The Little Blogger Who Did

By Cernig

Imagine a blogger, broadly liberal and vehemently anti-war, who decided she had to see for herself what things were like in Iraq. So she scrimps and saves to afford her plane ticket and spends weeks in the Green Zone and posts about what she found there. Now, back in the U.S., she wants to get accreditation to imbed as a reporter with a frontline unit because she realises she didn't and couldn't see the whole story from the safety of the Green Zone.

You are imagining Jane Stillwell and her remarkable story.

"When I was there, I saw everything inside the Green Zone, but I never got to see combat. You can't see Iraq like that," said Stillwater, 64, of Berkeley. "It's like going to the zoo and not seeing the elephants and lions."

A longtime blogger and self-described peacemaker, Stillwater, who is not a professionally trained journalist but is a keen observer and a colorful writer, was inspired to go to Baghdad by her outrage over the war.

While there, she filed 17 reports on her blog, http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com, from March 28 to April 17 via a borrowed computer in the Combined Press Information Center in the U.S.-protected, fortified Green Zone in Baghdad.

Her entries dealt with everything from the variety of military Meals Ready-to-Eat (MREs) to flying to Diwaniyah in a helicopter, skimming over fields of rice, adobe brick compounds, sheep and cows, on her way to a news conference about a cleanup action conducted there.

...To pay for her trip last time, Stillwater, who lives in government housing and rides a bicycle, ate peanut butter sandwiches for months to save up for a ticket to Kuwait.

She secured press credentials with the help of a small Texas newspaper, the Lone Star Iconoclast, because editor Leon Smith liked the idea of sending an "ordinary person" whom "people can identify with" to dispatch news.

Some things about Stillwater are, indeed, quite ordinary.

Since returning home to Berkeley, she went with great excitement to see the Dalai Lama speak in San Francisco, "hoping he would be able to cleanse my soul of the ugliness that is Iraq."

What's most refreshing for me is that Stillwell isn't really a part of the greater liberal blogosphere. Her blog doesn't even have a blogroll. She didn't go to Iraq because of a feeling of "doing it for a larger circle" and she isn't trying to claim a spot as a mover and shaker of public opinion or as a guiding light of the netroots movement. She just decided she had to see for herself.

Her blog posts are great reading - covering topics such as PTSD, a contractor with Gulf War syndrome he blames on pollution left over from the invasion, a friend in the Green Zone who writes that "the only way to protect the troops is to bring them home, the war is finished in Iraq and the Shiites have won," and the legal status of Blackwater's mercenaries.

The good news is that Stillwell is probably going to get her chance. An overseas journalist has offered to back her imbed. I'm looking forward to reading her posts.