Blue Force tracking is a term used in the military for a computer system that tracks where military forces – friendly (blue forces) and hostile – are located. A new website has taken that name and used it to explain its mission – to help Americans understand where its military forces are in a unique, nuanced way.
The point of Blue Force Tracker (www.blueforcetracker.com) is not to show where troops are physically deployed, but to give Americans a more informed understanding of where their members of the military are in terms of mindsets—how they think, how they live, why they do what the do, what it means to them—and what it means to all of us.
The site and a complementary mobile app were launched in July by Nolan Peterson, a 2012 alumnus of the Medill School of Journalism’s graduate program who had served as an Air Force officer—a special operations pilot with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
www.blueforcetracker.com
Peterson wants to show Americans what’s going on in the military here and abroad by using as writers those who have recently served in the military, experts and current members of the military as his reporting staff in addition to professional journalists.
Peterson also said people who have served in the military or abroad have a deeper knowledge because they’ve experienced the culture and the issues of conflicts. He said he noticed it in his own reporting—when he went to Afghanistan as an embed before joining the Air Force his perspective was different than when he returned as a veteran because “people were telling me more things that they wouldn’t tell a civilian journalist.”
“Using people with real-world experience has two advantages – your breadth of knowledge of the stories that are out there and your ability to get sources ” he said in an interview. “We wanted to leverage that to give journalism skills to people with real credibility about the topics they are writing about.”
Peterson said he’s guiding the veterans, active-duty military and experts to change their perspectives from opinion into news and analysis.
A few months of reading posts on Blue Force Tracker shows he’s making some real headway in his mission. I found the stories from veterans and active-duty military to offer knowledge and perspectives that helped me think about some issues such as in new ways.
Blue Force Tracker Assistant Editor James LaPorta, for instance, shared a play-by-play on a day in the life of his platoon in the southern Helmand Province of Afghanistan – a straightforward account of boredom interrupted by fierce fighting and danger, something most Americans cannot conceptualize.
Eric Chandler , flew F-16s for 20 years. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan and wrote about his fears of helping out at the Combat Support Hospital.
A sample of the headlines on the front page of Blue Force Tracker. (Sept. 29, 2014)
“I told myself I was busy flying high performance jet aircraft in combat. I couldn’t afford to be distracted. … In a word, I was afraid. I was afraid to go to the hospital. I didn’t want to see the broken bodies of my service buddies. And I was ashamed that I was afraid, which made it worse. Luckily, pilots are good at compartmentalizing. Especially me.”
This brief passage gives enormous insight into what pilots, and other service members, have to battle inside themselves while fighting the enemy.
One point, made again and again by active-duty contributors as well as recent veterans, is the disdain felt for the “thank you for your service” mantra that is heard everywhere — from airline personnel letting service members, if they’re in uniform, get on planes first, to lawmakers and politicians offering thanks as part of a political statement.
Joe Osborne, a Blue Force contributor who spent 15 years in the Air Force, including multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, made the point in writing about the death of Maj. Gen. Harold Greene, who was killed when, according to reports, “a Taliban member dressed as an Afghan National Army soldier shot the general and more than a dozen others at an Afghan compound on the outskirts of Kabul.”
“What we need to do, as a nation, is offer more than just thanks to service members. Instead, we need to remember them. We need to remember those still deployed, and we need to remember those who made the sacrifice, who volunteered to go where others would not dare.”
Another contributor wrote that “I have been talking a lot with my military peers lately, and I sense a rising tide of disappointment among veterans with those who have never served. Most people with whom we interact cannot even place Afghanistan or Iraq on a map, but they still have incredibly strong opinions about what we have tried to do there. We don’t understand why our fellow countrymen don’t care enough to learn about these place and the issues that affect them, so they at least have the faintest clue about what they are sending these young men and women off to endure.”
The anger is palpable, but the call to action for citizens – and for journalists trying to help inform and engage Americans on the important issues of U.S. security and military operations – is clear.
