Iraq Vet wins prize for blog > book. Pentagon tries to stop it from ever happening, again.


A former American machine gunner’s memoir of a year’s tour of duty in Iraq based on his blog has just won a major accolade.


Colby Buzzell

The timing of the award is almost as striking as the writing which it honours. A former American machine gunner’s memoir of a year’s tour of duty in Iraq based on his blog has just won a major accolade at precisely the moment when the US military high command is clamping down on blogs among the rank and file.

Colby Buzzell was awarded the £5,000 Lulu Blooker prize for My War: Killing Time in Iraq, which was voted the best book of the year based on a blog. It triumphed over 110 entries from 15 countries.

The paradox of Buzzell’s victory is that it quickly follows the revelation that the Pentagon has introduced new rules restricting blogs among soldiers, fuelling speculation that live and unadorned combat writing from the field such as Buzzell’s may be the last of its kind.

The new rules require all would-be “milbloggers”, as soldier-publishers are called, to submit blog entries to supervising officers before posting them. That turns on its head the existing rules which allowed soldiers to post freely, with the onus on them to register their blogs and to alert officers to any material that might compromise security.

Yesterday the defence department went further and announced it was blocking access “worldwide” to 13 communal websites, including YouTube and MySpace from military computers and networks.

Buzzell’s book has been translated into seven languages. Pentagon policy should be translated into a landfill.

Posted: Tue - May 15, 2007 at 06:02 AM