US soldier's Iraq memoir wins blog book prize

By Peter Graff

LONDON (Reuters) - 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 Web site 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."