Colby Buzzell, soldier and author of "My War: Killing Time in Iraq (Penguin)" told me everyone came knocking his door in after his blog became a big hit while he was serving with the Stryker Brigade in Iraq.

Very kind of him to e-mail me back; I told him he had my respect, but of course he had it just for serving in Iraq as my brother-in-arms. I was a Marine, sure, but a grunt is a grunt, and everyone else, as they say, ain't s****. OK, so they're all valuable parts of the team, but still, infantry has to put up with so much dirt and so little sleep.

Buzzell, whose blog really does kick ass, inspired me to do likewise, so here.

Like Buzzell, whose book was in the galleys while I was back in the Hit-Haditha corridor of the al-Anbar Province of Western Iraq, I've written a book, "Digging for Fire: An Unembellished Tale of War," and I'm currently doing a re-write because Leigh Ann Eliseo with David Black Literary Agency in NYC said it was worth running a few parts through re-write. The fact that she and another agent from David Black even looked at the manuscript makes me dizzy with (false?) hope. Eliseo also told me I was a "talented writer." We'll see.

The book, straight non-fiction, is a story worth telling, and my angle, as you can see from the blog, is that of what I call "method journalism."

I just always wondered why, with the extremes gone to by embedded reporters, someone didn't just sign the dotted line for Uncle Sam and carry a rifle in order to get the most authentic story available. I was a Marine reservist, a rifleman, before September 11, before the Iraq War, and I was a journalist while I worked my way through college. I looked for embed jobs for newspapers, but in South Texas, there are no newspapers that would send a reporter overseas for anything--that's what the Associated Press is for, I suppose.

So I was out of the reserves, honorably discharged after six years, yadda yadda, and Marine reserve units began getting some serious field time alongside active duty for the first time since Korea. I was teaching English in 2004, surfing the web desperately, getting a resume ready for the AP, and it dawned on me: re-enlist in the Marine reserve and pull a combat tour in Iraq and voila, method journalism. Boots on the ground, the view behind the rifle, the real deal. I swear Michael Herr would have traded his sweet writing job for Esquire in Vietnam for Corporal's chevrons in the Marines as a grunt. I could tell Herr was smitten after I read "Dispatches," and I think he really dug the view from a patrol in column. It was just that the poor guy had never gone through Marine Corps Recruit Training.

So that's what I did, I re-enlisted, got my orders for Iraq, drew my gear from the armory and supply, and went. We had engagements with enemy fighters, we had frustration that comes from guerilla war, and I had material for my book, and I'll publish it and it will sell because war is a devastating business and it is something no one except grunts truly understand, least of all embedded reporters.

Semper Fidelis,
Salaam aleykum,
BC