Mike, who writes A Year In Afghanistan, wrote a brief tribute to his fellow Airman SSgt Timothy Bowles, Military Blogger & SGT Christopher Abeyta, SPC Robert Weinger and SPC Norman Cain, who were all killed last week by an IED in
Mike was also on the mission, and I'm sure he could use some words of support and encouragement.
Please visit Mike’s blog here.
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Sgt. Christopher P. Abeyta, 23, of Midlothian, Illinois, was killed last week while serving in Afghanistan. Sgt. Abeyta and three others who were with him, Sgt. Robert M. Weinger, Spc. Norman Cain III, and SSgt Timothy Bowles, were also killed when the vehicle they were riding in was struck by an IED.
Sgt. Abeyta ran a military blog from Afghanistan called The Chronicles of Butters! and according to a news story Sgt. Abeyta had kept a journal since he was 11-years old.
The SouthtownStar reports:
"Sgt. Abeyta had survived a year in Iraq and was on his second deployment in eastern Afghanistan, in the region that borders Pakistan, when the vehicle he was riding in hit an improvised explosive device set by the Taliban..."
The SouthtownStar story also shares his passion for writing:
"While deployed, he wrote entries in his ever-present journal, stories on two blogs and letters to his family. His mother held tightly Tuesday to one from November, which she read aloud on her back patio, demanding that his grandmother, Elvira Abeyta, and local veterans gathered around her know the man she raised.
"I know you don't enjoy the path I have chosen for myself but trust me it's so very rewarding," she read. "You know I know it bothers you that I am here. ... but what kind of person would I be, Ma, if I didn't try to make this better.
"OK?" she said at the end. "That's my son."
My prayers and thoughts go out to the family, friends of Sgt. Abeyta and all of America’s fallen and wounded. If you’d like to make donations, according to another SouthownStar story:
"The Abeyta family has requested donations be made to a fund for the family of Spc. Norman Cain III, 22, who died with Abeyta in the same explosion and left behind a wife and two children..."
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Writers have grappled with the issues of war in fact and fiction: Ian McEwan's Saturday ruminated on the pending war, and Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City vividly portrayed life in the Baghdad green zone.
The sensitive, angry poetry of the First World War has found a latter-day counterpart in the “milblog”, an entirely new literary genre: blogs written by soldiers in real time, an unfiltered and violent sort of poetry from the front line. The war has also produced more traditional forms of poetry, including Simon Armitage's deeply moving poems of soldiers returning to a changed society. Pop music has joined the chorus.
Read the entire story here.
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SGT Danger, a fellow Tweeter and Military Blogger, writes about why he's a Milblogger.
(SGT Danger) The strategic command of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has changed hands numerous times since 2001, through a dozen generals and their staffs. But the soldiers do the heavy lifting: the driving, the shooting, and the dying. For every general’s story told on NPR and Fox News Sunday, there are tens of thousands of soldiers on the ground whose stories are not told. I don’t know that the story of a bunch of Army truckers will end up being compelling, profound, or even very interesting. But I’ll be proud to tell our story anyway...
Read the entire story here. Follow SGT Danger on Twitter here.
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For more information about the 2009 MilBlog Conference, visit: http://conference.milblogging.com/
At Great Americans, we’re proud to share the stories of real-life American heroes that too often go ignored by today’s mainstream media. To that end, we’re pleased to highlight some of the likeminded bloggers who have demonstrated their support for our vision by recently posting Great Americans videos for their readers to enjoy.
Read the entire story here and while you're over there watch some videos of Great Americans.
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Basically it’s people saying how great the Army is, safety videos, and a scanty selection of soldier-generated content. In other words its no “kittens inspired by kittens”, the closest TroopTube answer to which is a bunch of hopelessly uninspiring videos of a golden Labrador called Bella.
Read the entire story here.
Bad Idea: TroopTube.
Good (No no, Great) Idea: GreatAmericans.com
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"This is just Shepherd's way of avoiding his responsibilities completely - not going to Iraq and not willing to go to jail for breaking his promises and forcing his duties on his comrades," writes Desert Storm veteran and blogger, Jonn Lilyea.
Other military bloggers are even more direct with their criticisms, and the accusation of "coward" is one of the least offensive things Mr Shepherd is being called online.
Read the entire story here.
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Others were there, and in the fight. What they saw - and more importantly, what they wrote - may or may not have impacted our strategic center of gravity. But it was certainly compelling reading.
Jules was there when a pair of young soldiers engaged in fierce combat shot a tank round into the Hotel Palestine in Baghdad, killing two journalists. The legacy media reported a war crime. He reported what he saw.
Read the entire story here.
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I live in the D.C. area, so if you’re planning to arrive early and wanna hangout let me know. I also have a car, so if you need to be picked up from one of the airports in the area (Dulles, Reagan National, or BWI) let me know (I might be able to help).
