MY WAR

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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

new article on page 206

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

New article in 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

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

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?"

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.”

'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.

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

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

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."

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

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

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."

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.

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...

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

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 other day, we went somewhere, and did something

"These words I write to keep me from total madness."
-Charles Bukowski

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

Quote of the day: "I just want this day to end."

"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

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...

-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

"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.

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.