For ethical reasons, or do you mean shouldn't be reported here?

Not that I'm, you know, nosy or anything.

Is there a particular reason you want 500 needy Making Light readers refreshing your page every quarter of an hour to see if you've left more bread crumbs?

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A certain famous comics writer has just blogged it on his research blog.

I had seen it earlier on the journals, anyway, so I know exactly what you mean and why it shouldn't be mentioned. That doesn't stop both the horrid fascination and the hope that everything will be all right.

Scott, if I know the bloggyverse, someone's going to blow the story soon no matter what. And knowing you, it's not going to take long for you to figure out where she must be, and why her superiors might not want her posting Live Journal entries.

I promise you the full story as I know it, whenever I can be sure that telling it won't give aid and comfort to people we don't like.

Right on schedule, though not where I expected. I'd have thought he had more sense than that.

It is, indeed, all over a certain subset of the blogosphere that some deign to consider part of the blogosphere and so tends to fly under the higher-band radar. (I'm not sure if that's a proper use of "high-band radar," but it made a certain euphonious sense, so neener.) --And it is, indeed, gripping, harrowing stuff.

On preview: oh. Whoops.

Okay, just worked it out thru the clues you gave.
I actually saw a link to it yesterday from one of the Blogosphere Ecosystem's Large Mammals, but didn't really follow up on it at the time.
I just hope the current horde of harassers don't make her life any more difficult than it already is.

And now a second blog has reported it. Patrick says I'm being unfair to said comics writer, on the grounds that he had no reason to know better.

Okay.

"deign not to consider"

Gad, but typos really wreak havoc on gnomic utterances.

First post...love the site...
Maybe I'm being overly skeptical here, but do you guys have the sneaking suspicion that this might not be real? I'm completely ignorant on the matter, but I don't see how this person would be allowed to do something like this, let alone have the time to post it so quickly after it happened.
Maybe I'm being too cynical...Please love me...

Good guess, Riba, but if it were Kathryn I'd say so. I've posted a couple of times on her weblog during this trying period, and phoned to see how she's doing.

No, I wasn't thinking it was Kathryn (btw, I prefer to go by Lis than by my last name), but I assume it's that kind of harrassment you're hoping this other blogger will avoid.
I sent you an email with my guess, since I figured you didn't want it posted here.

Kip, I figured that was what you meant.

Hello, Randall P. I understand your caution, but she reads as a real person to me and to everyone else I've talked to, at least half of whom are pro writers or editors with very good ears. Live Journal has a very forgiving interface. If she's got net connectivity, she can use Live Journal. She can write her entries as events unfold, and upload them when possible.

The other reassuring thing I can tell you is that certain bits of information in her entries -- one of which she deleted later -- correlate with reports from the area that come from completely unrelated persons and organizations.

She's been posting day-to-day entries on her blog for a ridiculously long time if it was all to prepare the waters for the Grand Fraud. Her persona and situation is internally consistent and convincing, and people out there often do have easily available web access. I'm sure she's for real.

This is like Salam Pax all over again.

I quoted

Okay, one other observation. Why we should allow women in combat: who knew that tampons made such great field-expedient dressings for bullet wounds?

at Squid. Gtst said: The Kotex people. Since Kotex was originally developed as a bandage material.

(Since I have no earthly clue what the rest of this is about and can't follow breadcrumbs worth a damn . . .)

... hell, I'm just a mere intern, and I'm only supposed to confirm in general terms where I work, and what I work with. She's BLOGGING this. Wow.

Why we should allow women in combat: who knew that tampons made such great field-expedient dressings for bullet wounds?

Maxi-pads also make excellent emergency bandages. That, I learned from a woman who goes to a lot of BDSM play parties.

Ah. Ahhhh.

Fascinating, just fascinating. I can't wrap my head around the possibilities or the consequences of this sort of thing. There's gonna be blog tennis over this sucker, no doubt.

And now I understand the frustration of wanting to talk about it, while wanting to keep it under wraps so nobody gets in trouble or gives away hot intel. My apologies for hitting the button for an electronic gerbil pellet, I'm... a gerbil.

I speak on the phone about once a month with my best friend from high school; he's a SAW gunner with one of the airborne divisions somewhere in Iraq (Lest it sound like I don't care about his situation, I do know his actual unit down to platoon and his position as of two weeks ago, but that info is not for the 'net).

The 'net access he had was subject to vetting, as was his mail and, to a certain degree, his phone calls. Which makes me wonder how much (or how little) of the same other servicemen and women face.

My main skepticism as to whether or not it is real stems from the fact that the blog hasn't been shut down yet, not necessarily the stories (although she's very articulate about what she's going through). It would seem to me that it would not be in the best interest of the powers that be to have some loose cannon over there spouting off freely about everything they're doing, especially considering the very volatile situation right now and the political timebomb that it is. My brother was in the military and he never told me jack about what he was doing at the time, so the fact that she is getting away with posting these things is a bit of a shock.
The unfortunate part is that second by second, as more and more people find out about it, she runs the risk of getting in serious trouble from her superiors.
Once again, apologies from a newbie if I have offended with my skepticism...

Randall, I'll say what I said about Mr. Pax: if this is a hoax, it's brilliant. Actually, if this were a hoax and Where Is Raed? were a hoax, this one would be more impressive.

I live and die by my ear for prose. It's not always right, but I always trust it. The journaler in question would be hard to get right as a fictional creation unless you were a journaler from the same community, working for the same employer, and were a remarkably gifted writer besides. It seems like a lot of trouble for a hoaxer to go to in order to spoof a low-level individual in a minor theater. Someone who could do that would have long since been promoted to Chief Spoofer for the re-election campaign.

Okay, Okay, I trust you already! :) My mind wanders into hoaxville so often, it's stupid. In fact, I wonder whether I'm spoofing myself, even as I write this. I find it kind of creepy how much her writing reminds me of "Blackhawk Down" (the book, not the movie).

I know who this is. It's a friend of someone on my LiveJournal friends list, and this person has spread the word to a lot of people (to confirm: the blogger is from Minnesota, correct?). Still not totally sure it's for real yet though. I've seen some weird things go on in the fanfic world.

