FAYETTEVILLE Soldiers who fought overseas during World War II sometimes made souvenirs of Nazi helmets, swords or daggers. Today's troops have war relics, too: digital photos and video with the potential to reach a vast audience.
"Oh yeah, I've got hundreds of 'em," said Army Spc. Bryan Bishop, a Florida native stationed at Fort Bragg. He was clicking on his laptop to open files of photos and footage he took during a yearlong deployment to Iraq that started in 2009. "I put them up on Facebook and show them to family. People like to look at them."
Over the past decade, the ease with which soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines can collect and disseminate images from even the most forward bases in combat zones has become a benefit and a bane to the U.S. military. Improvements in technology made it easier for troops to collect their own photos and video and share them through the Internet with the rest of the world.
Mostly, the images are tame and reassuring. Occasionally, they start a scandal.
In the latest example, earlier this month, a video that went viral showed four Camp Lejeune-based Marines urinating on what appear to be the corpses of Afghans.
That behavior itself may have violated the laws of war and the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice, and it could get the perpetrators court-martialed.
But the Department of Defense has no policy in place to govern service members' use of personal cameras, leaving it to each branch of the military to decide what advice to give to troops. Generally, the military takes the approach that if troops are doing their jobs and acting according to their codes of conduct, photos and footage that don't compromise the safety of individuals or the mission are OK.
Several high-profile examples have stung the armed forces, and the country. At least 11 U.S. soldiers were convicted on various charges involving the abuse of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison after photos and videos showing the atrocities surfaced in 2004. In 2008, a video of a Marine lance corporal throwing a puppy off a cliff in Iraq went viral.
In November, a video appeared online that shows uniformed U.S. soldiers cheering as a man in Western-style clothes beats a sheep to death with what looks like a baseball bat.
No help for the enemy
The military has found ways, however, to use social media to its advantage.
At Fort Bragg, the 82nd Airborne, several of its components and its Family Readiness Group all are on Facebook, as are units from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro. Photos posted on the units' Facebook pages are often the grip-and-grin variety, showing troops getting awards and promotions, or spouses and children at homecomings. The groups also share information about events and programs on the sites with troops and their families.
After once banning personnel from using social media, the Marines, too, have now embraced those platforms as a way to improve communication within the corps and heighten the Marines' image with the public.
The Marines released a 48-page guidebook last fall called "The Social Corps," advising how to use Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and similar sites.
"With social communication, you essentially provide a permanent record of what you say," the guidebook reads. "If you wouldn't say it in front of a formation, don't say it online."
Lt. Col. Robert Carver, spokesman for the N.C. National Guard, said the first concern with anything soldiers post online is what the military calls "operations security." Carver said troops constantly are reminded not to broadcast information that could be used, by itself or in combination with material found elsewhere, by an enemy.
For example, Carver said, a soldier in a guard mount at a base in Afghanistan might have a friend snap a photo of him at his post.
"But because he's up on a wall, over his shoulder is the entire layout of the base where he's stationed. That could be helpful to an enemy planning an attack. We'll contact that soldier and tell him, 'You need to take that down.'
"There's a lot of unit pride," Carver said. "It's esprit de corps, and that's good. We don't want to squash that, but we want to do it with the safety and security of our soldiers in mind and the safety and security of the mission."
Preserving a record
Scott Matthews was a film student in California when he joined the National Guard in August 2001. A month later came 9/11, and Matthews was suddenly looking at certain deployment.
Growing up, Matthews had been interested in U.S. military history, most of which he learned through movies and television documentaries. As he prepared to deploy to Afghanistan as a mechanic with a helicopter unit, he looked for video of more recent U.S. military actions, including the first Persian Gulf War, and couldn't find much that was of high quality. News organizations were getting footage, but it was limited by where journalists were embedded and what they were allowed to see.
Matthews decided to take a digital camera that could shoot high-resolution footage.
In Afghanistan, his unit hooked up with a helicopter unit of the N.C. National Guard, which also included an experienced cameraman. In their spare time, the pair collected hours of footage, later edited into a video still popular on the Internet.
In the absence of a more concerted effort to document the work of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, Matthews said, soldiers began inadvertently doing it themselves.
"So we've got 10 years of war relegated to handycam video footage," Matthews said. "That sucks for our generation, because when they start looking for that video in the future, it'll just look like a bunch of cellphone camera footage, because people were just using what was convenient."
Things that go boom
Even grainy video with ambient noise can get an online audience if it's engaging.
Military.com, a website started in 1999 as a source of information on military benefits for active-duty soldiers, veterans and their families, is a popular site for uploading videos. The site's editor, Ward Carroll, said videos on the site get about 4 million plays per month, by far the most of any military-related site.
Military.com was the second website, after LiveLeak.com, to post the video of urinating Marines, which attracted a half-million views on the site.
"Audiences have learned to accept poor production quality," said Carroll, who spent 20 years in the Navy. "We don't care anymore as long as the footage is entertaining or shocking or whatever."
The most popular videos are those that show spectacular explosions of IEDs, strikes by rocket-propelled grenades, or human targets being hit. One segment produced for the History Channel and posted on YouTube, re-creating a sniper strike on insurgents who had ambushed Marines in Iraq in 2004, has received more than 2.3 million views since January 2011.
"It's voyeurism," said Daren Brabham, an associate professor at the UNC Chapel Hill School of Journalism who studies the role of new media in society. "People like to watch these kinds of taboo things. And people like a good explosion; that's pretty well-established."
Fantasy and reality of war
Brabham thinks there is another attraction: a desire to vicariously experience combat. With less than 1 percent of the population serving in the military, watching videos online is as close as most people will ever get.
"It's a way of living out those fantasies, of being on the battlefield when they're not," he said.
The videos serve another purpose, Brabham said: to show the reality of war. WikiLeaks.org posted a piece taken from an American helicopter whose crew in 2007 shot and killed a Reuters photographer and driver.
Sometimes, Brabham said, that includes soldiers dehumanizing the enemy.
"On the battlefield, there are kind of no eyes watching," he said. "And that creates even more problems. I would be in favor of things being recorded in an automatic way. On ground raids, I don't see why we couldn't attach cameras to people's helmets. With more eyes, there should be fewer atrocities."
Most troops can be trusted to do the right thing whether a camera is running or not, said Carroll, of Military.com. There have always been those who celebrated their conquests; samurai warriors cut off the heads of their enemies to present to their warlords.
"The only difference between then and now is the peace-loving citizens back home didn't get to see it," Carroll said.
More and more, they will.
If they don't already, Carroll said, "Every sailor, every soldier, every Marine is going to have a camera. It's easy to capture the moment and make it live for your friends. It's so ubiquitous and easy. Even at the farthest reaches of the war, you can upload it to the world.
"The genie is out of the bottle."
