to their eyebrows, with death or serious injury an all too real possibility. Loved the way that "green" gunner captured the reality of that kind of firefight--he nailed it right on the money. Ed
Thursday, August 05, 2004
Thursday, July 29, 2004
I Dont Want To Live Alone
"We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm."
-George Orwell
-George Orwell
Thursday, June 24, 2004
Three Loud Explosions
I can hear small arms fire right now coming from outside the wire as I write this entry. On my way to the internet cafe that they have set up for us on this FOB (Forward Operating Base) I heard three loud explosions, about 5 minutes apart, followed by some breif small arms fire. We have cement mortar bunkers set up for us all over this FOB for us to seek cover in during an attack. From a cement shelter I observed three very large dust mushroom clouds from right outside the wire from where the explosions took place. You could feel the concusion of the explosions from where I was standing. No word yet what just happened. The craziness begins...
Soundtrack To Violance
-Kill The Poor/Dead Kennedys
-You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You / Dean Martin
-Anything and everything by SLAYER
-Stuck In The Middle With You/Stealers Wheel
-What A Wonderful World/Louis Armstrong
-Speak English Or Die/S.O.D.
-Bombs Over Baghdad/Outcast
-Theme Song from The Good The Bad And The Ugly
-Imperial March from Star Wars
-Kill Em All/Metallica
-Lets Start A War, Army Life, and Blown To Bits / The Exploited
-Stars and Stripes Forever
-Welcome To The Jungle/Guns And Roses
-Ride of the Valkyries/Wagner
-Paint It Black/Rolling Stones
-Die Die Die My Darling/Misfits
-Give Peace A Chance/John Lennon
-Shinny Happy People/REM
-Show No Mercy/Cro-Mags
-We Care Alot/Faith No More
-Danger Zone/Kenny Logins (Top Gun song)
-Countdown To Extinction/Megadeth
-It's Clobberin' Time/Sick of it all
-Iron Man/Black Sabbath
-I Dont Care About You / FEAR
-Bloody Sunday/U2
-Orange Crush/REM
-Never Gonna Stop/Rob Zombie
-Wont Back Down/Johnny Cash Version
-Seek and Destroy/Metallica
-You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You / Dean Martin
-Anything and everything by SLAYER
-Stuck In The Middle With You/Stealers Wheel
-What A Wonderful World/Louis Armstrong
-Speak English Or Die/S.O.D.
-Bombs Over Baghdad/Outcast
-Theme Song from The Good The Bad And The Ugly
-Imperial March from Star Wars
-Kill Em All/Metallica
-Lets Start A War, Army Life, and Blown To Bits / The Exploited
-Stars and Stripes Forever
-Welcome To The Jungle/Guns And Roses
-Ride of the Valkyries/Wagner
-Paint It Black/Rolling Stones
-Die Die Die My Darling/Misfits
-Give Peace A Chance/John Lennon
-Shinny Happy People/REM
-Show No Mercy/Cro-Mags
-We Care Alot/Faith No More
-Danger Zone/Kenny Logins (Top Gun song)
-Countdown To Extinction/Megadeth
-It's Clobberin' Time/Sick of it all
-Iron Man/Black Sabbath
-I Dont Care About You / FEAR
-Bloody Sunday/U2
-Orange Crush/REM
-Never Gonna Stop/Rob Zombie
-Wont Back Down/Johnny Cash Version
-Seek and Destroy/Metallica
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Blogging From A Combat Zone
"War is not a practical necessity, it is also a theoretical necessity, an exigeary of logic. That war should ever be banished from the world is a hope not only absurd, but profoundly immoral"
-Heinrich von Treitschke
I found out about this blog website stuff in an article that was printed in the new Time magazine. It sounded like a good way for me to kill some time out here in Iraq, post a little diary stuff, maybe some rants, links to some cool shit, thoughts, experinces, garbage, crap, whatever. I have no set formula on how i'm going to do this, i'm just going to do it and see what happens. You think the Sex Pistols knew what the fuck they were doing when they first started jamming? They just fuckin' did.
About me: I am a 11B Infantry soldier in the United States Army, currently in Mosul Iraq. Our mission: to locate, capture and kill all non compliant forces here in Iraq. So far we've done pretty damn good. I've been here for about 8 months now, and i have no idea how much longer i'm going to be here. My whole outlook on everything has changed since being here, and i've probably aged a great deal over here. So far, this has been one hell of an experince. Lots of lows, and very little highs. Everyday is the same, a patrol, an OP, a TCP, same food at the chow hall, see the same faces, same streets, ect. Nothing really ever changes here. Times goes by extremly slow out here as well. A little about me, I am from the San Francisco bay area, SF being the Baghdad-by-the bay, as Herb Caen calls it. I've also lived in Cleveland Ohio, Los Angeles, and New York Fuckin City.
