16 October 2010 Can’t see the battlefield for the advertisements

Google Earth debuted, if I recall correctly, in July 2005. I recall downloading the first release while we over-nighted in a motel in Bristol TN. We were on our way back from a fly fishing trip that took us to Vermont with a side trip to Niagara Falls, Ontario. We drove from Mechanicsburg PA to Bristol that day and wanted a good motel after a very unsatisfactory night in a Patel motel that badly misrepresented itself in rest stop throw-aways.

Bristol was a good stop. Using free Ethernet I downloaded Google Earth. Little did we suspect how much we would come to rely on it. When we returned to Florida we immediately installed it on Gloria’s desk-top. We saw it as more than a novelty map.

When we decided to move and finalized our choice of regions, Gloria began looking at houses in the on-line listings. Those that interested her wound up on the list of places to view on Google Earth. On our first trip to the area we used a realtor and let the salesperson select what we would see. When we knew for certain that our house was going to sell, we came back for our second trip with a list of houses we wanted to see after looking at them via satellite imagery. For the most part, that served us well. We were able to rule out some properties based upon proximity to things that don’t always show up at ground level.

We’re currently using the 5th release of Google Earth. It’s become a social networking tool for many people and many corporations. The company has videotaped and digitized many streets, showing more of some people’s lives than they care to have shown or known. I’m pleased that our location makes us less likely to be digitally visible. But even with our remoteness there are many people who have uploaded photographs of near-by places.

I’ve noticed that Google Earth has a way of disappearing from my notebook if not used regularly. I’m not sure how or why that happens and I’m not entirely comfortable with it happening. I’ve also noticed that some searches yield more locations for local businesses than anything that might actually be what I asked to locate. I know that ads pay the freight, but I don’t click on them and don’t find 99% of them at all of interest.

I had several sites in Ukraine, which apply to family genealogy, saved in one file. Several more in Vietnam were saved as points of interest in my release 4.x files. They all vanished, seemingly overnight and I’ve been trying to relocate and save the sites.

Release 5.0 is more likely to reject an overseas site during a “name” search than 4.x versions were. Release 5.0 is also horribly laden with ads. In searching for one geographic landmark in Vietnam, the software returned over a dozen commercial sites that had absolutely no connection beyond on common three letter word in business names. Since I was looking for a mountain, these were of no help. Several searches for small villages that provided names for base camps returned nothing but ads that were far outside the geographic area I was searching. One such village is apparently now under water, drowned in a reservoir that has been constructed some time since 1969.

Looking at the overhead imagery for Vietnam and surrounds, I’m reminded of how inaccurate our maps were during the war. Five mile variations were not uncommon. I’m also amazed at how much of the bomb and shell damage we left has been recovered by local forests, by the Michelin plantations that covered so much ground in III Corps. Even the short air strips that denoted Quan Loi and other bases have vanished. I’m sure the PSP that surfaced them was torn up and used for other purposes as soon as we left.

I’ve followed some highways that were unpaved deathtraps bordered by brush, forests, and the devastation wrought by Rome Plows. What were once hamlets or small villages are now large towns that line the roads. The surface of the land has changed markedly from the terrain I knew. That’s a good thing. What isn’t such a good thing, for my purposes but must be favorable for the Vietnamese is the huge number of ads linked to locations in Google Earth. I can find most of the sites I want to find. But, as with too many of our historic sites, the view of the former battlefield is obscured by the advertisements. Whether they appear as billboards or as balloons super-imposed on a map in Google Earth makes little difference. The coin of the realm is more important than preserving the battlefields where men and women died because diplomats failed in their jobs.