Digitized

Courtesy of TechCrunch, we have for you this morning, the digitized version of the Vietnam War Memorial.

Here's the story:

Footnote has taken the initiative to digitize all 58,000 names inscribed into the Vietnam War Memorial. It has also correlated them with military personnel records from the National Archives and made this information searchable from within an interactive Flash application.

The project started by hiring a National Geographic photographer to take over 2,000 high quality photos of the wall. The company then stitched them together, indexed the names, and pulled out information about each person from two major national databases: one for casualties and one for personnel. The whole process took about four months to complete and the end result is being provided for free.

If you want to find a particular name, you can run a simple keyword search. You’ll be shown key facts such as the person’s rank, grade, specialty, and casualty date. You can also search for names that conform to certain criteria such as enlistment type, race, hometown, casualty date, squadron, and much more.{...}

And it works well. For instance, meet the man for whom the husband is a namesake.

Pfc. Michael Laverne Pheiffer is the husband's first cousin, and, unfortunately, he was killed of "multiple fragmentation wounds" in Binh Duong province a little over a month after his first tour of duty started. This is information the husband never had. If his family knew this information at all once upon a time, it's information that was lost over the years. All the husband knew was that he was named after his cousin who died in Vietnam; he didn't know any of the particulars. But now he does. The husband has always felt a little awkward about the fact that he knew relatively little about the relative he was named after. He once told me it felt a little disrepectful to carry this man's name, but to know so little about him. This will never tell him what sort of a person Michael Pheiffer was, or what he was like to know, but it does provide something that his family had never provided: bare facts about what he was doing there (he was drafted) and how successful he was in his mission (sadly, not very). From that you can deduce a few things, none of which make Michael Pfeiffer less of a person or a soldier, but, nonetheless, fill out the story a bit more.

There are an awful lot of people who can't make it to the Memorial in D.C., for one reason or another, but due to the wonders of the internet, they can at least take a peek at the names on the Wall, and find out some very valuable and relevant information that's not necessarily available to those who visit in the flesh.

Posted by Kathy at March 26, 2008 08:16 AM | TrackBack