Marina Kubacki
holds her 19-month-old daughter, Julian, at their home in Hopkinsville, Ky.
They are able to stay in touch with husband and father Derek Kubacki, a member
of the 101st Airborne stationed in Kuwait, via the Internet. She was able to
e-mail her husband nearly every day when he was stationed in Kosovo in the the
late 1990s, making his absence a little more bearable.(PHOTO) (ASSOCIATED PRESS
PHOTO/JOHN RUSSELL)
The Internet has become a crucial bridge for deployed troops and their loved ones, but the frequent contact also creates new worries about compromising military security. "Mike can't even say whether he's busy today," Gordon Warren said of his son, who fixes radar on the USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier bound for the Mideast. "That could be construed as having a lot of problems with the radar."
Warren doesn't
mind the restrictions. He appreciates a line or two saying his son is OK. He
writes him daily and occasionally e-mails pictures. A colleague forwards jokes.
Soon after the
ship left San Diego two weeks ago, Mike Warren's former physics teacher in
Bloomington, Ill., Debbie Voorhees, posted on a Nimitz bulletin board,
"Keep that Radar running!"
"Chit chat
and small talk can relieve a lot of tension," Voorhees said.
E-mail and
bulletin boards can't replace phone calls or care packages, but they can help
fill the gap.
" That one
e-mail, you can save and read over and over until the next one comes,"
said Marina Kubacki, whose husband recently left Fort Campbell, Ky., for Kuwait
with the Army's 101st Airborne Division.
"It's nice to
know your family cares about you," Sgt. 1st Class Renee Jackson, 40, of
Harvey, Ill., said after getting e-mail in Kuwait.
Still, reminders
of the dangers are everywhere.
On the USS Kitty
Hawk, a closed-circuit television spot warns sailors not to talk about the
carrier's location, direction and speed. Other "no-no's" include crew
issues such as morale and weariness.
" The hardest
thing about e-mail is being careful about what you say," Mike Warren said
by cell phone as the Nimitz stopped in Hawaii. "Sometimes, it's kind of
hard to find stuff to talk about."
Navy submarines
monitor their sailors' Internet use because of greater requirements for
stealth. Elsewhere, restrictions and surveillance are left to individual
commanders, who generally trust their rank-and-file.
"They know
they can't talk about anything specific, specific numbers, specific
locations," said Command Sgt. Maj. Iuniasolua Savusa of the 101st's 3rd
Brigade.
First Lt. Joshua
Rushing, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Qatar, said few people
have sensitive information to begin with.
And Army Lt. Gen.
Peter Cuviello points out that if there is combat, key soldiers "won't be
doing e-mail anyway. They'll be in tanks, Bradleys and artillery pieces."
Unit commanders do
occasionally cut off outbound access completely -- and will again shortly
before any attack.
To keep foes
guessing, Navy vessels try to limit their electronic "leakage" from
time to time, meaning sailors can get e-mail but not reply right away.
Steven Aftergood,
senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, said Internet
breaches are low among security worries. The primary fear, he said, is not from
hacking or interception but from recipients spreading messages further.
Internet access
and speeds vary from ship to ship, camp to camp.
Sailors generally
get online through satellite links using computers in ship libraries or other
public areas. On land, "morale tents" are lined with rows of
Internet-enabled computers.
Some personnel use
computers at their work stations. A few have laptops, but not all are allowed
on military networks.
Specific
applications like instant messaging are also sometimes barred for security
reasons, though time zones are a greater problem.
When access is
available to the troops, usage can be limited -- 20 minutes here, an hour there
-- and lines can stretch for hours.
On the Kitty Hawk,
for instance, only 10 of the 1,400 computers are available for e-mail. The
carrier shares satellite bandwidth with other ships. The USS Constellation at
one point had to ban video clips because they were using so much capacity.
Phones are
available, but can get expensive -- an AT&T prepaid calling card costs $20
for 20 minutes on the Nimitz.
Many find e-mail
quicker and cheaper.
"If you can
type fast, you can get a long letter written in 20 minutes," said Pfc.
James Bowers, 20, of Indianapolis, with the 101st Airborne in Kuwait.
"When you call and get the answering machine, that sucks bad." He's
been e-mailing an Internet-savvy teenage niece, figuring she could pass notes
to others.
Back home,
Internet support groups help families cope. Some Web sites have organized
campaigns to write letters and send care packages or music CDs to the troops.
Many families are
setting up online photo albums or journals known as blogs. Some units in the
field have created Web pages. The Army even gives soldiers accounts to set up
password-protected sites.
"Families
worry a lot less," said Brandon Rice, who kept a blog as an Army reservist
in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. "They can see our faces, what we were
doing."
But that, too, can
create problems.
Rice once
mistakenly posted a photo of an airplane on his unit's blog. Later, as its
audience grew beyond friends and family, a network administrator suggested that
he get the site approved, which he then did.
David Sherman, an
Air Force health care administrator in Montana who regularly read Rice's blog
and writes his own, said security concerns leave soldiers talking about the
mundane: "It's dry. It's dusty. They are serving prime rib."
As dependency on
the Net increases -- the Pentagon suspended letter-writing campaigns because of
anthrax fears -- expectations grow, too.
Spouses going
through first deployments get upset if they haven't heard back within a few
days, even though veteran military spouses know what it's like to wait weeks or
months, said Kim Modlin, who runs e-mail support groups from Germany and has a
husband in the Mideast.
"It can be
depressing," she said, "when everyone around you said they've heard
from their spouses."
Associated Press
correspondents Kimberly Hefling with the 101st Airborne Division and Rohan
Sullivan on the USS Kitty Hawk contributed to this story.
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