O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers! …
Blood and destruction shall be so in use
And dreadful objects so familiar
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war; …
And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
— Billy Shakes, Julius Caesar
Wired’s August issue prominently features Lt. Neil Prakash of the U.S. Army in a story about milbloggers called ‘Blogs of War.’ The Silver Star-decorated tank platoon commander has a striking full-page photo in camouflage, glowering as hard as a 28-year-old can glower.
The story says Prakash was born just outside Bangalore, the son of two upstate New York dentists. He’s quite pyro about firing the tank’s main gun and other testosterone sports. Prakash says his favorite sound is an F-16 strafing run: it sounds like a cat in a blender or as if God were ripping up a phone book in the sky (all quotes paraphrased). He also says something like, ‘I’d rather be commanding a tank than sitting in a call center telling someone in Bumfuck, U.S.A. how to reformat their hard drive’ 🙂
His platoon has been rotated out of Iraq and is currently recuperating in Germany. Prakash used the downtime to get married in Denmark.
Check it out on the newsstands. Here’s Prakash’s blog.
Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Update: The story has been posted.
By the crude light of a small bulb and the backlit screen of his Dell laptop, Neil Prakash, a first lieutenant, posted some of the best descriptions of the fighting in Fallujah and Baquba last fall:
Terrorists in headwraps stood anywhere from 30 to 400 meters in front of my tank. They stopped, squared their shoulders at us just like in an old-fashioned duel, and fired RPGs at our tanks. So far there hadn’t been a single civilian in Task Force 2-2 sector. We had been free to light up the insurgents as we saw them. And because of that freedom, we were able to use the main gun with less restriction.
Prakash was awarded the Silver Star this year for saving his entire tank task force during an assault on insurgents in Iraq’s harrowing Sunni Triangle. He goes by the handle Red 6 and is author of Armor Geddon. For him, the poetry of warfare is in the sounds of exploding weapons and the chaos of battle.
“It’s mind-blowing what this stuff can do,” Prakash tells me by phone from Germany, where his unit moved after rotating out of Iraq earlier this year. One of his favorite sounds is that of an F16 fighter on a strafing run. “It’s like a cat in a blender ripping the sky open – if the sky was made out of a phone book.” He is from India, the land of Gandhi, but he loves to talk about blowing things up. “It’s just sick how badass a tank looks when it’s killing.”
Prakash is the son of two upstate New York dentists and has a degree in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins. He’s a naturalized American citizen, born near Bangalore, and he describes growing up in the US and his decision to join the military as something like Bend It Like Beckham meets The Terminator. He says he admired the Army’s discipline and loved the idea of driving a tank. He knew that if he didn’t join the Army, he might end up in medical school or some windowless office in a high tech company. With a bit of bluster, Prakash claims that for him, the latter would be more of a nightmare scenario than ending up in the line of fire of insurgents. “It was a choice between commanding the best bunch of guys in the world and being in a cubicle at Dell Computer in Bangalore right now helping people from Bum-fuck USA format their hard drives.”
It’s taken some adjustment, but Prakash says his parents basically support his Army career, although his father can’t conceal his anxiety about having a son in Iraq. Prakash says he blogs to assure the folks back home that he’s safe, to let his friends all over the world know what’s going on, and to juice up the morale in his unit. “The guys get really excited when I mention them.”
By the time Prakash left Iraq early this year, the readers of Armor Geddon extended far beyond family and friends. He still posts from his base in Germany and is slowly trying to complete a blog memoir of his and his fellow soldiers’ experiences in the battle for Fallujah…
Blackfive himself has degrees in archaeology and computer science and avidly follows the postings of fellow bloggers. He describes Neil Prakash as “borderline Einstein…”
Prakash remains in Germany, awaiting orders to jump back into his beloved tank, which he calls Ol’ Blinky. He says he has no plans to resume his study of neuroscience, although it wasn’t completely useless in Iraq. “Neuroscience actually came in handy when I had to explain to my guys exactly why doing ecstasy in a tank when it’s 140 degrees out on a road that’s blowing up every day is a really bad idea.”
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He’s also qui’ fi’, as the Brits might say, and his light-colored peepers made People’s beauty list in ’98.
Rediff.com is reporting
The hirsute 