Note, As an added bonus for @cjgrisham of A Soldier’s Perspective, I’ve got my 2-year old’s car seat buckled in, so I got you covered bro (one less thing for you to bring on the plane). Just saying...
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Military personnel tell Danger Room that they're unable to get to TroopTube from both domestic and overseas military installations.
My pal Noah has the story.
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Once the documents are scanned, they will be analyzed, catalogued and placed on the Library of
The Library of Virginia, in collaboration with the Virginia Commission on the Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War, plan to take the preservation effort to every county in the state — if funding can be secure.
Read the entire story here.
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Keep updated here.
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Anyone who has ever planned a military wedding knows how difficult it is to round up the parties and have everyone you want at your wedding. So-and-so will be deployed then. So-and-so will be TDY. So-and-so's wife can't make it because her husband is deployed. So-and-so is in
For now, we have two panels as situated as they're likely to get:
Back to Our Roots: Some say the “Golden Age” of milblogging has passed. The age when milbloggers were a small, tight community. Today, there are so many interesting milblogs. We'll meet some milbloggers you may or may not have heard of and get back to the finest tradition of milblogging - celebrating and highlighting the diversity of voices within our community.
Moderator: Matt from Blackfive
Alex Horton
Maggie of Boston Maggie and Castle Argghhh!
Rebekah Sanderlin
****
Beyond MilBlogging: Taking the blog to the next level. From book deals to paid writing assignments, documentaries, speaking engagements, television and radio appearances and much, much more, many milbloggers have been able to branch out beyond the blog. We’ll find out how a few of them did it, and what projects they have in the works.
Moderator: David Stanford from The Sandbox
JD Johannes
Uncle Jimbo
Lily Burana
airforcewife
Craig Stewart
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I had a brief conversation with Greg Schindler one of the awesome folks over at GreatAmericans.com --- a website that allows you to upload and share videos about ordinary Americans, who perform EXTRAORDINARY deeds. GreatAmericans.com is also one of this year’s sponsors of The 2009 Milblog Conference being held next month in the D.C. area.
JP, MILBLOGGING.COM HOST: In addition to sharing videos, you also run a blog on your website? Tell me more...*doing my best Chuck Woolery impression - hands on chin, elbows out*
Greg: The Great Americans blog is mostly a summary of what’s new at Great Americans, including contests, promotions, events, etc. I’ve recently started compiling the blog, and I’m shaping it more into a “Great Americans in the Blogosphere” feature, so we can highlight all the bloggers that incorporate our videos in their posts. Just as our site is apolitical, our blog isn’t likely to contain any edge editorials; it’s just a way to keep our members apprised of what’s on tap. We’re happy to team with Milblogging.com to the fullest extent possible, so we can follow up about whether or not our blog itself it worth adding to your database. I’m confident that most mil bloggers would appreciate our mission and content, but as a video portal, our text-based content likely will be used more to supplement our main attraction (videos) than anything else. That being said, we’re still so young that I’m sure the site, including our blog, will branch out in ways we never imagined.
JP: Is GreatAmericans.com on Twitter?
Greg: Great Americans is on Twitter: http://twitter.com/greatamericans ... I’m not running our Twitter account right now, but it will probably be handed off to me at some point, as it falls under my “social media” umbrella. I only recently transitioned from old media to new (I used to be in the newspaper business), so I’m learning about some of these tools on the run.
JP: Why is telling the story of great Americans so important?
Greg: I think these videos will give you a good understanding of why Matt Daniels (our founder) created Great Americans.
http://www.greatamericans.com/videos/60285eff8b/welcome-to-great-americans-from-monkeyboy360
http://www.greatamericans.com/videos/0616865356/great-americans-launch-on-fox-from-monkeyboy360
JP: Why did GreatAmericans.com choose to be a sponsor of this year’s Milblog Conference?
Greg: We’re very excited to sponsor and attend the MilBlog Conference, and I could go on forever about how much respect I personally have for the mil blog community. But if you don’t mind, I’ll get a quote directly from Matt Daniels’ mouth, seeing as he’s the brains behind our site and makes the financial decisions. I’m happy to communicate with you and facilitate anything I can, but I’m just a lowly behind-the-scenes guy J.
JP: Any big plans for your website you could share with my readers?
Greg: The MilBlog Conference is one of our exciting plans on the horizon, and we’ve got several other potential partnerships in the works. Again, Matt would know much more about this than I would, and he said he’d be happy to chat with you any time. We are launching a Great Americans account on Facebook in the near future, and we know social media is a great way to interact with our target audience and expose our site to as many people as possible. Networking within the mil blogger community is a huge priority for us, because we know the same patriotic people who are interested in reading about our amazing women and men in uniform are likely to also enjoy videos about these people.
JP: Back in 2 and 2. And if you’d like to learn more, pay GreatAmericans.com a visit or email Greg gs@greatamericans.com
Note, After scouring their website for hours I didn’t find any Chuck Norris videos. Zip. Oh boy! I immediately emailed Greg and informed this is a *must have* site requirement.
