"Courage Still Counts"

Michael Yon in Iraq



I try not to make a big thing about it, because the war in Iraq is not directly related to the main theme of this blog.

But I have encouraged you to read Michael Yon before, and I will continue to do so for many reasons. It's not just that the man is, in my mind, the Ernie Pyle of the 21st century, but because he's damn readable.

Mostly, I read Yon and I think you would want to because he writes the stories that we need to read.

It's impossible to cherry-pick individual stories, and it's difficult to navigate his archives. He doesn't have an index of his stories. What you do is, you find ONE story in his current links list, read it, and then start following the links which are embedded in almost every story.

I've been reading his "Ghosts of Anbar" four-part series, and this is as good a place as any to start. He just published Part III of IV. It took me probably 15 minutes to read, but I spent over an hour following the embedded (you should excuse the expression) links to earlier stories. You can search for "Ghosts" in his website search engine, but it isn't available from current articles and you need to learn the keywords to know what you're looking for.

I'll save you the trouble. In his "Ghosts of Anbar" series, Yon just published Part III, which you find here (August 30, 2007), but you probably want to read Part I (August 22, 2007) and Part II (August 27, 2007) first.

No word on when Part IV will be published. (UPDATE: read PART IV now!) As you read the articles, you will intuit that quality writing takes a lot of time; putting it together with pictures, and captioning the photos, takes even more time.

Give him a week, you won't be disappointed.

And while you're there, contribute to his fund. It's the best use you'll ever find for a PayPal account.

Iraq, here, looks a lot like Vietnam.