you can be sent to a place

where you don't understand the language. where the customs are very different from your own. where you don't know who is friend or who is foe. where you may be killed at ANY moment. where you have no business being because the citizens of 'that place' have never attacked you (until you attacked them that is), have never done ANYTHING to you as a matter of fact. you were sent there by a madman and his lunatic friends.

you can be a very young, inexperienced man (or woman). you can be loyal. you can be a patriot. you can be a hero. JUST DON'T YOU DAMN F**KING WRITE ABOUT IT

Silent Posting

With His Blog Kaboom, a Young Soldier Told of His War. Last Month, the Army Made Him Shut It Down.

By Ernesto Londoño

Washington Post Foreign Service

BAGHDAD

There was a boy who went to war, like many other boys before him. Maybe it made him a man, maybe it didn't. Maybe he already was a man, maybe he wasn't. Maybe it doesn't matter, maybe none of it does, maybe it all does. Maybe.

-- Lt. G, March 4

He was an unlikely warrior, this scrawny boy from Reno, Nev., the son of two lawyers, raised in the suburbs.

He had a way with words, this boy. When his Stryker unit deployed to Iraq last winter, he was a rookie platoon leader who had never seen combat. And like many other soldiers before him, he decided he'd chronicle the war on a blog. Intending to keep family and friends abreast of the follies and pitfalls of soldiering in a five-year-old war that now relies less on gunfire and more on diplomacy, this boy, under the pen name Lt. G, launched "Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal."............