behind the news

Matthew Currier Burden on the Endangered Milblog

With the military increasingly cracking down on military bloggers, one prominent milblogger collects some of the best examples of the form.
November 2, 2006

In September, Matthew Currier Burden, a former Army officer and author of the popular military blog, Black Five, released a book, The Blog of War: Front-Line Dispatches from Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan that captured some of the best blog posts that have been written by active-duty service members in Iraq and Afghanistan and their families. He spoke with CJR Daily earlier this week about the book, and about milblogging in general.

Paul McLeary: Talk a bit about how you started writing about the lives of military personnel serving in war zones, and using their own words, culled from their blogs.

Matthew Currier Burden: There were a couple of reasons why I wanted to get the book published. One was that there were just so many good stories that I wanted to capture and preserve. A lot of the material in The Blog of War you can still find online today, but a lot of it you can’t, since some Internet sites sort of fade out after a while. The second reason was that I wanted to give people who didn’t have the same ideas about the Internet or user-generated content an opportunity to read those stories. Third, the military has sort of been cracking down on [military bloggers] in one way or another, and in the epilogue of the book I talk about who’s left.

A lot of the stories in the book are newsworthy stories that haven’t been told in the media, and I thought that the book would be a great outlet for those — you don’t get a lot of first-hand combat experiences and the experiences of people who are involved in the war but aren’t in combat, like the families, the nurses and doctors, that kind of stuff [in the mainstream media].

PM: You mentioned that the military is sort of cracking down on some blogs written by active members of the military. On Sunday, the Boston Herald reported that “the military has assigned a National Guard unit to monitor the Internet for possible violations of operational security.”

MCB: Just to go back a bit — during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the military offered up Internet service as a morale boost for the soldiers and their families, and when you’ve got a job to do, it’s easier to focus on it when there aren’t any problems at home. So imagine being in combat, and you want to know that everything’s taken care of back home and one way to do that is phone, but also now by e-mail, and it opened up the floodgates.

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In the book I call it a Pandora’s Box, because once they started doing that, without fully understanding user-generated content, and the Internet generation’s ideas about sharing information — which is completely different than any war in the past — I don’t think the military, which moves on a sea of paperwork and takes decades to change, understood what they were doing. So all of a sudden you had soldiers sending e-mails, posting blogs, sending pictures and things, so that’s where I started blogging. I had a couple hundred friends in Iraq and Afghanistan and they were sending me e-mails and photos that were contradicting things I was reading in the mainstream media, and I started posting those.

But the military then started putting out some operational security guidance. OpSec is kind of hard to define … but the Army began to require that all bloggers register their blogs with the chain of command, and the first colonel in the chain of command was responsible for having the blogs reviewed on a regular basis, which at the time I think was quarterly. So for the most part you had bloggers registering, and their products reviewed. There have been cases where a division general has reviewed a blogger’s content and thought it was great, where the Army has later come down and said, “No, this person violates operational security,” those kinds of things. So even in the Army there are mixed messages.

I do think that military blogs need to be monitored, since there is always a chance that you’ll give something away that could be taken advantage of by the enemy. They use an example of a situation where a soldier was posting photos of his guard position and talking about the best ways to take him out – and that guy needs to be punished. But some of the stuff [the Army] is citing I could point out to you on DoD Web sites.

PM: How long did it take you to put the book together?

MCB: I had an idea of how I wanted to flesh it out and who and where and what would fit into the book. What I did was I went onto my Web site and said, “I got a contract for a book, so what do you, the readers of military blogs, think is some content that should be included? About 20 percent of the material in the book actually comes from sources that I had never read before. The whole process took about a year.

PM: Were there people who you couldn’t track down, or who didn’t want to participate?

MCB: No, there were a couple people who I had to find at the last minute to get the authorization to use their material, and I also wanted to give them the opportunity — since the proceeds are split 54 ways, and I had four charities picked out in order to make it easier on myself, in terms of distributing the money — to help decide what to do with the money.

PM: Have you had any feedback from the military about the book?

MCB: Yeah, it runs the gamut. I was at a book-signing on Sunday and had a World War II vet come up to me and say he read the book and that — I have a chapter about nurses, medics, doctors, chaplains — that chapter was really powerful for him. From the military we’ve gotten a very positive response, but I’ve had some friends who aren’t going to read it, since it’s still too close to home, it’s too emotional, and I understand that. It’s a very emotional book.

PM: Since there are only so many reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they can only cover so much, what do you think the milbloggers bring to the coverage of the war? Is it just a personal perspective, or do you see their work informing the mainstream media’s coverage somehow?

MCB: I was just at the Military Reporters & Editors association conference in Chicago, and I got to meet some people there. I’ve been frequently critical of the media’s war coverage, particularly the mainstream stuff. You get a lot of great stories from local papers, and they do the “local boy or girl does good,” or “someone paid the price with their life,” and they’ll tell the story of that, but I think in terms of what the military blogs offer, there’s a couple things.

One is, it’s a direct, first-hand experience. Sure, the embed has first-hand experience, but they’re not doing the fighting. The other aspect is that you hear all the time that our society is disconnected from the war, that not enough rich people are involved in the war, not enough educated people are involved in the war, which is complete BS. But the blogs themselves serve as an outlet. People check in every day, and people can connect with people who are doing the fighting. I think as the blogs disappear — and there aren’t very many combat experience blogs left – you’re going to begin to see even more of a disconnect.

PM: Since the military is cracking down on blogs written by active duty service members, is there any move on the part of military bloggers — either active duty or civilian — to work within the chain of command to find a middle ground?

MCB: In terms of intelligence capability, they [the Pentagon] really need to have a unit that is established in that kind of media, because it’s going to evolve. One of the things we’re looking at is trying to take the rules for embeds — which have OpSec in mind — and marrying up some rules [for military bloggers] and dealing with it. We’re going to run it by some military lawyers and see what they think. And a lot of this is being run by people I can’t talk about because they’re on active duty, but we’re taking a look at it and seeing if we can influence it. There’s been times when bloggers have been pretty successful at influencing what’s going on, and there’s been times when we haven’t, but we’re going to give it a shot, and see what happens, because I think it’s really important that we keep America connected with what’s happening and give a voice to the soldier in this war.

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.