Soccer Dad

Milbloggers etc.

(via NRO's Media Blog) About two weeks ago The Washington Post featured an article on Milbloggers (Military Bloggers). When I read it I couldn't believe it. Here's how PostWatch neatly sums up the article:

What do you suppose the Post would focus on in a front-page story titled The New Ernie Pyles: Sgtlizzie and 67cshdocs by Jonathan Finer?

1. Milbloggers often complain that mainstream media is biased against the war and don't report on the good they're doing. This is their story...
2. Military officials earlier this year issued regulations on milblogs, and some have been shut down after reporting on casualties and antiwar sentiment among troops
3. Other blogs haven't been shut down. They report on the horror of war.
4. I know, let's run a sidebar featuring an Iraqi blogger with a "chilling 5,000-word posting" on being interrogated by U.S. forces.

PostWatch readers know they can skip "1" and run merrily along to 2,3 and 4.

Since the Washington Post won't give you a taste for other Milbloggers (though the article mentions the Mudville Gazette) I'd like to give you a taste of a couple that I follow (though not as consistently as I ought to.)

For one there's Firepower Forward. In "Something to chew on" he uses quotes from the Civil War classic, "Killer Angels" to frame his feelings as to why he's fighting by contrasting the cause of the Union to the evil nature of the Taliban that he is now fighting:

…This was the land where no man had to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become. This was the first place on earth where man mattered more than the state. True freedom had begun here and it would eventually spread over all the earth…

If freedom is the ability to choose your own destiny, then the recent history of this country that has been engaged in war and conflict longer than most of its citizens can remember, is truly the antithesis of freedom. Following a peaceful monarchy and a bloody subjugation by the Soviets, a new, more sublime method of enslavement manifested itself, a slavery of the worst kind. It is a slavery in which the chains that bind a person are the scriptures and sacredly held religious beliefs which have been perverted and used to exploit the most vulnerable, the ones whose physical condition has become so desperate that they feel the only tangible possession they have is the paradise that awaits them in the afterlife.

Going from eloquent to harrowing we leave Afghanistan and read of Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum's close encounter with an IED in "Simple Words and Power:"

Yesterday I finally came face to face with an IED. The soldiers…no men of Delta Company 1-184, and Rogue platoon recognized the threat. As we passed by the device, the driver became hyper aware, he saw what most of us did not, a glint of metal amongst the trash strewn road. As we passed by it, it lay there barely visible, yet it was the only thing I could see, it became what could have been our end. Life does not flash before your eyes when you come face to face with mortality, but a resignation that this could be the last moment, then sadness. Yet oddly, it didn’t take us. We cordoned off the area and kept the civilians away, spectators began to gather, and the danger became three dimensional. Moments before we passed our IED, another of our patrols was struck by an IED of similar design, there were no injuries, within moments of that report we seemed years away surrounded by onlookers, and trapped within our own cordon. The walls we had built to keep people away had also trapped us within.

I felt as if we were on a stage, and everyone from everywhere was looking at us. Demon 6, the on scene commander called up the report and help was on the way. Until then we were to wait literally on top of the weapon. Uncertain if the man who was to detonate it was amongst the on lookers, uncertain if an attack was to come at us. As the temperature rose so did the tension. Everyone was visibly on edge. We were each assigned sectors to scan for threats, yet the uneasy feeling that you were in someone’s sights was never far from our thoughts. It is that uneasy feeling you get when the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and your spine tingles because you know you are not alone. The urge leave had to be overcome; each man there knew his duty and his job. Yet, each and every one of us knew that innocent lives were on the line, it sounds cliché but as we looked at the crowds gathering, the people getting out of their cars, we knew that the real danger didn’t lie with the IED itself, the real danger was us… We were the bait, if we were blown up, the crowds could easily swell to hundreds of onlookers. There is an old Arab saying; “It is foolish to hunt a tiger when there are plenty of sheep to be had.” If we were blown up, our enemies know that the civilians would converge upon the scene providing a much more lucrative target.

I realize that the Post's article reported on real people and told no lies. I also realize that by focusing mostly on those milbloggers that share the reporter's apparent opposition to the war the article gave an impression that was as dishonest as a lie.
And of course the mainstream media has not just made soldiers against the war a focus of its coverage; now with Cindy Sheehan, relatives of soldier now have a voice - a special moral authority - in opposing the war.
But Ms. Sheehan doesn't speak for all military families. Ronald Griffin, for one, disagrees and he quotes other grieving relatives who feels as he does:

Although we all walk the same sad road of sorrow and agony, we walk it as individuals with all the refreshing uniqueness of our own thoughts shaped in large measure by the life and death of our own fallen hero. Over the past few days I have reached out to other parents and loved ones of fallen heroes in an attempt to find out their reactions to all the attention Mrs. Sheehan has attracted. What emerges from those conversations is an empathy for Mrs. Sheehan's suffering but a fundamental disagreement with her politics.
Ann and Dale Hampton lost their only child, Capt. Kimberly Hampton, on Jan. 2, 2004, while she was flying her Kiowa helicopter. She was a member of the 82nd Airborne and the company commander. She had already served in Afghanistan before being deployed to Iraq. Ann Hampton wrote, "My grief sometimes seems unbearable, but I cannot add the additional baggage of anger. Mrs. Sheehan has every right to protest . . . but I cannot do that. I would be protesting the very thing that Kimberly believed in and died for."

One of the side effects of the focus on Ms. Sheehan is the way writers use her grief to paint the president as an insensitive boor. But President Bush isn't avoiding Cindy Sheehan because he's insensitive to her pain; he's avoiding her because she is trying to use him to highlight her cause.
If he were to meet with her (as he once did) it would be a private matter, not for the media as a story that Jack's Shack links to tells us:

Privately, Bush has met with about 900 family members of some 270 soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The conversations are closed to the press, and Bush does not like to talk about what goes on in these grieving sessions, though there have been hints. An hour after he met with the families at Fort Bragg in June, he gave a hard-line speech on national TV. When he mentioned the sacrifice of military families, his lips visibly quivered."

For the president meeting with grieving military family members isn't a publicity stunt; it is a dignified private audience. Those who disparage him for not meeting with Cindy Sheehan disparage his sensitivity.

Posted by SoccerDad at August 24, 2005 12:11 AM