By John HockenberryPage 1 of 4 next »
The snapshots of Iraqi prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib were taken by soldiers and shared in the digital military netherworld of Iraq. Their release to the world in May last year detonated a media explosion that rocked a presidential campaign, cratered America’s moral high ground, and demonstrated how even a superpower could be blitzkrieged by some homemade downloadable porn. In the middle of it all, a lone reservist sergeant stationed on the Iraqi border posed a simple question:
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I cannot help but wonder upon reflection of the circumstances, how much longer we will be able to carry with us our digital cameras, or take photographs and document the experiences we have had.
The writer was 24-year-old Chris Missick, a soldier with the Army’s 319th Signal Battalion and author of the blog A Line in the Sand. While balloon-faced cable pundits shrieked about the scandal, Missick was posting late at night in his Army-issue «blacks,» with a mug of coffee and a small French press beside him, his laptop blasting Elliot Smith’s «Cupid’s Trick» into his headphones. He quickly seized on perhaps the most profound and crucial implication of Abu Ghraib:
Never before has a war been so immediately documented, never before have sentiments from the front scurried their way to the home front with such ease and precision. Here I sit, in the desert, staring daily at the electric fence, the deep trenches and the concertina wire that separates the border of Iraq and Kuwait, and write home and upload my daily reflections and opinions on the war and my circumstances here, as well as some of the pictures I have taken along the way. It is amazing, and empowering, and yet the question remains, should I as a lower enlisted soldier have such power to express my opinion and broadcast to the world a singular soldier’s point of view? To those outside the uniform who have never lived the military life, the question may seem absurd, and yet, as an example of what exists even in the small following of readers I have here, the implications of thought expressed by soldiers daily could be explosive.
His sober assessments of the potential of free speech in a war zone began attracting a wider following, eventually logging somewhere north of 100,000 pageviews. No blogging record, but rivaling the wonkish audience for the Pentagon’s daily briefing on C-Span or DOD press releases.
Missick is just one voice – and a very pro-Pentagon one at that – in an oddball online Greek chorus narrating the conflict in Iraq. It includes a core group of about 100 regulars and hundreds more loosely organized activists, angry contrarians, jolly testosterone fuckups, self-appointed pundits, and would-be poets who call themselves milbloggers, as in military bloggers. Whether posting from inside Iraq on active duty, from noncombat bases around the world, or even from their neighborhoods back home after being discharged – where they can still follow events closely and deliver their often blunt opinions – milbloggers offer an unprecedented real-time real-life window on war and the people who wage it. Their collective voice competes with and occasionally undermines the DOD’s elaborate message machine and the much-loathed mainstream media, usually dismissed as MSM.
Milbloggers constitute a rich subculture with a refreshing candor about the war, expressing views ranging from far right to far left. They also offer helpful tips about tearing down an M16, recipes for beef stew (hint: lots of red wine), reviews of the latest episode of 24, extremely technical discussions of Humvee armor configurations, and exceptionally raw accounts of field hospital chaos, gore, and heroism.
For now, the Pentagon officially tolerates this free-form online journalism and in-house peanut gallery, even as the brass takes cautious steps to control it. A new policy instituted this spring requires all military bloggers inside Iraq to register with their units. It directs commanders to conduct quarterly reviews to make sure bloggers aren’t giving out casualty information or violating operational security or privacy rules. Commanding officers shut down a blog that reported on the medical response to a suicide bombing late last year in Mosul. The Army has also created the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell to monitor compliance. And Wired has learned that a Pentagon review is under way to better understand the overall implications of blogging and other Internet communications in combat zones.
«It’s a new world out there,» says Christopher Conway, a lieutenant colonel and DOD spokesperson. «Before, you would have to shake down your soldiers for matches that might light up and betray a position. Today, every soldier has a cell phone, beeper, game device, or laptop, any one of which could pop off without warning. Blogging is just one piece of the puzzle.»
