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The Duffel Blog responds
Military Times releases 'hit piece' against the Duffel Blog, calls stories 'fake'
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A former Marine infantryman runs a fake military news website — and he does it so well that officials have had to field questions from outraged readers who mistook the stories for fact.
Former Sgt. Paul Szoldra, of Lakeland, Fla., runs The Duffel Blog, the military's equivalent to The Onion, a satirical newspaper. He has about 20 volunteer writers who regularly contribute stories from the Marine Corps, Army and Navy.
"I guess airmen just don't have anything to complain about," he joked about the lack of Air Force contributors.
The stories on his site are not real; in fact, they can be ridiculous. But Szoldra, a 28-year-old college senior, and his contributors so expertly mimic the look and tone of real news stories that they regularly snow baffled readers. When a story announcing a Defense Department ban on Tapout apparel for all troops went up, some people got pretty upset.
"What the hell man, this is ridiculous," one reader commented.
And Szoldra said an official at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington received at least one phone call from a service member miffed about the ban on his favorite mixed martial arts gear, not realizing it was all meant in jest.
Szoldra was a mortarman and a combat instructor during his eight years in the Corps. When he got out in 2010 and transitioned to college life at the University of Tampa, he found the change jarring. He started a website to help others making the switch from the combat zone to the classroom and called it CollegeVeteran.com. In an attempt to boost traffic, Szoldra came up with the idea to add some fake military news.
So he posted a story about a colonel in the Air Force who was so sick of the "Chair Force" nickname that he banned all chairs on base. The story was a hit, but he was worried people would think his college veterans site was a joke, so he separated the two and in March, The Duffel Blog was born.
About five months later, the blog has more than 8,500 fans on Facebook and about 1,200 Twitter followers.
A 23-year-old active-duty Marine, who writes under the name Stormtrooper, said he contacted Szoldra about contributing to the blog after he read a story about a lance corporal who was so distraught after watching the movie "Pearl Harbor" that he wanted to attack Japan.
Stormtrooper, who wrote for his high school newspaper and took some writing courses in college, said writing for The Duffel Blog is a great outlet for the frustrating things he has to deal with as a low-ranking Marine.
"Military policy is so absurd sometimes," Stormtrooper said. "We get yelled at for having our hands in our pockets, we get yelled at for not saluting someone, we get yelled at for talking on a cellphone when every other person can do it. Writing about it all is just a great outlet."
Stormtrooper's first article for the site: "Marine officer's wife emotionally disturbed after being denied salute."
Szoldra and Stormtrooper said their growing audience, along with the success of the "Terminal Lance" comic strip, shows there's an appetite for a humorous, but clever, look at military life.
"I think we've proven that infantry guys are not stupid," Szoldra said.
