Web brings war home

The military still hasn’t officially released the names of the Dalton, Ga.-based soldiers injured last weekend in a bomb blast in Afghanistan, citing “operational security concerns.”

But everyone knows who they are anyway, thanks to the social networking site Facebook.

Sites like these, along with blogs and other personal Web sites, are opening the war zone up to outsiders like never before, offering instantaneous, firsthand accounts of events. They’ve become a major asset to relatives hungry for information about their loved ones — and a problem for military officials worried about revealing too much to enemy forces.

“It’s not that we don’t want people to know what’s going on, or that we don’t want the information out there,” said Sgt. 1st Class Roy Henry, a spokesman for the Georgia National Guard. “But when you talk about unit strength being down because of an attack that may have occurred, or supply levels are down, you’re basically feeding the enemy information that they can use.”

In releasing information from the battlefield, officials are constantly struggling to balance several different interests, Sgt. 1st Class Henry said: the interest of the public to know what’s going on, the free expression rights of its troops and operational security for the overall missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

individual responsibility

The military can’t just cut off communication or ban social networking sites outright, Sgt. 1st Class Henry explained. So instead, the military depends upon individual soldiers and family members to use it responsibly. Each service member is briefed on communications and media relations prior to deployment.

“One of the things we teach them is that if we don’t speak for ourselves, other people are going to do that for us,” he said. “It’s up for us to do that. We owe it to our families. We owe it to the public.”

Sgt. 1st Class Henry conducts those briefings for the National Guard, and he makes sure his soldiers know that the U.S. Department of Defense must make official contact with families of any victims prior to any release of names to the public.

Command Sgt. Maj. Joey Recker — who authored the detailed Facebook account after the four 1/108th Cavalry Regiment members were hit by an improvised explosive device last weekend — explained he and his fellow soldiers are well aware of the policy.

“The military has systems in place to ensure that families are notified properly and that they receive the proper support when they receive bad news,” he wrote in a Facebook message. “We must discipline ourselves to allow those systems to work and ensure we do not cause additional pain by spreading rumors or sending information home before family members have been properly notified.”

In this particular case, the system worked well, according to Charlie Rosenquist, whose son, Cpl. Henry Rosenquist, is in the unit.

Ms. Rosenquist, who lives in Tunnel Hill, Ga., and works in Chattanooga, is one of the leaders of the unit’s Family Readiness Group, which is designed to keep relatives of those serving connected.

“It was great because what we had asked everyone not to do, like not to call each other, worked,” she said. “We didn’t hear about this until after the families (of the injured) had already been notified.”

benefits outweigh drawbacks

Facebook ended up being a great way to tell the story accurately and as quickly as possible, according to a post from Carol Anderson, of Atlanta, who identified herself as the cousin of one of the injured, Spc. Andrew Sullens.

“Glad to hear about Andy’s performance under fire by someone with first-hand information,” Ms. Anderson wrote in response to Sgt. Maj. Recker’s account on the 1/108th’s Facebook networking page. “We would be greatful (sic) if you would continue posting information of their recovery.”

Online sites are also a helpful tool for families grieving the loss of their service members, said Hope Gluff of Dalton, Ga., whose husband was killed in Iraq in January 2008. Within hours of receiving notice of Marine Lance Cpl. James Michael Gluff’s passing, Mrs. Gluff was sharing the news on her MySpace page.

“I guess it was like a sense of closure for me,” she said. “It felt so surreal to me, so putting it up there was like, I could look at it and I wouldn’t feel like I was in a dream.”

Obi Ebbe, a sociology professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, said he believes the general public consensus is that benefits of Internet communications outweigh the drawbacks and security risks.

“The Internet is a revolution and it has made life very easy in a lot of ways,” Dr. Ebbe said. “Looking at the future, this is where it’s going.”

Military officials have embraced that fact and will continue to do the best they can to work around it, according to Sgt. 1st Class Henry.

“With all of the social media that are out there, things are going to slip through,” he said. “We realize that.”