The Blog of War

 by Matthew Currier Burden

From The Washington Post:

"It's so hard to let go; you want to make time stand still. You barely breathe and try to feel his heartbeat in your own breast because his heart will always beat in yours." These words, the timeless lament of a father seeing his son off to war, are included in a remarkable collection of e-mails and blogs by soldiers and their families in The Blog of War: Front-line Dispatches From Military Bloggers in Iraq and Afghanistan , by Matthew Currier Burden (Simon & Schuster; paperback, $15). A former Army officer, Burden was inspired to begin a "milblog" of his own -- called Blackfive, "the generic call-sign for the executive officer making things happen behind the scenes" -- in June 2003 after learning of the death in Iraq of a friend, Maj. Mathew E. Schram. Schram was killed when he ordered his Humvee to accelerate into an insurgent position in order to break up an ambush of his convoy, probably saving the life of the reporter embedded with his unit. But "the reporter never wrote a story about my good friend, Mat, the man who saved his life. That wasn't news," Burden explains. "It took a few weeks to figure out what to do with the story that I knew, the news that I felt should be out there."

So he turned to the Web. Blogging the story of Schram and hundreds of other unknown soldier-heroes was a good decision, as was piecing together a collection of military blogs from all over the Iraq theater. Though Burden's politics have a decidedly conservative slant (one of his favorite bloggers, a Marine who re-enlisted as a corporal after watching others go off to Iraq and Afghanistan, calls his site "Red State Rants"), nonpartisan patriotism is the common thread tying together these reflections, love letters and stories of combat. They make for riveting reading.