Concerned

While reading the blog of one of my occasional readers this week, I found a link to My War - Fear and Loathing in Iraq - a blog by a soldier who is a machinegunner in a Stryker unit in Mosul. The Stryker is an armored vehicle that runs on tires, rather than tank-style tracks, and is proving quite useful in the urban combat engagements our guys find themselves in in Iraqui cities these days.
The soldier, who goes by the name of CB, has been writing the most gripping, true-to-life first-person combat stuff to come out of this war - all under the cover of blogland anonymity. He's developed a huge audience, apparently reaching as far as the White House and the Pentagon.
Early this week, he got called into his battalion commander's office for a talk. Turns out the BC is a fan and wants CB to keep blogging, but asked that he run his posts past his platoon sergeant to make sure there is nothing in them that compromises operational security. Since the BC knows one of his guys is writing the blog, I believe he has a duty to make sure nothing gets onto the internet that could endanger the men or the mission, so I can't fault him for calling CB in for a chat.
CB is, understandably, freaked out by this development and, in his most recent post that described the encounter, left the question open as to whether he would continue blogging.
Being a journalist myself, I understand how intellectually stifling it is to have your words run through someone else's filter. I doubt the sergeant would censor CB unnecessarily, but I suspect this added step in the process kinda kills the spontaneity of the blog. He can no longer just go to the internet cafe, bash out an entry and post it. Now he has to include the sergeant in the loop, which probably would involve saving his post as a draft, getting a printout to run past the sergeant and then going back to the internet cafe to post the approved version. It's probably do-able, but it may make the process so laborious as to discourage posting.
At last glance, he's received more than 200 comments from readers - all of them supportive and most encouraging him to continue.
While his first duty is to the mission and the unit, I hope he can find a way to make this new arrangement work because it's our best window yet on what's going on over there.