It is a new year, and a new decade. An important election season is underway. A great plague is spreading throughout the world. Supply chains are breaking. Isolation grows. Social media is an absolute cesspool. Might as well restart my old blog. Although the former site has turned into whatever it is that abandoned blogspots eventually become, WordPress seems easy enough to use.
I originally began milblogging with a group of friends in the summer of 2003. We started not long after the nuclear aircraft carrier on which I was then stationed entered the shipyard for half a year of planned maintenance, following our return from Operation Iraqi Freedom. We joined the Alliance of Free Blogs not long after Frank J declared war on Instapundit, and we were among the first few dozen to join the original Milblogs Ring.
Milbloggers generally kept their identities off the internet, for obvious reasons, opting instead to identify by handles. In May of 2004, after my friends and I decided to break off into solo blogs, I turned our old blog into ArklahomBoy to match my handle–which was probably the coolest handle that a young fellow from Arklahoma could have conceived back then. I do not remember how high up in The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem I ever got, but I was a solid top-200 at the time I called it quits.
I blogged as ArklahomBoy from my first tour (on sea duty), throughout my second tour (on shore duty), and then placed the blog on hiatus before my third tour (on overseas duty), which took me on all sorts of adventures throughout Central Command. As far as milblogging goes, that was probably a point at which the blog would have only gotten better, but I had no time for it.
After one enlistment, two deployments, three tours, and three extensions, I came home and used my GI Bill to get a BA in History and Political Science. Aside from a genealogy blog that I share with relatives, which we will soon be migrating to a better forum, I never had a good reason to start blogging again. I figure I will sporadically post news links until I get bored with it. Until then, I will again carry the banner of an OG Milblogger. And even though Harvey (who migrated to Blogger) proclaimed on September 05, 2006 at 08:04 AM that the “Blog War is over,” and our side apparently lost, I will not be reconstructed.
An old Weblog Review of ArklahomBoy from August of 2004 concluded thusly: “If you’re interested in enjoying a large slice of southern hospitality with no Bravo Sierra, just the goods clean and true, then this would be a great place to feast.”
Soup’s on.
ArklahomBoy 