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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 11, 2006 Open PostBy GreyhawkTime to pack up this computer, we have many emails to answer still with little time. If your email has not been answered yet, please bear with us, we'll answer as soon as possible. Posted by Greyhawk / July 11, 2006 11:30 PM | Permalink 35 TrackBacksWhile calling terror "not really as important as far- right scaremongers would have us believe," Dems nevertheless promised to tear into international terror rings "like Mother Sheehan with a fifty dollar gift card at Jamba Juice." Read More With all the recent media buzz on atrocities committed by US Forces in Iraq, I thought I would take a moment to sound off with my views on this distasteful matter. First off let me state that these WAR CRIMES... Read More The stupid federal investigation of Novak is over Read More The Surrender mom Posted on her Crawford Peace House that traveling for 22 hours while on a diet is very taxing... Read More Look how our serviceman’s head is held out like a trophy. You can’t see who’s holding it there, but are you concerned with his human rights? Right to a speedy trial? If he were detained without charge, you’d be upset with that? Truly? Piled into a n... Read More You can say a lot of things about a Soldier without cutting him too deeply. Tell him that he's stupid or ugly or uncouth or foul-smelling, and you might not even get an argument. Tell him that he lacks honor, and you are sure to get a passionate response. Read More Who do you think wins? Click here for the video. Read More This video shows a terrorist who thought he could have it both ways: he could try to escape in his car, and if that failed, he could surrender--he'd be sent to some cushy prison like Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, get fed three squares a day--remember, ... Read More I still think this guy intentionally joined the army with a goal to be the first commissioned officer to refuse his orders to combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. Sort of to be the Poster Child for the Anti War Crowd. Frankly I hope the coward gets the maxim... Read More I was dropping the Little Woman off at Nordstroms and decided to spend a few hours in Your Nation's Capital. Watching a lawyer get beat up. By some other lawyers. You'd think someone would be getting sued. But not in... Read More Here it is! The first ever video broadcast of B36 News, the Good News. Read More Israeli incursion into Lebanon news... Not getting enough of the talking-head pundits, out-of-work party consultants, former administration advisors on TV and the web? Don't worry, a new bi-partisan, consultant-run blog, HOTSOUP.com is on the way...... Read More Today's winner is James Crosby Jr. Read More The New York Times slanders the US military, again, in an outrageous editorial. I’m in the military that the Times Editors so thoroughly despise and disparage at every opportunity. No military on the face of this earth more thoroughly complies with bot... Read More Not too long ago, we were bound together in life. We shared the world, our communities. Yes, predictable the changes a modern world has wrought. But to me they are becoming just that much more insidious. Read More Of course, us folk on the fascist fringe think of human suffering, genuine human suffering, as the height of comedy, so when I hear of genocide, it just fills my gut with a hearty belly laugh. I wonder why the Left doesn’t think it’s funny to have peop... Read More A defensive strategy is one of surrendering the initiative to our enemies. Read More Today's winner is PGA tour Commissioner Tim Finchem. Read More These two will have to be considered for idiot of the week, and definately for the carnival of the insansities. First of all, Dan Rather is out there in the mainstream media trying to rehabilitate his damaged career, and now Ted Koppel rallies to his d... Read More This is the official CENTCOM press release regarding the transfer of security responsibility for the Iraqi province of Muthanna. As of today, the Iraqi Security Forces are responsible for all security operations in this province. Read More Iran and Syria are certainly behind the Hamas and Hizbollah escalation. Ahmadinejad should be worried about explosions in the Islamic world, especially those dropped from Israeli F 16's. The next time Israel buzzes Syrian President Assad's summer home ... Read More I met Nick Mascolo of the BBC Salon in Tenafly, New Jersey while visiting my parents last Thanksgiving. At that time Nick was working on a Christmas project for deployed troops... I told him about Soldiers' Angels and he promised the next fundraiser ... Read More The reports from the dirty Yooze, that I'm dead or mortally wounded are false. Sure, a few years back they also said that they had poked my eye out with a stick. But those were just more Joo lies. Read More Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame are suing Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and a bevy of unnamed others for "gross invasion of their privacy" among other things. This from the press release: The suit accuses the defendants... Read More I just reviewed Global Warming, What You Need To Know , narrated by Tom Brokaw, which will premier on the Discovery Channel July 16 at 8 PM. Although the subtitle, What You Need To Know , sounded intriguing, I soon determined what they meant is... Read More Well, what do you two have to say for yourselves? Read More The lead lawyer for Army Lt. Ehren Watada, the Fort Lewis officer who refused to accompany his unit to Iraq last month, says his client's chances of leaving the Army scot-free are slim. Read More Ever notice that whenever there is any kind of international dispute, be it North Korea, Iran, or Israel, Chavez somehow has to get involved? He is slated to go to North Korea later this month, likely to try and trade Oil for weapons or weapons technol... Read More Ever notice that whenever there is any kind of international dispute, be it North Korea, Iran, or Israel, Chavez somehow has to get involved? He is slated to go to North Korea later this month, likely to try and trade Oil for weapons or weapons technol... Read More First, the good news: Marv Wolfman is going to write Nightwing's adventures again (H/T: Titans Tower Monitor). He'd already written some stories for Dick Grayson and Roy Harper, aka Speedy/Arsenal back in 1988-89 in Action Comics Weekly, which were som... Read More The damage resulting from Ariel Sharon's retreat and negligence continues. Now, with the Hezbollah attacking Israeli targets anew, they've also struck Tiberias and the lower Galilee, and two people were murdered as a result. Read More Here's a video from April of this year: a pickup truck used by Palestinian terrorists to launch rockets at Israel is found and destroyed. Because they were driving, I guess, the terrorists couldn't hear the buzzing of the Predator drone . . . Read More Here's a video from April of this year: a pickup truck used by Palestinian terrorists to launch rockets at Israel is found and destroyed. Because they were driving, I guess, the terrorists couldn't hear the buzzing of the Predator drone . . . Read More A series of articles describing this week's events in the Midn Lamar Owens rape court martial. The judge is ahoot. Read More Daniel Freedman wrote in The New York Sun on July 13 about Ariel Sharon and what he wrought through retreat and weakness. Read More 2 Comments |
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 |
Trackbacks are being tempermental, so I just thought I'd leave this comment...we lost a local sailor this week. Went overboard off of the Kitty Hawk. I've got a post up here:
http://noangst.blogspot.com/2006/07/lost-at-sea.html
Have not been able to make trackback URLs work. Please look into this. In the mean time, for something on the lighter side:
http://www.captainsjournal.com/2006/07/13/so-you-think-you-had-a-bad-day/