It’s about the soldiers

Jan 31st, 2008 | By Steven Hodson | Category: The Social Web

It's about the soldiers One of the incredible things about blogging is the immediacy that the writers posts can bring to our daily shuffle through the good and bad things that happen to us all. Nowhere is this more evident that in the many blogs being written by the soldiers risking their lives everyday in Iraq. It doesn’t matter if you think the whole war on terrorism is right or wrong or if the government has screwed up so bad they should be impeached.

What does matter is that there are men and women who are going to work everyday not knowing if either they will live to see the end of the day or even make it back to their tents in one piece. Blogging has brought the reality of this to us all in ways that no reporter can or press conference from an air conditioned headquarters. Even so the military is scared to death of this blogging phenomena to point that they have threatened many times to shut it down all together or at the very least block access to places like YouTube or other such social networking sites.

So it was good to read the post on Raw Feed where a general in the Army has come out full force in favor of these milblogs as they are being called. As U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV wrote in a blog post:

First, we need to Encourage Soldiers to “tell/share their story”. Across America, there is a widely held perception that media coverage of the War in Iraq is overwhelmingly negative. We need to be careful to NOT blame the news media for this. The public has a voracious appetite for the sensational, the graphic and the shocking. We all have a difficult time taking our eyes off the train wreck in progress - it is human nature… [B]ut when it comes to their men and women in uniform, they also have a very strong desire to hear their personal stories. They want to know what it is like, what the Soldiers are experiencing, and how the Soldiers feel about their mission. That is why we must encourage our Soldiers to interact with the media, to get onto blogs and to send their YouTube videos to their friends and family. When our Soldiers tell/share their stories, it has an overwhelmingly positive effect.

I couldn’t agree more with the General. To this end I encourage all their fellow bloggers to checkout some of these milblogs and spread the stories around - even though they may not be tech related they are life related and we all need that in today’s world. Below is a list of some of the milblogs that I have checked out over time to get you started.

Milblogging.com - the premier milblogging site
Military Times - Tales from the Sandbox Blog
GlobalSecurity.org - a good directory of milblogs
BlackFive
One Marine’s View
Sgt. Hook
My War
Small War Journal

[tags]blogs, blogging, milblogs, wars, soldiers[/tags]