Major Andrew Olmsted was, besides those other things soldiers are, also a blogger - whose output included a blog at the Denver Rocky Mountain News and on his own site.
The past tense, though, is now necessary: Olmsted will blog no more. As the RMN notes:
Major Andrew Olmsted, who posted a blog since May 2007, was killed in Iraq on Jan. 3, 2008. Olmsted, who had been based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, began blogging after his unit was sent to Iraq with the mission of helping train the Iraqi Army. A sniper killed Olmsted as he was trying to talk three suspected insurgents into surrendering. A sniper's bullet also cut down Capt. Thomas J. Casey. They were in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad.
He had planned, as a soldier will - as we all need to - for this eventuality. In his case, that meant a blog post to appear after his death, written of course before it:
This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits...
As with many bloggers, I have a disgustingly large ego, and so I just couldn't bear the thought of not being able to have the last word if the need arose. Perhaps I take that further than most, I don't know. I hope so. It's frightening to think there are many people as neurotic as I am in the world. In any case, since I won't get another chance to say what I think, I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity. Such as it is.
It is of course worth reading: perhaps it's part of the advantage of blogging that you can meet Major Olmsted in death as you could in life. The blog, and his site, is still there.
Though for how long? Dave Winer has wondered about how quickly his own digital leavings would rust and crumble, and what can be done about it. His verdict:
With all possible humility, I'd like to tell you that a few days after I die my entire web presence will likely disappear. My servers require some attention from me from time to time. The first time that happens, poof, there goes 10-plus years of Scripting News, and all the docs for the OPML Editor and the OPML spec, the XML-RPC site, to name just a few. Anyway, within a couple of months it will all certainly disappear, unless someone pays my hosting and DSL bills. Maybe someone will, but isn't it ridiculous that that's what it depends on?
We've written about virtual memorials, but personally those seem too like being buried in a box made by someone else, not one that fits the shape we left in the world. For, while Woody Allen said, "I want to become immortal through not dying", if the only option is through your website..
A final note from Major Olmsted, though the post itself is of course one to read; this is only one of the great nuggets therein:
while you're free to think whatever you like about my life and death, if you think I wasted my life, I'll tell you you're wrong. We're all going to die of something. I died doing a job I loved. When your time comes, I hope you are as fortunate as I was.
