Soldiers of a Thousand Dawns

Greyhawk

Quiz time: Name two current milblogs from deployed troops in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Did you pass?

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Noah Shachtman: "I think the golden age of soldier blogs, you know, soldier-on-the-front-line-blogs, is over, unfortunately."

If that's true, the US Air Force will certainly breath a sigh of relief:

Nearly three years after the Army took notice of Soldier blogs and began insisting the writers register with their chain of command, the Air Force is going in a different direction altogether: restricting which blogs its airmen may read.

But while the Army -- which now has regs requiring security reviews of blogs before publishing -- acted to keep sensitive information from getting out, the Air Force’s move appears driven by a desire to choose which news sources are legitimate.
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"Basically," said Maj. Henry Schott of the command’s plans and requirements section, "if it’s a place like The New York Times, an established, reputable media outlet, then it’s fairly cut and dry that that’s a good source, an authorized source."

Well, if you say it, it must be true.

However, it looks like Air Force members (along with everyone else) might have had a hard time finding any news about Iraq lately:

According to the News Content Index conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the percentage of news stories devoted to the war has sharply declined since last year, dropping from an average of 15% of the newshole in July to just 3% in February.

There's been a bit of coverage here and there to that story that Iraq is no longer a story, but few people have noticed the actual focus of that coverage - something that's obvious even in the headline used at Pew: "Awareness of Iraq War Fatalities Plummets "

Did you notice it? If there's any hand-wringing at all in the media regarding the lack of coverage from Iraq (the news has been overwhelmingly positive over the past several months, and monthly death tolls for military and civilians have plummeted) it's over the conclusion that Americans are no longer aware of the total body count. (That conclusion is arguable, but I'll save that for another post.) While that statistic is important, from reading the survey itself and the subsequent coverage one is left with the impression that nothing else matters.

Even the folks at IAVA fell into it:

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, but you might not have seen much about it on TV recently. Just 3% of the news in February was dedicated to the war and fewer than one in three Americans know how many American troops have died in Iraq. Believe it or not, a study just released by the Pew Research Center shows that press coverage of the war is at the lowest point since the war began.

What should be obvious from the focus of coverage of this story is the revealed (though tacit) acknowledgement by certain sectors of the media and other fundamentally anti-Iraq groups (no, I don't mean IAVA) of something they would otherwise vehemently deny - something that was apparent to everyone else who was paying attention to Iraq from the get-go: the only thing Americans need to know about Iraq is the death toll, the death toll, and the death toll.

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Pro or con, there's nothing new about that debate. But surprise! - Iraq returns to the headlines today:

BAGHDAD - The overall U.S. death toll in Iraq rose to 4,000 after four soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad, a grim milestone that is likely to fuel calls for the withdrawal of American forces as the war enters its sixth year.

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So, milbloggers are suppressed, and the media presents a selective and narrow view of Iraq - stories to that effect have been told for years now. Meanwhile, milbloggers continue to blog in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as I've noted before, most people continue to ignore them.

You know the funny thing about the whole "Pentagon Silencing MilBlogs" thing? Nobody actually reads blogs from deployed troops. Check the site meters for any of them and you'll see what I mean. Even funnier, when all the brou-hah-ha was raging, no one, and by that I mean no one, linked or quoted any of them on the issue. (This is because no one actually reads them, including those who were the most outraged about them being "shut down".) The Mrs had a nice collection on the Dawn Patrol the other day, for the 4 or 5 folks who might actually give a damn.

I'll add my sincere thanks to the one-in-a-million Americans to whom this doesn't apply. I suppose some might interpret my comment above as a complaint, but while I would prefer more people to read milblogs, I'm long past the point of expecting that to happen anytime soon. Readership of this site (and I suspect others like it) ebbs and flows for various reasons, some of which are beyond my control. During the earliest days of full combat activity in the surge - as death tolls in Iraq spiked - I speculated on one of those reasons:

I suspect my commitment to victory in the war on terror (to the point that I'm actually participating in it when I could have retired to a safer life) and annoyance with those who oppose that goal have a lot of die-hard Democrats assuming I'm a Republican, and perhaps an increasing number of Republicans avoiding my site in their desperate search for other things to talk about.
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Both groups wish it [the war] would go away. As a guy just interested in presenting facts, I believe my efforts are less and less appealing to the average American every day."

Again, my thanks to those to whom that sentiment does not apply. I'm fully aware of other reasons for rises and falls in readership, a significant one being my own ability to post things routinely, something that I (and most other bloggers who are deployed with a much more important mission on their hands) find exceptionally difficult in that environment. I accept that, I expect that, but I suspect that other deployed troops who run the risk (be it minimal or otherwise) of irritating their superiors and find (or make, at the expense of sleep or an email/phone call home) the time to get something up on their blog might be more prone to not bother any more once they discover that nobody outside their immediate family cares to spend the 10 minutes to read what they've written. Are there fewer milblogs operating from Iraq and Afghanistan now than there were a few years ago? Yes - but I think the fault for that does not lie entirely with Army policy.

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Let's return to those halcyon days of yore - this is an August, 2005 episode of The Daily Show:

Okay - upfront, that's cool. Milblogs in Wired Magazine and on the Daily Show, I was glad to see it. But several aspects of this stand out for me today as illustrating my point above. One - the acknowledgement that milbloggers were better than the media in presenting the war to a reading public; two, the discussion of whether the Army could clamp down on those milblogs; and three, Stewart and Hockenberry pretending that they read them. Stewart attempts to recall the name of a blog he's claiming to read, and before he can even describe it Hockenberry provides that name - except he gets it wrong. At least at the time it was something new and different - since then it seems I get email questions from reporters every couple of months asking me the exact same questions Hockenberry did back in early 2005. (Why did you start your blog? Can you give me the name of some bloggers who've been crushed by the Army? What do you think of these OPSEC rules?)

