I wanted to wish my Mom and my wife and all the Mothers reading this post a Happy Mother's Day.
I decided to post a recent photo of myself for my Mom. That’s me on the far right. Her "little noble". Yup, that's what she called me growing up as a kid.
Since it is Mother's Day, I have to say, don't believe that baloney about quality time, flowers and gifts on Mother's Day. My Mom's "little noble" (that's me) used to go all out by scribbling with Crayon on paper bags and I'd tell her it was a Mother's Day card. I know what you’re probably all thinking: “Ahhhhhhhh, what an amazing son! Why can’t mine be as thoughtful?”
Yeah, I know. And to top it off, I was 23 years old at the time and living at home. I mean what more could a Mother ask for?
So, uh, all you Moms out there eat your hearts out on this Mother's Day!
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The NEA will host 25 writing workshops across the country this year, including several at veterans centers for the first time, according to program directors. Nationally acclaimed writers such as Jeff Shaara, Andrew Carroll, Tobias Wolff and Marilyn Nelson will lead the monthlong workshops.
The program, now in its fourth year, is linked to the Endowment’s open call for essays, poems and short stories about life in combat. Officials said they’ve received more than 1,200 submissions since 2004, about 100 of which were featured in a nonfiction anthology two years ago.
Read the entire story here.
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(Stars and Stripes) Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Minor has watched friends die on combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the teenage translator killed by a grenade tossed into a Kirkuk street. Minor gave his Purple Heart to her family.
He was a college student in Ohio until recently, when he decided to return to Iraq, he said, so that a new father in his Reserve unit wouldn’t have to go.
“I’d take a dozen of him for 20 of my soldiers,” said Sgt. 1st Class John Pumma, Minor’s former first sergeant with the 2100th Military Intelligence Group in Ohio. “He’s a super solider.”
But Minor, 30, was recently threatened with legal action and with being kicked out of the Army by his new command in Iraq.
What had he done?
Read the entire story here.
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This year's festival will also have a milblogging panel called "The GI in the Media Discussion". It's an opportunity to join some of the nation’s most popular milbloggers in a spirited discussion on how GIs and military families are portrayed in the media and on film.
The panel discussion takes places on Sunday, May 18th at 11:30 AM. Right now there are 70 seats available for the panel. The cost is $5 per seat.
For more information on the festival, visit the website.
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Milblogs, as blogs authored by members of the military are called, have revolutionized the way soldiers in war can communicate with the public, allowing people from Tennessee to Montana to read, on a daily basis, first-person accounts of the battlefield.
“It’s more than writing letters home, it’s writing letters for the world to see,” said Alan Rosenblatt, a professor and author on digital media, politics, and blogging. Through milblogs, soldiers in war can stay connected to their life back home, and the public can experience war through the eyes of a soldier, which offers them a much closer connection than perhaps they even imagined.
Read the entire story here.
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Thirty one seniors from Belfry High School situated in Kentucky were inspired by Bad Voodoo's War and got together after watching a taping to send us care packages, t-shirts, and copies of the school newspaper, which incidentally, was dedicated entirely to Bad Voodoo.
I especially like the "Redneck Questions for Bad Voodoo" section, that included questions like, "Is a .50 cal good for squirrel hunting?"
And I thought I'd take the time to answer it...
But damn, this question is tough -- I hadn't really thought about using a .50 caliber machine gun for squirrel hunting in awhile. Or at least not since the summer of '03 when I did my Annual Training in Indiana and used an AT4 anti-tank weapon to go bass fishing.
True story.
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Blocked blog access on Air Force networks. A Navy blog opposed by Public Affairs. Crackdowns on YouTube and other social media. The military has really struggled to come to terms with the internet era -- in stark contrast to jihadists, for whom the internet is the major medium for recruiting and spreading tactics and weapons plans.
Read the entire story here.
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You'll be happy to know we've completed our final mission just a few days ago. All Bad Voodoo soldiers are safe and off the road. Pictured above is myself and "SGT Q" (a fellow Bad Voodoo Team Leader) posing for a photo during our last mission. We both happened to serve in Afghanistan at the same time from 2004-2005, but we were in different units. "SGT Q" was actually a member of the 25th Infantry Division. I served with the Virginia National Guard during my tour, but I was also awarded the Tropic Lightning during my Combat Patch ceremony.
Well, pretty soon this place will just be a memory and I'll be looking at pictures from my deployment saying to myself, "Those were the days. Really takes me back..."
