As a Brit who as a child used to love reading about war, loved target shooting and some of the techniques of soldiering with the army cadets, I've now grown older with the knowledge that I would rather run from war than fight it. I'm also in a generation that perhaps is lucky enough to be able to make that decision without the fear of shame or the firing squad that greeted my grandparents generation.
I've also felt it important to show my son the many First & Second War cemetaries and sites in France, Germany and the Low Countries, not so much to 'enforce' on him any beliefs or ideals, but so that he can see for himself the costs of war.

The rights and wrongs of political beliefs are for others to judge, but the cost to so many parents is as graphic in this amazing posting as any war cemetary that I've seen in Europe.
It's an excellent posting, and the work in presenting it with simple facts and an image is an outstanding online memorial worthy of any war graves cemetary status. Well done.

Regarding your comments re civilian casulties - yes, it's the other side of the war story which is often ignored and sometimes hard to comprehend. The effort and work to create an online memorial for them would be massive, and the impact of how to put over the shear numbers involved could be difficult without the view being a mass of dots. Your method of locating a soldier's hometown is good for this initial 'memorial', but in a warzone civilian type memorial you could have tens or hundreds of caulties just in one small location.
However, there is perhaps some method to symbolise and recognise the civilian losses within a war zone, but the best means to do it simply, effectively, and sensitively with respect, is obviously going to be quite difficult.

Great post!

Sorry to all and their families!
Imagine the one you'd have to do for the innocents in Iraq!!!

I must say that this is a great first post.

I have been working on a Iraqi causualties layer for this post... and I will say that seeing 30,000 placemarkers over Iraq (and 15k over Baghdad) is pretty striking...

However, Google Earth starts to choke over about 10k placemarks. I don't really want to have each placemarker = 10 deaths, or some other similar dilluting solution.

So will keep tinkering with it on my free time.

I also want to hook this link up to live data from icausualties.org, so it will stay current (I've been generating the kml file with php and csv flat data files).

Thanks for looking in, and let me know if you have more suggestions.

sean

This is an A1 post.... Thank You very much. May more people rememeber our fallen heroes, wether you agree or disagree with the politics that put them in harms way.

Somber but worth it is right .........good post.

Thank you for this.... I hope it opens the eyes of this country that the deaths are closer to home then they realize.... Having lost family and friends there this means the world to me.... thanks
~Denver

As somber as this thread is genehil, the picture of the K-man next to your name still managed to crack a smile out of me...

Any good sources of data like this available for Afghanistan and prior wars such as Vietnam, Korea, WWII, etc?