| Veterans
News Flash 
Doonesbury Creator, Military Bloggers Compile New Book
By John J. Kruzel
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18, 2007 - War can inspire great
writing, like a series of superlative dispatches
from servicemembers in Iraq and Afghanistan compiled
in a new book that offers an arresting glimpse
of life on the front lines.
Conceived by Garry Trudeau, creator of the long-running,
satirical comic strip Doonesbury, "The Sandbox" is
a 309-page compilation of roughly 90 online journal
entries penned by scores of the military's most
talented scribes.
"In fascinating and compelling posts, soldiers
write passionately, eloquently and movingly of
their day-to-day lives, of their mission, and of
the drama that unfolds daily around them," Trudeau
said during an interview at the Pentagon yesterday.
"In the military they call it 'hotwash,' I understand;
this kind of downloading, debriefing of experiences
right after they happen," he said. "It's the kind
of first-person journalism that you really can't
find anyplace else."
Thousands of military bloggers, or milbloggers,
in Afghanistan and Iraq use the Internet to tell
an unfiltered version of war, sharing stories of
compassion, hope, anguish and suspense to primarily
niche audiences of family members and friends.
Trudeau, who said he began reading milblogs as
a source of inspiration and information at the
wars' outset, decided last year to help the authors
tap into a wider readership.
"I have a Web site -- doonesebury.com -- that does
have a fairly broad reach," he said, "and so we
thought maybe this would be a good place to set
up an aggregate site, a site that compiles the
very best of what we could find of the milblogs."
In October 2006, Trudeau and editor David Stanford,
duty officer at the Doonesbury Web site, began
hosting milblogs online. To draw attention to the
nascent site, Trudeau used cammie-clad Doonesbury
character Ray Hightower -- apparently an Army noncommissioned
officer of undisclosed rank -- to spread the message
via word-of-mouth.
"At The Sandbox, contributors can operate in a
clean, lightly edited debriefing environment where
all content, no matter how robust, is secured by
the first amendment!" reads the text next to Hightower's
helmet-covered head in the Oct. 8, 2006, Doonesbury
strip, to lure comic-strip readers to the new site.
Hightower adds, "So if you support the troops --
but haven't a clue what they're actually up to
-- you owe it to yourself to log onto The Sandbox!"
Meanwhile, Stanford scoured some 2,000 milblogs
in search of compelling posts. The editor also
opened the Web site to submissions, resulting in
an encouraging response of surprising quality and
depth.
"I figured people maybe wouldn't have enough time
to write, and maybe they'd be writing a brief piece
here, a quick report there," he recalled. "But
we were getting 2,000-, 3,000-word posts from people
who would be out on a 15-hour mission and then
just sit down and write a beautiful account of
the entire thing with style."
Milblogger 1st Sgt. Troy Steward of the New York
National Guard regrets the empty pages of the journal
he sparsely kept during the first Persian Gulf
War.
"It was 16 or 17 years ago, and there's a lot I've
forgotten," he said during an interview yesterday.
When Steward deployed to Afghanistan in May 2006,
he resolved to discipline himself as a writer.
Over the course of his year-long deployment, the
first sergeant maintained his bouhammer.com milblog,
which attracted a readership of unexpectedly high
volume.
"As people around America starting reading it,
my readership of 200-300 hits per day was 70 percent
people I'd never met," he recalled. "So many e-mails
I received were from people that had family members
-- sons, brothers, husbands, whatever -- deployed
to Afghanistan that they hardly ever heard from.
They would write me and say, 'Your blog gives me
an idea of what they're going through. It gets
me in touch with what they're going through.'"
Steward said many of his readers were Americans
interested in but deprived of traditional media
coverage about Operation Enduring Freedom. The
war in Afghanistan, which "does not grab the headlines
anymore," often is referred to by servicemembers
deployed there as "the forgotten war," Steward
said.
"In fact, when I came back on leave, people didn't
even know we were still in Afghanistan," he said
with an incredulous tone. "And that's amazing.
"Many people were just concerned citizens, great
Americans that wanted to know what was going on
and what servicemembers were going through," he
continued. "It gave them a small glimpse into what
life was like over there."
Three of Steward's posts appear in The Sandbox,
including a dispatch titled "Lost Innocence," an
account about an Afghan boy Steward met while on
patrol near Sharana, Afghanistan.
"I wrote about a young boy -- probably about 10
years old -- that watched his father, who worked
for the government, get murdered right in front
of him very violently by enemy forces," he said. "No
one in the village would go to the funeral, because
they didn't want to be associated with helping
out a member of the government.
"He and his mother and his siblings had to drag
his father's body, dig the hole and bury him. So
I wrote about how a 10-year-old boy will never
have a chance to be a child," Steward said. "His
innocence is lost forever."
Milblogger Army Sgt. Owen Powell became a regular
contributor to the Doonesbury Web site while deployed
in Iraq from June 2006 to July 2007. Seven posts
by Powell, who blogs under the nom de guerre "Roy
Batty," appear in The Sandbox compilation.
During an interview yesterday, the sergeant laughed
when asked about the meaning behind his pseudonym,
a homage to a character from the film "Bladerunner." "There's
an awesome line at the end of the movie where it
says, 'I have seen things that you people wouldn't
believe.' And for me that resonated even when I
was a kid, and as a soldier it really resonated.
"I wanted to just capture, 'What did it feel like
to walk in the desert in Kuwait at night? What
did it feel like to drive a Humvee through the
mahalas (neighborhoods) of Baghdad? What did it
feel like to get shot at or hit with an improvised
explosive device?'" Powell said about his blog. "I
was trying to bring out these images and these
feelings and the visceral experience of being in
Iraq."
Proceeds from The Sandbox, Trudeau's third in a
series of military-related books, will be donated
to the Fisher
House Foundation. Located on the
grounds of military and Veterans hospitals, Fisher
Houses offer a setting where family members can
be close to loved ones hospitalized for an injury,
illness or disease.
SOURCE:
VNIS
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