Update: My War, Over and Out

Those of you who began reading this blog with my review of CBFTW's My War--Fear and Loathing in Iraq (CBFTW is a Hunter Thompson fan) and got thoroughly hooked on it in the days and weeks afterward most likely already know this, but for those of you who may be tuning in late, My War has been shut down--maybe by CBFTW himself, but maybe by the Army, and for reasons that aren't entirely clear. Ron Brynaert at Why Are We Back in Iraq? has done a nice job summarizing the story, some of which I didn't know.

[O]ne day he posted a story which claimed that he just fought a battle with Al Qaeda...bad enough...but he also claimed (mostly based upon the word of one of his Commanding Officers) that the enemies were Al Qaeda that had come into Iraq from Iran.

That seems to have been the beginning of his difficulties (although Ron mentions that right-wing commenters had begun using My War as a platform for supporting the SGW and attacking anyone who didn't or whose support was less than enthusiastic), though why it should have been is a mystery. The battle was reported in the press, as was the participation of AQ which came straight from official Army statements; C was merely repeating what we already knew. The Army also didn't seem to have a problem with it since they left it up. They did, however, decide that from then on they wanted to see what he wrote before he posted it. And they wanted some changes.

The first noticable change was that the title was shortened to "My War." I guess the Military don't do irony. Then he started to become annoyed with the myriad of posters on his blog. He was trying to sanitize his site for the brass...but posters were copy-and-pasting and resubmitting some of his posts.

No, Ron, the military doesn't do 'irony'. They don't know what it is but they're pretty sure it must be a way of making fun of them.

If the commenters were a drag, he could have shut them off. He was running a new Blogger template and all he had to do was go to the comments settings and click 'No'. From that point on, no comments would have been allowed. A lot of bloggers whose comments sections are becoming wastelands of right-wing troll excess have been forced to do that--or threaten to. C must have known that--maybe he isn't a techie but he had to turn them on when he set up the blog, so he knew he could turn them off. He could even delete the ones that had already been posted. That wasn't the real problem. Here's the real problem (Ron again):

Then he became famous.

He began getting write-ups here and there throughout the land. One day, the Wall Street Journal ran a story which carried his name, and while it didn't mention his blog, it pretty much told the same story as one of his posts (I'm not going to give the exact link...because his name is in it). Then NPR ran a piece on him. Yet, they (stupidly...though they later corrected it by deleting it) made a direct connection to his name and blog.

On August 19th, CB's only post was the text to the 1st Amendment, which created a ton of wild speculation. He returned briefly to the blog warning his fans again not to copy-and-paste. But most wouldn't listen.

There's more to this story (read Ron's whole post) but that, I think, is the heart of it.

The Army is notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to the media--any media. After the Viet Nam War, they began treating the press as if it were as much an enemy as the enemy. The reason was simple: the press of that day told the truth about what was happening in Viet Nam, and that truth was not necessarily complimentary to the military. Their arrogance, bad decisions, and total misunderstanding of both the enemy they were fighting and the kind of war it was were paraded nightly on television. The massive exaggeration of the number of enemy killed and the orders to exaggerate were reported in full. Westmoreland's blunt style wasn't a good fit for tv but that wasn't what did him in. His downfall--and to some extent the Army's with him--came from his own mouth: he insisted that things were true that we could see for ourselves were not. His credibility at the end of his tenure was below that of a used-car salesman or Scott McClellan.

And then there were the pictures--of a South Vietnamese intelligence officer shooting a suspected VC in the head at point-blank range; of a naked Vietnamese woman running down the road, screaming, from her napalmed village; of a platoon of Special Forces commandos posing with their collection of VC body parts--ears, teeth, noses, fingers--and smiling for the camera. Americans began to ask themselves, 'What kind of war is this? What's it doing to our boys?', and once they started asking, the war was as good as over. For the answers were not satisfactory.

The Domino Theory--that the Soviets intended to take over the world one country at a time and so we had to stop them in Viet Nam or they'd be invading Santa Monica--had by 1970 been so thoroughly discredited that not even the hard-liners used it as an excuse any more. The next line--that we were bringing democracy to Viet Nam and saving it from a dictatorial takeover--began to fall apart when we saw the destruction and havoc we were wreaking on that country in the name of saving it--a doctrine forever emblazoned in our minds by the phrase, 'We had to destroy the village in order to save it' uttered by an unnamed Army Colonel. Eventually, it was just too hard to see what we saw and believe that there would be much country left to democratize when we got done with it.

The third excuse--that we were protecting the people of South Viet Nam from the revenge the Communist North Vietnamese would undoubtedly take on the South--was so weak it never got any traction. The South Vietnamese wanted us gone worse than the insurgents; by then, they were more frightened of us than of anything their blood-cousins would be likely to do to them.

None of this was really the military's fault. They were, to the best of their ability, trying to carry out their orders--orders from civilian commanders who knew even less than they did about the war they were being asked to fight; who had lots of theories and beliefs but no real experience; who were operating from a premise so profoundly false that there was no way it could ever have been brought into the real world. Viet Nam was their mistake, not the military's.

