The aftermath of war in the Internet age:
WASHINGTON - Army Pvt. Clinton Tyler McCormick is buried in Florida, but his photo and his words are still online. They haven't changed since he logged into his MySpace.com profile on Dec. 26, 2006 - the day before he was killed by a makeshift bomb in Baghdad.
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 war of the Internet age, and McCormick is one of many fallen soldiers who have left ghosts of themselves online - unsentimental self-memorials, frozen and uncensored snapshots of the person each wanted to show to the world. [...]
"He really didn't have a family, it's one of the reasons he went into the military," Harwell said. "When we read MySpace, we said, 'Who are all these people that Tyler was connected with that we've never known before?"'
They are MySpace "friends" who have left comments attached to his profile - they didn't have to visit a grave and leave flowers to say goodbye. Months later, some are still coping.
"I can't believe this. It's my worst fear come true. I don't know how I'm ever going to be able to accept this ... to know that you're not coming home to me and I'll never get to see your face and hold you in my arms where you belong," Stacey Zeller, McCormick's fiancee, wrote the day after he died. [...]
She posts on his MySpace page because it helps her deal with losing him. "It's a way for me to feel like I can still communicate to him, still get my thoughts and feelings out," she said.
"You and God are where I pull my strength from every day," she wrote March 19, months after McCormick's death, "just to get out of bed and continue on."