Strong opinions throughout the military ranks in and out of wartime are nothing new. But online technology in the combat zone has suddenly given those opinions a mass audience and an instantaneous forum for the first time in the history of warfare. On the 21st-century battlefield, the campfire glow comes from a laptop computer, and it’s visible around the world.
«In World War II, letters basically didn’t arrive for months,» says Michael Bautista, an Idaho National Guard corporal based in Kirkuk whose grandfather served in World War II and who blogs as Ma Deuce Gunner (named for the trusty M2 machine gun he calls Mama). «What I’m doing and what my fellow bloggers are doing is groundbreaking.»
If you’re stuck in southern Baghdad in the dusty gray fortress called Camp Falcon and find yourself in need of 50-caliber machine-gun ammo, chopper fuel, toilet paper, or M&M’s, you call Danjel Bout, a 32-year-old captain and logistics officer from the California National Guard who blogs as Thunder 6. He’s been stationed here with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division for most of 2005. When he’s not chasing down requisitions of supplies or out on patrol hunting insurgents, Bout is posting about the details of Army life in language evocative of literary warbloggers of yore like Thucydides, Homer, Thomas Paine, and John Donne.
Sleep, blessed, blissful, wonderful sleep. Mother’s milk. A full harvest in a time of famine. The storm that breaks the drought. It is the drug of choice here – assiduously avoided because of the never-ending chain of missions, but always craved. If rarity is the measure of a substance’s worth, then here in Iraq, sleep carries a price beyond words. There is no more precious moment in my day than the sublime instant where my mind flickers between consciousness and the dreamworld. In that sliver of time the day seems to shimmer and melt like one of Dal� paintings – leaving only honey sweet dreams of my other life far from Arabia.
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Bout’s blog, 365 and a Wakeup, is unlikely to put you to sleep. It’s one of the most genuine accounts anywhere of what life is like for a soldier in Iraq. The captain can be spotted composing and editing his posts on his laptop from the roof of one of Camp Falcon’s dusty buildings in the dark early-morning hours, or in a scarce patch of shade during a rare moment of daylight downtime. His posts are sharply rendered parables and small, often powerful scenes built on details of the violent world around him. «I just kind of bookmark the things I see during the day so I can reflect on them later. There’s almost nothing about life here that isn’t interesting in some way.»
Thunder 6 is the oldest of eight siblings in a devout Catholic family. His dad is a computer technician, his mom a horticulture therapist. This former altar boy and longtime reservist left the touchy-feely psychology PhD program at UC Davis after September 11, grabbed an M16 rifle and a Beretta 9-mm sidearm and went all-infantry. Trained as an Army Ranger, he saw action in Kuwait and Bosnia and claims to have no yearning for his former scholarly life. «I was coasting through college,» he says, «and the Army spoke to honor and camaraderie and things I really believed in.»
While Bout’s blog is all about his emotional connection to the Army and very little about the daily bang-bang of Iraq, there are lots of milbloggers who will take you straight to the front lines, posting first-person accounts of the fighting and beating some newspaper reports of the same battle filed by embedded journalists. By the crude light of a small bulb and the backlit screen of his Dell laptop, Neil Prakash, a first lieutenant, posted some of the best descriptions of the fighting in Fallujah and Baquba last fall:
Terrorists in headwraps stood anywhere from 30 to 400 meters in front of my tank. They stopped, squared their shoulders at us just like in an old-fashioned duel, and fired RPGs at our tanks. So far there hadn’t been a single civilian in Task Force 2-2 sector. We had been free to light up the insurgents as we saw them. And because of that freedom, we were able to use the main gun with less restriction.
Prakash was awarded the Silver Star this year for saving his entire tank task force during an assault on insurgents in Iraq’s harrowing Sunni Triangle. He goes by the handle Red 6 and is author of Armor Geddon. For him, the poetry of warfare is in the sounds of exploding weapons and the chaos of battle.
«It’s mind-blowing what this stuff can do,» Prakash tells me by phone from Germany, where his unit moved after rotating out of Iraq earlier this year. One of his favorite sounds is that of an F16 fighter on a strafing run. «It’s like a cat in a blender ripping the sky open – if the sky was made out of a phone book.» He is from India, the land of Gandhi, but he loves to talk about blowing things up. «It’s just sick how badass a tank looks when it’s killing.»
