Doonesbury -from The Sandbox

Doonesbury.com's: The Sandbox

edited by David Stanford
ISBN # 978-0-7407-6945-0
Andrew McMeel Publishing, 2007, $ 16.95

Who are these Marines and Soldiers whose courage and tenacity is so politicized or trivialized by those who never served ?

Editor David Stanford brings us the daily stories of those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in their own blunt and brutally honest words. A Gary Trudeau-inspired addition to his 11-year old Doonesbury.com website, Trudeau and Stanford invited the warriors overseas to write back so the folks back on the home-front could stay informed about the war. They weren't looking for strategy and tactics but rather the daily routine - ranging from boring to mundane to kinetic - that the troops experienced.

And write they did, as "mil-blogging" increased in popularity, the writing skills of a few of the blogging Marines and Soldiers brought the wars back home in a visceral fashion that often leaves the reader with damp eyes. No slick writing here, but rather just the honest words of your son and daughters and husbands at war.

1st Sgt Troy Steward, New York Guard, writes of his time in Afghanistan as part of an Embedded Training Team (ETT) with an Afghan National Army Unit. Sgt Roy Batty, stationed in Baghdad, writes of the boredom associated with living on a FOB and then later segues into problems with an Iraqi Police unit that shot and killed an old man. "They are our buddies," he writes, "our comrades in arms with whom we are supposed to bring Jeffersonian democracy and security to this wonderful country...". 1st Lt Stefan laments the death of a fellow officer, 2nd Lt Scott Lundell, with whom he attended OCS. "Rest in peace, "Stefan grieves on his keyboard,"...a brother in arms who is loved and missed. The debt will not go unpaid..."

Stanford has sifted through the hundreds of articles posted on the more popular milblogs such as bouhammer.com, sackiniraq.blogspot.com. and traversa.typepad.com, and posted a few of the best. "The Sandbox" has articles from men and women, officers and enlisted men, and warriors, chaplains, and corpsmen. These are unforgiving wars where the combat zones start at the border, and Stanford lets those doing the fighting talk about how it affects them. In an environment where the media is criticized for playing politics by wanting to show photos of coffins being returned to the United States, one can instead read SPC J.R. Salzman's (jrsalzman.com.weblog) blunt description of having his arm blown off "...the taste of blood in my mouth, realizing that the bottom half of my arm was missing with nothing left but a couple of fingers and part of my hand hanging off by some skin and tendons and realizing how much pain I was in."

The value of "The Sandbox" is that it lets the reader forget the petty politics of the last few years and instead get to know something about the Marines and Soldiers who are doing the fighting and dying. Republicans - Democrats are unimportant when one reads 1st Sgt Stewards reports from Afghanistan, or SPC's Salzman writing about how "the last time I saw my wedding ring was when it was being snipped off with a pair of bolt cutters at a hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad." Thank you, Gentlemen, for what you are doing, and thank you for sharing it with us; "The Sandbox" should be read by every American.