Riding through the streets of Mosul, Iraq's second- largest city, in a United States military armoured vehicle, Colby Buzzell, a soldier in the Stryker Brigade Combat Team, turned to see a man dressed in black emerge from nowhere and point an AK-47 at him.

A few hours later, with his ears still ringing from the gunfire, Buzzell described the ambush on the anonymous blog he maintained from an internet cafe on the Fort Lewis military base.

"I heard and felt the bullets whiz literally inches from my head, hitting all around my hatch, making a 'Ping', 'Ping', 'Ping' sound ... AK-fire and multiple RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) were flying at us from every single f***ing direction. IEDs (improvised explosive devices) were being ignited ... I kind of lost it and was yelling and screaming ... I fired and fired and fired and fired and fired. At EVERYTHING."

While the event received little coverage in mainstream US media, army specialist Buzzell's account of the brutal firefight on a dusty Iraqi street caused a buzz through the blogosphere. His narration of this largely ignored battle captured a loyal audience for the soldier-turned-writer.

For the 10 weeks of its existence, the blog, entitled "My War", received up to 10,000 hits a day before catching the attention of his irate superior officers.

Written under the pseudonym CBFTW (Colby Buzzell F*** The War), Buzzell began his blog after reading a Los Angeles Times article about soldiers with online journals.

Though Buzzell had included a disclaimer on his blog to emphasise that the views expressed on the site were his own and separate from the army's official line, his superiors were frustrated by the soldier's writings.

Now home in San Francisco more than three years after his tour of duty in Iraq, 31-year-old Buzzell laughs at the suggestion that he is the "blogfather" of soldier blogs.

"There were a lot of people blogging before me," Buzzell said. "When I started blogging over there, the army flipped out. In other wars, they could control the letters home and the phone calls. But at the start of this war, my chain of command didn't even know what a blog was. When they found out what I was doing, they didn't know how to handle it."

Accused of "endangering operational security" - Buzzell had described weapon-loading procedures, how he had to climb outside the armoured vehicle in the midst of the shooting and detailed the American soldiers' lack of water - he was promptly confined to base and banned from going on patrol.

There is no doubt that the media attention given to soldier blogs like Buzzell's has affected the military's approach to soldiers and their use of the internet. In April 2007, the US Army issued a directive that ordered soldiers to stop sending emails or posting blog entries without first having all content cleared and approved by a superior officer.

Matthew Burden, a former major in military intelligence who served in Iraq with special operations between 1991 and 1993, created blackfive.net with the intent of filling the news gap "about what was really happening in Iraq and Afghanistan".