The 3,000 degree weather in full Battle Rattle. Back to back missions, over and over and over. Some times getting little or no sleep. Heck, throw in walking a mile to use the internet and eating sand during dust storms and I'm basically describing utopia.
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(American Enterprise Institute) Stop-loss is now the subject of an eponymous film that tells the story of three soldiers who return from Iraq and attempt to handle the burdens of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) while re-entering civilian life as sons and husbands. When Staff Sgt. Brandon King is stop-lossed and told that he will be returned to the war in Iraq rather than be released from the Army, he flees his post in an effort to escape the orders. King's flight forces his friends and family to choose whether to support him and ultimately brings him face-to-face with the costs of abandoning one's comrades.
Not surprisingly, the movie has met with an unkind reception among milbloggers. Terri, a blogger at A Soldier's Mind whose boyfriend has served three tours in Iraq, watched the movie and panned it as "unrealistic," "inaccurate" and "inconsistent." She points out numerous factual errors, such as the immediacy of King's orders to return to Iraq, the film's treatment of PTSD and the police manhunt for King. Her conclusion: "It's obvious that this is Hollywood's latest attempt to make the military look bad and to glorify desertion."
A more typical response among milbloggers was to pan the movie without having seen it. Both "SSG Thul" at Foreign and Domestic and "Deebow" at Blackfive cheered the movie's poor takings during its opening weekend, as the film posted eighth at the box office. Thul concludes that the film did poorly because "Americans don't want to go see a movie that tells them that they are stupid because they are Americans." Deebow asks why there have been so many movies that criticize the war but none celebrating real-life heroes who fought in Iraq and have died for their brothers in arms.
The one sympathetic milblogger review of "Stop-Loss" that I found was by Carissa Picard, on the Military.com Daily Election Center Blog. Picard, founder of the soldier's advocacy group Military Spouses for Change, attended the movie's sold-out premier at Fort Hood, Texas, and interviewed audience members afterward. A notable (and vocal) segment of the audience included members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, which had organized a group to attend the premier and distribute anti-war literature. They agreed with the film's premises and thought that it provided a fair treatment of what they view as a betrayal of American soldiers. (AFJ staff writer Chuck Vinch reviewed "Stop-Loss" favorably, concluding, "'Stop-Loss' is not an anti-war film; if anything, it's pro-troops.")
Read the entire story here.
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Below is some information about the 2008 Milblog Conference, along with the final agenda. I'm gonna keep everyone updated here about the conference as more information becomes available.
Date: SEPTEMBER 20, 2008
Location: Blog World Expo, Las Vegas
Registration Info: Coming soon...
Agenda:
10:30a – 11:00a: Opening Remarks
Presentation of 2007 Milbloggie Awards
11:00a – 12:00p: Are MilBlogs Still Relevant? In the wake of a successful military surge in Iraq, waning media attention and an election year, are MilBlogs as relevant to the national conversation on war as they once were?
12:00p – 12:15p: Break
12:15p – 1:15p: MilBlogging as a Community. A fascinating look at how the milblogging community was built, what it’s achieved and how deep and wide its reach has become. We’ll explore how milblogging gives a voice to supporters, parents and spouses of service members, and how that voice is effectively used to support an entire military community.
1:15p – 2:45p: Lunch Break
2:45 – 3:45p: The New Cadre of War Reporters. Reporting from the Green Zone is not an option for this gritty band of milbloggers. Today’s technology enables milbloggers and embedded reporters to report directly from the battlefield. We’ll talk with some of these milbloggers about their experiences in the combat zone.
3:45 – 5:00p: Free Time (Sit in on other panels or stroll the vendor floor).
5:00 – 6:00p: Panel TBA
6:00p: Closing Remarks
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(Telegraph) In a ground-breaking departure for newspapers, The Sunday Telegraph has "embedded" a video camera with a front-line infantry regiment in southern Afghanistan.
Readers will be given a soldier's eye view of life in Helmand, where 8,000 British troops are locked in an increasingly bitter conflict against the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces.
The Sunday Telegraph will receive regular video dispatches from Corporal Billy Carnegie, a section commander with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the 5th battalion of The Scottish Regiment (5 Scots), which will appear on the Telegraph website on a regular basis.
Read the entire story here.
