Iraq War Veteran and Milblogger wins Blooker Prize

international | arts and media | news report Tuesday May 15, 2007 12:00 by DM

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Iraq War Veteran, Colby Buzzell - Blooker Prize Winner. Photograph: Reuters

Blooking about the war
The last time an Iraq war veteran won a major prize he collected a lot more hard cash but a lot less attention. But that was when 24 year old Peter Willers Jepsen defeated 284 players in the Euro Poker Championship (http://peacenikhurler.blogspot.com/2007/04/iraq-war-vet....html), to win the biggest sum of a $1.385 million prize pool, picking up $433,000 for his win. Extracts I have read from US soldier Colby Buzzell's prize-winning book, which began online as a blook (blog book) while he was stationed in Mosul, Iraq, are quite disturbing, to put it mildly. Ranging from his recollection of how 'Lt Armeni's guts were spilling everywhere' after an RPG attack on a U.S. convoy to how he tried to 'waste an unarmed man' flying a scene of carnage, mourning the fact the 'somehow the bastard got away'. Well, by the tone of these couple of examples we can be fairly certain that Colby did indeed 'waste' a good few Iraqis on his tour of duty. War on terror? More like 'War of terror'. Then again, why should any of us be shocked at such an obscene account of violence, when we all know the disaster the invasion and occupation of Iraq has been.

His account of fighting in Iraq's Sunni triangle has won the 'Blooker prize' (http://www.lulublookerprize.com/), worth $15,000, beating off stiff competition from over 110 entries from 15 countries. The former U.S. military machine-gunner turned writer, whose successful account entitled 'My War: Killing Time in Iraq', was voted the best book of the year based on a blog. The award is granted by Lulu (http://www.lulu.com/) which credits itself as 'the world's fastest-growing provider of print-on-demand books'. But it's quite probable that Buzzell's win will be last such victory for military personnel typing up their experiences online.

Milblog Clampdown
This is due to the irony of his success coming at the same time as the Pentagon's attempts to crackdown on the amount of free-blogging engaged in by soldiers in the theatre of war, citing security concerns and pressure on servers as the justification. Supervising officers will now have to check and censor the 'milbloggers' before they can place their entries online for the whole world to read. The Pentagon announced yesterday that they were blocking access, throughout their system of military computers and networks, to 13 popular websites, such as YouTube.

The pen is mightier than the sword
The memoir is based on Buzzel's experiences in Mosul, northern Iraq, where he was based for a year in 2004. He claims to have joined the army after a period of time when "I was living off Top Ramen [pot noodles] in a suburb of San Francisco and my life was going nowhere".
He discovered blogging by reading a Time article while in Iraq, and started posting eight months into his tour. Whatever one thinks of his book, and the little I have read doesn't make a good impression on me about the type of stuff Buzzell and his fellow soldiers got up to, it has already been translated into seven languages. Thankfully, his new found talent has led him to embark on a career away from the killing fields and the machine guns to freelance writing for Esquire magazine, among others. He's back living California, this time is Los Angeles.

He cites the deceased Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thomson as literary heroes of his. An unlikely duo one might think, but I was surprised to read the following words from Vonnegut, "My War by Colby Buzzell is nothing less than the soul of an extremely interesting human being at war on our behalf in Iraq." U.S. Today believe that "military recruiters won't be handing My War to prospective soldiers, who would do well to read one grunt's account of what they could be getting into." So it certainly seems that this real-life account of the terror U.S. soldiers perpetrate and experience on the ground in Iraq and elsewhere is a read those of us who are anti-war could learn a lot from. Indeed if Kirkus reviews are right about the potential impact the book contains, then we may even need to start promoting it: "If military recruitment is down now, wait till the kids read this book."

The following is an extract from Buzzel's book, as posted on the Guardian website:

My War: Killing Time in Iraq

Thursday August 4 2004

Down in the hatch, I was frantically scanning my sector when suddenly about 300 metres away from us, over by the traffic circle, I saw two guys with those red-and-white jihad towels wrapped around their heads creeping around a corner.......

More at http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2079657,00.html