At least one MilBlogger who recently returned from serving in Iraq quoted it without even the slightest hint of disbelief. That means the jargon's right, the operational details are plausible, and the attitude fits the role the writer claims for herself. Someone who could pull a hoax that clever doesn't need to.

-j

Ah. AAAAAAH! Jeez Louise.

If this is a fake, he's the second coming of Hart Crane. You know what I mean.

C.

Well, I hope a bunch of you are saving it, because if it's that neat, and it's that likely to get wiped off the web, there are going to have to be a bunch of mirror sites that spring up to carry on...

I would, but I'm still in the dark. But that's ok. All things with time.

I remember reading in a first-aid book a long time ago that sanitary pads were good emergency bandages -- 1960s I think; this was back when they didn't stick-on, but had the long tabs for tying or pinning.

Don't blame the "Comic Writer" for linking, Digby had it yesterday.

And yes, it's fascinating reading. I hope she doesn't get shut down.

I finally figured it out despite my complete inability to follow your bread crumbs. Being a geek has its advantages I suppose. I'm just too jaded - I've seen and heard of enough hoaxes in general and on LJ in particular. I trust your ear, but there's a cynical part of me that thinks this is just a work in progress. Plus, I'd suspect that someone *would* have pulled the plug by now if it weren't a hoax. But maybe in that sense I'm naive. Interesting reading either way.

I heard of sanitary pads as bandages in Vietnam myself - but this from my history-buff husband, not any text books or personal reading.

Dang. Thanks for the non-pointer. Fabulous stuff, and onto the friendslist it goes.

Barry Longyear gave a speech at a convention once that included his hysterically funny account of using Kotex pads as surgical dressing, and trying to do a testimonial for them. The Kotex folks didn't want to hear about it.

Well, about Salam Pax: he's making a nice appearance on BBCWorld tonight: friday, 0330, 0830, 1130, 1530, 1830 and 2330 GMT.

I'm mentionning it not only because of Salam himself, but also because I agree that this blogeress mentionned earlier sound very believable to me, and no less likely to slip under the military censorship radar for a while than say, "turning tables" or pre-war Salam Pax once were.

She rings true to me as well, and I have a pretty well-honed bullshit detector.

What's striking to me about this young woman's lj is not just the ring of truth it has, but the fact that there's something about her attitude and her matter-of-factness that reminds me very strongly of another recent favourite, Elena the Ukrainian motorcyclist.

It's sort of sad that it takes situations like these to make me realize this--or to demonstrate these potentials--but I keep thinking that if we can raise young women with this kind of grit, we're not doing everything wrong on this planet.

Re: "I live and die by my ear for prose. It's not always right, but I always trust it. The journaler in question would be hard to get right as a fictional creation unless you were a journaler from the same community, working for the same employer, and were a remarkably gifted writer besides. It seems like a lot of trouble for a hoaxer to go to in order to spoof a low-level individual in a minor theater. Someone who could do that would have long since been promoted to Chief Spoofer for the re-election campaign."

In either case, this is a diamond for a publisher to scoop up, no?

There is one other possibility. It may that her postings are carefully vetted/rewritten by higher in order to provide the enemy with some lovely disinformation.

Alex

From today's New York Times:

Last weekend, eight Blackwater contractors assigned to protect a building in Najaf fought alongside four marines and three Salvadoran soldiers to defeat a determined attack by hundreds of Iraqi militia members. The men fired thousands of rounds, yet were very nearly overrun, Mr. Toohey said. "They were down to single digits of ammo, less than 10 rounds a man."

Desperate and unable to communicate directly with military commanders, the eight Blackwater contractors instead called in help from Blackwater employees, he said. With approval from Mr. Bremer's staff, three Blackwater helicopters — the same ones used to ferry Mr. Bremer around Iraq — were dispatched to the Najaf battle to drop ammunition and retrieve a wounded marine.

"It was O.K. with him if they went out and saved some American lives," Mr. Toohey said of Mr. Bremer.

Sounds pretty similar.

I actually picked it up from American Street where her livejournal cohort Julia from Sisyphus Shrugged blogged it earlier.

I thought about whether it was a good idea to pass it on, but ultimately decided to do so at Julia's behest. I had supposed that the writer was aware that her story could receive public notice, but perhaps I misunderstood the nature of her journal and her realtionship to Julia.

I certainly hope that she suffers no recriminations from her "employer." It's the most gripping reporting of the Iraq invasion.

Hmm, just part of the way through, and I need to get some sleep, but so far it sounds right. It is not too slick or knowledgeable, and it isn't over consistent in that self concious way that some hoaxes have. It rings right and some of the details are telling. Bitching about not getting the CIB is one of them.

If we're talking about the same blogger, she's either genuine and very brave or an AMAZING spoofer.

* * *

My store-bought Earthquake Survival Kit came with a maternity-strength pad for use as a wound dressing.

I think tampons BEGAN as surgical dressings. In fact . . . well, I'm not going to flip through them now, but in a emergency-surgery scene in one of the "Lensmen" books, Smith notes the use of "tampons" on the patient (probably Kimball Kinnison since he's the one most often torn up in persuit of evil-doers).

Unless the mighty Lenses of Arisia induce menstruation along with telepathy, perception, and a square-jawed can-do attitude, we're probably talking about a cotton plug for tidying up a wound site.

Re "tampon" -- yes, that's a term for a pressure dressing, though for understandable reasons that usage has faded. "Cardiac tamponade" is what you get when the pericardial sac fills with fluid, and it compresses the heart. At the time Doc Smith was writing, the other item would have been called a "sanitary napkin" or "sanitary towel," and he wouldn't have used the term if Clarissa were trying against odds to reattach Kim's severed DeLameter.

