BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Last week, we reviewed the obstacles that are keeping journalists from covering the war in Iraq. This week, we consider one alternate source of information, the soldiers themselves, with computers, wireless connections and digital cameras, soldiers are armed with everything it takes to publish a blog. Those blogs, and there are dozens and dozens of them, are bringing war in all its glory, horror and mundanity to our home computers, whenever we want to log on.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: One such blog is called MaDeuceGunners.blogspot.com, written by Corporal Michael Bautista, based in Kirkuk, in the Kurdish north. He's a machine gunner with the 116th Brigade Combat Team in the Army National Guard. When we reached him by cell phone, he told us it began simply as a way to keep in touch.

MICHAEL BAUTISTA: You know, I started the blog because I felt bad that I didn't write enough letters and emails to my family, and they can see what I'm doing, they can hear some of my experiences. I immediately was recognized by some other bloggers. They linked to me, encouraged me, and it's now become a, a hobby that I really enjoy. I enjoy the feedback. I get a lot of people that tell me that I write well. I guess I'm kind of a budding writer.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Have you gotten any resistance from your commanding officer?

MICHAEL BAUTISTA: I've got the tacit approval of my platoon leader. He's reviewed what I've written thus far, and I think their main concern is operational security, and I at this juncture have not given away any information that could be used against us or anything that would compromise my fellow soldiers. So, other than that, I - you know, I don't comment on Army policy. I try not to comment on politics. As long as I stay away from operational security or governmental policy, then I think I can write about what I'd like to.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Was there some principal idea that you wanted to get out there into the world through your blog that you felt needed to be expressed, or was it just a desire to convey your personal experience.

MICHAEL BAUTISTA: It kind of transformed itself from a desire to convey my personal experience into letting people know the real story. I think the main coverage that you'll see at home is this car bomb blew up; this amount of people died. I think my main effort now is more toward showing that this is a good thing that we've done, regardless of, of what political decisions were made to get us here. We're here. We have done a good thing. I, I want to say to, to the American public that my brothers and sisters in arms that have been here before and have not come home - that have, that have died in this conflict - have not died in vain. This is a just cause, and that it is - it's a righteous endeavor. That's part of why I write. If I'm given an opportunity to say it, by God, I will.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What about your personal feelings? Do you ever, for instance, get afraid, and do you write about that fear?

MICHAEL BAUTISTA: There are elements of fear in my everyday job. But, you know, one thing is, is I'm sure that my enemy probably reads my blog, and one of the things that I need to make sure is that I don't tell him that I'm scared of him. I don't allow them to know that they hold the edge of fear over me. I mean, hey - every day I go out into a foreign city where there are a number of people who don't want me there, and they possess explosives and guns, and of, of course there's fear; of course there's a little bit of trepidation, every time you leave the wire, and, and even just walking around inside the wire. You cannot communicate that to your enemy, or else you will lose.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That was Corporal Michael Bautista, a machine gunner based in Kirkuk. Joe Chennelly, a reporter for the Army Times, has been covering the soldier bloggers. He says the Defense Department has no special rules for these newly-minted correspondents in uniform.

JOE CHENELLY: The rules that apply to bloggers right now are the same rules that apply to any soldier who wants to write home or email home or even, if they're back in the United States and they want to write a letter to somebody, explaining their training. They can't give away certain things such as unit sizes, unit locations, some specific tactics, plans of operation.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Since the Pentagon has no explicit policy covering content, it's left to individual commanders to call it as they see it on the ground.

JOE CHENELLY: You know, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that speech undermining command authority is not protected under the first Amendment - not saying that soldiers don't have protection under the first Amendment; just that it's been ruled that it can be limited, if the commander is protecting the morale or welfare or good order and discipline of his unit.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, lacking clear guidelines, Chennelly says soldiers have to decide for themselves what to share with the world and what to hold back.

JOE CHENELLY: One particular blogger who - he goes by the handle Gray Hawk - and he recommended that anyone blogging, when they write, to write assuming that the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff is going to read your blog and to apply common sense, which is obviously a huge gray area.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That gray area turned downright murky for one soldier. Jason Hartley's blog, JustAnotherSoldier.com, raised the ire of his commander and cost Hartley a demotion and a hefty fine. JustAnotherSoldier is frequently profane, uproarious, vulgar, searing and poignant, but always nakedly honest. He writes about life and loose bowels and self-abuse and death - kind of how Holden Caulfield might write if he loved the Army as much as Hartley says he does. Hartley is back from Iraq and in New York now, though he remains in the National Guard. We asked him to read a brief segment from an entry about his mixed feelings when he wrapped duct tape around the eyes of a prisoner who repeatedly refused to wear his blindfold.

JASON HARTLEY: [READING] There's a darkly intoxicating aspect to this kind of thing. I'm over-armed with my rifle and grenade launcher, and the veritable ammunition dump that is my vest over my body armor. Because of this, my power over these men is near absolute, especially if I were to consider spending life in Fort Leavenworth immaterial. I can see how the bully feels, how one could grow fond of this darkly amusing massive imbalance of power.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You've written that it is impossible to determine when something you write crosses a line from not a violation to a violation. What do you mean?