At the time of this story appearing online (and nearly 8 hours since I alerted Greg), still no Chuck Norris videos. Which leads me to believe Chuck Norris delivered a roundhouse-kick to Greg’s face. *preferred method of execution in 16 states.*
*Fact* Chuck Norris is the only person in the world that can actually email a roundhouse kick.
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Back in 2004 when I started writing a military blog from Afghanistan, I was lucky enough to stumble upon the URL milblogging.com. After several months of blogging I became part of an online community and wanted to stay involved even though I was no longer writing from Afghanistan. So I came up with an idea --- I wanted an easier way to find military blogs online. I figured the best way to do it was to create a searchable index, but I needed a memorable name. All the other top keyword names that were relevant to the subject matter like MilitaryBlog.com were registered. Fortunately, Milblogging.com wasn’t. In the Spring of 2005, I went ahead and registered the name and several months later launched this website.
If you’ve invested in building your own brand like Mudville Gazette or Bouhammer – even if your brand is your actual name – you probably wanna think about registering your brand on other social media websites like YouTube and Twitter.
Why spend all your time building a brand, only to let someone else register the username and benefit from it. Social media sites like Twitter have a Search feature, so if you search for milblogging my Twitter profile is the top result. There are other sites where you probably want to register your brand like YouTube, particularly if you share videos and plan to set up a channel. Even Facebook allows you to setup a page for your Website Brand here http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
Registering your brand around the internet is free, easy, and only takes a few minutes at each site. Even if you don’t use a particular website like MySpace, it’s a good idea to defensively register your brand. In case you wanna learn more, here’s an informative article I found on the topic.
Note, I'll finally be able to sleep at night now knowing I registered myspace.com/milblogging
Although I'm not a fan...because most of the time when I visit a MySpace page it looks like it was designed by a kindergartner. I know Milblogging.com can take some time to load (because of all the awesomeness going on behind the scenes), but if you wanna see your computer screen literally take a dump --- I totally recommend visiting MySpace.
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Nearly half of all Air Force personnel are less than 30 years old -- and tweeting, blogging and social networking are the ways they want to receive their information, said Capt. Dave Faggard, the chief of emerging technology at the Air Force Public Affairs Agency at the Pentagon, who is also an Alabama native.
"Social media is nothing new, it's just communicating in different ways to people that were always there," Faggard said. "But it may be now that they and I have the ability to interact directly with each other and I don't necessarily have to use mainstream media as my megaphone.”
Read the entire story here.
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The story was carried over at The Captain’s Journal right here, http://www.captainsjournal.com/2009/03/08/the-captains-journal-blocked-in-afghanistan/
According to Registan.net any site with the word “blog” in it is supposed to be blocked, hence the surprise that blog.bouhammer.com is allowed through to military members in Afghanistan. You can read that article here, http://www.registan.net/index.php/2009/03/07/dispatches-from-fobistan-the-armys-woeful-it-policies-poison-the-war-effort/.
Needless to say I am very glad that Bouhammer.com it is allowed through and somewhat disturbed that the military is filtering and blocking great sites like www.blackfive.net.
Read the entire story here.
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The movie is a documentary filmed by Jake Rademacher, who wants to learn more about his younger brothers’ service in the military. Jake seeks to understand what his brothers go through on the frontlines and much of the film actually takes place on the homefront.
It’s beginning to look like the best way to portray war and for people to get a better understanding of what really goes on, is through the actual eyes of those serving – as a documentary. I served in
In 2007, I contacted Deborah Scranton (of The War Tapes) and working with her and Toby Nunn (my Platoon Sergeant), my Platoon and I made a documentary film called Bad Voodoo’s War that aired nationwide on PBS Frontline.
It was the only way for me to tell my story - as a documentary. And after watching it, my family and friends had a much better idea of what I was doing on tour. What made it harder for them is that the film aired while we were still running missions throughout
Jake did a great job of telling his brothers’ stories, and in the end, Jake achieved what he set out to do --- which was to understand his brothers’ service. This was his first time making a film and he put in all of the work himself. Although the film is Rated R, there is only one violent scene towards the end of the film – and much of the film tells the story of both of his brothers back home, which I thought was important since deployments impact families, too.
If you’d like to learn more about the film, visit the official website. The film is opening in theaters around the country this month.
Note, I'm not a very articulate writer and this happens to be one of my first movie reviews. I did twitter the event which was my first time tweeting from my Blackberry. If I had to guess, I'm pretty sure the group sitting at my table thought I was texting my wife or playing Tetris. I didn't bother explaining what I was doing, but halfway through the screening no one had punched me in the face, so I decided to keep tweeting.
Although when I came back from the restroom, my lunch plate wasn't in the same place. Also, I'm pretty sure my sandwich didn't have shoeprint on it before I stepped away. Just saying...below is a preview of the film.
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