Mapping The Fallen
By Nicole Belle Monday May 25, 2009 5:00pm
(h/t Russ, S&R)
I love love love Google Earth. I can easily spend hours swooping all over the globe, looking at satellite pictures of the homes of friends and family, favorite vacation spots and dream destinations.
Sean, part of the content design team for Google Earth, has put together a special application for the program that is perfect for this Memorial Day: Map the Fallen.
This Memorial Day I would like to share with you a personal project of mine that uses Google Earth to honor the more than 5,700 American and Coalition servicemen and women that have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have created a map for Google Earth that will connect you with each of their stories—you can see photos, learn about how they died, visit memorial websites with comments from friends and families, and explore the places they called home and where they died. [..]
For this project I collected information from a number of sources, including the Department of Defense's Statistical Information Analysis Division, icasualties.org, MilitaryTimes.com's Honor the Fallen, Washington Post's Faces of the Fallen, the Iraq and Afghanistan Pages, and Legacy.com. I used the Google Maps and GeoNames.org geocoding services to get coordinates for each person's home of record and approximate place of death. The map includes data through March 2009. I'd like to point out the incredible time commitment the above organizations invest in maintaining this information; as I've learned, it is not an easy task. All of the data I have assembled and generated for this project will be made freely available for download in the near future.During this project, I have sought the advice and perspectives of several groups directly tied to these losses, including Gold Star families, veterans' groups, active-duty servicemen and women, and leadership in the United States Army. I've done my best to incorporate their feedback and suggestions in creating something that pays tribute to the memory and service of these fallen heroes. Out of respect for the families of those people on this map who have taken their own lives, I have chosen to describe these deaths as coming from "non-combat" related causes. This is a broad category used by the Department of Defense to define other causes of death resulting from accidents or illness.
I recognize that this map is just a slice of the story in these conflicts. The Iraqi and Afghani people have incurred substantial civilian losses through these wars; there are also U.S. and Coalition civilians, contractors, and reporters who have died as well. For this project, I've chosen to focus on the U.S. and Coalition military casualties, but I recognize that the losses extend beyond what is mapped in this project.
Each figure on the map denotes a servicemember lost during the last six years. Tied to their hometown, each figure pops up a screen that gives information about that fallen troop. In addition, families can add photos, audio and a guestbook for others to give their remembrance and honor their service.
Please, take some time to look through Map the Fallen and honor the sad sacrifice these men and women have made.
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This puts a human face on those who courageously served us--they are not casualty numbers---they are real and unique human beings who have a common bond of humanity with all of us. How sad it is that we shall see them no more---and may this give us pause to remember the utter folly and depravity of war.
It's something that needed to be done. I don't believe there's any way for civilians to grasp something as abstract as war other than to understand something about the lives that were lost because of it.
Sad that we were deprived of honoring these people, that we were made to feel guilty and unpatriotic for wanting simply to understand.
Wow. I was anti-war from the beginning, because war is almost always a cynical push for more presidential power, that warps the efforts and ideals of servicemembers.
I've wished there was a way to visualize these losses, and to make each sacrifice more personal/individualized. This is nicely done.
All of this sacrifice and so very many more in Iraq and Afghanistan and for what? What a shame there will be those who do not see the sorrowful waste of young life on this map as just that - sad and a waste.
From this day forward, I'll do my part to support and work toward the end of the fighting, maiming and killing in the name of whatever sick, twisted and unholy rationale these wars were started.
5679 dead? !
Where the f--k have I been?
WHAT IF this project reflected the civilian deaths our wars of aggression in Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan have produced?
How long would it take to chart the death and personal statistics of over a MILLION people? WOWSA!
That's much more than 150x the amount of US military personel, because we don't concern ourselves with what destruction lies in our wake, or the wake of private mercenary corporations, so it would be a colossal job.
Google earth is free. If you want to do it, go for it. But don't diminish what's been done here.
Just putting it all in perspective. It boggles the mind that we are in such a large part responsible for that amount of deaths. It's mind-numbing actually.
i had no idea where (geographically) in iraq the place where my little brother was killed.
It took me a little bit, but I found the six guys from my hometown who were killed--including one who committed suicide. I then followed over to where they were killed in country.
I can see how this could be tremendously comforting to the families.
yes, I found him thanks.
