MINNEAPOLIS -- Earlier this summer, Lynn Clasen's son was wounded in battle in Afghanistan. In some high-tech contact with him as he recovered, Clasen was told that the U.S. Army was sending him back to the combat zone with a broken arm.
"Shame on them. How can they treat their soldiers like this and put them in jeopardy? I'm getting messages from other military moms on the Internet saying, 'Get on the phone and find out what's going on.' "
Through a spokesman, the U.S. Army said Clasen's son is able to handle the physical demands of his mission. But her story reveals an emerging and important truth about today's wired warfare.
While instantaneous global connectedness has transformed communications between soldiers and their families, it's led to new anxieties for families at home and raised new concerns for the military.
"This definitely is not your father's war," said Army Maj. William Willhoite, reached at Central Command in Baghdad, Iraq. "It's all wired. And that brings both benefits and drawbacks."
One of the military's biggest concerns: Today, a soldier's death risks being broadcast to the world long before the military makes its face-to-face visit.
"When someone is killed, the next of kin really need to know that first -- and that's an issue with all this technology, said Air Force Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
From a military family's perspective, the intermittent dribble of letters from wars past has been supplanted by a 24-hour tide of information from e-mail and a host of military, news media and other Web sites detailing different missions or events where a soldier is stationed. Random scraps of misleading information can easily set off alarms.
"When you really think about it," Clasen said, "World War II was better. You still worried, back then -- but now you know what you're worried about."
While the instant communications mean families like Clasen's know their loved ones are still alive, a soldier's cryptic comment about having to go offline for a few days can scare families back home, who worry about dangerous missions away from the base's computers. Any sudden, unexplained loss of the soldier's Internet service can be unnerving; the military does that when there's a death.
While cruising the Web, Clasen once found her son's name on a list of missing soldiers. She started making calls and asking the other military moms on the e-mail list she's on to find out anything they could.
"We were all trying to find T.J.," she said -- meaning a network of hundreds of moms, who in two years have sent one another more than 30,000 messages.
But she still doesn't know why her son's name was on that list. Perhaps it was a mistake. She said she is such an amateur at computers that her son once discovered she was paying for two Internet connections at once.
Pamela Mettille, whose husband is in Iraq with the Army National Guard, said he's been able to advise her via webcam on a "problem spot in our plumbing," and to take him virtually outdoors to see "flowers blooming, a yard that needs mowing, hear birds singing and watch our children play. That is a dose of morale that cannot be reproduced any other way."
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