Blogs Chronicle War from Soldiers' Perspectives

Since January, Merritt's office has hosted "blogger roundtables," which are conference calls for bloggers writing on Defense Department issues. Hurley of "Andi's World" and other milbloggers participate, posing questions to many top officials in the Multi-National Force of Iraq.

Blogger Bill Roggio served in the military and started "The Fourth Rail" in March 2004, using media accounts, milblog posts and Defense Department press releases to craft coverage of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Impressed with his reporting, the U.S. Marine Corps invited Roggio to become an embedded reporter in the Anbar Province of Iraq.

Because he was a blogger and not affiliated with a media company, he had to find organizations to help him acquire credentials. The Weekly Standard sponsored Roggio's first trip to Iraq along with the Canadian talk radio show The World Tonight. He raised $33,000 from more than 700 of his readers for the trip.

Roggio has since joined troops three times in Iraq and once in Afghanistan. He formed his own media company so that he can acquire press credentials. Without any formal journalism training, Roggio--who is vocal about his pro-Iraq war stance--has turned his writing into a career.

"When I go on BBC radio I'm called a journalist and when I'm on The World Tonight he calls me a military analyst, blogger, journalist," Roggio said. "I say whatever they are comfortable in calling me."

Another blogger, Bert Stover, who piloted a helicopter in Al Asad and Al Taqaddam, Iraq, for 12 months, walked an even more complicated media-military line. Stover wrote the blog "Reporting for Duty" for washingtonpost.com.

Stover was manager of commercial and enterprise systems at the online news site before being called to active duty. He pitched the blogging idea to editors and his superiors in the military. Because he was part of the Virginia Army National Guard but was working under the Marines in Iraq, he ended up working his way through three chains of command to get the project approved.

Stover said he was able to write about his deployment for washingtonpost.com because he was forthright with the Marines.

"I was the go-between," Stover said. "I had to have a sense of awareness of what was acceptable and what wasn't and when there was something that was questionable I would tell the Marine Corps that I was writing something questionable and basically that they should be ready to deal with it."

At one point in his deployment, a general e-mailed Stover an order to stop blogging. Confused, Stover asked his chain of command to investigate. They found there was no real order and that someone had spoken for an officer when they did not have the authority to do so. Stover lost about a month of blogging time because of the incident.

Later, in an effort to be more cautious, he deliberately delayed posting details of a helicopter crash where there were no casualties so he would not rattle his chain of command.

"I definitely think this was the right thing to do-to play that role between what is perceived to be the left, media, and the right, military, and meet in the middle of the two groups," Stover said.

When Stover returned to the states in March, he stopped blogging.

For many milbloggers once their mission is completed, their blog is finished too. But this is not true for everyone.

Buzzell and Hartley put portions of their blogs back online and wrote books based on their posts from Iraq.

Burden uses his blogging celebrity to raise money for the wounded. He raised $30,000 overnight for the family of a triple amputee so they could live in Washington while the soldier recovered at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He also helped raise more than $210,000 in November 2006 to buy voice-activated laptops for soldiers with wounded hands.

He has no plans to stop blogging, though if he did, he said it would be for a good reason.

"There's a lot of times when I think I would have been done a year ago because I thought this war would be over," Burden said. "I think that if I stopped blogging that would mean nobody else would be dying, so that would be a good thing."