YouTube Soldiers: How the Internet Has Brought the War to Our Homes

Youtube, Revver, Live Leak, Google Video, Daily Motion-the list of free online video sites goes on and on. Countless thousands use these sites on a daily basis, uploading and watching videos worldwide. Among these users are many serving in our nation's armed forces, in the United States and abroad. While this may seem to be a simple side-effect of these video websites popularity, it has changed the face of war as we know it.

In WWII, the Vietnam War, and even in the (somewhat) recent Gulf War, we as a nation received our war footage from the big news outlets. Vietnam brought the war onto our televisions, and the Gulf War continued that tradition. However, with the new War on Terror, and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have suddenly had the war at our literal finger tips, one click away.

The young, tech savvy, men and women who have grown up with computers, and that are now fighting for us overseas have replaced the mass media with their wartime footage. Sure, there were (and still are) journalist imbedded with the soldiers overseas, but we are now seeing a plethora of videos made by soldiers overseas saturate sites like Youtube.

Searching for' Iraq' or 'Terrorist' on these sites will net you hundreds of videos made not by CNN but by those directly in the line of fire. Soldiers have captured everything from the opening moments of the invasion of Iraq to the daily firefights against insurgents in the streets of Baghdad on film. Many of these clips are set to heavy rock music, or simply to the audio of the shootouts. Some of these videos paint a grim picture of US troops under fire, ambushed at night, hit by IEDs by day, as they fight insurgents in the Iraq or Afghanistan.