Silent Posting

Lt. Matthew Gallagher sits on a burned out Iraqi armored vehicle, early 2008. The photo was presumably taken by a member of his platoon (the "Gravediggers"). (Courtesy of Dennis Gallagher)

Lt. G said he could relate.

"My grandma was horrified when my mom told her she was marrying a Catholic," he wrote. "Same concept, right?"

Sometimes overtly, sometimes not, Lt. G wrote about what he saw as a widening disconnect between America and its warriors. His dispatches often read like a desperate call from a largely forgotten war. The Gravediggers received odd letters and care packages from strangers. Some were from older women probably looking for love. One was from someone in corporate America who somehow figured golf shirts would come in handy in a war zone.

Then there were the letters from children, which spoke volumes about how many Americans have come to feel about this war. Some excerpts from a Feb. 6 entry:

· "I hope you don't die, soldier. That would be bad."

· "I feel sorry for you."

· "I think war is worse than math."

· "My daddy doesn't want me to be in the soldiers, cause he says that the Irack will last forever. Maybe if he changes his mind I'll see you in the Irack."

· "My cousin was in war but he got hurt. Now he has a big beard and drinks beer all day long. My mom says he should get a job."

· "Can you send me back a bad guy's head? That would be cool."

· "I'm going to study real hard, so I don't have to go to Iraq. Do you wish you had done better at school?"

* * *

Halfway into his deployment, Lt. G, who was up for a promotion, was asked to take a new job in Iraq. In a May 28 posting describing a conversation with a supervisor, he juxtaposed their dialogue with what was going through his mind.

"No, not me," he wrote. "Not interested. Keep me on the line. I want nothing to do with a lateral promotion . . . that involves becoming a logistical whipping boy and terminal scapegoat for all things NOTGOODENOUGH. I've been out here in the wilds too long, dealing with matters of life and death, to go back to Little America for PowerPoint [contests]. Not me."

The supervisor took it "like a spurned teenage blonde whose dreamboat crush tells her point-blank that he prefers brunettes," Lt. G wrote.

The lieutenant told the officer that he wanted to stay with his platoon. Besides, he had decided he wanted to leave the Army after his deployment. So the promotion should go to an officer who wanted to stick around.

The supervisor gave up, Lt. G wrote, but threatened to give him a new job nonetheless.

"I got a rubber stamp with your name on it," Lt. G wrote, summing up the outcome of the conversation.

Shortly afterward, Gallagher, who is now a captain, was ordered to delete his blog. He did. The content remains on an archive blog one of his friends created: http://kaboomwarjournalarchive.blogspot.com. The old blog site is now controlled by City Girl, Gallagher's fiancee, who occasionally pens updates on the Gravediggers.

Lt. Col. Steve Stover, a military spokesman, said in an e-mail that Kaboom was "deemed by the commander to be counter to good order and discipline of his unit." He added that the blog had not been registered with the military, an assertion Dennis Gallagher disputes.

Lt. G wrote in his last dispatch that all postings, except for the one about the promotion talk, had been vetted by a supervisor. On June 27, he wrote one last entry, titled "A Tactical Pause":

I'm a soldier first, and orders are orders. So it is.

If you think, please think of us. If you pray, please pray for us. The second half of our deployment will be just as challenging and dangerous as the first half.

Thank you for caring. Agree or disagree with the war, if you're reading this, you are engaged and aware. As long as that is still occurring in a free society, there is something worth the fighting for.