US soldier's Iraq memoir wins 'Blooker prize'

LONDON: An American soldier's violent and darkly comic account of fighting in Iraq has won the "Blooker prize" for best book that began as a blog on the Internet.   

Colby Buzzell, whose Internet diary became the book "My War", started posting online from a Sunni triangle frontline Internet tent as a way to "kill time". The book won the second annual $10,000 prize sponsored by publishing website lulu.com.   

His blog allowed him to explain the war to readers back home with an immediacy he couldn't have matched in a "regular" book written after he returned, he said by phone from Los Angeles.   

"I would come back after missions, my ears still ringing from the firefight, and sit down and write about it," he said.

"I've been back two years. If someone told me to write a book about Iraq now, I wouldn't know where to start."   

While he was still in Iraq, the military, citing security, ordered Buzzell to stop posting his notes on the Web.   

"A soldier writing on a blog for the whole world to read made them extremely nervous. This was the first war where the Internet was such a part of it, and they were nervous about that," he said of his commanders who ordered him off line.   

But he said other soldiers are still posting on the Web.   

"The more blogs and the more books and the more writing that comes out of the war, the more understanding there will be. People here are oblivious to what our soldiers are going through every day."   

Buzzell is not always a sympathetic character.   

"One thing I've noticed about me since I've been here is that I've developed that really disturbed, warped, sick war humour about everything," he writes in one blog entry.   

"Like a week ago I was flipping through the photos on Spc. Martinez's digital camera, and when I came across the photo of the dead guy they killed in the mosque, without even thinking about it, I busted up laughing, because the guy's eyes were open, and how is tongue was sticking out and his mouth was all agape, it just looked comical to me."   

He was inspired in part by Kurt Vonnegut, the author who survived the fire-bombing of Dresden during World War Two.   

Vonnegut, who died last month, called Buzzell's book "nothing less than the soul of an extremely interesting human being at war on our behalf in Iraq". He sent Buzzell a postcard "from one veteran and writer to another", which Buzzell keeps.   

"I read 'Slaughterhouse Five' when I was over there in Iraq," Buzzell said of Vonnegut's classic wartime satire. "The guy's a genius. The way he deals with situations of dark humour and wit. He was a huge inspiration."   

But Buzzell says the best praise he gets comes from soldiers still serving in the field.   

"The only opinion I care about are e-mails from the guys," he said. "That's the highest praise possible (when) writing a war memoir: by someone who's been there."