Many proclaim Michael Herr's Dispatches the preeminent portrait of the Vietnam War. Based on a 12-month stint in Vietnam between 1967 and 1968 and written in a vivid, impressionistic style that plunges readers immediately into the tumult of war, the book was not published until 1977, nearly a decade after Herr's trip, but its powerful voice, attention to detail and cinematic immersiveness made it the record of an era.

The corollary to Herr's masterpiece in the current war is the collective notion of the military blog, or milblog, written by dozens of men and women around the world who daily record their experiences with a similar urgency and intensity, but without the polish or novelistic breadth of their predecessor. A rough comparison between the two forms – between the carefully shaped creative nonfiction that drops readers into a 360-degree experience of Vietnam, and the multiple, quirky, cranky and often contradictory windows into the private lives of military that make up the dozens of military blogs – quickly sketches the contours of our own era, its technology, its wars and our own desires and needs as a culture.

Military blogs participate in a larger national DIY ethos fomented by easy-to-use Web-based tools that allow users with Internet access to quickly establish and maintain a Web presence. Initiated a decade ago when Jorn Barger began posting accounts of things found online, blogs tapped into that decade's obsession with subjectivity and the desire to reckon with the quotidian as significant. Continued by posters as varied as Justin Hall, then an undergrad at Swarthmore who authored one of the first Web-based diaries, blogs accommodate a host of voices and agendas, from the personal to the political, from the erudite to the crazed. Most significantly, however, blogs take a DIY sensibility and apply it to writing as self-expression and/as self-determination. Blogging becomes an assertion of being – and not being in exile as a solitary author but being as a process of participation within a distributed network of subjectivity.

For some military writers, blogs are an easy outlet for pent-up frustrations. Army Girl, whose identity remains unknown, began her blog in 2005 by writing about her need to express herself:

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