For a view from the front lines: The Mudville Gazette is a good source and also lists links to other military bloggers in Iraq. Scroll down and check them out. What you will find are fascinating, and often inspiring, accounts of what is going on out there.
Just a taste. Here's a post from BC of I Should Have Stayed at Home. He titles it "Lunchtime with Heroes."
Just got back from lunch with the family mentioned in one of TJ's posts below. One of their sons was shot by a sniper while guarding a checkpoint last week. He's well on the road to recovery now, having been shot in the clavicle and released from the hospital within 24 hours. What I never mentioned after that happened, and what amazes me still today, is what I saw later that night. I dropped by their shop again after visiting the son in the hospital. The tears were not yet dry in the mother's eyes. The father was stoic, greeting me as if nothing had happened. Another young son was playing a computer game, shooting bad guys from a water tower with, get this, a sniper rifle.And amidst all this, yet another 20-something son was putting on his body armor, tactical gear, and Kevlar helmet. As he slipped a magazine into his rifle, I asked him where he was off to."Work!" He smiled and headed for the door. When I asked him where, he named the checkpoint to which he was assigned for duty that night. I looked around the room to make sure it wasn't a joke. It wasn't.Only hours after his brother was shot at a checkpoint by an unseen terrorist, this young Iraqi soldier marched proudly out the door to man the exact same checkpoint for the rest of the night.
This is not just rah rah stuff. Some of the things they describe remind me of the mickey mouse crap we had to put up with when I served back in the Sixties. The military may have changed a lot since then, but at the most basic level, it's still the military.
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