Blogs link families with children at war

Carla Lois started an online diary - a weblog - just before the army sent her son Noah to Iraq in January 2005.

Eight months later, it paid off in a way she must always have prayed it would not, when she posted a terse item headlined: "My Son Has Been Injured."

Noah had a serious spinal injury, she told her readers, and she asked them to pray for him.

Within hours, 200 emails had flooded in offering prayers, comfort, support - and news.

Someone who read Carla's blog had got word to a nurse at Noah's hospital in Balad, Iraq.

"He emailed me and said: 'I've seen your son. His injuries are not life-threatening.'"

The blogosphere - as the online community of bloggers is known - had passed information to Carla literally days before she got official reassurance from the army that Noah's wound was not as bad as she was initially told.

Carla, who blogs as Some Soldier's Mom, was one of about 150 people who attended a conference of military bloggers, or milbloggers, in Washington DC in late April. (At least five times as many participated online, the conference organiser said.)

Over the course of a day of discussions taking place both in person and online - and, naturally, among a panel of official conference bloggers - participants wrestled with questions about how to blog without violating military security, how much leeway the military should give to bloggers, and how milbloggers could help influence - or force - the mainstream media to cover the war in Iraq better.

Retired Col Austin Bay delivered a keynote address in which he argued that milblogging was already having a impact.

"Milbloggers have made a difference - at least to their families and to the military community.

"This conference is about the military community, the families that comprise it and the people it serves."

Many people at the conference had known each other via the internet for years, but had never met in person before.

"It's like picking up a conversation with old friends, but I'd never seen them before," said Scott Koenig, who, as Smash of the Indepundit, was among the first milbloggers to gain wide readership.

He was blogging even before he was posted to Kuwait as a naval reserve officer at the end of 2002.

He was keen to keep it up, he said, because he was addicted - but there was another reason as well.

When he shipped out, his father said: "Son, you have to post every day. Your mother worries if you don't."

Mr Koenig was not sure he would have the time, or even the technology, to keep his blog updated that frequently, and he told his father so.

His father - himself a former military man - had a simple answer: "Son, you have to post every day."

She never expected to become a blogger, but, she said, she needed some way to deal with her son's departure for Iraq.

"Nothing prepared me for sending my son off to war. It's not covered in Dr Spock," she said, referring to the canonical child-rearing text for American parents.

"When he left, I stayed in bed for two weeks," she said, flipping from one TV channel to another for news about the war.

She was not satified with what she found, and resolved to put up her own website aimed at people who had family members serving in Iraq.

But she quickly realised it would be frustrating to have to contact a webmaster every time she wanted to update the site.

"I put the blogging software on... and I became a blogger," she said, the tone of evident surprise in her voice drawing laughter from the crowd.

Several milbloggers said they had started blogging at least partly as therapy, but Deb Conrad emphasises her desire to help others.

"I keep my name and phone number on my blog. If someone is up at two in the morning and wants someone to talk to, I want them to have someone to call," she said.

Carla Lois, too, says she hopes other people in her situation will learn from her blog.

"I try to post advice - things I've learned that the army doesn't tell you and life doesn't prepare you for."

But she says it is also important to educate people whose children are not in the military.

"It's like a mental asthma attack 24 hours a day when you have a child at war. You gasp," she says.

"I write about the experience because I want people to understand the war is not just 'over there'."

Milbloggers With Attitude

Bloggers can be a critical bunch. When they don't like what they see or hear in the world around them, they let everyone within click range of their piece of the Web know it. And when they get together at a blog conference, then the rhetoric can really get harsh.

That's what happened Saturday at the first annual Milblog Conference in Washington. About 200 soldiers, veterans, family members and assorted others who gathered to celebrate the military blogging community spent much of their time chastising the media, denouncing peace activists and lamenting the military's lukewarm response to the blogosphere.

The panelists and attendees directed their firepower first and foremost at the media. Novelist and military commentator Austin Bay set the stage as master of ceremonies. He said the nonstop television news cycle "does to war, natural disaster, crime and celebrity trials what pornography does to sex," adding that the milblog community exists "to get the story [of war] right."

The gripes against the "mainstream media" amplified from there:

-- Matt, who left the military in 2001 and now blogs at Blackfive, blasted Newsweek for not telling the story of a friend killed in combat -- an episode that moved him to start blogging.
-- Author and panel moderator Robert (Buzz) Patterson ranked the media among a "fifth column" in America that aids and abets terrorist enemies.
-- Steve Schippert of ThreatsWatch reached into the past to condemn Walter Cronkite for what Schippert called biased reporting about the Tet Offensive. He said such reporting turned people against the Vietnam War but argued that it "can never, ever happen again -- not ever -- because of milbloggers."
-- Chuck Ziegenfuss, who was injured in Iraq last year and blogs at From My Position ... On The Way, mistrusts journalists so much that he regularly searches the Internet for their articles before granting interviews. "You kind of have to control them as much as they're trying to control you," he said.

The subject even arose in the mid-morning panel discussion dubbed "Milblogging Family Style." "We can't have a milblog conference without mainstream media discussions," said Andi, an Army wife and organizer of the event who blogs at Andi's World.

