Blogs – online diaries or journals – have become popular with soldiers serving in Iraq. Many have found their voices while overseas. Some write to tell the world about what was really happening in Iraq and others just to fill down time.
One such soldier, Colby Buzzell, turned his boredom and time into a blog and then a book.
Buzzell, a gunner – or “trigger puller” as he so casually puts it – completed a two-year stint in the Army. At 26, the self-professed slacker had grown tired of his succession of dead-end jobs. The solution: Join the Army for some excitement, a little travel and a full-time job. He had no interest in being the best he could be or any sort of recruiting hogwash.
Buzzell simply went to kill: “My heart was dead set on being a trigger puller.” When signing on for this “exciting” job and “vacation” in the Middle East, he didn’t realize what he was signing up for. Two of his biggest aggravations during his stint in Iraq were “stop-loss,” or the military’s “unofficial draft,” and boredom. His blog eased the latter.
His voice at times is rebellious. Other times he sounds like a stereotypical Army clone. Yet he’s always interesting. A fan of Hunter S.
Thompson and Ernest Hemingway, he tries to fashion his writing after the two, peppering his prose with cursing. The foul language at times becomes a distraction.
Buzzell started his blog when he became irritated with other soldiers’ blogs he had read. He thought they didn’t encapsulate the war, because those bloggers weren’t in the combat zone like he was and served “brainwashed rhetoric, like, ‘Oh, the Iraqi people love us, we’re doing the right thing’ mentality.”
In “Men in Black,” his most widely read post, he describes a gunfight in Mosul that he says the media glossed over. His version is like strong black coffee compared with the media version. By Buzzell’s account, this is typical.
One thing he finds is that many of the soldiers are uneducated about the rest of the world. Their insensitivity to other cultures and religions is clear in his stories. His account is riddled with derogatory terms and overwhelming generalizations about Iraqis. Buzzell writes, “Every (expletive) person there looked like a (expletive) terrorist to me. Every single one of them. And dude, they were all over the place.”
He also frequently mocks their religion as he recalls his excitement at shooting at a mosque, killing “hajis,” and enjoying a double helping of pork sausage to begin Ramadan.
Readers may also find disturbing what these young soldiers are taught. As one battalion commander so blithely put it to his soldiers: “Men, this is not a peacekeeping mission. We will not be handing out bread, we will be handing out lead.” The battalion will “cut out their (terrorists’) living guts and use them to grease the gears of our Strykers (armored vehicles) and the bolts of our weapons.”
Of course, such attitudes are not new to this or any other war. But the soldiers’ youth and inexperience combined with their lack of sensitivity is troubling. Buzzell does at times contemplate moral issues, particularly the day he feared he killed a civilian instead of an insurgent.
He makes it clear that not all is well with the forces in Iraq. He confesses that at times he “was more nervous of our own guys than I was of any terrorist.” Speaking of President Bush’s speeches, he says, “Sometimes I wondered if they were talking about a different Iraq than the one I was in.”
Several other books have come out during the war from blogs like “Salam Pax,” by a local Iraqi blogger, and “The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell,” by John F. Crawford, another U.S. soldier. What makes “My War” stand out is the author.
The way in which a punk-rock skateboarder navigated the Army gives him a compelling voice and take on the Iraq war.
Renée Warner is an Atlanta freelance writer.
My War: Killing Time in Iraq
By Colby Buzzell
GP Putnam’s Sons, 416 pages, $25.95
