MWSA Review

A Timely and Insightful Look at the War in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In this new age of information reporting, blogging has become an important link for soldiers to communicate about their own “war on terrorism” in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his book The Blog Of War – Frontline Dispatches from Military Bloggers in Iraq and Afghanistan author and military veteran Matthew Currier Burden brings us the “news” from the frontlines as fresh and emotional as it gets. This is not “your father’s war book” for sure – this is a forerunner of things to come, where books are written on blogs as they happened in real time.

Burden does a great job of organizing the book and allowing us to feel and see different personalities and situations. There is even some prose mixed into the fold of this book and certainly lots of personal details about the life of our soldiers. This book is not some old censored news dispatch from the DOD but an insider view on what is really happening there NOW.

Exciting, entertaining (if that can be said about war and suffering) and insightful; this book breaks new ground and allows us to get a better understanding of what is happening and has happened in our current war. The reader can almost place themselves in the situations and the events –the editing format allows you to fully immerse into the experiences. The book does not feel like a blog but more like a series of online conversations that you are allowed to eavesdrop on.

The book is destined to set a trend for other blogger books as this one certainly leads the way with an excellent telling of our experiences in this current war. This will be a hard act to follow for the others!

Reviewed by: Bill McDonald (2006)

Author's Synopsis

Matthew Currier Burden founded www.blackfive.net, one of the most popular military blogs on the Internet. His blog began as an homage to a friend killed on duty in Iraq and quickly became a source of information about what was really happening in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In The Blog of War Burden presents selections from some of the best of the military blogs, the purest account of the many voices of this war. This is the first real-time history of a war, a history written even as the war continues. It offers a glimpse into the full range of military experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, from the decision to enlist right through to homecoming. There are powerful stories of soldiers in combat, touching reflections on helping local victims of terror and war, pulse-racing accounts of med-evac units and hospitals, and heartbreaking chronicles of spouses who must cope when a loved one has paid the ultimate price. The Blog of War provides an uncensored, intimate, and authentic version of life in the war zone. Dozens of voices come together in a wartime choir that conveys better than any second-hand account possibly can what it is like to serve on the front lines.