Ahhh, the good old days. Note also that two great blogs that are the focus of the discussion - 2slick's Forum and 365 and a Wake Up (a wake up call being something else entirely) have both joined the ranks of the Ghost Battalions, as so many have before and since. Chris Missick, by the way, can be found here. My good friends at Blackfive, of course, are going strong.

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Why did I start my blog? I started it five years ago this month - just before the invasion of Iraq, because I wanted a place to record my own thoughts on whatever might develop, and because I wanted to counter what I anticipated as hostile coverage of our efforts from other sources who would claim to be speaking for the troops. I can't speak for the troops, but I can be the troop who speaks for himself.

Others were on the same wavelength, a few before me and many after. By November 2003 there were enough that I thought it might be a good idea to link together in an informal ring - no rules, no regulations, just a way of stating that each of us was one voice among many others. An additional consideration that I'd had in creating that group in the first place was the belief that milbloggers would come and go, and that each in their turn would be contributing something to a whole that would in many ways exceed the total of it's parts. In short order that "whole" grew to a size that no one could capture in it's entirety.

So March makes 5 years of Mudville, but I missed another anniversary earlier this month. However, I just checked with the Mrs and she couldn't even tell me the month or year of the event either, so I'm safe in that regard.

On March 7th, 2005, The Dawn Patrol made its debut here.

It evolved quickly from it's initial format..

I've decided that the Dawn Patrol should be of our MilBlogs and not of the MSM. I'd rather promote Free Speech from those who help make it possible than those who take it for granted. I know a lot of you liked the Dawn Patrol before, but let's give this a whirl.

...but that limitation didn't accomplish what we really wanted either.

Mrs G had rather quietly been running the MilBlogs Ring since shortly after I formed it in November, 2003. As I said, it grew beyond anyone's ability to capture its totality, and certainly beyond the point of my ability to run it and this blog while continuing a military career. But one thing we both agreed was desirable was a source that would capture as much of that running narrative as was humanly possible, against the backdrop of the story being woven by the media and other voices raised for or against our efforts in the war on terror. The Dawn Patrol was that something. By early June, 2005, the format was established and links were presented without any additional commentary from this site. By the end of summer each entry began with this simple mission statement: Welcome to the Dawn Patrol, our daily roundup of information on the War on Terror and other topics - from the MilBlogs, other blogs, and the mainstream media.

And the rest, as they say, is history. In fact, it may be the most comprehensive history available anywhere on Iraq and the war on terror. On any given day the Dawn Patrol contains links to more information than anyone could possibly consume, but we saw each entry in the series as a menu from which a reader could select whatever might strike their fancy. For three years I've been in awe (and sometimes frustration) with the amount of time and energy Mrs G has dedicated to the task of compiling an ongoing chronology of coverage of the war on terror from multiple perspectives as that history was made. Particularly in an age of RSS feeds such an effort seemed perhaps not worth the effort. But three years later...

Like the MilBlogs Ring itself, the summation of the effort now far exceeds the total of it's parts. The three-year archive of the Dawn Patrol (nearly 600 individual entries - she took some days off...) stands as a unique historical collection of the parallel story of Iraq, Afghanistan, and America - from the (often conflicting) viewpoint of those who lived it and those who reported it.

So this morning I deleted all but the most recent entries in the series from the archives of The Mudville Gazette.

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If you think it's tragic that such an archive should be lost forever, let me assure you I agree. But I also think that archive shouldn't be scattered throughout the 5-year archives of this site, and deserve to be compiled in their own right. And so we've created a new site: The Dawn Patrol Archives. New entries will continue to be posted here at Mudville, but moved to the historical archive a few days later. Those who might be interested in finding information on the past years of the war on terror, or a comprehensive chronology of milblogger's experiences therein might find it a useful resource.

As those who are interested in the current and future will always find something new right here.

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Thank for sticking around to the end of my rather lengthy post.

Oh, by the way, this:

Hour 18 of a 24-hour mission. Well, two missions really. We had spent the day pulling outer security for General Petraeus himself, while he strolled down Anu al-Verona with no body armor, surrounded by a camo entourage and media parade Patton’s ghost would respect, to buy some falafels. I didn’t get to meet the Big Man, but I did get a photo of the aforementioned circus from about 100 meters away, with all three rings in action. Trust me, I didn’t want to be any closer. No matter how many gorgeous aides there were in his posse who would have been dutifully unimpressed with a too-cocky, too-skinny scout platoon leader who can’t get rid of the black bags entrenched underneath his eyes, had drank 10 bottles of water in the past eight hours to fight off sunstroke, and hadn’t showered in two weeks.

is from Kaboom - a milblogger currently in Iraq. Yes, they do write them like that anymore.

And if you hurry you can meet this guy before he leaves Afghanistan.

(Via The Dawn Patrol, of course - where you'll find more every day.)

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What? Mudville is FIVE YEARS OLD this month? Yes - more reminiscing to follow, though I expect there will be plenty of new things to discuss, too, over the next five years.

Hope you'll come back soon.

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Update: Heh - I beat Mrs G to this one - here's Major John's latest from Iraq.