Another feed that definitely needs wider promotion: sandbox_blog

[pegkerr]

You may have seen the recent Doonesbury strip, where Gary Trudeau announced he was going to start a blog written by soldiers on the front line in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Welcome to The Sandbox, our command-wide milblog, featuring comments, anecdotes, and observations from service members currently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. This is GWOT-lit's forward position, offering those in-country a chance to share their experiences and reflections with the rest of us. The Sandbox's focus is not on policy and partisanship (go to our Blowback page for that), but on the unclassified details of deployment -- the everyday, the extraordinary, the wonderful, the messed-up, the absurd. The Sandbox is a clean, lightly-edited debriefing environment where all correspondence is read, and as much as possible is posted. And contributors may rest assured that all content, no matter how robust, is currently secured by the First Amendment. To submit a post, click here.

This has been syndicated on LiveJournal as sandbox_blog. Only seven people are signed up so far--we can do better than that! I think it is important to get the perspective of people on the front line.

Comments

[tesla-aldrich.livejournal.com]

Done - thank you for the pointer to it! I've read a few of these via Slate and am curious to see what happens if it grows significantly more popular.

[glinda-w.livejournal.com]

thank you. (just signed up. I vaguely remember reading that this would happen, and then it dropped out of my memory...)

[mlion.livejournal.com]

Added, and thank you. I didn't know it existed. (F'lists are wonderful things..)

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads up!

[origamilady.livejournal.com]

danke, added it as well.

[bobhowe.livejournal.com]

Peg I suspect a ton of folks are accessing Sandbox via Slate. It can be gripping reading, but the decision makers and voters who are out of touch with the realities of war are that way deliberately, I'd say.

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

Thanks for pointing that out.

I will say though, that first amendment or not, my sister told me that she is specifically forbidden to do any blogging while she is in Iraq. I'm not sure if that is because she's in intelligence or whether they're telling everyone that.