On terminology, and I know this belongs on another thread but it came up here: is anyone else a bit troubled by the use of the term "contractors" for the Blackwater armed guys? I am aware that "mercenaries" is a touchy word, and wouldn't object to them being called "private security forces" or somesuch, but I have noticed a habit in the press of referring to these people as "contractors," with no other identification. When I first saw the headline "Four contractors killed," the first assumption was that they were some kind of construction workers; it certainly wasn't that they were armed to military level. I can see that "contractor" would be their employer's, and perhaps the men's own, preferred term, but it seems to me to go beyond euphemism. "Military advisor" at least admits that you're performing a military function.

I think it's real. Artlessness as an expression of character in an otherwise aesthetically controlled presentation is one of the hardest things to get right in fiction.

What we need here is some kind of machine that we can feed a sample of writing into and have it tell us based on an analysis of the text whether the writing is fiction or not... surely in this day and age we're capable of building such a thing. Or then again perhaps we already have built this machine and the intelligence services use it exclusively to make assessments of foreign government statements and terrorist communiqués, assessments which are then promptly ignored because they don't provide the answers that the administration is looking for... Oh yeah and happy holidays everybody.

I have not finished this discussion... I am just unable to sit still to the end, so as to keep my coments from repeating people.

Without any confirmation, other than her posts of the past few days... she's real.

This sounds real, it stinks real and (from where I sit) is all to familiar.

As for her being able to blog... depending on the sen she has access to, she can. LJ was blocked from me, but (as some of you may recall) I was able to send posts to this very chunk of blogdom, at a time when the access to the web was far less open than it is now.

Oh, and for the record... I've had tampons in my Combat Life Saver bag for years. Not as good as a pressure dressing, but one can carry a dozen of them, for the space of three Field Dressings. Adapt, Improvise, Overcome.

I now head to my brandy, and then back to the conversation in progress.

Terry

Wow, she sounds real as hell to me. I recently had occasion to read the Confederate infantryman's memoir called "Co. Aytch"--it feels very similar. One of you editor types should contact her for a book deal NOW.

Actually, one of her friends is on my friends list in LJ and asked me to blog it the day before yesterday.

She's gone back and deleted anything she thought was sensitive, and I followed suit.

I would have done so earlier, but my computer was down yesterday.

Any poor judgment here, I'm afraid, is mine (although you wouldn't know it by most of the links).

(Pssst: it was posted in the open thread yesterday.)

(Pssst: I'm an idiot who can't tell her browser windows apart. It was "cancelled contract.")

I dunno: when the contractors in question are commandos who are among other things airlifting Marines out of firefights (and bully for them for it, too, and hellfire and damnation rained down upon the bare heads of those who sniffed about not needing any more boots on the ground), "mercenaries" seems pretty darn apt. (I have a hard time imagining the "private security force" down at the mall pulling this off, say.)

I've run into this person elsewhere in fandom in the past. She's for real. She's not the only person I know of who's blogging from over there, but she is the only one who's been through something like this.

Yeah, it smells real. There are quite a few military LJs out there, if you look for 'em. I have a guy friended who was writing brilliant material about his time over there, until he took shrapnel in the foot. Amazing reading.

It's to be expected, in retrospect. The military is full of people around the same age as a large segment of the LJ userbase.

When I was in high school I was an athletic trainer and we used tampons a LOT for nosebleeds.

Never told the wrestlers or football players what they were though (can you imagine a 16 yr old boy letting a tampon be stuck up his nose?)

Interesting insight into the combat too. I think she's real.

Bryant, so it's more to be retrospected? I certainly can respect it.

I wish I had time to read all of it; I like her style.

Boy, I hope some of these MilFans get back in time for WorldCon, and leave enough to go...I'd love to actually meet Terry, frex.

I hope even harder that they get back, period. (Terry did, at the cost of some health problems, but I mean all of them.) Actually I hope that all our troops get home alive, but that's not in the realm of possibility...

...am I a bad person for hoping "harder" that fans get home? That's a guilt I'll accept, frankly.

Damn I hate this stupid war.

Tamara, at that age I'd have preferred bleeding to death.

Also, thinking back...so that's what those were...damn, no wonder that female PhysEd teacher was laughing...

I'm an ex-Army spouse. My husband just got out. He was an E5, prior to that he did a four-year in the Navy. We both scrutinized the post in question and we both have a funny feeling. The problem is that real soldiers talk in certain jargon, and no, that's not something that she would've deleted due to security concerns. It's automatic; it rolls off the tongue and most soldiers and spouses don't even know they are doing it.

The jargon is off. Example "helmet." It's never a helmet. Football player wear helmets. It's a kevlar. And it's always a kevlar. "My captain" is another dead give-away. The Captain, the XO, the Commander. Our CO. But not "my captain". With three or four guys, you'd have a First Sergeant, maybe even an E5. (She is confused about expats too, but I'll leave it alone.) It seems unlikely that a Captain would be put in charge of three or four soldiers, and British are not going to have an American Captain leading them. A Captain wouldn't be wasted on a force of that size anyway. They are valuable.

The time varies too much. It's not 3 am. It's zero three hundred. O-three hundred. Tank/hybrid? Is that a Bradley? Bradley isn't a tank; it's a gun. (And Lord, if you call any of these tank-looking things tanks while in a Wheel or Track shop, about a dozen mechanics are going to stop dead in their tracks and very carefully explain to you that it's a gun.) Is it MLRS, which is a missile shooter on tracks (multiple launch rocket system. Very expensive, you practically never see them shot in practice.). Is it a Hymar, which is MLRS on wheels? (The US Army, with the exception of very few Air Force cross-over installations doesn't use Hymars. They are basically a Marine weapon.) My husband pretty much crawled over every track vehicle the Army has - he was in charge of a commo shop, so it's must be some odd coalition thingie, but we both found it odd that she didn't compare it to anything. A soldier would say, it was like a Hymar.

Couple of other things: never says her MOS. Security has nothing to do with it - there are several thousand soldiers in any given MOS, so it's absurd to delete it out of security concerns. My husband was 31U, frex.

Which leads to another question. Why is a woman there with hardened Brits, who btw, are basically as tough as you can get. Is she a medic? She doesn't talk like a medic. There is no mention of her equipment.

