Michael Yon from Iraq: Ernie is dead

Michael Yon, a reporter/blogger embedded with Coalition forces in Iraq sends periodic dispatches. If you aren't reading them on his blog, you aren't getting what is really going on in Iraq.

Michael writes this week about how there are no more Ernie Pyles and how the enemy has control of the media. (For those who don't know who Ernie Pyle was you will find out by reading this dispatch). Not only does Michael report what is happening, but his writing is superb. You feel you are there. Example:

Many of the soldiers streaming into Iraq will spend a scorching summer with no air conditioners or running water. They will stink like soldiers; there will be no ice cream. There will be grit and filth, mosquitoes with malaria, foul smells from the burning garbage of the cities, snipers, and terrorists who will try to flatten their buildings with truck bombs. The soldiers will see things that age them a decade or more over the course of a single summer. Many will die here, others will lose limbs and a few will go crazy. They bring the final hope for Iraq.

A future President of the United States might spend his or her 25th summer in downtown Baghdad, Ramadi, or maybe out in Diyala Province or up in Kirkuk, watching full moons rise and fall over the cities, hearing dogs bark in the night. Maybe the distinct POP will puncture the darkness, as an American sniper kills a man nearby who was carrying a shovel next to a road at midnight.

Machine guns and rifles will fire until they become so hot they glow. When big machine guns fire too long their barrels will begin to melt and droop. Lubricant evaporates and leaves the weapons dry, signaled to soldiers when the odor of hot weapons mixed with smoke and dust fills their nostrils and lungs. When the weapons fall silent, the air percolates with metallic clicks, tics and tinks, the sounds of parts cooling. During the silence the soldiers redistribute ammunition and check each other for holes. Sometimes the wounded do not know they are the wounded until someone tells them.

He goes on to write about how the press is covering the war from safe positions away from the front, and even from New York and Washington. Ernie Pyle, and his fellow journalists covered WWII in the field, with the troops, just as Michael Yon is doing now.

Some of the soldiers streaming into Iraq are raw and new to battle. Others are serving their second, third and fourth combat tours, having fought across Afghanistan, or down in Africa, or in some corner in a secret fight, on a special team of some sort, killing men in jungle camps in South America, in wars few people have heard about. Around the world, dangerous American soldiers will close in on men tonight and kill them in small battles that will never be spoken of. Al Qaeda turned it on, but is powerless to turn it off.

Terrorists started this war with killing, and now are suing for peace with more killing, lashing out at schoolyards, marketplaces, and soccer matches, blowing up kids, women, and men on their way to work or worship. All to win the battle for headlines, which they are certain to get; the greater the savagery, the bigger the font.

Our soldiers, meaning the soldiers from countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, yes France, and the United States, are better in all aspects but one: The terrorists somehow manage to beat us all in our respective medias. We may own the air, but terrorists own the airwaves.

Now, that's someone who can write, which mainly seems to be a lost art.

Read the whole article, and check back frequently to read his dispatches.

Technorati Tags: Iraq,Press,MSM,MediaMichael Yon