Remembering the Soldiers with Google Earth

Sean Askay, who works for Google, has created a unique way everyone can contribute to remembering fallen soldiers. Especially with Remembrance day this year, and with another year of ongoing conflict in the world, there are millions of people who have taken a moment to remember the men and women who have given their lives for their country. The beauty of this project, which Sean started when he was still in graduate school, is that it uses Google Earth to map 5,700 American and Coalition soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not only does the map show the location these men and woman lived in, but it also shows where they lost their lives and it tells you a bit about themselves. Links go straight from each soldiers story to memorial websites where people can leave comments and read those left by family and friends.

To make this project as amazing as it became, Sean implemented many of the latest Google Earth features as they came out. At this point, the map the fallen project uses 24,000 place marks, 6,000 folders, 2,500 screen overlays and line arcs with over 250,000 vertices, according to Google.

On the map the fallen website, Sean mentions he collected information for this project from sources such as 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. He also used the Google Maps and GeoNames.orggeocoding services to include the coordinates for each person’s home and the approximate place where they died. At this point the map is updated with data through March 2009.

The picture at the top of this post is one that I find extremely impressive. Although realizing how much work and dedication went into this project is astonishing, the sheer number of people on the map give a much better feeling of the magnitude of losses the country has suffered. You could have spent your entire Remembrance Day, and many more days using this application to learn about and remember the soldiers who lost their lives, and the families they belonged to. This project is amazing for many reasons, but the manner in which it really puts a face (rather faces) to the numbers makes it truly valuable and a tribute to the unity of the United States.

You can download the map directly here, but you do need to have Google Earth in order for you to be able to see it.