Other little things that are just not quite there. Part of it is her language. It's too smooth. She might be taking extraordinary pains at writing for civilians, but I've heard several people fresh from Iraq. Here is E4 Clint Wagner's account given at his son's birthday party that was held upon Clint's return from Iraq, "And goddamn, the fucking mortar hit fucking two feet from us, and shit, I thought that was it."

The radio comminucation reads like something out of a movie. Without it, I would've actually wavered. With it, I'm pretty sure, it's a false account.

First, I'm unsure how she is overhearing this conversation? What were they using? If they had manpacks, the only person hearing the stuff would be the person with his ear to the phone. You just don't hook up speakers to the manpack. If it's inside the vehicle, the commo guy would have headphones on. Now please recall that it was my husband's job to actually do commo. He taught commo to PLDC, he taught it to Officers. It's hard to hear commo when you're right there. Several feet away - practically impossible. It's just common sense at this point. They don't want soldiers to hear communications - only the commo and NCOIC or OIC would know what went on.

“Our ammo situation is red. Over.”

“Oh.”

Oh? And Roger? Pilots say roger. Infantry says Check. Understood. If she had said Over and Out anywhere, it would be a complete give-away, because nobody ever does it. And no person is going to be blabbing that they will be run-over by dawn. The protocol of the commo is very tight. It's almost code-like and it's drilled and drilled and drilled, until it's completely automatic.

I don't want to say that it's 100% a fake, because I'm simply not willing to put this sort of claim out there. I'm very careful with "never" and "absolutely sure", unless I am absolutely sure. I do feel that it is a false account. I also feel that it is an insult to people serving over there. Clint's wife Tiffany, whom I did my best to support while her husband was over there for a year, went to a funeral of one of the soldiers in his squad. (Oh, btw, "team" is odd too. It's squad or unit. Special Forces have teams. ) It was the hardest thing she had ever done, harder than seeing Clint off to the plane. They called out the man's name three times, and of course he didn't answer, and it was terrible. His parents were there and it was just absolutely terrible. She came back a wreck. My husband served on funeral detail too, and it was no picnic. To put something like this out there, if it's not genuine, is simply wrong.

So far I haven’t seen anyone else blogging it.

Don't we count in Live Journal as bloggers?

I'm sorry, I wrote Air Force in that post. I meant to write Airborne. In my defense my husband was fussing about Singars in my ear at the time.

Ilona - it seemed to me (caveat - I know very little about military) that she's a reservist from some of the things she says. Would this make her less adept with the jargon, or is consistent use of the terms you cite something that spans the regulars and the reserves?

Ilona, yah, my background is as a naval officer (and now spouse) though I also went through Army airborne training, and I tripped over many of the same things you mention. The lack of MOS really struck me: she's obviously not an infantryman, but if not then she'd have been there for a very specific purpose beyond taking or defending a building, and she never mentions one. A medic would have mentioned the people getting injured and what she did about it. A mechanic would have mentioned being unable to get to the vehicle to fix it, or the futility of having fixed it and then watching it get blown up, or something.

(It sounds like this was a NEO [Non-combatant Evacuation Operation], which isn't something I'd usually associate with the Army, but you tell me.)

(Oh, and on that front: the expats--presumably she meant they were civilians? Or foreign nationals, or non-combatants, or . . . I can't picture a soldier saying expat.)

People are pointing at the level of detail, but to me it's like she included lots of details, but all the wrong ones. Details that can be checked elsewhere just means they could have *come* from another source, too; the details I would expect from a person on the round there are missing.

I find it curious that she'd have been able to include the details she *did* include in the first iteration; my husband couldn't e-mail me that much detail when he was off the coast of *Fort Lauderdale* last month, nevermind in a combat zone. Everything in and out gets checked, and that's when and if they get internet access at all. (My Marine friends certainly didn't/don't have this kind of internet access, but I acknowledge that Marines are a different sort of animal.)

So my instincts are that you're right.

I served in the US Army for 12 years. In that time, I served in ordnance, administration, and armor. For most of the comments that Ilona Gordon made, I could have pointed to a soldier who did or said it differently when I was serving. That's just how diverse the service was. Yes, there were guidelines for equipment nomenclature, but there were often moments caused by excitement or an attempt to get a point across to someone unfamiliar when even those who knew better reverted to using something else. Also, those who had nothing to do with some equipment rarely learned the proper nomenclature for it. The same held true for how to convey information such as time or an acknowledgement.

So, my point is that the failure to use the proper terminology in the blog is not truly indicative as to the blog's authenticity.

Dave, I think Ilona's point was not that some details weren't 100% military spec, but that there were so many things off that she finds it suspect.

Ilona, some of the jargon inconsistencies you mentioned might be due to her not being in for a while. Or her exact job. Or, as Jill mentioned, if she's a reservist. But I noticed them as well and got my "bullshit radar" going because of it. Since she's in the Army, I know that the jargon isn't pounded into her head with quite the same frightening persistence as it is in the Marines. I wonder how long it took my brother to say "pen" instead of "ink stick" after boot camp. Her jargon might also be different if she's an officer, which I don't think she is, but I haven't read her rank posted anywhere yet so I can't be sure.

Still, it doesn't ring completely true for me - a military brat since I was five months old, and the sister of a Marine who fought in Iraq. I'm reminded of a Clancy novel in some of her posts. Now that's either a compliment to Clancy's research or a disservice to the poster's writing, if she's genuine. I'm actually surpised that she gets as much internet time as she does. Granted, my surprise is due to the fact that my brother was over there only during the actual war (or major combat, or whatever the hell Bush called it when he said it was done) and he was also doing recon to help prepare the way for the front lines during the war. And he was a Marine. He never got a shower or mail or even a real port-a-potty until everything was winding down and he was at some makeshit base. I'm going to send this to him and see what he thinks.

...she reads as a real person to me and to everyone else I've talked to, at least half of whom are pro writers or editors with very good ears.

Yes, but no matter how good your ear, if pro writers and pro editors haven't been in the military and don't know how they operate (and that's basically most of us), I can't see how you can make that your prime basis for accepting this account.

