Soldier's Passing Announced Through Facebook AGAIN!

Back in February, a fellow blogger Krystel from Army Wife 101 wrote a post about her frustration with a news clip about two soldiers who died in Afghanistan violence and the widow found out on FACEBOOK!

When I first heard this I thought, why in God's name would someone do that?! I was horrified that someone could be so careless to assume that all the family memebers were inform of the death. And why would someone do it so publicly?!

So here I am, almost two months later and there is another article of a solider who died by an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) and the widow found out how? Let's take a guess shall we? FACEBOOK!

What the Hell?!

Who gives these women the right to become the bearer of bad news? And through FACEBOOK?! There is a protocol that the military as well as the family have to go through! SHAME!

The widow did say it best! She was quoted saying, "She wasn't supposed to but I guess she took it on her own power to do it".


Here's my thing.

Living on base where EVERYONE knows other people's business is tough, learning when to shut up seems to be the difficult part for most. If it were you, would like to find out tragic news like that through someone on your Facebook page?? Think about that before you decided to air someone else's laundry for the world to see!

My biggest problem is OPSEC.

For those who don't know. OPSEC stands for Operations Security and is the process that identifies critical information to determine if friendly actions can be observed by adversary intelligence systems, determines if information obtained by adversaries could be interpreted to be useful to them, and then executes selected measures that eliminate or reduce adversary exploitation of friendly critical information.

That was the Wikipedia version. Allow me to translate.

OPSEC pretty much means, information such as tour dates, flights to and from locations, where the tours are taking place and what is happening (if you are lucky enough to get that info) is not to be shared to the masses.

Some may not even know they are doing it!

"So sad hubby leave for (insert tour area) in 5 days :( "
"20 hours and I have my husband is home!"

It's a SAFETY issue people!  And since everyone loves to post photos with cute sayings on it, here are mine:

GET IT?!