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US soldier's Iraq frontline blog wins prize

May-15-2007 » Filed Under: 3/2 SBCT

AFP Wire Service

An American soldier's graphic account of his deployment in Iraq, detailing the firefights and frustrations of frontline life, has won a prize for books based on blogs, organisers said Monday.

Colby Buzzell's "My War: Killing Time In Iraq", the winner of this year's Lulu Blooker Prize, grew out of an online journal which he started in 2004 while serving as a machine-gunner based in Mosul, northern Iraq.

The blog ran for just eight weeks before being shut down by the US military, but by then it had been widely picked up by the media and publishers offered Buzzell a book deal when he left the army in 2005.

His uncompromising style, peppered with profanities and misspellings and inspired by authors such as Hunter S. Thompson and Kurt Vonnegut, gives readers glimpses of military life that rarely emerge from official sources.

[...]

"I pretty much started blogging just out of boredom," Buzzell told AFP.

"I was bored in between missions but over time I realised it was therapeutic, it helped me to live out a lot of feelings."

[...]


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