Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Loyal fans hunger for blogger's candidness

The ex-Green Beret went to Iraq to see the war for himself. The posts were an afterthought.

WINTER HAVEN - He didn't have to go, it wasn't his job and nobody paid him to do it. But Michael Yon said he went to Iraq because he wanted to see for himself what was going on.

The 41-year-old former Army Green Beret, self-published author and world traveler didn't know exactly what he was going to do when he got to the war zone last year, nor did he have any particular plans to report what he saw to the world at large.

But that's what he did.

After getting himself embedded as a freelance journalist with troops last year, he used his blog to report on the car bombs, fire fights and dead soldiers. But he also wrote descriptively about acts of compassion and heroism, small triumphs in the country's crawl toward democracy and the inner workings of the military machine.

Yon's dispatches have been extolled by loyal readers as gutsy and honest reporting. He has been interviewed and his blog quoted by major newspapers and TV news networks.

Actor Bruce Willis is a fan and has said he wants to make a movie about the exploits of the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment - also known as the "Deuce Four" - which Yon followed through battles against insurgents in Mosul.

"Deuce Four is an overwhelmingly aggressive and effective unit, and they believe the best defense is a dead enemy," Yon wrote in one dispatch. "They are constantly thinking up innovative, unique and effective ways to kill or capture the enemy; proactive not reactive."

In May, a poignant photo he shot of a soldier cradling a dying Iraqi girl after an explosion in Mosul was printed in major U.S. newspapers and brought even more attention to his unpaid mission. A subsequent appeal for donations on the Web site brought in thousands of dollars.

And at one point, he crossed from observer to participant.

In August, during a fierce fire fight in downtown Mosul, Yon and witnesses said he picked up an M4 rifle and fired three times at insurgents inside a shop as two of the battalion leaders lay wounded nearby. That's forbidden for embedded journalists, and it brought a stern reprimand from the Army.

The slant of Yon's blog is unflinchingly pro military, but he has frequently criticized Army public affairs officers in print over how news out of Iraq is managed. He hasn't shied away from describing the horrors of war.

"They know I don't follow the party line," said Yon. "Like when our guys get killed, I'll write about it and I'll write about it the way it really happened, which sometimes is pretty graphic."

[Last modified January 30, 2006, 00:32:10]