Blogging from Iraq

I didn't mean to let this much time go between blog posts, but the Jewish High Holy Days intervened. I've been looking through some Library Journals and an American Libraries magazine for ideas for technojournal. I must be learning something in this GSLIS program, because now many of these articles catch my eye where before they wouldn't have because they were about subjects I didn't understand or have a clue about. I did know what a blog was - vaguely. But now I'm doing one.

So something in American Libraries from April 2008 stuck out at me on page 25. On the bottom left there's a small box called "Blogging from Iraq." It has a picture of Army captain Adrian Massey in his uniform and an explanation about his blog. He's been blogging from Iraq for the Public Library of Westland, Michigan. He's from there and the director Cheryl Napsha asked him to blog about his experiences. She was hoping his blog posts would help her patrons understand what the soldiers are experiencing on deployments in Iraq. I thought that was an amazing idea. So I checked out the westland.lib.mi.us link. And sure enough, I was able to find the link to Captain Massey's blog.

I read some of his posts and found out that he is coming home from his deployment soon. The last post was Sept 8, 2008 and was called "Trouble Sleeping." In early September, he and his soldiers had been in Iraq for 13 months with 2 months to go. I learned that they had originally been stationed in Baghdad and then moved to Baquba. I saw some of the photos on his blog - of him getting a coin of achievement from General Petreus, of he and his first sergeant taking a break and having a smoke. I read about how they needed to take this break because the two of them are totally responsible for the 114 soldiers under his command.

Reading Sergeant Massey's blog was very moving for me. My daughter is in Iraq, too, - her third deployment. Hers is for 15 months also. But she isn't coming home for another 9 and a half months since she left 5 and a half months ago. My daughter is a captain too. Of about 100 soldiers. I've met her First Sergeant, a man near his retirement from his years in the army. A man my daughter trusts. Her battalion moved too - from Kirkuk to near Nasariya.

But my daughter doesn't blog. She sends me very short emails and I get an occasional, very occasional, phone message from her. Once in a while a letter. So it meant a lot to me to read Captain Massey's blog. It's almost like hearing my daughter talk to me. Telling me more about her life in Iraq than her two sentence emails reveal.