KEY POINTS:
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".
Burden, 40, believes the army's move towards blanket censorship was too heavy-handed and will ultimately result in stifling "true" stories about the war. The assumption that soldiers do not already omit sensitive material from their online postings is naive: "No soldier wants their buddies killed because of something they wrote," Burden said.
Either way, freedom of speech for future soldier blogs looks rather grim.
"I think the writing is on the wall," Burden said. "You can blog about the fantastic meatball sandwich you ate in the mess hall, but you can't describe some of the more kinetic stories due to Operational Security concerns."
However, the difference between the beginning of the war in Iraq, when bloggers like Buzzell and others could document the war from on the ground, and now, when few commanding officers are willing to approve "edgier" soldier blogs for fear of breaching security, is significant.
Burden began his blackfive.net in mid-2003, initially as a tribute to a friend killed in action in Iraq. A shared frustration amongst Burden and other former soldiers about mainstream coverage of the war made blackfive.net expand beyond the personal narrative or diary forms favoured by the majority of bloggers and incorporate some elements of a standard news website.
Based in Chicago, blackfive.net decries the lack of attention given to particular successes in Iraq and in the "war on terror" in general. The US military's presence in Afghanistan and lesser-known operations against Al-Qaeda forces, such as in the southern Philippines, has become a minor element of the greater mainstream news cycle - a phenomenon Burden is determined to change. "My intent is eventually to have [soldier bloggers] treated like official journalists," he said.
"I think that every unit should have a blogger as a historical reference for their activities during their tour."
Since his return from Iraq, Buzzell has moved on to writing for Esquire magazine, covering issues as diverse as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and medical marijuana to the rapid rise of industrial cities in China.
However, the transition from soldier writer to civilian journalist has not been without difficulty, both personally and professionally. "It was easier to write when I was in Iraq - I never had to deal with writer's block," Buzzell said.
This is not the only side of returning from war Buzzell has found difficult - he has continued to document his struggles with PTSD and alcohol abuse in his own writing: "The [PTSD] comes and goes ... I don't think drugs and alcohol will fix it. I don't think talking to someone will fix it. I don't really think anything will fix it." Buzzell features in an Oscar-nominated documentary Operation Homecoming which fuses the function of memory in war writing and the trauma of conflict.
All soldiers-turned-writers in the documentary agree on one thing - that war is literally hell on earth - and that this hell is a nearly impossible place to describe. Joe Haldeman, a science fiction author and professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, appears in the film alongside other Vietnam veterans (including Tim O'Brien and Tobias Wolff) who have become some of America's most important literary voices. Haldeman recognises the importance of soldiers writing about their experience. "When I was in Vietnam," Haldeman said, "I would write a letter home every day, but there were certain things I could not tell my wife. Those things, I sent to someone else."
The soldier blog, Haldeman said, offered not only a view into the lives of soldiers, but also allowed an "essential" expression of the war experience - an expression now muted by the US Army's new codes of censorship.
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
The fight against the censorship of soldiers' blogs has aligned some unlikely allies. General David Petraeus, in charge of all US forces in Iraq and last year named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential leaders , has thrown his support behind military bloggers.
General Petraeus sent a message from his post in Baghdad to the assembled bloggers at the 2nd Annual Military Blog Conference held last year, thanking "the bloggers who have worked to provide accurate descriptions of the situation on the ground here in Iraq and elsewhere".
He also recognised the new means in which information is delivered from the battlefield to the civilian world. "Milbloggers (military bloggers) have become increasingly important, of course, given the enormous growth in individuals who get their news online in the virtual world instead of through newspapers and television." Petraeus added his appreciation to bloggers "for (blogging) in ways that do not violate legitimate operational security guidelines". Despite pushing for the freedom of speech, the sharing of sensitive material continues to be the US Army's primary concern.
Across the political divide, noted Iraq War critic Senator Ted Kennedy has also voiced opposition to the screening of soldier blogs by Army officials. After the military's screening regulations on email communication, Senator Kennedy sent a letter to the acting secretary of the US Army, Peter Geren, asking him to reconsider the army's position on military blogs. Kennedy worries that restrictions on blogging will cause even further disconnection between the American public and the troops serving abroad. "Soldiers, their families, and the public who read blogs and use other public forums will lose valuable insights into the lives of our soldiers if the policy continues to be enforced," he wrote. "This loss is particularly troubling, since it comes at a time when there is a deep need for Americans to connect with their soldiers."
As shown by the support from Senator Kennedy and General Petraeus for soldier blogs, the argument against censorship of them is based on two main factors - that soldiers have unique truths about the war experience and that blogs connect the American people to their armed forces. Furthermore, say ex-soldiers such as Colby Buzzell, the popular media's sanitisation of the war in Iraq is frustrating for active soldiers and veterans alike, whether liberal or conservative. In a blog entry from Iraq, Buzzell pointed out the stark difference between soldier blogs about the war and the way events are portrayed by major media outlets such as CNN. "A car bomb went off in Iraq, 30 dead, 100 injured, two soldiers killed, three wounded. That's it. A little small blurb, you know, AP-style journalism," Buzzell wrote. "We become desensitised ... "But when you read the blog of a soldier that's over there and he's writing about his fears, his concerns, his hopes and what he's going through, then it's like the war becomes real to the reader."