....for sharing this wonderful site with us all!
It's truly in the true spirit of this holiday and a very thoughtful thing for you to have done.
Simply amazing. Big HT to all who did this work!
They'd just as soon hide the fact (as did Bush with his refusal to allow coverage of the returning war dead) that real human beings with real histories are involved here.
So long as they remain nameless and faceless, it's much easier to continue a fraudulent policy of war for oil, war for Israel, war for whatever lame reason they can come up with.
"American and Coalition servicemen and women that have lost their lives". I wanted to suggest a rephrasing? "Lost their lives" conveys an impression that is different from what has happened. The causus belli was a lie, a fraud. These lives were taken, not lost, they were taken by fraud and deceit. they were stolen. "Lost" can carry with it a sense of accident and passivity. These are victims of something intentional. They [We, the world] were lied to, and they acted on the lies and died. Might we call them "stolen lives"; lives they were defrauded of. Surely there's truthful, accurate, real language that can convey the perfidy of the architects of these wars that seem to have no upside in Iraq [Hussein was old and becoming vulnerable and any transition from his regime is likely to have been far less deadly for everyone. Besides he was as much evidence of a fundamental ungovernability present as perpetrator, but that is a different argument.] Afghanistan is different but all the trends seem to indicate it is on the path to hell on a road paved with innocent's bodies. gone on long enough. Taken lives, not lost.
For on this very auspicious day, where millions of human beings, must unfortunately take pause, and deal with loss. Im sure many will heal from your posting (today, and those that will come for US due to THEIR ultimate sacrifice) and I wish to extend my appreciation to you and Sean (et. al.) for showing , IMO , what truly defines patriotism.
The distribution of casualties is similar to the population distribution of the United States. The 'blue states' and the 'red states' both. Even Fake America has given lives.
Let's also remember that by and large the U.S. military casualties represent a fraction of the lives lost in these conflicts that were brought about with the U.S. as the foreign aggressors -- even in the case of Afghanistan we are doing more harm than good (unless you happen to trade in opiates) and those who sign up for the U.S. military need only look at the past 50 years to see how our military functions in the world for corporate interests. When do we start honoring the true heroes that choose to dedicate their lives to non-violent methods of peacekeeping?
Are you jealous that you haven't gotten a statue for blog-commenting?
because for every one of those lost lives there is an untold number of family and friends who have felt their losses personally, not to mention the many more that have been permanently scarred by both visible and invisible wounds during their tour of duty in the middle east.
I think of all the people these people were connected to.
The mothers and fathers, the sisters and brothers, the aunt's and uncles, the cousins, the son's and daughters the grandchildren.
I wonder if the cowards that sent these people off to be killed in a foregin land even give them a second thought?
Do they even care that a child has no father or mother?
Or that a father and mother has lost a child?
Do they ever think what if it were my child or father or brother or cousin?
Do they still spend their time making jokes about wepons of mass destruction hidden under a desk?
Or do the cower from an undisclosed location? Or get on a TV show and lie about why they caused these things to happen.
As long as the people are willing to put cowards in high places cowards will send people other then themselves to be killed in foregin lands.
What a shame. What shame we have brought on ourselves by letting these cowards do these things.
I think by now we have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that republicanism is a mental illness. Brought on by ignorance and greed. Some get older and wiser and are no longer republicans. But some never wake up to the facts. Some remain greedy selfish bastards their entire life. For these there is no hope and they should be shunned like the plague, never allowed to be part of our government. Because as part of our government they can harm not only themselves but others and that is the real sin they bring to our country. Greed without consience ignorance without the desire to learn.
I see the fallen are not from just the "pro America" south. Whoulda thunk the librul northeast and Pacific west coast would have had so many America haters fight and die for their country?
Let's take a moment and remember the prominent patriotic politicos who served their country in the armed forces as well as the combat dodging chickenhawks who dodged. http://www.awolbush.com/whoserved.html
This picture should be done in a Christmas card and sent to Bush and Cheney every Christmas.
....not that it would bother Cheney in the least. Bush maybe a little.
Why do you think there are so few from Red states?
Probably because the red western states combined have fewer people than, say, Kentucky.
Christan terrorists who needed to be tried and convicted any way.
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