Today’s Washington Post has a nice profile of Adam Tiffen, a National Guard lieutenant whose powerful blog posts are gaining him national attention.
I interviewed Tiffen last month for our latest issue, after Garry Trudeau picked up one of Tiffen’s blog posts for his new project, The Sandbox, a best-of showing of military blog posts (what Trudeau calls the first “GWOT literary magazine”).
Tiffen’s posts are raw, honest and gripping and it wasn’t long before The Sandbox’s editor, David Stanford, asked for more. And Trudeau has even included quotes from Tiffen’s posts in recent strips.
In 2005, while stationed outside Baghdad, Tiffen started his blog, The Replacements, for family and friends. He then gained a loyal readership of strangers who came to rely on his posts, and worried if he would miss a day. He wrote in detail about what we at home can barely imagine: details of the soldier’s “human experience,” the emotions, the textures, the visceral moments that troops experience each day.
As for now, Tiffen is still adjusting to being back home, and likely his newfound fame. He remains in the Guard and sees his men every month, which helps, he told me. When he was in Iraq he thought we were making progress, he tells the Post. But now he’s not so sure. “Something has to change,” he says. “I really don’t know what it is. Maybe putting 30,000 more troops in will help. I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows.”
