The Power of Facebooking: Keeping Soldiers in touch

This past week I received the unfortunate news that a classmate of mine from the Infantry Officer Basic Course was attacked and severely injured in Afghanistan while on patrol.  This news came to me thru a posting on Facebook from another classmate of mine,  only he was in northern Iraq.  In the matter of a few hours news has spread to all of our class that a brother of ours was down and hurt.

I have to applaud the fact that this would not have been possible 10 years ago.  We would have gone days not having heard anything aside from a series of phone calls and rumors.  However, in the matter of minutes dozens of us knew from a reliable and close source specifics about the incident and the location of our fellow LT who was now in critical condition.

In calling Walter Reed I was delighted to have the nurse in the ICU take my information and make sure that I was who I said I was and clear me to get some information from our his family who was there with him.  And than in return I posted a brief message to our crew that he was talking and was gonna make it.

Following up on this, another LT from my class took it upon himself to make the trek to DC to visit him at Walter Reed and again put out good intel on his status.  In a simple posting we all learned that he was hurt attached to an EOD team and that his leg was badly injured but, that he again would be ok and his family was grateful for all our calls and concern.

And so even if not for our own benefit, the family of our fallen Infantry LT knew that we were all saying prayers from all over the country and world.  This was entirely due to the fact that the news of his injury came almost instantaneously over Facebook alerting us all. So thank you Facebook for allowing us to say our own prayers for our man who is going to be ok, and for allowing his family and girlfriend to hear from us and to know that we were all praying and keeping them in our thoughts.