Prakash is the son of two upstate New York dentists and has a degree in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins. He’s a naturalized American citizen, born near Bangalore, and he describes growing up in the US and his decision to join the military as something like Bend It Like Beckham meets The Terminator. He says he admired the Army’s discipline and loved the idea of driving a tank. He knew that if he didn’t join the Army, he might end up in medical school or some windowless office in a high tech company. With a bit of bluster, Prakash claims that for him, the latter would be more of a nightmare scenario than ending up in the line of fire of insurgents. «It was a choice between commanding the best bunch of guys in the world and being in a cubicle at Dell Computer in Bangalore right now helping people from Bum-fuck USA format their hard drives.»
It’s taken some adjustment, but Prakash says his parents basically support his Army career, although his father can’t conceal his anxiety about having a son in Iraq. Prakash says he blogs to assure the folks back home that he’s safe, to let his friends all over the world know what’s going on, and to juice up the morale in his unit. «The guys get really excited when I mention them.»
By the time Prakash left Iraq early this year, the readers of Armor Geddon extended far beyond family and friends. He still posts from his base in Germany and is slowly trying to complete a blog memoir of his and his fellow soldiers’ experiences in the battle for Fallujah.
The most widely read milbloggers engage in the 21st-century contact sport called punditry, and like their civilian counterparts, follow few rules of engagement. They mobilize sympathizers to ship body armor to reserve units in combat, raise funds for families of wounded soldiers, deliver shoes to barefoot Afghani kids, and even take aim at media big shots. It was milblogger pundits who helped bring down Eason Jordan, a senior executive at CNN who resigned earlier this year over remarks he made that US troops were targeting reporters in Iraq.
One important milblogger who weighed in on the Jordan affair is a secretive 20-year-career Army GI who goes by the handle Greyhawk. His blog, the Mudville Gazette, investigated the incident and concluded that Iraq-based reporters disputed Jordan’s claim. He’s unhappy that a more thorough news investigation wasn’t conducted. Other bloggers call Greyhawk «the father of us all» and credit him with coining the term milblogger shortly after he started Mudville in March 2003. In an email interview – Greyhawk wouldn’t agree to «voice-com» or a «face-to face» – he writes proudly of his lifetime pageviews, which recently exceeded 1.7 million (700,000 of those have come in 2005): «Mudville is far and away the largest, oldest, widest-read active-duty MilBlog in the World. It’s all in how you make the words line up and dance.»
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Then there’s Blackfive: «I’m just a guy with a blog and I know how to use it,» says this modest former Army intelligence officer and paratrooper who gives his real name only as Matt. He prefers the nom de guerre of his popular site. His peers voted Blackfive the best military blog in the 2004 Weblog Awards, beating out such contenders as Froggy Ruminations, The Mudville Gazette, 2Slick, and My War. Blackfive is a popular forum for analysis of the war and strident, argumentative warnings about media bias. It’s nearly as cluttered with ads as the Drudge Report, and the sales pitches mostly hawk «liberal-baiting merchandise.» There are pictures of attractive women holding high-powered weapons, dozens of links to conservative books and films, and even the occasional big spender like Amazon.com. Blackfive also sells his own T-shirts to benefit military charities.
He says that milblogging is the result of an explosion of communications technology throughout the military and an increase in brainpower among the lower ranks. «The educational level of sergeants and below is out of control.» Blackfive himself has degrees in archaeology and computer science and avidly follows the postings of fellow bloggers. He describes Neil Prakash as «borderline Einstein» and Danjel Bout as «a real rock star.» In his last deployment, Blackfive’s unit had two such brainiacs, a sergeant with an MBA and another with a master’s in economics from the University of Chicago.
