War blog rings true for many

Back in February, one month into his stay in Iraq, writer Michael Yon almost ended his attempt to chronicle the war in an online blog. He lacked the backing of a newspaper, magazine or book publisher, and grew weary of the risks of life in a combat zone as he embedded with U.S. troops.

"I was ready to get out. I wasn't getting paid, and it was damn dangerous," Yon said. "Every day I was thinking 'Is this the day I might get killed or get my legs blown off?' "

Yon hung on, emerging as one of the best-read bloggers of the war (his site is michaelyon.blogspot.com), as he chronicled a tumultuous spring and summer in Mosul with the "Deuce Four," a battalion of the 24th Infantry Regiment, part of the Fort Lewis-based 1st Brigade (Stryker), 25th Infantry Division.

Yon's words and photos offer a sometimes gut-wrenching view of the war and its toll on U.S. soldiers, insurgents and civilians.

The blog emerged as a powerful example of the platform that the Internet offers a lone writer, and Yon as a high-profile voice who believes the U.S. military in Mosul has made substantial progress in quelling in the insurgency.

Yon is part of a broader network of war bloggers that include U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians such as Riverbend, a young Iraqi woman. She posts an often bleak view of an occupation gone sour in her blog, Baghdad Burning, riverbendblog.blogspot.com.

Collectively, these blogs offer alternate portals through which readers around the world can gain insights into Iraq. Yon says his best-read dispatches have attracted more than 80,000 viewers. And last summer, after he started posting a solicitation for money to help pay for the dispatches, thousands of people responded; the smallest donation was $2; the largest, $2,000.

Last week, Yon was taking a brief break from Iraq, returning to the United States for the first time this year for a welcome-home ball in Tacoma for the Deuce Four. The formal event on Saturday drew hundreds of battalion members as well as actor Bruce Willis, who touts Yon's blog as the "real deal" in a post on his own Web site.

Embedded boundaries

Yon is a former Green Beret and writer, whose memoir, "Danger Close," describes a difficult coming of age. At 19, he killed a bar patron in a fistfight. Charged with murder, he was then set free after an investigation concluded he had acted in self-defense.

Today, at 41, Yon speaks softly in the drawl of his native Florida. A muscular build hints of his former military service. Single and without children, he went to Iraq with the idea of writing a book about ground troops in the war.

Yon operates under the same rules as other embedded reporters. Military officials can put some information off-limits if it would jeopardize a unit's security, according to an embed agreement that he signed. Yon has frequently tussled over how the military determined what was off-limits.

Time and time again, Yon has been told that he could not publish details of missions, only to find some of the information then published by newspapers or television journalists working out of Baghdad who may have had less insight into what actually happened.

"How many major stories have to be mangled into meaninglessness before someone connects the cables and lets the information flow in a direction other than down the mainstream media drain?" Yon wrote in an Aug. 20 dispatch titled "Proximity Delays."

He then declared that he would ignore "at my own discretion" orders that he felt went beyond the bounds of the embed agreement.

His comments angered some Army officials, who required him to be escorted under guard in his trips to the Mosul base mess hall.

Facing fire from all sides

Even as he clashed with military brass, Yon forged strong bonds with the men of Deuce Four. His passion for the unit reverberates throughout his blog, as he praises the courage of U.S. soldiers, grieves their deaths and heaps scorn on the savagery of insurgent bombings that kill children and other civilians.

"I know journalistically, you should remain neutral. But more importantly, I think that you should be honest," Yon said. "I really started to like the guys and should just admit it."

Yon says that his admiration for the soldiers did not prevent him from scrutinizing their actions. During one mission, Deuce Four soldiers shot what appeared to be an innocent man, a taxi driver who was tagged as an insurgent due to bad intelligence. An account of the screw-up appeared in the blog.

On one perilous occasion in August, Yon decided he had to join the fray. Insurgents had wounded the unit's commander, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, who lay in a street with three bullets in his body, while still exchanging fire.

Two soldiers who had been in Iraq only a short time balked at attacking a shop where the insurgents were taking cover. Afraid that Kurilla would die, a frustrated Yon picked up an M4 rifle, yelled for ammo, and fired three times into the building.

The third shot hit a propane canister that jumped into the air, began spinning violently and nearly smashed into his head.

As he fired his weapon, reinforcements arrived, and the wounded Kurilla was rescued.

And as his fame has grown, the volatile world of Internet bloggers has sometimes made Yon a target. One critic is Carl Prine, a reporter with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review embedded with the military during the initial invasion and who is now on active duty in the Army National Guard. In his posting, he attacked Yon's work as unorganized, cliché-ridden and lacking in context of the broader war.

But other bloggers have come to his defense, and, perhaps more important, Deuce Four soldiers praise his work.

"I never allow what I call drive-by reporting, where someone comes by and says they will embed for a day," said Kurilla, the Deuce Four commander who approved of Yon's lengthy stay. "Mike is one of the few who is going on patrols every single day."

Yon's success has spurred other bloggers to seek to embed with the Army.

As for Yon, he has plenty of ambitions beyond blogging. His agent is circulating a proposal for a book. But he is not done with his Internet posts.

When Yon returns to Iraq this month, he hopes to write about a Marine unit in the troubled Anbar Province.

Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com