Iraq War Veteran and Milblogger wins Blooker Prize

US soldier Colby Buzzell

First published on Indymedia Ireland

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, 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', 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 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 is a read those of us who are either anti or pro the Iraq war could learn a lot from. Indeed if Kirkus reviews are right about the potential impact the book contains, then anti-war folk may even need to start promoting it as key book in our canon: "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. They were hunched down hiding behind a stack of truck tyres. I could tell by their body language that something was up. I placed the crosshairs right on them and was about to waste them, but for some reason I didn't pull the trigger. These guys were not dressed in black like the guys earlier and from what I could see they didn't have any weapons on them. Something told me that I should wait for just one, maybe two more seconds. Then I saw another guy come creeping around that corner with an RPG in his hands. As soon as I saw that I screamed as loud as I could, 'RRR-PPPPP-GGGGGGG!!!' into the CVC. My crosshairs were bouncing all over, so I gathered my composure as fast as I could, put the crosshairs on them, and engaged them with a couple of 10-round bursts of some .50-cal, right at them.

Nobody moved from behind those tyres after that.

A couple minutes after that the Stryker that was parked 10 metres in front of us, Bravo 65 Victor, took an RPG that came from a building that looked like a parking garage that was diagonally across the street. It scared the fucking shit out of me when they got hit ... We all pointed our weapons to that building and started lighting it up with everything we had. Bravo 65 immediately reported casualties, "We're hit! This is Bravo 65 Victor! We have wounded!!! We need CAS Evac. Time: Now!" came over the radio.

Lt Armeni, who was inside that vehicle, got severely injured and needed medical attention immediately. The RPG penetrated right through the armour and sliced Lt Armeni's guts completely so that they were hanging out of his stomach ...

I then saw a man, dressed mostly in white, with no weapon on him, run for his life, out of the building, and right in front of our vehicle. I lowered the .50 cal at him and tried three times to hit him, missing him every time. Several other people tried shooting at this guy as well, and somehow the bastard got away.