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 Greetings! You are reading an article from The Mudville Gazette. To reach the front page, with all the latest news and views, click the logo above or "main" below. Thanks for stopping by! July 26, 2005
22 TrackBacksA group of House and Senate Democrats held a joint press conference today, demanding ice cream, cake and cookies. This comes on the heels of yesterday’s stunning announcement that they will refuse to eat their vegetables. Read More bRight & Early is SupportingFreedom Alliance in Blogathon 2005Register and Donate I am taking up Brian’s challenge, but first of all let me thank him for placing me on his list. He has been very kind both on his blog and in our email corre... Read More The NY Times falsely reported the federal government refused to comply with a court order. Then it tried to dismiss the matter in one sentence of a one paragraph correction. The Times needs to tell us more. Read More Evidently, the will of the voters still doesn’t count here in California – at least not to Yolo County Supervisor Mike McGowan. I can’t remember if I voted for this knucklehead, or not. Regardless, this is without a doubt one of the... Read More Much has been made recently of the shooting death of Brazillian Jean Charles de Menezes on Friday by London's Metropolitan Police at Stockwell Station. I would agree that it would be a tragedy if the police killed a truly innocent man, but the facts ... Read More This thank-you card was emailed to me from Patti, the founder of Soldiers Angels. The email with it was written by Tim Chan and says, "My 8 year old daughter made a thank you card to all the US soldiers in IRAQ thanking them. Is it possible to e-ma... Read More for acknowledging that there are two schools of thought when it comes to recruit training. Here's mine: Abuse of recruits is training when it maninfests in a little yelling. Abuse of recruits is a crime when it manifests in physical assault, and courts... Read More The "this didn't seem to make the MSM" file is getting pretty fat these days. Another example of our men and women of service truly serving. Military dot com reports. SAN DIEGO - More than 650 Sailors and Marines from commands throughout San D... Read More Today's winner is Stephen Knight age 17. He called the police to report a break-in at his apartment. What had been taken? Read More Hilarious. Adult but not profane. The easily offended may not appreciate this and it may, or may not, be work safe. Chin music. Tom Hamilton Baseball Terms by Ida Rose. Thanks Mudville and and please enjoy a fine meal at... Read More According to the latest numbers from the Gallop Organization, the people want John Roberts. The latest poll has the American public 59% for approval, 22% for not approving, and 17% with no opinion, and a +/- 1% error factor. Read More According to the latest numbers from the Gallop Organization, the people want John Roberts. The latest poll has the American public 59% for approval, 22% for not approving, and 17% with no opinion, and a +/- 1% error factor. Read More Naval Base Kitsap (NBK) Bangor-based fleet ballistic missile submarine USS Pennsylvania (SSBN 735) was recognized as the U.S. Navy's best Trident submarine July 25 when it was presented the 2004 U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) Omaha Trophy. Read More Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address- Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a... Read More Riiiiiiight, I hear what you're saying Osama. You were going to use the drugs to kill Americans. There's only one problem. Just a second ago you said that it wasn't YOUR coke, that it belonged to a friend. Remember? You said that "somebody must have le... Read More I haven't weighed in on the upcoming Jane Fonda anti-war bus tour. Many bloggers have already written eloquent and passionate posts about the subject, and I didn't feel that I had anything of consequence to add. However, I read a great column this morn... Read More "A few months ago, I suggested to a family member that they read Norman Podhoretz's World War IV, which I thought was worth proliferating, especially due to its coverage of our domestic enemies, and the origins of the permanently cadred "anti-war" mo... Read More The Senate voted Tuesday to allow U.S. military bases to continue to host Boy Scouts events, responding to lawsuits and a federal court ruling aimed at severing relationships between the government and the youth group Read More The Nose On Your Face has received information that world- renowned hide-n-seek champion Mullah Mohammed Omar will be retiring from international competition sometime this fall. Omar issued the following statement during a recent cave-side press confer... Read More For Sen. John Kerry, this Friday, July 29, 2005, represents 180 days of maintaining a 180 reversal of his promise to sign Form 180 releasing his military records to the public. What's the problem? Let's recap. During the 2004 election, Presidential can... Read More According to Military.com, it appears that not only will the Army miss its 2005 goal but 2006 is almost lost already. The delayed entry program (DEP) is not close to where it needs to be to get the recruiting year started right. This is an early indica... Read More Get out of my car! I read recently that Assemblyman John McKeon, D-Essex, proposed a bill in New Jersey that will ban smoking while driving. OK Mr. McKeon, at what point did this sound like a good idea? This is yet again, an attempt by the PC police... Read More |
November 26, 2010America@war [Greyhawk]
I think anyone who's ever pondered the "comment" option - once only available on blogs and bulletin boards, now ubiquitous on almost any web site - will appreciate this:
The so-called faculty of writing is not so much a faculty of writing as it is a faculty of thinking. When a man says, "I have an idea but I can't express it"; that man hasn't an idea but merely a vague feeling. If a man has a feeling of that kind, and will sit down for a half an hour and persistently try to put into writing what he feels, the probabilities are at least 90 percent that he will either be able to record it, or else realize that he has no idea at all. In either case, he will do himself a benefit. That's wisdom from the past, captured for posterity at the US Naval Institute, shared via the web on the institute's 137th anniversary. From their about page:
"The Naval Institute has three core activities," among them, History and Preservation: The Naval Institute also has recently introduced Americans at War, a living history of Americans at war in their own words and from their own experiences. These 90-second vignettes convey powerful stories of inspiration, pride, and patriotism. Take a look at the collection, and you'll see it's not limited to accounts from those who served on ships at sea, members of the other branches are well-represented. I'm fortunate to have met USNI's Mary Ripley, she's responsible for the institute's oral history program (and she's the daughter of the late John Ripley, whose story is told here). She also deserves much credit for their blog. ("We're not the Navy nor any government agency. Blog and comment freely.") We met at a milblog conference - Mary knew (and I would come to realize) that milbloggers are the 21st-century version of exactly what the US Naval Institute is all about. Once that light bulb came on in my head, I mentioned a vague idea for a project to her - milblogs as the 21st century oral history that they are. "Put that in writing," she said (of course - see first paragraph above!) - and here's part of the result. Shortly after the first tent was pitched by the American military in Iraq a wire was connected to a computer therein, and the internet was available to a generation of Americans at war - many of whom had grown up online. From that point on, at any given moment, somewhere in Iraq a Soldier, Sailor, Airman or Marine was at a keyboard sharing the events of his or her day with the folks back home. While most would simply fire off an email, others took advantage of the (then) relatively new online blogging platforms to post their thoughts and experiences for the entire world to see. The milblog was born - and from that moment to this stories detailing everything from the most mundane aspects of camp life to intense combat action (often described within hours of the event) have been available on the web... And et cetera - but since you're reading this on a milblog, you probably knew that. And you know that milblogs aren't just blogs written by troops at war, that many friends, family members, and supporters likewise documented their story of America at war online in near-real time, as those stories developed. The diversity in membership of that group is broad, the one thing we all have in common is the impulse to make sense of the seemingly senseless, and communicate the tale - for each of us that impulse was strong enough to overcome whatever barriers prevent the vast majority of people from doing the same. Everyone at some point has some vague idea they believe should be shared - we were the people who, from some combination of internal and external urging, found and spent those many half hours persistently trying to write it down. But where will all that be in another 137 years? Or five or ten, for that matter. That's something I've asked myself since at least 2004 - when I wrote this:
Membership in the ghost battalion has grown in the years since, and an ever growing majority of those abandoned-but-still-standing sites are vanishing. Have you checked out Lt Smash's site lately? How about Sgt Hook's? If you're a long-time milblog reader you know the first widely-read milblog from Operation Iraq Freedom and the first widely-read milblog from Afghanistan are both gone from the web. If you're a relative newcomer to this world you may never even have heard of them - or the dozens upon dozens of others who carried forth the standard they set down. If you have a vague notion that something should be done about that, (a notion I've heard expressed more than once...) then you and I and the good folks at the US Naval Institute are in agreement. Preserving the history documented by the milbloggers is just one of the goals of the milblog project, the once-vague idea that we're now making real. And it's a big idea, if I say so myself - too big to explain in one simple blog post, so stand by for more. Likewise, it's too big a task to be accomplished by just one person. So if you're a milblogger (and exactly what is a milblogger? is a topic for much further discussion on its own) I'm asking for your help. All I'll really need is just a little bit (maybe just one or two of those half hours...) of your time, and your willingness to tell the tale. We've already made history, it's time to save it. (More to follow...) Posted 4:02 PM | Permalink |
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The Mudville Gazette is the on-line voice of an American warrior and his wife who stands by him. They prefer to see peaceful change render force of arms unnecessary. Until that day they stand fast with those who struggle for freedom, strike for reason, and pray for a better tomorrow.
 
 
 Furthermore, I will occasionally use satire or parody herein. The bottom line: it's my house. I like having visitors to my house. I hope you are entertained. I fight for your right to free speech, and am thrilled when you exercise said rights here. Comments and e-mails are welcome, but all such communication is to be assumed to be 1)the original work of any who initiate said communication and 2)the property of the Mudville Gazette, with free use granted thereto for publication in electronic or written form. If you do NOT wish to have your message posted, write "CONFIDENTIAL" in the subject line of your email. Original content copyright © 2003 - 2011 by Greyhawk. Fair, not-for-profit use of said material by others is encouraged, as long as acknowledgement and credit is given, to include the url of the original source post. Other arrangements can be made as needed. Contact: greyhawk at mudvillegazette dot com  Tending Distant Far from hearth and home, watching What tales we'll tell When things grim Some distant sunset, vision fading Saluting fallen friends whose names - Greyhawk, Baghdad, December 2004 |
