A soldier's video diary.(From The Frontlines)(Iraq)

The "Nightline" theme music faded and Ted Koppel looked straight into the camera.

"At times, it seems as though everything these days is recorded, photographed, videotaped," he said, in that deep steady voice that's so familiar to late-night news watchers.

Inside the ABC control room, you could see Koppel from several different angles, as the studio cameras ted their pictures onto a wall of TV screens. It looked like a miniature version of NASA mission control rows of people wearing headsets, all concentrating on the screens in front of them as if they were waiting for blast-off:

"Sooner or later, in one form and place or another, the most extraordinary images and voices come bubbling to the surface, where they become available to the public at large," Koppel continued.

Koppel was talking about a growing phenomenon one that has probably had just as much impact on coverage of the Iraq war as the Pentagon's policy of embedding reporters with U.S. troops. He was talking about soldiers with cameras.

"You have only to think about some of the photographs of prisoner abuse that emerged from Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Why would anyone photograph such things in the first place? How do such pictures ever become public?

"Part of the answer may lie in the fact that the young men and women in our armed forces belong to a generation entirely at ease with cameras and microphones. Where, once perhaps, people kept track of their lives in letters and diaries, now, those events are quite literally recorded for posterity.

"Very shortly, you will meet Staff Sergeant Ken Weichert of the California National Guard's 223rd military intelligence battalion. He carried a video camera with him over the course of a 13-month tour of Iraq. We will show you small segments of what Sergeant Weichert videotaped. And alter each segment, he and I will talk

what we've just seen.'"

BOOT CAMP FOR THE MASSES

I met Ken Weichert at a gym in San Francisco. He looked like a life-size GI Joe action figure. Muscles bulged under his …