Film of 101st Division, US Army in Iraq

Sean Smith is a photojournalist for The Guardian newspaper. His short film of Apache Company, 101st Division of the US Army recently won a Royal Television Society Award in the UK. Any comments on the substance of the film would be most welcome, especially from my American readers.

Taxi!

Do you know any insurgents you can pick up? We're here for another hour...

An insight into counterinsurgency from the Afghanistan Milblogs

I've found some new Afghanistan milblogs thanks to this very useful resource.

• 'The word 'infantry' just doesn't seem to cover everything we do here' according to a US Infantry Platoon leader in Afghanistan. He discusses the provision of medical supplies, the role of the US Army in winning hearts and minds for the Afghan government and 'collateral damage'.

• Over at 'Bill and Bob's Excellent Afghanistan Adventure', an old hand has some new faces to look after. Some of them, he says, just don't get counterinsurgency:

'I think that he thought that he was going to be hunting Taliban every day. Snooping around the rocks, tossing grenades into every suspect cave opening and generally scaring the living hell out of everything; walking like some kind of KISS band member through quivering Afghan villages who will toss their Talibs out in the street just so that this otherworldly killing machine will be satisfied and leave them alone.'

• While LTC Rich Phillips knows that counterinsurgency can't begin until you've found a way out of your room at base...

Bandwidth: the curse of US milbloggers

Frontline Fobbit says he hasn't been able to access his blog recently because his journal has been blocked by military networks. He claims:

"It isn't because of anything I did or said, but because they have filtered out blogging sites to conserve bandwidth."

'Bandwidth' was also cited by the US military when they stopped serving soldiers using Youtube and MySpace in May last year.

If any other US milblogs have been affected in the same way as Frontline Fobbit please get in touch.

Blogging in the snow

• "It was a gift straight from Mother Nature herself (with a possible assist from her red-headed stepchild, Global Warming) – snow": Lt G over at Kaboom tells us about his first 'snow patrol' in Iraq.

• And it's no warmer in Kabul, Afghanistan. Maj Gian P. Hernandez escapes the weather to watch the neurosurgeon at work in the ER room of a local hospital.
  

I'm enjoying Lt G at Kaboom...

Here's his latest post. For starters, I haven't picked up many milbloggers who begin with Shakespeare! But for me, the most interesting part and the crux of the post, is the suggestion that America's recent success in finally winning over some hearts and minds is mostly a consequence of giving Iraqis jobs and filling their wallets.

Blogging from beyond the grave

I've just come across a fascinating blog post via the Sandbox website. It was written by Major Andrew Olmsted who was killed in Iraq on 3 January.

He was trying to persuade insurgents to surrender when he was hit by sniper fire. He soon became the first US Casualty in Iraq in 2008. (There's more about the circumstances of his death at Rocky Mountain News.)

Olmsted had prepared a 'Final Post' in case he was killed in Iraq and primed another blogger to publish it the day after his death. It's a surreal thing to read and I'm not really sure what to make of it all. I've certainly never seen anything quite like it before.

(My immediate and rather strange thought is that sombody could prepare a whole raft of blog posts to be published after their death and thus 'live on' in the digital world.)

Here are some extracts:

• "This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits."

• "What I don't want this to be is a chance for me, or anyone else, to be maudlin. I'm dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren't going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss."

• "Believe it or not, one of the things I will miss most is not being able to blog any longer."

• "I do ask (not that I'm in a position to enforce this) that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn't a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side."

• "I write this in part, admittedly, because I would like to think that there's at least a little something out there to remember me by. Granted, this site will eventually vanish, being ephemeral in a very real sense of the word, but at least for a time it can serve as a tiny record of my contributions to the world."

• "This is the hardest part. While I certainly have no desire to die, at this point I no longer have any worries. That is not true of the woman who made my life something to enjoy rather than something merely to survive."

You can read the full post at the Sandbox.