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Army rules on blogs, e-mail not being enforced

DENVER — “Eighty Deuce On the Loose,” a blog run by an Arizona soldier based in Iraq, has gone silent.

Well, sort of. Like everything else, there is a right way, a wrong way and the Army way.

Cpl. Edward Watson got a chewing out from his platoon leader for some of the things the 82nd Airborne paratrooper from Phoenix had said in his blog.

“He initially yelled at me for what he said were operational security violations and pointed them out to me. The tone of the conversation calmed down, and we discussed stuff for awhile,” Watson said in an e-mail. He said the sergeant gave him advice on what to say and not to say and that he could continue to blog — but it would be checked regularly.

Under new rules imposed by the Army in April, all public communications on Defense Department networks, especially from the front, are supposed to go through a security vetting. The Army subsequently said it didn’t have the staff to enforce the rules.

In this wireless world, the Army was concerned that soldiers, whose blogs were overwhelmingly pro-war, might be tipping the enemy off.

Watson, 25, has been in Iraq for five months. He said he decided himself that rather than posting “scrubbed” messages, he would wait until he got home so he could say what he really wanted to say and in the style he wanted to say it.

“He’s not getting in trouble,” said Maj. Thomas Earnhardt, spokesman for the 82nd Airborne in Iraq, said of Watson. “We encourage our soldiers to express themselves and to talk about how they feel about their mission and how they feel about serving their nation. We have nothing but confidence in our paratroopers’ ability to communicate with the American people.”

The Web site is still up, but Watson’s earlier posts are inaccessible.

Before he chose to stop writing, in an April 30 posting headlined “The True Cost of War,” Watson told of a base communications shutdown that soldiers immediately sensed meant someone had been killed.

“After a few minutes our first sergeant came in and shut the door. He wore a terrible expression on his face. We all knew what was coming, just wondering who. And sure enough the words came from his mouth.

“ ‘I just wanted to put out to you guys before the rumors got started. Today Sgt. [Norman L.] Tollett [of Columbus. Ohio] was out with the CO and was shot in the head. He didn’t make it.’

“The room became a dungeon of fear, anger, sorrow and pain. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard ... One of our fellow soldiers, a brother in arms, and a friend, lost his life,” Watson said.

Watson said Tollett, 30, was loved by everyone in the company.

No one is checking Watson’s private e-mails, through Google’s popular e-mail system, before they go out. And there has been no indication that soldiers, whose families rely on the Internet for daily reports on their safety, have faced any new systematic obstacles.

Retired Maj. Matt Burden, a pioneer in military blogging, said it may take some time for the new rule to reach commanders in the war zone.

“I know of blogs where the soldier wrote of getting mortared. I think they have to be careful about telling the enemy how close the shot was. We don’t want them to adjust later mortars based on where the soldier said it landed,” said Burden, a former intelligence officer and author of “The Blogs of War.”

The enemy is increasingly using the Web, including sites like YouTube, to get its message out with videos allegedly showing misconduct by U.S. forces or insurgent attacks on them.

Burden said Watson’s site is a good antidote.

“Whether it’s hanging out on the Forward Operating Base, getting shot at or racing through a rain of mortars looking for injured people, Eighty-deuce gives readers a better understanding of what it is like to be a corporal in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq,” Burden said. “Gritty, sometimes harsh, sometimes raw, Eighty-deuce provides an uncensored, immediate, direct and unfiltered view into a unique experience.”

Phil Carter, a blogger and former officer in Iraq, concurred.

“It’s especially important to encounter these voices given the general disconnection from the war effort. Our democratic processes for making and managing war break down when so few Americans have a personal stake in the outcome — especially among the elites,” said Carter. He also noted many soldiers “scrub” their messages to avoid scaring their families.

Noah Shachtman, who runs a national security blog for Wired Magazine, said winning the information war is as important as bombs and bullets. He said U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were among the most eloquent advocates of the Army’s cause.