To military bloggers and conservative hawks, Michael Yon was a super hero -- a fearless Green-Beret-turned-citizen-journalist who spent years on the frontlines of Iraq and Afghanistan when most big media outlets kept their reporters at home. But now, those same military bloggers are turning their sights on Yon, after he began savaging America's top general in Afghanistan and warning that the American war effort is all but doomed.
There was a time when Yon lauded U.S. commanders, and military bloggers celebrated Yon. Now Yon, reporting solo from Afghanistan, tells Danger Room that he's the victim of a "smear campaign" orchestrated by Gen. Stanley McChrystal's closest advisers. And milbloggers are reluctantly telling their former star to knock it off. "He has called his own competence into question," writes Jim Hanson at the popular Blackfive.net blog.
Online writers have been sniping at one another since the Internet's Cretaceous era. But this "is not just another dumb blogosphere flap," writes blogger and Boston Herald editor Jules Crittenden. It "apparently involves some serious issues potentially compromising a vital asset for anyone trying to understand these wars of ours."
The troubled started earlier this month, when the military ended Yon's embed with the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division in Afghanistan's Kandahar province after three months. That's weeks -- months -- longer than most reporters are permitted (or want, or are able) to hole up with a single unit.
But to Yon, it was still a betrayal. The 5-2's commander agreed to let Yon stay until the brigade went home. The shorter embed was to him a sign that "McChrystal himself thinks we are losing the war."
"Today, I do not trust McChrystal any more than some people trust the New York Times, Obama or Bush," Yon added. "McChrystal is a great killer, but this war is above his head. He must be watched."
No reporter has spent more time embedded with American and coalition troops since 9/11. Few reporters have put themselves at more personal risk -- or spent more of their own money -- during their times on the battlefield. Yon produced one of the most iconic images of the Iraq war, and defended the conflict as winnable when most experts assumed the opposite.
But this wasn't the first time Yon had been separated from his unit, or started public fights with military leadership. As early as 2006, Yon was warning that the United States was falling behind in the Afghanistan war. The following year, when he felt he was being treated unfairly in Baghdad, he unloaded on "Public Affairs officers [who] stagger like sway-backed mules with shifting excuses."
Last September, he was told to leave the British 2 Rifles in Afghanistan's Helmand province. In return, he blasted the local British media officer Minister of Defence Bob Ainsworth as "Bullshit Bob."
But that came after weeks of friction over Yon's criticisms of the British lack of helicopters in the region. This time, Yon tells Danger Room, there were no early warnings. "There was no back story. None. Zero indication from the brigade company or unit level," he says over an intermittent cellphone connection from Jalalabad, Afghanistan. "I'm mystified."
Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, says there's a simple explanation: Yon's extended embed was holding up other reporters who wanted similar access.
"The problem is that there are more than 100 other reporters on a waiting list to get into embeds with the 5-2 and other units -- especially in and around Kandahar -- which is why embeds are established for defined periods of time. Since demand far exceeds supply, we try to balance the needs of individual reporters with our responsibility to provide information through embeds to a large and diverse a field of reporters," Sholtis tells Danger Room in an e-mail.
Yon couldn't accept that rationale. "McChrystal's crew has declared an information war on me," he posted to Facebook. "If McChrystal knew what he was doing, he would not be drawing attention to his staff."
He called McChrystal's aides "crazy monkeys," and said that he had "compelling evidence of General McChrystal's smear campaign" against him. "Official statements by his people -- in writing -- have been defamatory and libelous."
I asked Yon what that evidence was. He pointed me to an e-mail exchange between Sholtis and blogger Herschel Smith. In it, Sholtis said Yon's campaign to stay with the 5-2 "amounted to a choice to disrespect his colleagues," and that contrary to the blogger's claims in this case, "the most significant impediment to independent reporting from Afghanistan has been Michael Yon himself."
It's a pair of phrases Sholtis now says he regrets. But they're hardly libelous.
Yon still has his defenders in the tight-knit community of military bloggers. Smith, for one, likens Yon to legendary World War II journalist Ernie Pyle.
But many of his biggest fans and advocates are now speaking out against him. "I swear, I really need to step up my game and start posting completely randomly made-up tweets or Facebook comments about public figures like 'so-and-so is the world's biggest idiot,'" writes Milblogging.com founder J.P. Borda.
"Michael Yon has done some excellent reporting from both Iraq and Afghanistan, but if my count is correct he has now been kicked off four embeds. Each time he has excoriated those who booted him and blamed them for his predicament," blogs Blackfive.net's Hanson. "There comes a time when you have to look in the mirror and accept responsibility. It is not a collection of incompetent public-affairs officers or some conspiracy to silence truth telling, it is his own fault."
Yon, for his part, says he'll remain in Afghanistan -- but not as an embedded journalist. "I'm still reporting," he says, but now I'm outside the wire."
Photo: Wikimedia.org
