Patty Loew:
We begin this week with a soldier's story. As the United States begins to stand down in Iraq and debates the troop increase in Afghanistan, we thought it would be worth revisiting our report on US army major Andrew Olmsted. He's a soldier with Wisconsin connections and the first US casualty in Iraq last year. We learned there's a new book about this army hero. More on that in a moment. First Art Hackett shows you how Olmsted's writings are having an impact around the world and in Cedarburg.

Wesley Olmsted:
He's an exceptional writer. He'd been writing for six or seven years and had really gotten into discussing a lot of political issues among other things. He also wrote about the Red Sox which were his team.

Art Hackett:
Wesley Olmsted of Cedarburg is US army major Andrew Olmsted's father. Major Olmsted, age 37, was the first US soldier to die in Iraq in 2008. He was based at Fort Carson in Colorado. Andrew Olmsted left behind a widow, Amanda Wilson. Andrew Olmsted grew up in Maine and then Massachusetts where his father was a chemical engineer for Polaroid. While in college, Olmsted joined ROTC and then entered the army.

Wesley Olmsted:
There were a number of different things that influenced his decision. Some of the books that he read. When you read through a book like that and it's all about camaraderie and how you can make a difference in the world by -- and at the same time be a part of something bigger than yourself.             

Art Hackett:
About seven years ago, Andrew Olmsted became a blogger, writing a series of postings on the internet, known formally as a web log, or “blog” for short.

Wesley Olmsted:
He got into blogging because he liked to have a discussion and his blogs were not way-conservative or way-liberal. If you go through and look through some of the earlier blogs, you'll discover he's trying to use the blog as a way to consolidate in his own mind what he thinks about specific issues.     

Art Hackett:
He eventually created a new blog, AndrewOlmsted.com and then joined a group of other bloggers at a site called Obsidian Wings. The group was looking for a conservative voice.

Wesley Olmsted:
He's more of a libertarian than conservative. It was a small “l,” not a capital “L.”

Art Hackett:
Andrew Olmsted served in the army for 15 years but wasn't ordered to Iraq until mid 2007.

Wesley Olmsted:
In general this is what he felt, that because he was a soldier, he had to go. Plus I think he felt he was going to be able to do some good by doing the training and in the ultimate, hopefully we would be able to turn this over to the Iraqis and then walk away.

Art Hackett:
The Rocky Mountain News in Denver enlisted Olmsted to write a blog for their website. Reporter David Montero was assigned to write the background story.

David Montero:
It was interesting the first few entries of his blogs that I read. I thought they were technical and he really didn't let himself be, his voice be in the writing, I didn't think, early on in the -- in our blog. It wasn't until later, I think as he got comfortable with the forum, and got reader comments that he started to open up a bit.

Wesley Olmsted:
He put one up one time asking people to send, not soccer balls, but the needles and pumps so the kids could re-inflate these things. Once the Iraqi kids had beaten them up, they deflate rather rapidly sometimes.

David Montero:
I think he was more comfortable making observations about things that he was seeing and things he was doing but this is stuff that we had talked about prior to his leaving to -- about his interests in the culture and his trying to understand the culture, making sure that he did the proper things to be the best ambassador as he could be. I think he did seem himself as an ambassador to the Iraqi people.     

Art Hackett:
His last post for the Rocky Mountain News was dated December 26, 2007, describing the Muslim holiday Eid al Adha.

David Montero:
The managing editor came up to me and said there was a report going around the blogosphere that Andrew had been killed. I didn't believe it right away. I was really hoping it wasn't true and so my first reaction was, a lot of things that appear on blogs aren't true, and sometimes it's like a dry tinder fire. Things can spread so fast and I thought maybe somebody inadvertently posted something that wasn't true.

Art Hackett:
The day after Olmsted was killed, another post appeared on the blog. It begins, “this is an entry I would have preferred not to have published but there are limits to what we can control in life and apparently, I have passed one of those limits.”

David Montero:
I can visualize Andy trying to go over and talk to people, see if they would put their guns down and unfortunately, they didn't know him and they decided to shoot him.

Art Hackett:
When he died on January 3, all of a sudden this last post pops up on the blog. Did you know that was coming?

Wesley Olmsted:
No. No. I had no idea. I'm not surprised. As he said when he opened the blog, he said he always wanted to have the last word and by God, he was going to do it. So he did.

Art Hackett:
Andrew Olmsted had written a lengthy message to be posted in the event of his passing. It was led with a quote from his favorite science fiction series, Babylon Five and this one from Plato. “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Here’s some of what Andrew Olmsted had to say.

Olmsted’s blog:
I do ask, not that I’m in a position to enforce this, that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn't a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side.

Wesley Olmsted:
If you read in his final post the comment that he said I hope that -- two things. One he said, we went to war too quickly. There were mixed feelings about doing this. He also said, I'm in the army. When the boss says you go, you go.

Olmsted’s blog:
A decision that for most of us in America was academic, whether or not to go to war in Iraq had very real consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. Yet I was as guilty as anyone of minimizing those very real consequences in lieu of a cold discussion of theoretical merits of war and peace. Now, I'm facing some very real consequences of that decision. Who says life doesn't have a sense of humor?

David Montero:
It reminds me of that -- I don't know if you saw the movie “Contact” with Jodi Foster but when she's up there looking at all of the stuff and she said “I shouldn't have sent a sign, I should have sent a poet” to describe what you saw. We have essentially a writer able to describe his feelings and what he thought about what was going on over there and how he saw things over there.

Wesley Olmsted:
I knew the blog was worldwide. I knew there would be a lot of people who would see it.

Art Hackett:
Accounts of the final post bounced from blog to blog. Andrew Olmsted's final post was reprinted in papers in Australia, South Africa and Germany. Here it is in Hungarian.

Wesley Olmsted:
It's a broader thing than just a single family. He wanted this seen by as many people as possible and he got his wish in a way. There are over half a million hits on it and that was several months ago.

Art Hackett:
Wesley Olmsted has collected printouts of the online comments from the blogs. They fill hundreds of pages in a ring binder. More than 4,000 US troops have died in Iraq since the war began in 2003.

Wesley Olmsted:
There have been a number of comments from a number of soldiers, people who had served with him, some who had just been in Iraq and unilaterally, almost universally what they're saying is, somebody finally said what I've been thinking for a long time. So I mean, in the way that Rupert Brook was the poet for the first world war, Andy has become the spokesman for those who died in Iraq.

Patty Loew:
Andrew Olmsted's perspective lives on in a new book called A Soldier's Words published Vantage Press. His father said he sent a copy of the book to President Obama, suggesting he read it prior to making a decision on whether to send more troops into Afghanistan. So far he's not heard back from the president. Proceeds from the book will go to a scholarship fund at Olmsted's former high school in Massachusetts. The heartbreak of war and tough economic times are hitting hard on the homefront.