It started off as an experimental effort to cover the war in the era of social media. But launching a forum where anyone could weigh in about a combat unit's fight proved to be more than the Marines were willing to handle. The media pioneers have been sent home -- largely over some comments left on a Facebook wall.
Journalists working for Basetrack, a new nonprofit media group, arrived in the Musa Qala district of Afghanistan's Helmand Province in October with an unconventional mission. They'd exhaustively document the war of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines in videos, audio interviews, articles and mapping tools. And, through Facebook, they'd make their work a portal for those invested most in the Marines, like their relatives.
But the social media experiment turned out to be too social for both the battalion's command and its superiors. They were largely fine with the journalists' work. It was the commenting community on Facebook that drove the brass nuts. Last month, the Marines abruptly ended the experiment and terminated Basetrack's embeds.
For some Marine family members, the command's dissatisfaction with Basetrack's Facebook page is hard to fathom. "I haven't seen anything they've done to put any of these kids in harm's way," says Jackie Giambrone, mother of a Marine in the unit. "They've done what they promised -- they kept us connected."
Too connected for the Marines' comfort, it would turn out.
Last year, the Marine Corps took a gamble by reversing its ban on social media. Like the rest of the Defense Department, the Corps figures it needs to get its message out on web 2.0, where its audience increasingly is. But that also puts it in uncharted open territory, where it isn't always able to control that message.
The new social media rules gave photojournalist Teru Kuwayama an idea. He'd send embedded reporters into Afghanistan, where they'd file video, short blog posts and longer stories onto a website that simulcast its content on Facebook. It wouldn't be a website as much as it would be a community of interest about the unit his journos covered.
And he had an opportunity. Six years after a positive embedding experience with Kuwayama in eastern Afghanistan, Maj. Justin Ansel had become the executive officer of the 1-8 Marines, which deployed to Helmand in the fall. Ansel asked Kuwayama if he'd like to document the 1-8 Marines' war.
Thus was born Basetrack, the website and the Facebook page created to give granular, personal and at times gut-wrenching information to those who cared about the 1-8, and provoke discussion about it. After landing a $202,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, three Basetrack reporters arrived in Helmand's Musa Qala district in early October to document the 1-8's entire deployment. It was a major commitment to battlefield reporting at a time when many mainstream news organizations were cutting back on Afghanistan coverage.
The "large majority" of Basetrack's content was "extremely positive," Ansel says. "It's unfortunate that a couple bad apples spoiled it, but that's the way it goes."
Some of that content was much like conventional embedded online reporting -- down to the occasional disagreements about tone with the command. Its reporters produced some eye-opening stuff. One-on-one audio interviews let Marines tell their own stories, unfiltered. Embed Balasz Gardi produced a tense account of an hourlong firefight with the Taliban in November:
But the social media aspect of Basetrack caused Ansel aggravations. Reports from other media about Afghanistan that Basetrack aggregated blurred the lines between what Basetrack was saying about the battalion and what other journalists were saying about the war as a whole. And on Basetrack.org, content is accessible via pushpin icons on a Google map roughly corresponding to where the action took place. To higher headquarters, that looked like a giant targeting system, waiting to be exploited by insurgents.
Both Kuwayama and Ansel say that Basetrack's map posed no threat to the Marines. Yes, geocoordinates show up on the screen by one of the icons, but they're inexact, and they're not uploaded in real time. "If you launched a Hellfire at the coordinates," Kuwayama tells Danger Room, "you'd be nearby, but you'd miss." Still, Ansel says, readers "see a post blocked off, and they think it must be accurate... [but] the locations of the maps were offset, sometimes at a great distance."
The comments on Basetrack's Facebook wall stirred up problems, too. Self-identified family members of the battalion kept chiming in -- sometimes touching on subjects that Marines wanted left alone. In one instance, Giambrone, whose son Anthony is a lance corporal in the 1-8, posted something about a Marine wounded in an insurgent bomb attack, in what she describes as an effort to get people to pray for his recovery. Ansel e-mailed her and told her to take it down. She did, but the experience left an unpleasant taste in her mouth.
