SkaroffBlog

Last night’s Daily Show featured the always interesting John Hockenberry, long time NPR correspondent and Dateline reporter who now writes for Wired magazine. He’s written an enlightening and disturbing article for this month’s Wired entitled The Blogs of War:

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:

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.

As Idaho National Guard corporal Michael Bautista so aptly sums up in the article, “What I’m doing and what my fellow bloggers are doing is groundbreaking.” Throughout the military, and even on the battlegrounds of Iraq, these milbloggers are changing the face of combat by posting on their thoughts, emotions, and stories while at war. While some bloggers write from military bases or even their homes after returning from the war, others have created impromptu support networks in Iraq to help soldiers on the ground quicker than the Pentagon can. Others organize shipments of body armor from the US. Still more sites narrate first person accounts of actual firefights, often before the mainstream media’s embedded reporters have even arrived on the scene. In some cases, such as Neil Prakash’s site Armor Geddon, the writing can become quite frank:

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.

While much of the network infrastructure supporting the explosion of Internet usage and instantaneous communication in the military was created by the Pentagon, some soldiers have gone so far as to create their own networks, trafficking in instant messaging, webcams, gaming, and of course, porn. Major Michel Cohen bought his own satellite dish for an ad hoc wireless network at the 67th Combat Support Hospital based in Mosul. He live blogged the aftermath of the December 2004 suicide bomb attack that killed 22 soldiers in a mess hall:

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.

Here are some of our statistics. They are really quite amazing: 91 total patients arrived.

18 were dead on arrival.

Cohen’s blog was shut down at the Army’s request after the incident due to security concerns. In fact, all the bloggers interviewed agree that the current era of unrestricted access and communication over the Internet in our nation’s military will most likely come to a close soon with the Department of Defense’s review of global digital security. Combined with the horrors of Abu Ghraib and the ensuing worldwide moral backlash against the US, the military will almost certainly make changes to the present open system. But in the meantime, these bloggers are forcing the military, the White House, and the American people to face the unvarnished reality of this long war. Go read the article and if you can, read the words of our soldiers in uniform.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 11th, 2005 at 11:28 am and is tagged as Blog, Blogostan, Iraq, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.