FYI: In case your wondering how and why i got the name "MY WAR" as a title to this web site, its a Black Flag song, here are the lyrics to that song:
MY WAR
My war you’re one of them
You say that you’re my friend
But you’re one of them
You don’t want to see me live
You don’t want me to give
Cuz you’re one of them
My war you’re one of them
You say that you’re my friend
But you’re one of them
I might not know what a friend is
All I know is what you’re not
Cuz you’re one of them
My war you’re one of them
You say that you’re my friend
But you’re one of them
I have a prediction, it lives in my brain
It’s with me every day, it drives me insane
I feel it in my heart, that if I has a gun
I feel it in my heart, I’d wanna kill some
I feel it in my heart, the end will come
Come on!!
My war you’re one of them
You say that you’re my friend
But you’re one of them
Tell me that I’m wrong
Try to sing me your ego song
You’re one of them
My war you’re one of them
You say that you’re my friend
But you’re one of them
My war.
-Heinrich von Treitschke
I found out about this blog website stuff in an article that was printed in the new Time magazine. It sounded like a good way for me to kill some time out here in Iraq, post a little diary stuff, maybe some rants, links to some cool shit, thoughts, experinces, garbage, crap, whatever. I have no set formula on how i'm going to do this, i'm just going to do it and see what happens. You think the Sex Pistols knew what the fuck they were doing when they first started jamming? They just fuckin' did.
About me: I am a 11B Infantry soldier in the United States Army, currently in Mosul Iraq. Our mission: to locate, capture and kill all non compliant forces here in Iraq. So far we've done pretty damn good. I've been here for about 8 months now, and i have no idea how much longer i'm going to be here. My whole outlook on everything has changed since being here, and i've probably aged a great deal over here. So far, this has been one hell of an experince. Lots of lows, and very little highs. Everyday is the same, a patrol, an OP, a TCP, same food at the chow hall, see the same faces, same streets, ect. Nothing really ever changes here. Times goes by extremly slow out here as well. A little about me, I am from the San Francisco bay area, SF being the Baghdad-by-the bay, as Herb Caen calls it. I've also lived in Cleveland Ohio, Los Angeles, and New York Fuckin City.
FYI: In case your wondering how and why i got the name "MY WAR" as a title to this web site, its a Black Flag song, here are the lyrics to that song:
MY WAR
My war you’re one of them
You say that you’re my friend
But you’re one of them
You don’t want to see me live
You don’t want me to give
Cuz you’re one of them
My war you’re one of them
You say that you’re my friend
But you’re one of them
I might not know what a friend is
All I know is what you’re not
Cuz you’re one of them
My war you’re one of them
You say that you’re my friend
But you’re one of them
I have a prediction, it lives in my brain
It’s with me every day, it drives me insane
I feel it in my heart, that if I has a gun
I feel it in my heart, I’d wanna kill some
I feel it in my heart, the end will come
Come on!!
My war you’re one of them
You say that you’re my friend
But you’re one of them
Tell me that I’m wrong
Try to sing me your ego song
You’re one of them
My war you’re one of them
You say that you’re my friend
But you’re one of them
My war.
INFANTRYMEN'S CREED
I am the Infantry.
I am my country's strength in war.
her deterrent in peace.
I am the heart of the fight...
wherever, whenever.
I carry America's faith and honor
against her enemies.
I am the Queen of Battle.
I am what my country expects me to be...
the best trained solider in the world.
In the race for victory
I am swift, determined, and courageous,
armed with a fierce will to win.
Never will I betray my country's trust.
always I fight on...
through the foe,
to the objective,
to triumph over all,
If necessary, I will fight to my death.
By my steadfast courage,
I have won 200 years of freedom.
I yield not to weakness,
to hunger,
to cowardice,
to fatigue,
to superior odds,
for I am mentally tough, physically strong,
and morally straight.
I forsake not...
my country,
my mission
my comrades,
my sacred duty.
I am relentless.
I am always there,
now and forever.
I Am The Infantry!
Follow Me.
I am my country's strength in war.
her deterrent in peace.
I am the heart of the fight...
wherever, whenever.
I carry America's faith and honor
against her enemies.
I am the Queen of Battle.
I am what my country expects me to be...
the best trained solider in the world.
In the race for victory
I am swift, determined, and courageous,
armed with a fierce will to win.
Never will I betray my country's trust.
always I fight on...
through the foe,
to the objective,
to triumph over all,
If necessary, I will fight to my death.
By my steadfast courage,
I have won 200 years of freedom.
I yield not to weakness,
to hunger,
to cowardice,
to fatigue,
to superior odds,
for I am mentally tough, physically strong,
and morally straight.
I forsake not...
my country,
my mission
my comrades,
my sacred duty.
I am relentless.
I am always there,
now and forever.
I Am The Infantry!
Follow Me.
Previous Posts
- Stories Of Our Time
- MY WAR: KILLING TIME IN IRAQ
- WELCOME BACK
- San Francisco Chronicle
- Guide To Minor Transgressions
- RED, WHITE, AND BEIGE: The State Of The Union 2008...
- CNN - Soldier finds his voice blogging from Iraq
- Best and Brightest issue
- Life After Wartime
- PRI: To The Best Of Our Knowledge
Archives
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