BLOG, AND GET BUSTED

Army spe­cial­ist Colby Buzzell mans a gun in a Stryker brigade in Mosul. He also keeps a blog, “My War.” And the com­bi­na­tion of these two activ­i­ties is get­ting Spc. Buzell in a whole heap of trou­ble.
The Wall Street Journal calls the blog “a mix­ture of grip­ping accounts of caffeine-​​driven bat­tle maneu­vers and amus­ing vignettes from the dusty grind of life in Iraq’s third-​​largest city.” The L.A. Times recently fea­tured the site on its front page.
“But Spc. Buzzell’s writ­ing aspi­ra­tions may prove his undo­ing as a pro­fes­sional sol­dier,” the Journal reports.

Recently, shortly after his com­man­ders dis­cov­ered My War on the Web, Spc. Buzzell found him­self banned from patrols and con­fined to base. His com­man­ders say Spc. Buzzell may have breached oper­a­tional secu­rity with his writ­ings. “My War” went idle as he pon­dered the con­se­quences of pur­su­ing his craft while slog­ging through five nights of radio guard duty, a list­less detail for an infantry­man. More recently, the pages again went blank, as he chafed under a pre­pub­li­ca­tion vet­ting regime imposed by his com­mand.
Such pre­pub­li­ca­tion cen­sor­ship is rare in the mod­ern mil­i­tary: Soldiers’ mis­sives haven’t been rou­tinely expur­gated since World War II and the days of “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” The Pentagon doesn’t pre­screen sol­diers’ com­mu­ni­ca­tions, whether print or elec­tronic, assign­ing the job of polic­ing soldier-​​journalists to com­man­ders in the field. There are restric­tions against divulging ref­er­ences to spe­cific troop loca­tions, patrol sched­ules or any­thing that might help the enemy pre­dict how U.S. troops might react to an attack. But com­man­ders in Iraq rely on the honor sys­tem and sol­diers’ com­mon sense to enforce restric­tions. Infractions are in the eye of the beholder, dif­fi­cult to define but easy to rec­og­nize in prac­tice…
The blog entry at the root of Spc. Buzzell’s dif­fi­cul­ties was an Aug. 4 piece called “Men in Black.” Opening with a bland, four-​​paragraph squib about a Mosul fire­fight that he snatched from CNN’s Web site, Spc. Buzzell spins a riv­et­ing account of a nasty, hours-​​long fire­fight with scores of black-​​clad snipers. It begins with an enemy mor­tar attack and a testosterone-​​driven scram­ble to arms. “People were hoot­ing and hol­ler­ing, yelling their war cries and doing the Indian yell thing as they drove off and locked and loaded their weapons,” he writes. He describes a har­row­ing ambush. “Bullets were ping­ing off our armor all over our vehi­cle, and you could hear mul­ti­ple RPG’s [rocket-​​propelled grenades] being fired and fly­ing through the air and impact­ing all around us,” he writes. “I’ve never felt fear like this. I was like, this is it, I’m going to die.“
Spc. Buzzell’s account caught the atten­tion of the News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., the news­pa­per that cov­ers Spc. Buzzell’s home base of Fort Lewis. Noting that the attack got scant cov­er­age by big­ger media, the local paper drew heav­ily from Spc. Buzzell’s anony­mous account. The Pentagon’s inter­nal clip ser­vice picked up the News Tribune story and it landed in the hands of com­man­ders in Iraq.
Within hours, Lt. Col. Buck James, the bat­tal­ion com­man­der, ordered Spc. Buzzell to his office. Spc. Buzzell quickly shaved and grabbed fresh fatigues to see the colonel he had never met. As he later recounted on his blog, he arrived to find Col. James leaf­ing through a mas­sive print­out of his Web writ­ings, which some­one had marked up with a yel­low pen. The colonel, whom Spc. Buzzell described as a cross between George Patton and Vince Lombardi, opened with a ques­tion: ” ‘Youre [sic] a big Hunter S Thompson Fan, arnt [sic] you?’”
Spc. Buzzell says he was called to account for two details: the obser­va­tion that his unit ran low on water dur­ing the hours-​​long stand­off and a descrip­tion of the steps he took to get more ammu­ni­tion as the fire­fight waxed on. Both were excised from his online archives.
In an e-​​mail exchange, Col. James says the Army was con­cerned about a pos­si­ble secu­rity breach on Spc. Buzzell’s blog, but had no desire to muz­zle him. “I coun­seled SPC Buzzell along with his Platoon Sergeant on these points and ensured that he under­stood that any­thing he was unsure about should be reviewed by his chain of com­mand,” Col. James says. Spc. Buzzell has “per­formed gal­lantly” as a sol­dier, he says.

THERE’S MORE: “I am offi­cially no longer writ­ing about any of my per­sonal expe­ri­ences here in Iraq on this web­site,” Spc. Buzzell just posted.

September 10th, 2004 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.