MySpace Tombstones

People go to MySpace to flirt, to chat, to check out pictures, to catch up with friends.

More and more, they also go there to mourn.

Many American soldiers have MySpace profiles, a comforting reminder of home, of normalcy, of sanity. And when those soldiers die in Iraq, their sites stay active, unspeakably sad ghost pages in cyber space. Usually, there's a picture of the soldier, sometimes trying to look tough, sometimes trying to look cool, sometimes abandoning all pretense and simply smiling a kid's disarming smile.

Friends migrate to the dead soldier's page to say how much they loved him, to thank him for his heroism. To say goodbye.

If virtual tears exist, these pages are soaked.

It's difficult to look at the ghost pages, and I've done so rarely, in part because I wonder if I'm violating a dead kid's privacy by doing so, in part because they shatter my heart. But, sometimes, you need a reality check. You need to shake your head and forget about a delusionally evil president and his handlers. You need to forget about the politics. You need to forget about the big picture and zoom in on the people, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the 3,454 Americans whose lives have been -- as the now justly marginalized and ridiculed John McCain said in an unguarded moment -- wasted.

So today I typed in the name of an 18-year-old soldier from Montana -- Matthew -- who was killed by friendly fire a week after arriving in Iraq. His mentor, another young soldier, died with him -- on perhaps his final day of combat duty. Time magazine reported that the Montana kid had been rushed into combat with inadequate training.

For those who knew and loved Matthew, of course, politics means nothing.

Their messages on his MySpace page are heartbreaking. One example:

OMG, MATT, IM SOR SORRY i GET TO SAY GOODBYE IM REally sorry, you'll be really miss now more than ever,since theres no goona be more chances for us to see each othere again I'll miss you budy, RIP,

In his boy-next-door profile on MySpace, Matthew wrote in the "Interests" section: "A happy life at my home and hopfully i can have children soon." He described himself -- with a smile, I'm sure -- as a "swinger." He was 5-foot-8 and "slim/slender." His education level: "High school." His occupation: "Army."

I'm reluctant -- out of respect for his privacy -- to put his picture here and to post more of his friends' anguished goodbyes. But, obviously, this was as typical a kid as you're going to find in the Army. A kid who no doubt believed his country would never spend his life recklessly. It's important to see his face and his heart.