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Smedley "The Camel Spider" is still living with us in our tent. I took it upon myself to do some scientific research so I went on over to Wikipedia and read more about camel spiders. Here's what Wikipedia says:
"In the Middle East, it is widely rumored among American and coalition military forces stationed there that Solifugae will feed on living human flesh. The story goes that the creature will inject some anaesthetizing venom into the exposed skin of its sleeping victim, then feed voraciously, leaving the victim to awaken with a gaping wound. Solifugae, however, do not produce such an anaesthetic, and they do not attack prey larger than themselves unless threatened. Other stories include tales of them leaping into the air, disemboweling camels, screaming, and running alongside moving humvees; all of these tales are dubious at best. Due to their bizarre appearance many people are startled or even afraid of them. The greatest threat they pose to humans, however, is their bite in self-defense when one tries to handle them. There is no chance of death directly caused by the bite, but, due to the strong muscles of their chelicerae, they can produce a proportionately large, ragged wound that is prone to infection."
I was a non-believer, until the other day. So I was packing my belongings and a spider ran out from underneath my duffel bag. I hit it with my boot several times and I'm not sure if he got away. Well, later that night while I was talking to one of my battle buddies --- and in the corner of my eye --- I swear Smedley was staring straight at me with those little beady angry eyes. Like he wanted to eat my flesh or something.
Smedley Update1: Turns out, Smedley escaped from his cage. He's small, just over an inch so it wasn't too hard. Not that I'm scared, but I now sleep with my eyes open. And all my body armor. And my M-4. Hell, I'm not ashamed, I even clutch a Woobie.
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(Pier System) Since January, the Thirteenth District Public Affairs Office has been maintaining a blog and podcast as an additional way to tell the Coast Guard story. In the interest of transparency and to enhance our ability to tell the Coast Guard's story we are looking for motivated Coast Guard members, active duty, reserve, auxiliary and civilians, who would be interested in blogging about their Coast Guard experiences. Blogs can be written about almost anything that you are doing in the Coast Guard. Remember that this is an official blog so keep it to the Coast Guard and stay in your lane. Talk about your experiences, cases you've been involved in, boating safety, important topics, training, etc..
Read the entire story here.
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(The Patchwork Quilt II) Being a blogger, more so than being a member of Soldiers Angels, is what led me to meet the Founder of Soldiers Angels,Patti,when I attended the Milblog conference last year in DC. And also meeting Robert Stokely and briefly speaking with him, one of the most towering men of Christian faith I've ever had the privilege to meet. Over a year later, the brief conversation we had while in the lunch line still resounds within me, and, now that my husband/'s son is deployed, brings me a great deal of comfort and peace.
Read the entire story here.
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(Milblogs) The second annual
GI Film Festival will take place in Washington, DC from May 14-18. In addition to film screenings and other fun happenings, the festival will present a series of panel discussions.The festival has added a panel on milblogging to this year's agenda.
Read the entire post here.
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Smedley is a camel spider that we caught while cleaning our weapons after a mission. He lives in our tent in a tiny terrarium Ranger Nievera bought him. Smedley is pretty much the cutest thing on the planet. Just look at those beady little eyes. And his legs? Not 1, not 2, not even 6 or 7, but 8 of the most adorable little furry legs you've ever seen. We're considering entering him into the "World's Cutest Pet" contest. I'll keep you updated on his story.
Smedley Update1: Apparently, people keep telling us Smedley isn't all that adorable. They say there's no way he could win any "Cutest Pet Contest". Puh-leeeassse. Once we dress up Smedley in a baby diaper and pacifier, I guarantee a win. We might even have him drive a little red fire engine. Oh, I smell victory.
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In case you missed Bad Voodoo's War (the personal story of my Platoon), you can watch it online. If you did watch the show and want to share your thoughts, please feel free to share in the Comments section below.
Oh, and yes folks, that's me at the top of the PBS website raising one eyebrow like James Bond. I mean, you can't look like me and not raise one eyebrow during photographs. It's unnatural. Shoot, it was hard enough to resist ripping off my shirt and flexing my pecs and back for the camera.
