My favorite new blogger My War—Fear and Loathing in Iraq has learned the price of fame:
I never even knew what a Blog was until I read about them in an article in Time Magazine, about two months ago. I read the article and it mentioned how a lot of the soldiers down in Baghdad were writing about their experiences here in Iraq. After reading the article, I went down to the Internet caf‚, and checked them out, and a majority of them were just pure garbage. In fact nauseating. Its like they were written by armed forces recruiters, “Oh I love the Army, I’m soo glad to be here, oh, the Iraqi’s love us, I feel like were doing the right thing” That kinda crap. Nobody was telling it like it is. So I said fuck it, I’m going to do one. I was at the point in my deployment where the letters from friends and family were getting fewer and far between, and I needed something to combat the extra time and loneliness that being on deployment hits you with when you’ve been here for awhile. So I though doing a blog might be a fun thing to do, help kill some time. And it worked, time started flying by once I stated this thing.
[…]
So today I’m walking back from chow, and my Plt Sgt is outside my door waiting for me and he said, The Col. wants to see you, hurry up and go shave, I’ll be back in 15 to take you down there. My heart sank. Shit. I know exactly what this one is about. Its like that feeling you get in high school when you’d fuck up, and they’d call your name over the loud speaker and tell you your presence was needed in the principles office, and you know the police are there in the principle’s office waiting for you.
As the man says, read the whole thing.
I hope his CO’s go easy on him and let him be what he is—a fresh, honest voice.