Carla of Some Soldier's Mom displayed a recent copy of her local newspaper, The Daily Courier in Arizona, and complained that it contained "not one word" about U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. "And then they wonder why there are milblogs and why we need additional sources of information," she said.

The criticism was not limited to the conference room at the Academy for Educational Development, either. Milbloggers unable to attend the event took their jabs at the media in a Web chat that was projected onto a screen throughout the conference.

As disgusted with the media as milbloggers are -- one said reporters are "stigmatized" in the eyes of many military people and called them "the enemy" -- they were even more hostile toward anti-war protestors. They are known as "moonbats" in milblog parlance.

At least twice, panelists called attention to "Concrete Bob," an active member of Free Republic who was in the audience. He played a key role early this year in forcing the group Code Pink Women for Peace to relocate its protests outside Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

The protests prompted the milblog community to swarm both virtually and physically. Concrete Bob received a rousing round of applause when Andi praised him for "kicking Code Pink to the curb".

"The people who are in that hospital are not the policymakers," said Ziegenfuss, who spent time at Walter Reed recovering from his injuries. "They are the policy enforcers. ... There's a time and a place for everything, and outside a hospital is not the place."

The milbloggers' rap against the Pentagon was more respectful and subdued but no less assertive. They think the military brass are blowing it big time when it comes to the blogosphere, both by failing to embrace bloggers and by pondering potentially onerous rules for blogging by soldiers.

The military certainly has taken note of the blogosphere. At least one official from U.S. Central Command, for instance, attended the conference. That is just one example of attempts at blog outreach that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld mentioned in a February speech.

The Defense Department research wing that created the Internet also is looking to cull information from foreign-language blogs. And just last week, the department's press service announced that the Defense Science Board this summer will study the military impact of blogs.

But bloggers see room for improvement. John Donovan of Argghhh, a milblogger at the event, said in an interview that the Pentagon right now is just sending "obvious pieces of recruiting propaganda" that milbloggers are rejecting. "They're frankly clumsy about it because they still don't understand blogs," he said.

Bill Roggio of The Counterterrorism Blog and The Fourth Rail offered this message to the Pentagon public affairs team: "Accept us like you accept the media. ... Allow your people to talk. The risk you take with [operational security] is miniscule compared with the benefits you can get from engaging the milbloggers."

Engaging them is only half the equation, though; the other half is not quashing them. Panelists repeatedly urged milbloggers to remember one key principle before posting content to a blog: that their words can be read by enemies like al-Qaida terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. That means milbloggers need to write responsibly.

Missteps may well come, the panelists said, but the military should not respond by regulating blogs. "If the Army restricts bloggers," said Matt of Blackfive, "all you will have are ... dissident bloggers who are willing to take a risk."

John Noonan of OPFOR offered another idea instead: "We will help you and do it in a less abrasive way."

Military bloggers speak out against more restrictions
Speakers at conference say self-regulation can maintain security

By Leo Shane III, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Monday, April 24, 2006

WASHINGTON — Overregulation of military weblogs by the defense officials will not only demoralize troops but also silence many of the military’s strongest advocates, a panel of leading bloggers said Saturday.

“There’s a growing gap between people who have no contact with the military and people who have contact every day,” said Scott Koenig, better known as the blogger L.T. Smash. “And one thing we can do (to counter that) is tell our story, and tell it effectively, and tell it intelligently.”

But the blogging experts also warned that servicemembers and military families who use weblogs must be vigilant in what they post, because carelessness could easily enrage military leaders and possibly risk lives.

The comments came at the first military blogger conference, designed to highlight the online writings of servicemembers and their supporters, and to look ahead at the challenges facing the growing format.

More than 150 bloggers and blog readers attended the event, and dozens more participated in the activities through a collection of virtual conference links.

The bloggers who spoke at the conference — most of whom have been online for several years — said that operational security is usually at the heart of command concerns over troops’ Internet usage.

Sgt. 1st Class C.J. Grisham, who served in the 3rd Infantry Division during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, ran his online blog, A Soldier’s Perspective, for 18 months until earlier this month. He said his site received hits from all over the world, including from many Middle Eastern groups he suspects were looking for tactical information.

Koenig, who began his blog while stationed in Kuwait as a Naval Reservist, said he has seen only a few cases where problematic material has been posted online, but even a single careless post could be invaluable to those working against U.S. forces.

“We all worry about that,” he said.

Still, the bloggers who spoke Saturday believed that self-regulation by the blogging community and attentiveness among military writers is the best solution, as opposed to more military regulation.

Last week, Pentagon officials announced the Defense Science Board, a 40-member body that advises the Pentagon on technical and other matters, will study a host of online tools, including blogs, to determine the challenges they present to military readiness and morale.

In addition, in the last year each of the four services has also issued its own directive on troops’ posting pictures and stories online.

Airman John Noonan, who recently helped launch the blog www.op-for.com, admitted that for now the site is more of a hobby than a career, and if the Air Force told him to stop his online activities he would. But he hopes the military doesn’t take that adversarial approach to the bloggers.

“These are people standing up, trying to win the war at home,” he said.

More information on the conference is available at www.militarywebcom.org/MilBlogConference.

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