Like most bloggers, Mr. Yon has an agenda, writing often that the United States’ mission to build a stable, democratic Iraq is succeeding and must continue. He rarely disparages those who disagree, though, and he does not shy away from describing the disturbing things he sees.  He sometimes criticizes United States forces, their Iraqi allies, and even decision makers in Washington; lately, he has warned that while the American focus is on Iraq, Afghanistan is being lost.  His upbeat outlook on the war has made Mr. Yon a favorite of the war’s supporters. But others in that camp have attacked him for insisting that Iraq is in a civil war, and for condemning American treatment of some detainees.  “His work has a remarkable, chin-out, unvarnished intimacy,” said Jackie Lyden, a National Public Radio reporter who has worked in Iraq. “He isn’t a guarded, diplomatically toned reporter; he can be very frank, and he questions his own assumptions.”  The Internet has fostered such citizen journalism, shaking up ideas about where news comes from, but few have taken on the expense and danger of working in a war zone. Mr. Yon’s daily expenses are small, but he has paid tens of thousands of dollars for computers, cameras, phones and body armor.  He went to Iraq believing that the mainstream news media were bungling the story, and he still often criticizes the media’s pessimism. But he has also praised particular reporters from major outlets, or defended the media in general, explaining how difficult and dangerous it is to cover the war.  Along the way, he created a niche outlet that is better reported than most blogs, and more opinionated than most news reporting, with enough first-hand observation, clarity and skepticism to put many professional journalists to shame.  “We saw the man lying face down, barefoot, in filthy, oily mud, human excrement all around him,” he wrote in 2005, describing the aftermath of a gun battle he had witnessed. “He had fallen in an open air toilet, where he lay, belly-shot,” Mr. Yon continued. “The man brought his hand to his head, and touched his forehead with his index finger, pointing right between his eyes. ‘Shoot me, shoot me,’ he said. ‘I want to die.’ ”  Col. Stephen Twitty, a brigade commander with whom Mr. Yon has spent time in Iraq, had high praise for his work, saying that he often takes the same risks as the soldiers he accompanies.  In his first year and a half of online writing, Mr. Yon carefully avoided a position on whether he thought the war should have been waged in the first place. He eventually said that he had supported it reluctantly because of claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  Mr. Yon aims some barbs at the military brass, but talking with him and reading his work, it becomes clear that he has also pulled punches, not wanting to undermine the war effort.  In an interview, he said that when he first went to Iraq, in December 2004, “I knew we were losing the war,” and that “it was worse than the news was portraying.”  He said that in the early going, the military mishandled both the fighting and the press, and that among field commanders, “I started finding quite a few that seemed to be dialed in and knew what they were doing, and I found quite a lot that were quite clueless.”  Little of that dark view made its way into his dispatches, especially in his first year.  Mr. Yon has spent much of his life traveling and immersing himself in new places. Along the way, he wrote and self-published a book about his childhood. He decided to see the Iraq war for himself after three of his friends were killed there in 2004, and the military decided that his book was credential enough to let him accompany a combat unit.  Since then, bloggers and independent journalists have grown in numbers in Iraq, while the mainstream media there has shrunk. Overall, the number of embedded reporters at a given time dropped from several hundred in the early going to a few dozen in recent months.  In 2005 and 2006, Mr. Yon went through a period of rocky relations with the military hierarchy, which at times tried to bar him from accompanying units. But since then, things have improved, and the military has generally become more conscious — and solicitous — of Internet journalists. To Mr. Yon, ever-hopeful about the war, that change is healthy for Iraq, as well as for him.  “If you have bad media relations, you don’t know how to run a counterinsurgency,” he said. “Now they’re very good at it.”  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Frontline Blogger Covers War in Iraq With a Soldier’s Eyes. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
A former Special Forces soldier has created a loyal following on the Web with his accounts of frontline  soldiers’ daily work in Iraq.