I've come to expect warblogs to consist of tales of boredom, punctuated by occasional bursts of utter terror. So it's refreshing to come across a blog written by a soldier that is utterly different from every other milblog I've read. Birding Babylon is a blog written by a birdwatching enthusiast known only as "John", who happens to be on a tour of duty in Iraq with a US army medical unit.
I seem to have come to Birding Babylon a little late: the US public radio station NPR's Scott Simon interviewed him back in October last year.
Writer and birdwatcher Mark Hedden, of Keynews.com, wrote about the blog last Friday:
Unlike most blogs, where the authors share, without restraint, their most hardline political sentiments or the most sentimental of their internal emotional goo - sometimes both - John writes about birding. The site is not strictly biology or ornithology, but a set of solid, clear field notes that convey a strong sense of what it might be like to stand where he's standing.
The blog chips away at the stereotype that troops in Iraq are living in a state of continuous siege. As John explained in his NPR interview:
It's not a safe place, but that's a small part of the day for me - the rest of the day can be very normal. It's not a constant barrage on the senses, as one might get the impression of watching the news ... it's a small sample of the totality of things happening here.
I can only admire his attitude to the threat of violence which must hang over every day, though. John stoically describes going birdwatching in "'full battle rattle', weapon included of course" after eight or nine rocket or mortar attacks landed inside the camp in a single day.
