Blogging in the news
A writer from the Wall Street Journal writes better and has more freedom to write than I do.
Army Blogger's TalesAttract Censors' Eyes
By CHRISTOPHER COOPER Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNALSeptember 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."
27 Comments:
Above, a letter to CB:
Rio de Janeiro, 11 de setembro de 2004.
Prezado "Colby Buzzell Fucking This War":
When you shoot down the entirely blog, I wrote to you saying "Sad, but well done". Despite without thousands of readers and fans, to writte freely without any kind of preoccupation about censorship, misunderstand and hated letters is a very good - and perhaps profitable - think. And, of course, to do an american soldier's job today in Iraq without being upset is also a very good think for one's health.
If the "War Street Journal" was correct, you are out of the batles. Well done to. Noboby needs to be an died heroe... And now, you republish the enterely blog. Great!
By reading your blog, you remember me Forest Gump. He is a morom, of course, in the first acception of the word, and you surely not, in the first and other acception, but he do have a very deep, intuitive and sharp intelligence. Then, dispite he has no pretension to led a message, he tells the people very simple thinks that people just doesn't is capable to understand, and, because of it, he becomes an national hero...
By telling the Internet world the day by day live of an american soldier in Mossul, you sure were doing a big hole in the information blockade of the occupation. By reading the blog with the brain, not the heart, one were able to figure that there are a very strong insurgency and uprising in Iraq. Your blog were just showing the war is lost for the US.
In the terrain, one doesn't just appear and disappear withou strongly support of the local population. And, as Guevara said, if the guerrilla express the very will of the people, and if the men has no fear to dead, the guerrilla will win, despite any handicap in weapons and tecnology.
If the FOB is mortared in a daily basis and the "mad" mortar-men moves freely from one place to another in order to avoid be pinpointed by the radar, and if the only think the soldiers, racing across the suburbs to find out them, is able to get is kids throwing rocks against them, how to avoid the growing daily rockets? And, then, one just sleeps under mortar atack... It is so simple. As we said in Brazil: "A ocupação foi para a casa do caralho".
As you know, Mosul is far from the epicentre of the insurgency. But, one day, a whole detachment of the resistance come properly uniformed, well trained and well armed, without any fear, and made a big ambush. If one cross this information with the well knew fact that the old divions Medina, Bagdah and Republica suddenyly disappeared in front of the yes of the US brasses, leaving nothing in the terrain, in the last days of the occupation war, what conclusion arise? Who are these guys? AlQaeda, as the brasses said? In uniform? LOL.
And who are the guy that raced against one Striker with only one AK in his hands? Why he is too angry to commited suicide? The obvious answer: the iraq people are totaly upseted with the occupation. And these people has lots and lots of old russian-made weapons and ammunition stockpiled since before the invasion. And the hardcord of the resistance have up-to-date russian-made weapons, sent to them by Iran and other muslim states, have full intelligence of the terrain, and knows very well how to fight a guerrilla war. Conclusion...
Then, the interview with one iraqi. In Brazil, one say "seria cômico se não fosse trágico". It shall be a comic think, but is a very tragical one. For sure, the guy were real... But this real guy were just faking the americans. "What about Abu Graib?" "Fine!". How to give some confidence to a "puxa saco" like him? When the invasion of Iraq were organizing, all the iraqi that were questioned by american intelligence about what will happen allways answered "You will be received with flowers!". But...
And the real nice woman that becomes a translator and latter desappears. Probably was the one that were shoot to dead two or three days ago, in the city's University. Very very sad. But, in a war against a foreign occupation, translators, dealers and other colaborators with the occupiers must be shoot to dead, despite they are fake or they are nice. French resistance kill thousands and thousands of French colaborators with the nazi. Then... As we said: "Puta merda!"
What a mess the very presence of the american troops is doing to Iraq. Your blog showed all of this. The fans obviously don't figure anything like that. They are in your blog just to got some entertainment: "Please, kill some Iraqis and tell us the felling." As a brazilian chanson said:
A platéia ainda aplaude,
Ainda pede bis.
A platéia só deseja
Ser feliz.
If the War is ravenous of the soldier's humanity. You didn't lossed yours and I'm sure you won't. This is the most important think.
Keep in "peace" and
Aquele Abraço!
Álvaro Frota
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Paz entre nós! Guerra aos senhores!
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Álvaro Frota is an troll who is not above using the suffering of others to advance his agenda.
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