My brother in law, an ex Marine, is just back from Baghdad where he's been working to help GE build power plants for many months. He's only been out of the service for 10 years, but he was amazed observing the troops at how much the Corps has changed (meaning improved) in that time.

Jill, great point. Reservists do go through regular bootcamp and once they are active, they act as a unit. If anything, they are typically worse with the jargon. :) Even if they weren't, it grows on you. Once in company of regular Army units, it would come back very quickly. And some of the problems in that account, like the commo exchange, can't be explained by being in Reserve.

But suppose she is a reservist, who hasn't been in Iraq for that long. What is she doing at NEO? People who perform this sort of operations are hardcore, professional active duty. Especially if they are acting together with Brits, who are basically highspeed units. During mixed force operations, Army would want its best troops there. And I hate to say it, but Army does discriminate. If they can send a man instead of a woman, they will. For her to be in NEO, she must be absolutely vital and as highspeed as she can be. For her to be a woman and a reservist and be in this situation, she would have incinerate enemy forces with a mere stare or do something equally incredible. So what is she doing that is so vital and must be done only by her?

Forgive me for being skeptical. It's just I would hate to think that while people are fighting over there, some of whom we've had over for a barbeque and a beer not so long ago, someone posts something like this. What would be a motive? Attention? Trying to raise people's awareness of the conflict? Surely there are better ways than pretending to be a soldier.

The point I was making is that very few service members, regardless of MOS and rank, use all the terminology frequently and correctly.

Dave,

"“Our ammo situation is red. Over.”

“Oh.”

“Come morning, we will be over-run, with high casualties. The enemy has stated they will eliminate everyone in the compound. Over. Have you relayed my last transmission to Higher?”

“Roger that, over.”

And then nothing. “What was their response?”

There was none. "

Does this read okay to you? And I still don't know how she is hearing this, unless it's a Vietnam movie and the commo is sitting there with a telephone. It's not like that at all, the units in Iraq all have Singars. In fact, Singars, I think, are pretty much standard now - my husband left for his Biology exam, so I can't ask him. And why would the enemy attack at dawn? So our forces would have better targets?

Yes, of course, the jargon varies. And of course, there are reservists. But there are so many small things that a bit fuzzy here.

I've been told that it was nurses in WWI who realized that the new-at-the-time surgical dressings would also make good pads and tampons. (Tampons were not, however, invented by them -- tampons have a history dating back to Roman times, when suitable natural sea sponges were employed.)

What if she's deliberately 'de-militarizing' her language for her audience's sake? She writes when she's not in Iraq, as well, so perhaps she has a grasp of how to pull that off.

I have no military history of any sort, unless you count being the son of a JAG who was out of the service before I was born. So as to the other details, I leave that to those who know more than I do.

Andrew, I don't think that would be the case. People who are in a profession that uses jargon generally stick to that jargon when they're talking about what they do--sometimes they will explain the plain English meaning of the jargon, but usually not more than that.

I'm not offering an opinion about whether this blog is fake or not--I have my suspicions, but I'm neither an editor nor a military member.

To the people who think the woman in question is a fraud:

A number of people on LJ have her address and have been sending her care packages since long before she had her exciting experience. If she's not really over there, then where are those packages going and how can she know what was in them? I've sent packages to soldiers in Iraq, and those types of addresses are completely different from civilian ones.

I suppose she could have a confederate who's really a soldier over there, but if so, then why the need for a fraud?

By her own account, she's a reservist who joined recently and hasn't been there long. She's also been posting for several years about other topics, which doesn't prove that her account is true but does prove that she's a real person whose voice is consistent between old and new posts.

Again, if this is a hoax, it's a very strange and elaborate one. I can't imagine that Sadr's men are combing Live Journal in the hope that a fanfic writer and reservist would get sent to Iraq and spill something, so disinformation makes no sense as a motive. If she's trying to get a book deal, it'll fall apart the instant she fails to prove her identity.

As for her jargon being non-standard, people who are writing for an audience that doesn't know the jargon tend to tone it down. If I'm writing for karatekas, I'll discuss kata, kihon, and kumite. If I'm writing for people who don't train, I'll say "forms" or even "set sequences of techniques," "basic techniques," and "sparring."

I was skeptical at first as well, but revised my opinion of the blogger in question upwards after doing a little poking around.

I'm basing my estimation of her credibility on the livejournal community. She's apparently a fairly longstanding member, and some of the people with whom she talks about exchanging physical mail (packages and so forth) are friends-of-friends of mine, who I have seen active in comment threads and so forth over a period of over a year.

Because of the way livejournal is set up, with its interlinking networks of people-who-know-people, it in some ways acts like an old fashioned kinship people. You become aware of a lot of other livejournalers who are sort of at the periphery of your own area of activity, because you see their posts in comment threads and so forth. A lot of fandom-type people are either on my friends list or on the friends-lists of people who are on my friends list, and many of the people commenting in her threads are what I'd call "social acquaintances" if I knew them in the meat, so to speak.

It's certainly possible that she's got them set up as sock puppets or as collaborators, but I'd generally consider it unlikely.

Of course, I've been wrong before. *g*

Bleh.

That should be "old fashioned kinship system," above, dammit.

Brad: [*cough*], er, well. Good idea, that.

John B., there are very sophisticated programs out there that can do that. Less formally, there's me. Also the rest of this crew, who are a pretty sharp bunch. If they all told me my ear was off, I'd believe them; but they hear it as real too.

Terry, thanks for the confirmation, smells and all.

Kate, Julia: It's bloggable now? She's sanitized it?

Robert: Sam Watkins! That's a tremendously readable book.

Bryan: Yes. She's also a member of the skiffy tribe, and I've never heard anyone outside it get the voice right.

Kip: I assume there's contractors and there's contractors. What I know is that I heard remarkably similar reactions out of a lot of ex-military guys when they first heard that four contract security guys had gotten killed.

TNH: the post in question says that it's been edited, though I didn't read it carefully pre-edit, so I'm not sure how sanitized it needed to be (I glanced at it and then found the start of posts about being there and was working my way forward). I was more pointing out that the cat had been let loose elsewhere in the blog already.