"I can understand not saying, 'My son Anthony is on a patrol base now, he's going on a mission,'" Giambrone tells Danger Room. "I understand that's a security violation. But [removing] our feelings? No, that's wrong."
Ansel concedes that Giambrone "was probably within her rights" to post about the wounded Marine. But to him, posts that brought up sensitive subjects while nerves are still raw after an attack crossed a line. He says "two or three other times," he e-mailed people requesting them to take their posts off the Facebook page, and had problems with many more. Suddenly, the chief advocate for Basetrack's experiment inside the battalion was policing people's reactions to it.
It's a question of propriety, Ansel says. "Someone whose loved one was killed by the bad guys, and then somebody posts on, 'We got to get out of [Afghanistan],'" he says. "I go to work every day protecting people's freedom of speech. There's a time and a place." His own unfamiliarity with social networking didn't help: "The battalion commander isn't what you'd call a social media guy. I'm much more experienced, but I'm new to it."
The family members split on whether Basetrack's work was valuable or exploitative. Giambrone, who says she's "loved Basetrack from the beginning," began to receive e-mails from family members taking her to task. One accused Basetrack of "over-exaggerating the number of incidences and the severity of PTSD" and serving an "anti-military agenda." Janet Kroeker, whose nephew is in a unit supporting the 1-8, says she's gotten caustic e-mails from family members saying, "Who are you; if you're not 1-8, why are you on Basetrack; these Basetrack people aren't who say they are; the high command isn't happy with them."
Ansel won't name names, but he says he and the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Dan Canfield, heard from officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Marine attachment to U.S. Central Command and from Central Command headquarters itself expressing unease with the freewheeling nature of Basetrack. That led Ansel to ask Kuwayama to shut down the Facebook page in late January. Kuwayama refused, citing a lack of specificity over what he posted that was actually problematic or illegal. "You can't just shut down a Facebook page because of some undefined concern," he says. Kuwayama left Musa Qala for the U.S. soon after -- just as the next wave of Basetrack reporters received their approval from the military to join up with the 1-8 Marines through March 17.
By then, though, Canfield and Ansel had decided Basetrack was more trouble than it was worth. "The nail in the coffin wasn't Facebook," Ansel says. "The nail was, it was bigger than we were willing to fight." On Feb. 5, Kuwayama received notification from Lt. Timothy Irish, a spokesman for the Eighth Marine Regiment, that Basetrack's reporters were being asked to leave, citing concerns about the mapping tool's "perceived Operational Security violations." Yet a follow-on e-mail from a spokeswoman for the U.S. military command in southwestern Afghanistan concluded that "media ground rules were not violated."
"The juice wasn't worth the squeeze," is how Ansel explains it. He wasn't willing to fight with higher headquarters to keep Basetrack embedded through the end of the tour -- most Marine embeds last two weeks -- especially as he himself was preparing to head home, following the completion of his seventh post-9/11 deployment. The battalion will return to Camp Lejeune in early April.
Kuwayama is frustrated, and is now figuring out what to do with his reporters in Kabul who won't be continuing on to Helmand. Residual content from the embeds still gets posted to Basetrack. But there's a social-media question about his embed that he never got to answer.
"If you have people tracking this story on a Facebook page, does their interest translate into passing on their interest to their own social networks?" Kuwayama says. "When they 'Like' something, what kind of carryover does it have? Can we take this beyond this nucleus, directly connected to this battalion of Marines, and spread it out a degree or two?"
It could have meant a new way of covering the military -- one that Kroeker and Giambrone desperately want. "We didn't go there looking for an agenda," Kroeker says. "I was looking for information about my nephew. What his team leader says is that [Helmand] makes Fallujah look like child's play. And we could not get information we're supposed to get" from official military channels. Being able to bond with other Marine family members helped her stay strong, she says.
Ansel says Basetrack is welcome to cover the unit when it returns home to Lejeune. Even though he had to play enforcer, and for all the frustrations with social media, he still thinks that the dozens of stories Basetrack produced formed a good model for long-term coverage of Marines at war.
And in his own Facebook usage, he says, "Hell, I still Like it."
Photo: fB/Basetrack
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