Published Milblogs

There’s a flood of War Memoirs coming out of Iraq over the next few weeks and NPR’s Talk of the Nation did an audio story with guests, Colby Buzzell of the blog, My War and book My War: Killing Time in Iraq (rank # 2703 at Amazon) and Nate Fick, Author of One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer (rank #364 at Amazon).

Another blogger whom I know personally is also coming out with a book. I met Jason Hartley the author of the blog called Just Another Soldier and the book that goes by the same name (#12,306 at Amazon, I'll be reading his before any of the others). We passed through the processing plant of Udairi Kuwait in March of 2004 at the same time. Before we even knew we were within a mile of each other he has already published a picture on his blog of me. I’m in the 6th picture from the bottom, the guy with the backpack and 9mm strapped to his leg. Jason’s blog was shut down right before we met and he was sending his posts out by email, eventually his commander found out about there and things went bad. Me unlike him, I had support for my fotopage and blog from my command, my pictures were cleared by the base PAO and I had a couple thousand or so hits a day on my fotopage just from family members who actually knew me.

I’ve never had any trouble with my blog from official channels but my story wasn’t very raw and you would have better luck with a crystal ball then getting OPSEC out of me. Most of my stories were very close and personal or very far away and out of my realm of influence, ponderings and such.

I’ve been asked by other parties about writing a book about my experiences but to claim that I did many things that were earth shattering and interesting would be a lie and the interesting things that I did do had lots of dead folk around, "Where's the fun in that?"

Some day I’ll dig down and raise those demons and maybe on that day I’ll start putting together my experiences into a book. But for now I am merely a blogger who has a couple of readers and compared to the quality of some of the other milblogs out there, still think I’m a lousy writer.

Just enjoy putting my thoughts down, maybe tell of what might be interesting that day, making me happy or ranting about something. Here and there I’ll throw my support behind some cause (such as Soldiers Angels or the movie Serenity) I believe in. Mostly this is a release of what's going on behind my eyes, my lack of blogging lately is probably due to the lack of emotional build up and I'm sure everyone out there is tired of stories of how much I love my wife. I’m not in this for money or for popularity, I just like the idea of being able to throw my unique voice out there in the wind and see what kind of response I get back. Thanks for reading.