Blackfive is retired now, honorably discharged and working as an IT executive for a big civilian company. He blogs from Chicago and confidently claims he can mobilize thousands of people and their wallets, all from a wireless hot spot at his local Starbucks. He stays in the shadows because he believes that his company would not approve of his blog or of his unabashed support for the US war.
The site has become a destination for thousands of information junkies and influential opinion makers. According to TruthLaidBear, which tracks blog traffic for advertisers, Blackfive is regularly in the top 100 blogs and averages 5,000 unique visits a day. During the height of the war, traffic to Blackfive spiked when some high-profile conservatives linked to the site.
«My brother followed a link from National Review to me, and somebody, I think it was Jonah Goldberg» – a somebody who is only the editor of National Review – «told him that four or five of the biggest think tanks read my blog every day.»
Goldberg confirms that at times he turns to military blogs to supplement and sometimes contradict information coming out of traditional media sources. «Blackfive was good, and in the blog world if you offer something unique, you make eyeballs sticky.»
Since World War I, the military has opened the letters soldiers sent back home from the battlefield and sometimes censored the dispatches of war correspondents. Now mail leaves the battlefield already open to the world. Anyone can publicly post a dispatch, and if the Pentagon reads these accounts at all, it’s at the same time as the rest of us. The new policy requiring milbloggers to register their sites does not apply to soldiers outside Iraq, but nearly all of the bloggers contacted for this article say that the current system of few restrictions can’t possibly last. Blackfive and Greyhawk wonder what the landscape will look like after the Pentagon finishes its review of global digital security. So far, the DOD is giving no hints.
Michael Cohen, a major and doctor with the 67th Combat Support Hospital based in Mosul, touched a nerve at the Pentagon late last year with his blog, 67cshdocs. Before he began posting, Cohen turned himself into a local private broadband provider in order to set up his own network outside the one provided to the field hospital. «Some of the docs suggested that life would be really good if we could get Internet into our nice trailers.»
Cohen bought his network setup online and had it shipped directly to him in Mosul. For the oversize satellite dish, he had to get creative. He ordered it from Bentley Walker, a satellite broadband service provider, and they sent it to his wife’s house in Germany. On a medical escort flight to Germany for a wounded soldier, Cohen persuaded the Air Force to let him hand-carry the dish onto a transport for the return trip. After about six weeks of agonized troubleshooting on a hot rooftop, the network was up and running. «We had pretty decent bandwidth,» he says, «2 meg downlink and 1 meg up. It was better than the hospital.»
Cohen says the system supported webcams linking people back home, its own instant messaging system, live gaming, and, he theorizes, a robust trade in porn. «If you were to make the series M*A*S*H about today’s Army, Radar would be an IT guy and he’d be more popular than Hawkeye.»
Then Cohen started to blog on his homegrown network. Originally it was an attempt to stay in touch with family and friends, but when a suicide bomber killed 22 people last December in a mess tent, Cohen began detailing how doctors dealt with the carnage. His moving account drew attention from worldwide press as well as parents desperate to know the fate of their loved ones:
The lab was running tests and doing a blood drive to collect more blood.?The pharmacy was preparing intravenous medications and drips like crazy. Radiology was shooting plain films and CT scans like nobody’s business.?We were washing out wounds, removing shrapnel, and casting fractures. We put in a bunch of chest tubes. Because of all the patients on suction machines and mechanical ventilators, the noise in the ICU was so loud everyone was screaming at each other just to communicate.
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Here are some of our statistics. They are really quite amazing: 91 total patients arrived.
18 were dead on arrival.
4 patients died of wounds shortly after arrival – all of these patients had non-survivable wounds.
Of the 69 remaining patients, 20 were transferred to military hospitals in other locations in Iraq.
This left 49 patients for us to treat and disposition.
Cohen posted mesmerizing details about the medical hardware and surgical procedures used to save lives on that bloody day. And then, without warning, it was over.
«My doctor boss came to me and said, hey, we need to talk. There are some people in the chain of command who believe there are things in your blog that violate Army regulations.» Cohen was shocked. He hadn’t used names or talked about military operations. But his impression was that the information he provided about medical capability in the field worried senior officers at Central Command. At first the Army asked Cohen to shut down his entire satellite network, which at its peak was serving 42 families, but ultimately decided against it.