But the military did make mistakes, some of them irretrievable. There was Tiger Force, there was My Lai, there was fragging because untrained looeys were being put in positions of authority and getting men killed unnecessarily, there were the inflated body-counts and the inflated 'victories', and on and on. In the end, the military, particularly the Army, was blamed for both its own mistakes and the mistakes of its civilian commanders, and the way they saw it, it was the press that was doing the blaming.

They reacted at first by over-reacting: they began to shut the press out entirely. During the First Gulf War, they controlled the press with an iron fist. No reporter was allowed to go anywhere near the actual fighting; most were ordered into far-away enclaves--hotels in Kuwait and Cairo--where they were totally dependent on military press officers for information. No tv, no radio, no photographers. The shut-down worked so well that it was years before we even heard about the Highway of Death much less saw pictures of it. The Army had used silence and secrecy to rehabilitate its reputation. It liked the result.

During the invasion of Iraq, it was so confident in its ability to control the press that it allowed some reporters to ride with certain selected units, 'embedded' with them. It was a brilliant strategy. Not only could they control everything the 'embeds' saw or heard, but the embeds began to identify themselves with the units with which they rode, becoming cheerleaders rather than reporters.

Then the Army set up CentCom with the help of Republican PR strategist and dirty-tricks specialist Jim Wilkenson, a Hollywood-style set faked to look like a military HQ but miles from the action, and herded the giant press corps into it like cows, feeding them pre-digested pap that everybody had to pretend was 'information'. The results must have been beyond their wildest expectations--glowing reports filled the nation's tv screens, the military was all but worshipped, dissenters and questioners were--and still are--shouted down with calls of 'Traitor!', often accompanied by vocal and colorfully detailed threats.

In other words, they learned that absolute control works. The Viet Nam lesson was, "Show them only what you want them to see and prevent them at all costs from seeing anything else.' It is a dictum they have lived by in the years since and it has served them well.

It is not too much to infer that that strict control has been or is being extended to soldier-blogs like C's. Until the plug got pulled on My War, it frankly never occurred to me that anyone would care what he wrote as long as he wasn't doing dumb things like giving away their position or plans in advance, which he wasn't. He's a smart kid, and he was always careful to include only general information that the enemy would already know or personal details that would be of no interest or value to them.

But I was wrong. They did care. It wasn't the comments and it wasn't that he was giving away military secrets, which he wasn't. It was the potential notoriety and, more importantly, the possibility that C might say something that wasn't completely flattering to the military, the president, his commanders or those who commanded them. Look at the evidence as they must have seen it: he had a b & w copy of the most famous anti-war picture ever painted--Picasso's Guernica--on his header; he was a fan of the most notorious and undisciplined gonzo journalist of all time, infamous for ferocious independence, a dogged refusal to write what was expected, and insisting that nothing--NOTHING--was 'off the record'; and he was getting noticed by the media. The WSJ was alright, but that bastion of Communists, fellow-travelers, and military-bashers, NPR? Not acceptable. And NPR didn't help, although I can't see that publishing his name should have been a huge problem--Sgt Chris Missick has his name all over A Line in the Sand and nobody is terribly concerned about him. But then, Sgt Missick isn't a potential dissenter.

And that, I think, was the real issue: C wanted to tell the truth and the Army didn't want to take the chance that he would. The Army did not want to risk losing control of the official message, the only message the media was allowed to get. They didn't want any loose cannons. Whether they shut down C's site because it was one, or C shut it down himself rather than be told what he could or couldn't write, I don't know. At this point, only C does. If the latter, I can understand why and I support his decision; if the former, it was a mistake.

C had grown enormously as a writer in the short months he had his blog. While I disagree with Ron's characterization that C's early posts 'weren't well-written'--they may have been short on grammar and badly organized, but as I said in my review, there was a raw but undeniable talent there struggling to get out, and that was clear from the git-go--there's no argument that the more he wrote, the better he got. Even his grammar improved (he was concerned about that), and the way he organized his posts, while still scattershot, was beginning to show the earmarks of a subtle and sophisticated coherence--throughlines based on hidden connections and not-immediately-obvious resonances that would have escaped a casual eye. He was seeing more and seeing more deeply, and he was proving that he could write what he saw.

If the Army shut him down, they shouldn't have. He was a forceful voice for their presence in Iraq and he wasn't doing it with the PR jargon that many of us now dismiss as soon as we read it. He was doing it by letting us see what was really going on and how it affected both sides. Ultimately, it's in the military's best interest that we know those things, and their strongest argument lies in our understanding and support. Whether he knew it or not, intended it or not, C's writing was explaining and defining that role from ground-level.

C had the distinction of being that truly rare bird, a non-partisan. He wasn't for the war and he wasn't against it, he was just a grunt doing a job and telling us about it as plainly and as honestly as he could. As he said in an email to Ron, 'I'm not a republican or a democrat, I'm just a skater from SF who's packin a machine gun in iraq at the moment.' My War let us connect with him and others just like him in a direct way that isn't available from any other source. In the long run, the military could only benefit from such a connection. In the long run, they can only suffer because it was broken.