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MySpace as a war memorial

May-27-2007 » Filed Under: Tributes

Heather Woodward, The Olympian

Pfc. Anthony J. Sausto liked listening to the band Green Day and watching movies starring Adam Sandler.

The Fort Lewis soldier wanted to have children someday.

Sausto was killed May 10 by small-arms fire in Baghdad, but many personal details and his photograph live on at his MySpace.com profile.

“Anything you want to know all you have to do is ask,” the 22-year-old New Jersey native wrote. “I’m a pretty open person.”

In earlier wars, families had only the letters that soldiers sent home; often, bits and pieces were removed by cautious censors. Iraq is the first U.S. war in the Internet age, and many fallen soldiers from South Sound and nationwide have left ghosts of themselves online — unsentimental self-memorials, frozen and uncensored snapshots of the person each wanted to show to the world.

“War as we know it and as we’re taught through schools, in most cases it’s through the filter ... of a historian,” said Bob Patrick, an Army veteran who runs the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress.

MySpace pages, he added, “are grassroots stories on the foxhole level, or the cockpit level.”

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