Addendum: FWIW, in prior posts she's said she's "MI"; I don't know what that means, but it might shed some light for knowledgable people wondering about the circumstances described.

She's said stuff in passing in previous posts about being involved in interrogations, etc.

MI = Military Intelligence?

Kate, that could easily be "Military Intelligence" . . .

Military Intelligence...LiveJournal from the front...

Living up to the "oxymoron" joke, maybe?

MI is military intelligence. If she is an interrogator, she'd be L97. Translator is E97 (or 97L and 97E.) Unfortunately, you can't be a reservist and a military interrogator. They phased out the reserve military MOS awhile ago. See, the language school alone, the AIT, which you can't skip, is a year long. If you're lucky enough to jump into one of those highly coveted MOS, you go to school for a total of two years. And you sign up for six years. And... if she is MI, why is she posting this? Shouldn't the security concerns be of outmost importance to her?

Look, I don't want to give a wrong impression. I hope that she is who she says she is. If so, more power to her. I would hate to find out that she isn't a soldier because it would hurt me personally. The time when the deployment to Iraq had hung over my husband's head was the worst time of my life. Neither he nor I ever supported or felt right about this war and it hurt many people we know. It's an issue of great importance to us. If she is a fraud, well, I would feel a little betrayed.

I vote fake. I don't have an Editor's Ear or any knowledge of military jargon, but I have a standard issue bullshit detector and it is ringing fit to beat the band at the idea that she is able to blog this stuff.

I dunno whether to hope I'm wrong (ie, I'm too damn cynical) or right (in which case, this woman is going through hell AND having some asshole in Portland cast aspersions).

Ilona --

Nothing says she can't be a stenographer; everyone involved in an interrogation isn't an actual interrogator. (My guess would be a logistitican, but it's only a guess.)

Also, in keeping with the Vietnam-on-speed effect, I don't get the impression that MOS designations are being particularly respected over there. Undermanning and bad leadership will do that right quick.

Displaying my ignorance once again: Is interrogator the only option for being in MI?

(And, older posts explicitly stated that 95% of her day couldn't be blogged about, so the rants were about stuff around the margins, so there is some security-consciousness acknowledged.)

Well, we've made it to: "On the Internet nobody can prove you're not a hoax."

I sent her an email and got one back. Her originating IP address is 64.154.26.248, which is out of Broomfield, CO.

maybe MI stands for mobile infantry and she's actually fighting bugs, not iraqis.

...sorry, couldn't resist.

Was this the hotmail address listed on her LJ? If you're sending mail from a web service, will it have the web service as the originating IP?

Kate: There are lots of MOS's (jobs) in intel. The Army has interrogators, yes, but they also have a dozen other intel-related MOS's: 96B Intel Analyst, 37F PsyOps Specialist, 98C Signals Intel Analyst, 98J Electronic Intelligence Interceptor/Analyst, 96R Ground Surveillance Systems Operator, 97B Counterintelligence Agent, etc.

Yes, it was a hotmail address, but web-based email doesn't have it's own IP address. IP addresses are assigned by the Internet Service Provider. Hotmail and other web-based services attach your IP information to the header of emails one sends. That IP address is the address of the computer that originated the message.

Now it's possible that she's emailing her information to a friend in Broomfield, and that friend is posting it to the web, but it seems a little odd that I send an email to someone in Iraq, and the reply comes back from Broomfield, CO.

Ilona, I think you mean a MOS 97E - Human Intelligence Collector (which does have a bit of a science fiction air to it). The MOS 97L Translator/Interpreter is actually restricted only to Reserves and National Guard.

The google search on "(LJNAME) (ABOUT TO BE ISSUED MOVIE TITLE)" still generates only 8 hits. But one of them is from command-post.org. Add in the Redwood Dragon, Digby, the American Street, et cetera, and it seems to me that the information lockdown is about to be over.

If I were 11 Bravo, I’d have earned my combat infantrymen’s badge, except of course the fact that I’m a woman means I don’t get stuff like that. The way the Army has it set up, it doesn’t matter if you do the job, if you’re a woman----you’re not supposed to do it, so you don’t get acknowledgement if you do.

This reminds me of one of my favorite WWII stories from my dad.

Dad was a B-26 radioman (and gunner, of course) in Europe during the war. Arriving at their forward deployment in France, his entire unit almost got to discover first hand just what lousy infantrymen they would have made (I strongly suspect that more than a few of them passed their marksmanship tests with the assistance of a .38 caliber pencil) when the Bulge crested and broke just short of their base. At some point after that, they initiated an "exchange program" with some local grunts, where one of them would go spend some time near the front lines with the infantry, while a curious infantryman would ride along in the jump seat during a mission.

The almost inevitable result of these exchanges would be a petrified grunt kissing the ground upon his return to mother earth, and a petrified flyboy swearing never to go within 10,000 (vertical) feet of the German army again. One infantryman, however, decided that it would be cool to complete enough missions (five) to receive an air medal, so he toughed it out and did the deed.

Now, during the early days of the war, a 10% loss rate was fairly typical for a daylight mission (the vast majority of USAAF missions were, of course, daylight missions); fortunately for my dad (and the rest of his bomb group), things had improved considerably by the time he got over there. Still, it was dangerous enough that flight crews all received brevet promotions before their first mission, because it was well known that higher-ranked POWs received better treatment by the Germans (especially if captured by the Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe -- if they were captured by an SS unit, all bets were off). So completing five missions represented a non-trivial investment of both time and luck.

...Which is why it must have been so disappointing to our intrepid infantryman when he discovered that he wasn't going to be able to get his air medal. Like she said, if you're not supposed to do it...

Tony, the reverse DNS for that IP is halhoupro2.halliburton.com.

I suspect she's using some sort of private military-only network that gets NAT'ed at a Halliburton facility in Colorado. I know Halliburton provides a lot of things to the military (food, laundry services, etc.); do they provide internet access?

It didn't sound like she was walking into an Iraqi internet cafe and posting from there.

