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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! September 30, 2005
29 TrackBacksHere are a few opportunities for you to help support our troops. Each one of these is important so pick one (or two) that you think best works for you. -Send a letter to a soldier's 9 year old boy to let him know how proud we are of his daddy. Every... Read More A couple things came across my desk today, that warrant a comment or 2. I know...BIG SHOCK! Wonder Woman has something to say! The first one was forwarded on, by Jay at Stop The ACLU...Saying the United States “does not Read More I found a very cool firefox extension today while cruising around the web. Fantastic little goodie for Gmail users who don't like to use the 'archive' function but find the drop down menu bothersome in selecting 'delete.' Soooooo pretty much.......it's Read More President Bush has announced that he has backed off from his initial hard-line stance against any meeting with grieving anti-war mom Cindy Sheehan. In a statement that was released by the White House early this morning, Bush said that he Read More Wayne called yesterday, asking questions about online college registration forms. Eager to beat a looming deadline for Spring semester, our conversation felt curiously normal, like 'this is what we usually do this time of year. He'll actually be back... Read More Senator Schumer has worked hard to know everything so he could tell people how to live their lives. Now President Bush is giving him a hard time. After you see how the President's do it, you may have a little sympathy for Schumer. Poor guy. Read More Prosecutor Earle (A) pulls strings (B), releasing media hounds (C). Hounds scare rinos (D), causing a stampede, which forces DeLay (E) to step down (F), springing trap (G). Read More An avian flu pandemic would be a catastrophe that would unabashedly dwarf the human loss and disruption from all of this year’s international hurricanes and cyclones combined. Now with the oh-so-trustworthy headlines being snagged (again) by ... Read More Goes to Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. Read More Ever heard of "Viewpoint Discrimination"?? Read More You know the Republican Party is in trouble when an editorial like this appears in the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader Read More Friday marks the 50th anniversary of James Dean T-boning another car at the intersection of California Highways 41 and 46. So expect many tributes this weekend to James Dean. He died so young. Read More And so, we mourn our losses, but any day we can stop and appreciate and be eternally grateful for the dedication of our military, that is a good day. Read More Christine and Tom DeLay, with the Hammer Cake I ran into Tom DeLay and his wife Christine at an event earlier this year in your Nation's Capital. Before he was indicted for "criminal conspiracy," allegedly moving money from corporate... Read More There’s more controversy brewing over the body armor issue. Stirring the pot as usual is Operation Truth’s Paul Reikhoff.To listen to Reikhoff, you would think that somewhere deep in the Pentagon’s bowels, Rumsfeld’s gnome-accountants have factored e... Read More It's a fairly comprehensive article focused on the reservations I (and several others) hold about his decision to leave the Marines and join Al-Jezeera's English edition scheduled to go operational in the spring. Read More But just remember when you do that this is the first time the Iraqi people are having contact with the "evil Americans" in their lives, and experiences like this helps to dispel the old "great Satan" image, and create a positive environment of unders... Read More New Orleans officials have launched a "repopulation" campaign to get the city back on its feet. Jeanette Maier, former madam of the Canal Street Brothel has been asked to head the "repopulation campaign." Read More Habib asked that the number of Syrian military receiving training at Russian military institutes and academies be increased and he gave Baluevsky two lists. The first was a list of military equipment in the Syrian armed forces that needs repair and m... Read More At the crossroads of Creationism and Darwinism is the theory of Intelligent Design. From Spiegel Noah and the Dinosaurs: On the Trail of Intelligent Design.Dembski is also a leading name in Intelligent Design, a young movement of scientists who want... Read More Blanket of Hope provides comfort to wounded medic. Vicky W. writes: Hi Sue, I am writing to say thank you! Your beautiful eagle blanket made it's way around my fiance's shoulder! Rodney is a medic, stationed about 50 miles north east... Read More I've heard about this book, and right now, Neal Boortz has the author on the radio. He mentioned it has been on the NYT Best Seller List for six weeks, but...only two reviews so far, and by very "small" publications. He has had no call sfrom the "M... Read More ...there are few people actually opposed to the troops and wishing them ill. However, it's hard to say that the rest of the U.S. population is actually supporting the troops. "Support" is a verb--an action. Read More If you have a post, anti-ACLU in nature, or about how our civil liberties are being stripped away via judicial activism, please submit it to our carnival. The first carnival of true liberties will be held on Monday. It will start out here, and soon ... Read More "No sh-t, there I was..." That is how all good war stories start. So, we show up this morning and get all chuted up... Read More My bad. I left off the last part. Read More I can’t confirm the statement which makes up the title of this post, caught your attention though, right? All day long, one of the top searches on Technorati has been “paris hilton pregnant”. Who the fuck cares? I can’t hone... Read More Assalamualaikum! What is Ramadan? Ramadan is the 9th month of the Muslim lunar calendar. It is a during this month Muslims fast during the daylight hours and in the evening eat small meals and visit with friends and family. Read More Today's dose of NIF - News, Interesting & Funny ... Fun Loving Friday 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 |