The New York Times -- Neil Genzlinger
"… this is a very different view of the war than you'll see on the nightly news. …
"The platoon draws the seemingly mundane duty of escorting trucks all around the country, but in this roadside-bomb-based war, of course, it's not mundane at all. [Director Deborah] Scranton, aided by creepy nighttime video, builds the tension effectively toward the inevitable explosion, pausing along the way to fill in the back stories of a few of the soldiers. …"
The Wall Street Journal -- Nancy deWolf Smith
"… What kind of person can face months of such danger, day in and day out? Only the brave, undoubtedly. Beyond that, it is difficult to say much more specific about the men of Bad Voodoo Platoon. Of its 30-something members, only two have been chosen to speak at length here. What they have to say is disturbing on many levels. …"
United Features Syndicate -- Kevin McDonough
"… moving …
"You can't help but be touched by the dedication of these men to their country and to each other. …"
The Star-Ledger -- Alan Sepinwall
"… while admiring the complexity and achievement of [last week's 4.5-hour series] 'Bush's War,' I couldn't help but be more affected by 'Bad Voodoo's War.' Admittedly that's just the nature of the two films -- one a clinical dissection of foreign policy and inter-agency turf battles, the other an intimate, first-person look at only a handful of soldiers -- but if forced to choose one or the other as the proper fifth anniversary commemoration, I'd likely pick the latter…"
The Hartford Courant -- Roger Catlin
"Should be mandatory, albeit not easy, watching. ...
"If last week's massive summary brought us up to date on the history of the Iraq engagement, this week's episode … puts us vividly and uncomfortably in the present. …"
Contra Costa Times -- Susan Young
"… Unlike a journalist embedded with the troops, the camera makes no judgment; no color commentary spews from its lens. Just hard reality that viewers can filter through their own eyes. …"
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"… compelling television …"
The Cincinnati Enquirer
"… these guys make ideal subjects, combining strength and humanity. …"
The Huffington Post -- Leslie Griffith
"… the mother lode of all reality shows …
"Director Deborah Scranton (The War Tapes) uses her brilliant 'subject as reporter' theme to tell Bad Voodoo's War. With very few 'embeds' (journalists reporting from Iraq), Scranton jars us into the reality of war by forcing us to see through the eyes of the soldiers. …" [Read
Blackfive.net
"… The reason I like Scranton's work is that the soldiers tell their own stories - the good, the bad and the ugly - and you get plenty of that in the interviews. Yes, some just want to go home, others want to do the job they've been giving, and others worry about the (lack of) ability for Iraq to provide it's own security. …" [Read more…]
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My youngest son Joseph turned 2-years old today. It's the second birthday I've missed because of my deployment. But it's ok. My wife has been great about sending me photos and videos of him so I don't feel far away. He's a real cute kid. But are you thinking what I'm thinking? He's not even human, right? It feels like every time I see a photo or video of him, it's like I'm watching some Saturday morning cartoon. I, for one, am convinced he's a Care Bear. I'm pretty sure he's just made of fabric and stuffing.
He even comes fitted with a sound box that says lines like, "Poo-poo" and "Woof woof".
But honestly, I don't know how well this Care Bear product line did though for Marketing, because my wife still claims to find brown stuff in his diaper at least 5 or 6 times a day. Some times 7. Oh, and one time he just stood up, grabbed a box of Crayons and started drawing all over the wall. I swear, it said nothing of the sort on the box when we bought him.
Happy Birthday Joseph!
Feel free to browse through some of my previous entries on him:
How my kids cheer me up during deployment
Check Out The Milblogging.com Store!
My kids enjoying their Halloween treats from a reader
My 1 year old son, having a good hair day
My 1-year old son using his manners
My 1 year old doing Karaoke back in the States
My 1 year old rocking to iPod music - Part 2
My 1 year old rocking to iPod music back home
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Here's one of the latest and greatest music videos to come out of Iraq. It was featured in a Jacksonville paper. It's pretty rad. By the way, my own music video is near completion. Right now I'm just shopping it around looking for a record label. It involves me, a unicorn, Guitar Hero II, and the occassional hand-to-hand combat scene with ninjas.
I think my video has some serious potential.
Here's an excerpt from the story:
(Jacksonville.com) Mark Middlebrook, 23, of Ponte Vedra Beach returned with his platoon, 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne, from Baghdad in November after 15 months in Iraq stretched over 2 deployments. While there, the platoon made this fun music video, Baghdaddy Beat. Mark is a 2003 graduate of Nease High School.
Read the entire story here.
Click here to visit Mark's Milblog.
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Registration will be available in a couple more weeks.
See the schedule, location, and date/time for the conference here.
Like I said, just some real quick items because the whole "mission" thing here in Iraq really cuts into my personal time.
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