I'd guess that whoever is providing internet access to the troops would have a firewall in the US limiting outside access to whatever they're using to connect to Iraq (satellite? dedicated phone lines?). Kind of analogous to the way an "APO" address gets treated almost like a US address by the postal service, no matter where in the world the letters and packages actually end up.

All that I can gather from what I have read so far is that it feels like the same person since 2002 (spot checking posts) to me. Her language is inconsistent, but I have heard the same from reservist friends when they are not talking to other service types. The writer appears to be a enlisted member of some kind of a (I would guess) company or smaller sized military intelligence unit (from the references to "my captain" as opposed to other officers) currently attached to a larger unit in Iraq, and does not appear to be located in or immediately near to Baghdad. She might not be a translator but just feels more like some sort of technician. A geek in uniform.

As to the incident in question, from the few details left, it does sound like the kind of incident that does occur in urban combat where hostles can quickly cut off otherwise non-combat units and assorted non-military persons. (It happened all the time in Vietnam -- check some of the histories).

This is just what I can pick out of these posts based on the time I have here today. Obviously this is not proof one way or the other. If this breaks more publicly, I think we will find out if this is authenic very qucikly. Especially if some commander in Iraq thinks he recognizes our blogger.

I've known this person from LJ fandom quite some time before she went. I don't, frankly, like her very much, for reasons that have to do with chip on shoulder syndrome in certain perennial debates and do not at all impugn her truthfulness or bravery.

She's certainly spent a lot of time and effort establishing herself in this community, so I'm sure she's not a troll as such. That doesn't eliminate the possibility that she's lying now (hell, there's a fan who faked her own death, anything's possible).

But for what it's worth, I believe her. If nothing else, because I think if she were really sitting at home while she's supposedly overseas and unable to post much, she wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to make a sockpuppet for fannish activities. I don't know from military jargon, but I think I'd be able to pick out a suspicious newcomer spouting her very recognizeable views.

Tony: thank you for defining MOS! I was wondering.

Jeremy: one of her posts does talk about defense contractors running the camp.

Meredith Thank you for saying what I had been sitting here trying to figure out how to say.

I'm not really in her fandom, I just skirt the edges occassionally, but I've run into her in various forums. As much as I've never cared for her, I've always gotten the impression that she was a very genuine person, both in her beliefs and her actions. She's much more the type to say too much when others would be silent then the type to make up something like this as an elaborate hoax. My gut says genuine.

Oh, and hi all, I've been reading over here for a while, this is my first day posting anything.

Kate: MOS actually stands for Military Occupational Specialty (or Marine Occupatioal Specialty, if you're a jarhead).

Jeremy: Thanks for doing the reverse DNS lookup. I didn't think about it. If it's Halliburton, I'm convinced that it's real.

For those that don't know, Halliburton is the largest American contractor providing services in Iraq. Dick Cheney's former company.

Halliburton has internet access (I'm SURE), and I can see them providing it to troops. This clinches it for me.

I'd vote composite all told in the first person but not very confidently. On the tampon issue - quite honestly I thought everybody knew that, want to snigger about field expedient waterproof flashlights?

Picking a phrase not at random "I’ve fired Ak-47s---the weapon of choice around here---and I’ll take my M-16 any day. It’s longer and heavier and just generally bigger, but it’s got a good sight, and in thirteen days I’ll have been firing one of these exactly thirteen years." says an awful lot.

AK-47's have milled dust covers and so forth ('47 was the year like '03 Springfield) but it is the common misnomer. An M-16 is not an M4 and that says an awful lot. 13 years says an awful lot - can't be continuous?

MI combined with odd access to radio listening seems a key to me - and if that is true then I can imagine a language qualified analyst - of odd background and duties (there's such a one around here someplace) - but MI implies with certainty clearances and access such that this journal is and always was approved - by folks who themselves are almost certainly fen!

Otherwise it's a Mary Sue inserted into genuine intercepts.

What address her email is coming from is most probably irrellevant. I'll assume you read the headers correctly, and the originating MTA was at halliburton.com

99% of my email originates from mail.speakeasy.net, the rest from mail.gatewayedi.com. Never mind where I am -- first thing I do when I get online is tunnel home before I check email, and all that email goes through the tunnel. In addition, Speakeasy uses SMTP-Auth, I can use thier mail server from any IP address, if I authenticate first.

Doesn't matter where the notebook physically is -- the mailheaders look the same.

I would bet, if she's working for a corp or the military, that they would not be directly connected to the internet. They'll route through a private network, with gateways about to connect to the Internet at large, and I would be completely unsurprised to find Halliburton running one of them.

Clark, could you explain your point about AK-47s vs. M-16s in a little more detail for we laypeople?

In addition to the Halliburton thing, another point that comes up in the earlier entries: she says she writes offline and then uploads. That explains where her "time to blog" comes from. Also, Teresa, I honor your scrupulousness re linkage. But her Techonorati stats are 7 pages long now.

Note: Military blogger Citizen Smash links to it without demurral, though there's a debate in his comments section about whether ginmar is fit for combat.

It's not quite that bad over there. They're debating whether someone who's had this effusive a reaction to combat (rather than being all stoic and looking away, pained, into the middle distance) is healing "female-style," or the reaction of someone--whether male or female--unsuited for this sort of combat. --Though the person who seems to think no one would be quite so hopeless in a seige of so short a duration seems to have missed the point about how overwhelmingly they were outnumbered, and how utterly unforthcoming help was, and how scarily savage things seem to have gotten.

Dern it, Jim! I go looking for a pellet of outrage and find presentably decent--if decidedly alien (to my own outlook, at least) human beings. Nuts to you!

Re: "her Techonorati stats are 7 pages long now."

Seven pages? [Flicks switch to go live.]

I lurk here a lot, but I've never been compelled to post before.

I know the person in question. She does have a chip on her shoulder. She's very passionate. Her LJ before was less about fannish activity--she rarely posted anything fandom related--and more about her political thoughts. I've had her friended for nearly a year now, read her fic before that, and I know her from another message board (non-fandom related) as well.

I know she's genuine. I remember when her mom died, and I remember when she found she'd be sent to Iraq, and I remember when she talked about fanfic, and all in all, I know her as a good, forthright, honest person.