JASON HARTLEY: When I got in trouble officially toward the end of our deployment, the primary thing they targeted with what I had done wrong was violating operational security. So, once I finally got legal counsel, I asked them - okay, I violated operational security. Can you please - what's the legal definition of having violated OPSEC? And there wasn't one. They couldn't tell me - here's the rule you broke. Everyone listed different things that they felt were violations of operational security. There was no, like, golden standard for what I had done wrong as far as violating OPSEC.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You have advised other would-be soldier bloggers to retain legal counsel before they start. How come?

JASON HARTLEY: When this punishment came down, these accusations came down from my leadership, I felt as though I was just - I was flapping in the wind. I, I had no idea what my rights were; I had no idea what was realistic, what wasn't realistic. I mean I was accused of violating the Geneva Convention, for crying out loud-

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Because you had pictures of the detainees on your site.

JASON HARTLEY: Yeah, a picture of a person with flex cuffs on is technically a detainee, and therefore could be construed as propaganda, which-

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, you're not supposed to humiliate the captured prisoners.

JASON HARTLEY: Which I completely agree with. But-I didn't know that, so it would have been nice if there was someone I could have gone to, to have explained to me, you know, what this all meant.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you got into some famous hot water with your commanding officer. Can you briefly describe what happened?

JASON HARTLEY: I had been caught once in the beginning. We were at Fort Drumm. We had not left for Iraq yet, and my commander found the blog. He demanded that I take it down. I, I relented. I took the blog down. Two months before we were to return to the States, I put the blog back on line. I went on leave for two weeks. I came back, and when I came back, everyone already knew about it and I was immediately escorted to my commander, and the whole process began of me being given an Article 15. An Article 15 is a non-judicial form of punishment where basically you just, you, you're given a punishment, and that's the end of it. There's no jury; there's no legal process. It's a way of immediately punishing a soldier.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And what happened to you?

JASON HARTLEY: Once I was convicted of the Article 15, I was demoted to Specialist, which is E-4, and I lost 1,000 dollars in pay. So.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Are you sorry you put it back up?

JASON HARTLEY: No.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You were accused at one point of conduct unbecoming a non-commissioned officer-

JASON HARTLEY: Yes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: --because you took a picture of yourself sitting on the can.

JASON HARTLEY: Yes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Are there any posts that you regret?

JASON HARTLEY: I don't regret anything that I wrote. There are a few things that I wrote that I suppose I am a bit uncomfortable with, because, if for no other reason, for fear of how much trouble it might get me in. But that's a part of the reason why I wrote what I did, is I figured it would be of interest to people who want to know what it's like to be a soldier in combat, that the more honest that I could be with how I felt, the more value it would be to a person reading it. So, I would write about everything.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You wrote, "The only way for a soldier to not get into trouble is to write nothing but insipidly agreeable and conspicuously patriotic content that is reviewed by his or her leadership before posting. So, yes, I do feel as though my first Amendment rights were violated."

JASON HARTLEY: Yes. There are a lot of soldiers who have kept blogs. There are soldiers who keep blogs now. Not all of these blogs have been taken down. Coincidentally, the blogs that remain up are the ones, in my humble opinion, that are very insipid. I mean the Judge Advocate General for the Brigade that I was a part of, he keeps a blog. It's still up. But he writes about putting up Christmas lights, and we gave clothes to these cute kids today, etc, etc. There's nothing offensive about it. No one's going to harp on him for violating OPSEC, because they like it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You said that you think Army leadership can't grasp that it's possible for a soldier to be critical or satirical of the Army and still be pro-Army.

JASON HARTLEY: This bothers me a lot. I love the Army. I love my country. I'm very proud of my service.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you've served for 14 years?

JASON HARTLEY: For - I've been in the National Guard for 14 years. And my commander, he assumes that I don't like the Army. That's, that's not the case. I love the Army, and my way of exalting it is like - here's some pretty absurd stuff we did today. It's what happened. It doesn't mean I love the Army any less. It's just something kind of funny we did.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did you learn anything about yourself, writing about yourself?

JASON HARTLEY: Yes. I didn't really intend to always write about duality, but that was always what I found was this common thread, for the most part when I wrote was, an event would take place, and there would always be these incredibly opposing ideas. Even with things that I felt sometimes. There was one time when we had an engagement, the first time that I actually shot at someone with the intent to kill them. Intellectually I know this is morally repugnant. There's - what's - there's no morae bigger than the murder of another human being. But, that experience - that was the most exhilarating thing that I've ever experienced in my life, was making a concerted effort to kill someone. I have to admit this. I don't want to hurt people, but that was really exciting.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Would you have had to admit it if you hadn't made yourself obliged to write about it?

JASON HARTLEY: I suppose I would have anyways, except now there's just simply more people hearing my thoughts.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did you kill that person?

JASON HARTLEY: No.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jason, thank you so much.

JASON HARTLEY: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jason Hartley's blog is JustAnotherSoldier.com. His book, called Just Another Soldier, will be out this fall.

BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, the Christian right has its own mainstream media. Also, reporters put the gloves on in Italy and the UK.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR.