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thedrifter
10-26-06, 11:52 PM
Bloggers' take on military life

By Spencer Watson, Staff Writer

Most people have in their minds a romantic ideal of wars a generation ago, a time when young men on the front lines of combat half a world away would write wistful missives to family back home, handwritten letters that would take weeks or even months to arrive - censored or otherwise by military personnel wary of letting too much information get out.

But in the digital age of instant messaging, e-mail and other Internet communications, the old ways have given way to a new breed of unfiltered front-line communications, as Maumelle's own Rachelle Jones discovered during her husband's deployment to Iraq.

The world of information and telecommunications that Jones found was that of the military Web logs, or "milbogs." On independent Web sites, soldiers, their families, friends and colleagues would post stories or experiences of news or just musings in an attempt to share thoughts and feelings with those they love.

"Most of these blogs were written for family," says Jones, a mother of two her began her own blog, ArmyWifeToddlerMom, when her husband Richard returned from his deployment. "When I started mine, I had 10 readers."

She doesn't edit her posts for grammar or spelling and she doesn't censor her language either, but that hasn't impacted her popularity. And her view count has grown to more than 100,000 since her first post on March 7, 2005, and so involved has she become in the milblog community that she now writes for *************'s official spouse blog, spousebuzz, and an excerpt from her blog appears in a new book on milblogs, "The Blog of War" by former special operations officer turned Internet technology executive Matthew Currier Burden (or "Blackfive" as he's known in the milblogosphere).

This week, Jones was in Texas at Fort Hood participating in a spouse expo panel discussion on milblogs. She also took part in the first mibloggers conference held in Washington in April of this year, a site at which the state of the new communications medium and its future were the topic of much discussion.

The reason for the discussion is operational security, or op-sec, which is a constant worry of not only soldiers in the field but their superiors back home, who preach to soldiers that Web posting from the front line should be written with the knowledge that anyone — their mother, or their commanding officer, or Osama Bin Laden — could be reading it.

As a diarist writing about her day-today experiences following her husband's return, Jones' ability to compromise op-sec may seem relatively minimal — but nonetheless, it is foremost on her mind and the mind of every other milblogger when they write their posts, she said.

"You have to be careful what you talk about," she said. "And most bloggers know that."

But the Department of Defense is mindful of mibloggers, too, and some worry that changing rules of Internet communication from soldiers thanks to that department's mandates may be endangering the budding communications mechanism.

Jones says she stumbled on the world of milblogs in an attempt to get information of her husband's unit, which was in the area of Taji, Iraq. She found the blog of a private contractor working in the area and read it — and later other military blogs — for news.

"The whole time he was deployed … I didn't watch the TV news. I didn't want the kids picking up on it," she said, relating how she'd do her searching from 10 p.m. to midnight, after the youngsters were put to bed.

She read news not from journalists or pundits, but soldiers and civilians actually in the field who wrote not to entertain or push political agendas, but merely to share their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, be they harrowing firefights, mundane monotony, tales of dozens of soldiers and volunteers pulling together to save one life, or the shared, cathartic release of mourning a friend lost in the line of duty.

"I don't think it's hyper-patriotic ranting or anything like that. Most people just feel they really need to do this for their families," Jones said. "It's not journalism and it's not meant to be. It's just an account of what happened to you.

"It comes to a point where everyone wants everyone safe and everyone wants everyone home. It's not political when you're getting shot at," she added.

Burden's book is packed with such stories, both tragic and inspiring. Most of them were never published in a newspaper or seen on TV. As Burden relates in the introduction to "Blog of War," his blog, Blackfive, was started to tell the story of his friend Maj. Mat Schram, who died breaking up a supply line ambush in 2003.

"That wasn't news," writes Burden.

But the unfettered accounts in Burden's book and those that connected Jones to an active online community of soldiers and their families may be an unrepeated historical anomaly. As recently reported in the Boston Herald and elsewhere, increasing military efforts to monitor official and unofficial Web sites for potential security violations, including a new 10-man Guard unit based in Virginia dedicated to that purpose, has some worried that the on-the-ground stories published by soldiers, at a time when embedded reporters affiliated with traditional media outlets has dropped significantly (down to a total of nine now compared to more than 700 at the outset of the Iraq invasion), will dry up.

On his blog, Burden recently addressed this very fear.

"As a former Intel Officer, I agree that there's a need to make sure that blogs aren't violating OPSEC…. However, the watchdog should also realize that coming down on bloggers for some (perceived) OPSEC violations might be a bit ridiculous" he writes.

The worry from the blogging community, as expressed on Blackfive, is that losing these stories hinders the media war that the country is fighting against the journalists, or more directly, the propagandists on the other side. To shut down first-hand stories from the trenches is to further alienate a public already turning its back on the war, they argue.

Jones, herself, argues that op-sec is always a directive, but notes that the blogging community has developed its own support network that has done immense good. She points to organizations like Soldiers' Angels, a worldwide nonprofit that grew out of the blogging community and has raised money, goods and services to donate to soldiers in theater and those wounded and sent home.

And then there is also the "therapy" blogging itself provides. With her her closest family 12 hours away and raising young kids alone, Jones said she didn't have time to blog while her husband was away and she bottled up her feelings like jugs of water that eventually wore her down.

"The blog was one place where I could let go of those gallons of water for a little bit," she said. "I wouldn't recommend anyone try to do what I did, to go it alone…. So if there's one person out there that reads [my posts] and finds the help they need, then it's worth it."

Ellie