I hope she never knows that people were calling her a fake. And I hope she comes home in one piece. And I hope by this time next year she's happily writing fanfic and ranting about women's rights.

It's not "Singars".... There's a c in the radio system name somewhere, more like Sincgars or Cingars.... I don't remember the spelling and the acronym exactly anymore. But it's =not= "Singars."

Ah, here it is " Sincgars, the Army precursor of JTRS that used software capabilities to circumnavigate enemy signal jamming."

quote from:

http://www.washingtontechnology.com/news/16_17/cover/17471-1.html

It's annoying me, because someone who is casting doubts about someone else's credibility, has a case of credibility for me for failing to gie the correct spelling for the standard tactical radio set designation.... Since a decade and a half ago I was in the military C-cubed business and had to know that sort of stuff, I knew about SINCGARS, and I knew there was a c in it, it's one of those things that the name looks weird because of the letter concatenation combination and therefore, when one sees it spelled wrong, it -looks- wrongly wrong. [That is, the name itself looks wrong for standard English terminology/spelling. And since it looks wrong, one gets used to knowing that it's going to look wrong. And when someone types it wrong, it doesn't look correctly "wrong" -- case of "what was the strange thing the dog did in the night? The dog did nothing, that was strange" -- that when it's misspelled, it doesn't look properly -wrong- anymore for normal English. ]

When I called Boston in 1980 party at the 1978 World Science Fiction Convention over the Missile Warning Hotline from the Tactical Operations Room in Thule, Greenland, anyone tracing the call at the hotel would have seen a local telephone exchange for Phoenix, Arizona, not Thule, Greenland. The actual phone route was a Thule via satellite to somewhere in the middle of the USA to Cheyenne Mountain through the military system which many have been leased commercial lines to Luke Air Force Base to a local exchange in Phoenix to the hotel to the room. It wouldn't have shown "Thule" as the source calling the hotel.

As for language, one modifies one's language to a greater or less degree based on the audience or perceptions of the audience.

Add me to the list of people that have run into ginmar into other contexts. There's certainly been elaborate hoaxes in fandom, but most of them fail under even a little skeptical questioning; the crazy pair that lead the Sam portion of LOTR fandom on a merry dance last year were already revealed as hoaxers a year or two back, it's just that some people have an enormous need to believe. This would be an amazingly consistent, years long hoax requiring a collaborator actually in theater. I just don't see it as very likely.

The voice sounds authentic, the lists of wants sounds authentic, and 90 percent of the blogging has been about very mundane things. It sounds very like the livejournal of another fandom friend of mine in Iraq. And the arguments about the language, et al, being off really do remind me of the people who were convinced Salam Pax was fake because he sounded 'too westernized'.

The only thing that surprises me is that it's not friendslocked -- especially for someone in MI, you'd think she'd be aware of how much trouble she'd get into.

Jeremy, the TV ads Halliburton has been running here in the DC area (to try to make people like them despite the money-stealing) do include giving internet access to the military. One of the commercials ends with a soldier looking worried at a laptop and then his face breaks into joy and he shouts "It's a girl!" and everybody cheers.

The acronym is SINCGARS, the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System. It is a modular series of VHF-FM combat radios that range from units that require a vehicle to move to handheld. They are the basic radios for r ground and some aviation units. The technology was developed in the 70's by ITT and the damm things should be damm near universal by now.

Whoops -- didn't read far enough down in Paula's post. My apologies.

Having gone to look at her web page and random dips through the pre-deployment LJ, I vote for genuine.

This discussion, above, brings to mind one of the things I have been mulling over: is some people's attempts to equate the war in Iraq with the war in Vietnam, and the popular response to each war.

I know that reading milblogs like genmar's has modified my thinking about the war. I wonder how differently the folks would have reacted if blogging had been part of the Vietnam experience.

Claude and Paula, you're absolutely right on the spelling. Thank you so much for correcting me. When I get excited, and this issue excited me, my spelling goes out the window. (I also slide into my native language, but that's beside the point.) I guess after thinking about it for a few hours, I decided I no longer care if it's genuine. If it is, wonderful. I hope it is. If so, my apologies to her for doubting. If it's not, well, it's on her head.

What I think is really awesome, is that although people are passionate on the issue, nobody has broken into insults. And that's really pretty cool.

Ilona, we all tremble in fear before the awesome might of The Magnificent One, Our Hostess. Like spiders over the fire and like that.

No, seriously, you're right. There hasn't even been any sarcasm. It's been very cool. People have been very civil. Yay us!

Ilona, the quality and civility of discourse here is what attracts most of us. In my opnion, at least, you seem to fit in well.

Expanding by request - as noted by others the language used is a carry over from her audience not her surroundings. The author likely speaks a different dialect to her neighbor and I'll bet she grates on their ears too.

Usage specifically lacks the exactness one might expect from other groups around her who use slang of their own to communicate exactly and as some part of unit cohesion shiboleth if you will - cf the journal comment on a hug from a deer friend who ranks God and the NCOFH - sounds to my ear that she's a Slan and her Army is all mundanes - she's writing in the langage she shares with her friends not her associates.

As you know Bob the M4 is current issue - see pictures for short barrel and collapsing stock with optical sights. That's one of the things that makes me think composite - springing out of an SUV "in full kit" goes better with an M4. IIRC Jessica Lynch had an M16 and some say difficulties with it. The rifle was pointed up as a fact to cross with other facts.

I read the journal as about being a Slan in a mundane world that happens to be army not about being in the army.

Notice that Crane's Red Badge of Courage and Mailer's Naked and the Dead were not based entirely on each author's own experience. Guadacanal Diary and The Last Parallel were. Anne Frank trimmed parts of her own diary with publication in mind before her father did. Not shocking if this LJ is some combination of diary and a publication in progress. No more is it a moral defect.

What I read as possible composite may in fact be psychological distancing - the journaling may be a good adaptation to the circumstances and so encouraged by her command in this case. I'll stand by my belief that it is censored by a sympathetic officer risking that I will find out otherwise immediately I click preview and post.