Milblogs

By Holly Willis

Many proclaim Michael Herr's Dispatches the preeminent portrait of the Vietnam War. Based on a 12-month stint in Vietnam between 1967 and 1968, and written in a vivid, impressionistic style that plunges readers immediately into the tumult of war, the book was not published until 1977, nearly a decade after Herr's trip, but its powerful voice, attention to detail and cinematic immersiveness made it the record of an era.

The corollary to Herr's masterpiece in the current war is the collective notion of the military blog, or milblog, written by dozens of men and women around the world who daily record their experiences with a similar urgency and intensity, but without the polish or novelistic breadth of their predecessor. A rough comparison between the two forms – between the carefully shaped creative nonfiction that drops readers into a 360-degree experience of Vietnam, and the multiple, quirky, cranky and often contradictory windows into the private lives of military that make up the dozens of military blogs – quickly sketches the contours of our own era, its technology, its wars and our own desires and needs as a culture.

Military blogs participate in a larger national DIY ethos fomented by easy-to-use Web-based tools that allow users with Internet access to quickly establish and maintain a Web presence. Initiated a decade ago, when Jorn Barger began posting accounts of things found online, blogs tapped into that decade's obsession with subjectivity and the desire to reckon with the quotidian as significant. Continued by posters as varied as Justin Hall, then an undergrad at Swarthmore who authored one of the first Web-based diaries, blogs accommodate a host of voices and agendas, from the personal to the political, from the erudite to the crazed. Most significantly, however, blogs take a DIY sensibility and apply it to writing as self-expression and as self-determination. Blogging becomes an assertion of being – and not being in exile as a solitary author but being as a process of participation within a distributed network of subjectivity.

For some military writers, blogs are an easy outlet for pent-up frustrations. Army Girl, whose identity remains unknown, began her blog in 2005 by writing about her need to express herself:

"So I've learned a lot the last couple of days about what a blog is... thanks to some indirect and direct help. An anonymous outlet and sublet for some venting, frustration, general information and talking to everyone and really no one. It's almost as simple as talking to yourself... out loud. People either hear you or they don't. People either read it or they don't. So if you read this… or not, makes no difference to me. It's just a way for me to express myself without having people stare me down."

For others, blogs allow participation in a more politicized agora. Another milblogger known as Neptunus Lex is a naval officer now based in San Diego who uses his blog as a venue for arch commentary on the foibles of those who just don't understand the military from the inside. One of the strongest assets on his blog is Rhythms, a lengthy description of life on an aircraft carrier that goes a long way toward giving readers with no experience of naval life an insider's glimpse. However, the real mandate for Lex is bridging the gap between the enclosed world of the military and its political decisions and those of us on the outside. Blogging for Lex combines personal revelation – often touching details about his wife and kids – with wry political commentary, and the ensuing portrait is of a man deeply connected to his family, strongly devoted to notions of honor and virtue, and dedicated to the desire to make the world a better place, often through debate.

While blogs constitute a chief form of identification, one of the dilemmas faced by milbloggers of course is the fact that their identity is tied up with that of the military and its need for secrecy and the maintenance of certain standards. This affects how bloggers write. Sean Dustman, a military medic who started his Doc in the Box blog in 2004, asks: "What am I allowed to tell you?" He continues, "One of the things about being a military blogger is that I have to be deliberately vague about what I'm writing about. I can tell stories but I usually leave out the names and exact times, sometimes places. I can't forecast to my readers what our plans as a unit are but I can tell you what my plans are as long as they aren't involving a mission."

Army Girl, too, wonders how to frame her experiences so that her posts fall within acceptable limits. "I'm currently torn between the dilemma of writing a true journal for all to read, or just a blog of random censored thoughts. I do not have the same freedoms as a great deal of you do... to include some of my fellow soldiers. I could add more personal info, and maybe tell all of my friends and loved ones about this site. But then, I don't think my original intention in starting this blog was to really be read."

Milbloggers lack the sense of distance Herr enjoyed by publishing his book so long after the events he wrote about. Blogging is immediate, and censorship, either by the military or through the blogger's own self-censorship, has some impact.

Perhaps one of the strongest differences dividing Dispatches and milblogs, however, is the sense of conversation that develops. Milbloggers participate in a network of other bloggers, and their posts are followed by sometimes dozens of comments as readers from all over the world respond, often with empathy, sometimes with encouragement, and on occasion to argue. Dispatches was published, with all that the book publishing process entails. It arrived with critical reviews and publicity and engendered a great deal of conversation, but that conversation was for the most part situated within an academic and literary community. In contrast, to read the blogs of milbloggers is to witness Americans in conversation.

Not insignificantly, milblogs also feed the suspicion that the press is not doing its job. Many readers turn to blogs to get a different, non-corporate perspective on the war, looking not just for the personal account but for an accurate, on-the-ground account. Colby Buzzell's blog CBFTW gained notoriety when his description of a particular battle differed from those offered by reporters, for example. In cases such as these, readers become aware of the interests that underlie all writing, and while books such as Dispatches and nearly 40 years of postmodern thought have left most of us dubious of a single truth, milblogs underscore that doubt in a powerful way.

After publishing Dispatches, Michael Herr went on to offer advice on the screenplays for Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Oliver Stone's Platoon, films that, like Dispatches, create full-on sensory depictions of war. Herr's vision was of another era, indeed of another century, and certainly of another representational form, that based on rich storytelling and images; milbloggers, in contrast, exist in an information society and act as nodes within sprawling networks. Ironically, they also document a technological war fought with the abundant assistance of screen-based tools. The Iraq War may end up onscreen as a big budget spectacle eventually. But the blog posts that together sketch its day-to-day events are the form most appropriate to a network age and its proliferation of screens and informational flows.

Holly Willis is an associate director at the University of Southern California's Institute for Multimedia Literacy.