Soldiers blog through Iraq War

Accounts give new perspective of combat

Jonathan FinerWashington Post
Aug. 13, 2005 12:00 AM

BAGHDAD - No reporters were riding shotgun on the highway north of Baghdad when a roadside bomb sent Sgt. Elizabeth Le Bel's Humvee lurching into a concrete barrier. The Army released a three-sentence statement about the incident in which her driver, a fellow soldier, was killed. Most news stories that day noted it with just a few words.

A vivid account of the attack appeared on the Internet within hours of the Dec. 4 crash. Unable to sleep after arriving at the hospital, Le Bel hobbled to a computer and typed 1,000 words of what she called "my little war story" into her Web log, or blog, titled Life in This Girl's Army, at www.sgtlizzie.blogspot.com.

"I started to scream bloody murder, and one of the other females on the convoy came over, grabbed my hand and started to calm me down. She held onto me, allowing me to place my leg on her shoulder as it was hanging free," Le Bel wrote. "I thought that my face had been blown off, so I made the remark that I wouldn't be pretty again LOL. Of course the medics all rushed with reassurance which was quite amusing as I know what I look like now and I don't even want to think about what I looked like then.

"Since the 1850s, when a London Times reporter was sent to chronicle the Crimean War, journalists have generally provided the most immediate, firsthand depictions of major conflicts. In Iraq, service members are delivering real-time dispatches, often to an audience of thousands, through postings to their blogs."

I was able to jot a few lines in every day and it just grew from there," Le Bel, 24, of Haverhill, Mass., said in an e-mail. Her Web site has received about 45,000 hits since she started it a year ago.

At least 200 active-duty soldiers keep blogs. Only about a dozen blogs were in existence two years ago when the United States invaded Iraq, according to the Mudville Gazette, (http://www.mudvillegazette.com/), a clearinghouse of information on military blogging administered by an Army veteran who goes by the screen name Greyhawk.

Written in the casual, sometimes profane language of the barracks, blogs give readers an unfiltered perspective on combat largely unavailable elsewhere. Blogs also are drawing new scrutiny and regulation from commanders concerned they could compromise security

In April, Lt. Gen. John Vines, the top tactical commander in Iraq, published the military's first policy memorandum on Web sites maintained by soldiers, requiring that all blogs maintained by service members in Iraq be registered. The policy also barred bloggers from publishing classified information, revealing the names of service members killed or wounded before their families could be notified, and providing accounts of incidents still under investigation.

"We don't have a problem with most of what they write, but we don't want to give away the farm," said Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a military spokesman in Baghdad, who said such guidelines are nearly identical to those required of news organizations that cover the military.

Enforcement of the policy was left to the discretion of unit commanders. In late July, Arizona National Guard Spc. Leonard Clark became the first soldier found to have violated the new policy. He was fined $1,640 and demoted to private first-class for posting what the military said was classified material on his blog. His site since has been shut down, although much of the content has been posted elsewhere on the Internet. He did not return e-mail messages seeking comment.

His postings, which included long entries detailing attacks against American patrols and convoys, described his company's captain as "a glory seeker" and the battalion sergeant major as "an inhuman monster." In at least one entry, Clark, who has run for political office in Arizona several times and was expected to run for Senate in 2006, suggested that his fellow soldiers were becoming opposed to the U.S. mission in Iraq."

A growing number of men here are starting to wonder why we should continue to risk our lives for this whole mess when we know that the government will probably pull out of here," he wrote on April 11.

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