«I think they didn’t want a hornet’s nest,» Cohen says. Instead, Cohen stopped blogging.
Back in Germany now, where he says he spends more time delivering the latest R&R babies than treating battlefield casualties, Cohen says that he was tempted to challenge the shutdown, but since he was close to going home anyway, he went along with the decision. The Pentagon will not comment specifically on Cohen’s situation except to reiterate its policy that blogs should not reveal any casualty information that could upset next of kin or any details that might jeopardize operational security.
Army reservist Jason Hartley’s popular and notoriously irreverent blog, Just Another Soldier, also provoked the higher-ups; last summer, his commanding officer ordered him to shut it down. Hartley wrote with a fuck-you swagger that may partly explain why he’s not blogging anymore:
Being a soldier is to live in a world of shit. From the pogues who cook my food and do my laundry to the Apache pilots and the Green Berets who do all the Hollywood stuff, our lives are in a constant state of suck.
Hartley got a lot of mileage out of a post about a soldier who was assembling a rifle blindfolded. Another soldier in his unit, as a joke, handed the assembler a certain piece of his anatomy instead of the tool he asked for.
«I told the story and asked the question, Who is more gay, the guy who touches a dick, or someone who allows a soldier to touch his dick?» This pressing infantry-level controversy hit a chord with ?logger and noted pundit-of-all-things-queer Andrew Sullivan. «Sullivan was kind and wrote that he liked my site,» Hartley recalls.
The Pentagon won’t say why, but it ordered Hartley to shut down his blog. He did for a while. Then he resumed blogging a few months later, without asking permission, and was busted for defying a direct order and demoted from sergeant to specialist. He chose not to file an appeal and has returned to civilian life, though he’s still in the reserves. His memoir about his time in Iraq will be published next month by HarperCollins.
If you read A Line in the Sand, it’s hard to imagine Chris Missick offending Pentagon brass. He is careful not to criticize his superiors and will tell you he has aspirations to run for Congress. While waiting for an early-morning plane to take him back home to southern California, Missick confesses that his biggest blog-related scandal is a romantic one. His stateside girlfriend when he left for Iraq was displaced by another woman, someone Missick says fell in love with him by reading his blog. «When I get home I kinda need to sort that out.» (He kinda did and now has yet another girlfriend. Let’s hope she likes Elliot Smith music.)
Prakash remains in Germany, awaiting orders to jump back into his beloved tank, which he calls Ol’ Blinky. He says he has no plans to resume his study of neuroscience, although it wasn’t completely useless in Iraq. «Neuroscience actually came in handy when I had to explain to my guys exactly why doing ecstasy in a tank when it’s 140 degrees out on a road that’s blowing up every day is a really bad idea.»
Danjel Bout, aka Thunder 6, is looking to get home safely, keeping his head down on the streets of southern Baghdad and in his blog. He says the real value of milblogging may be that it brings to the US the reality of what is becoming a long war. «I don’t purposely leave out the moments when our bodies hit the adrenal dump switch, I just don’t focus exclusively on them.» More typical are his vignettes of Iraqi civilians interacting with US soldiers, or the sad tale of the death of a guardsman who had the chance to go home and instead requested another tour of duty, only to be killed by an improvised explosive device.
«Americans are raised on a steady diet of action films and sound bites that slip from one supercharged scene to another,» he says, «leaving out all the confusing decisions and subtle details where most people actually spend their lives. While that makes for a great story, it doesn’t reveal anything of lasting value. For people to really understand our day-to-day experience here, they need more than the highlights reel. They need to see the world through our eyes for a few minutes.»
Which suggests, at the very least, that this UC Davis psych-major dropout turned milblogger was perhaps paying more attention in class than he lets on.?
John Hockenberry ([email protected]) is a Peabody Award-winning broadcast journalist who spent the last nine years at NBC News. He wrote about assistive technology in issue 9.08.
