A story in the Wall Street Journal about military bloggers (”milbloggers”) who believe (as much as thousands of blogs can, as a whole, believe anything — but this is a trend story, so roll with it for a minute) that they are more qualified than the mainstream media to report and comment on the war being wages. Excerpt:

Matthew Burden, an Army veteran, started his blog, “Blackfive,” in December 2003 after he learned that an Army buddy, Maj. Mathew Schram, had been killed in an ambush near the Iraq-Syria border. Mr. Burden, 39, felt his friend received short shrift in media coverage and decided to blog about military stories he felt weren’t getting the attention they deserved.

“Does Abu Ghraib need to be told 40 times above the fold in the New York Times when half your readers couldn’t name the guy who won the Medal of Honor?” Mr. Burden says.

Read more on the blogs of war in SMITH’s Back Home from Iraq column, long interviews with former soldiers with lots on their mind.
Paul Riekhoff says, “I think there’s a need to make sure history is told from their perspective. I think there is an individualistic part of our society more than in past generations, but I think it’s also maybe deep-rooted in a sense that we know Vietnam was controversial, and even today there’s a lot of discrepancies and arguments about what Vietnam was, and I think soldiers, maybe subconsciously have a need to tell the stories they saw to make sure its taken into account.”
And find out why Jimmy Masey hates Harry Connick, Jr.