For a generation that lived the war in Afghanistan one grid square at a time, the war now feels like a series of dots on a map. A patrol base carved out of hardpan soil. A culvert on a highway that never felt safe. A ridge where the radio went quiet.

Nathan Kehler knows the pull of those dots. When he and a group of fellow veterans wanted to record the war they experienced, they knew all their stories would be easiest to see laid out on a map. They launched Project Athena — a visual map connecting the memories of soldiers to the coordinates where they occurred.

“War is chaotic, and when you’re a soldier on the ground, you rarely see the full picture,” said Kehler.

But putting memories — photos, names, notes — onto a map, and adding the memories of others, can fill out a picture of that war.

Kehler is Canadian and served as an armored reconnaissance soldier with the Royal Canadian Dragoons, then as a GeoTech with 2 Combat Engineer Regiment, the military’s map makers. He deployed to Afghanistan in 2009 in the Panjwayi district, and he left with memories that were specific and unfinished.

When he remembers the war, there is one day — and one grid coordinate — that stands out.

“I spent fifteen years wondering what the hell happened that day,” Kehler said. As his unit patrolled near the town of Chalghōr, outside of the town of Salavat, they were hit by a coordinated IED attack. One vehicle after another exploded as the mission turned to a fog of detonations and confusion.

Before Project Athena launched, he added photos and details of the engagement to the map. Three days after the project went live, a second entry appeared. An engineer uploaded a photo and a short account, one Kehler had never seen.

 The missing piece snapped into place.

“That day was one of those moments that stayed with me for years because I never fully understood what had happened,” Kehler said. “Seeing it on the map, with someone else’s account from the same operation, finally connected the dots. It turned a fragmented memory into something I could understand, and there is real value in that.”

Mapping a 20-year war

Kehler and a small team at the Canadian Research and Mapping Association built Project Athena as a public, veteran-led map of the Afghanistan War, a place where bases, routes, outposts, IED strikes, photos, and stories can live together (the name is from Operation Athena, Canada’s name for its Afghanistan involvement, equivalent to Enduring Freedom in the U.S.).  The project follows in the footsteps of an earlier CRMA project archiving World War II, Project ’44.  That project digitized unit positions, war diaries, and maps from the fight across Europe.

Afghanistan is a different animal.

“Project ’44 is linear. You can trace a front line from start to finish,” Kehler said. “Afghanistan is dispersed and personal. Everyone’s war was different down to the platoon.”

Right now, the map focuses primarily on IED incidents, the defining hazard of the conflict. Each plotted blast represents a real event across two decades of fighting. But Athena’s scope is expanding. “We’re building out new tools so veterans can map any event, from major operations to smaller patrol actions,” Kehler said. 

The effect is startling. Pick a spot at random — say, FOB Spin Boldak, a crossroads east of Kandahar. The map shows the road network littered with red dots, the sites of IED attacks. Next to a cluster of three dots, an American soldier has uploaded group photos of Team Horseshoe, a platoon from the 10th Mountain Division that augmented the Canadian Task Force 3-08 in the region in the summer and fall of 2008. The team was hit by three IEDs during their time — attacks that caused no casualties, the report says.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Team Horseshoe, a group of 10th Mountain Division soldiers, at FOB Spin Boldek in 2008, as posted to the Project Athena interactive mapping project. Screenshot from Project Athena website.</figcaption></figure>

From the start, Athena leaned on open data and community input. Tactical infrastructure, like COPs and patrol bases, began with a U.S. Marine-made dataset. Everything else grows from veterans uploading photos, adding fuzzy dates if exact ones are gone, dropping pins where an OP once stood, and writing the short, plain captions that make sense to the people who were there.

Curation is the hard part with any crowdsourced history. The project has a moderation queue that reviews all submissions, and a process that allows users to report entries they believe are false or have bad coordinates. But Kehler trusts the veteran network to keep it honest. 

“It is a small world. People will call out what does not pass the smell test,” he said. The goal is not to referee every sentence. It is to keep the map useful and fair and let honest memories stack into something bigger than one tour’s version of events.

If you have ever zoomed out on Afghanistan after a decade of up-armored driving, the scale can feel overwhelming. That is what strikes Kehler, too. 

“How many outposts there were. How many places I never heard about in my own AO,” he said. To make that scale readable, Athena’s next update will add a timeline that lets you play IED activity across months and tours, then drop back into a single valley. Another feature, already working in a sandbox, will let users build interactive story maps that move a reader across terrain while photos and narrative advance chapter by chapter. It is the kind of tool that turns a one-line mention in a battalion history into a full scene, anchored to ground.

Families of the fallen reach out

The reactions have been the proof. Veterans like having a place to park their story that is not a social feed that disappears by morning. Families of the fallen have asked for more detail than they were ever given at the time, not out of morbid curiosity, but to finally understand what happened and where. Kehler approached those conversations carefully and found that clarity helps. “They want to know the place. It gives some measure of closure,” he said.

Though Athena began as a project among Canadian vets, close to a quarter of visitors now come from the United States. Submissions by American veterans are still just a fraction of the system but Kehler hopes that will change and American troops will begin to catalog their own photos and memories.

“The war was shared by so many nations. This should reflect that,” he said.

There is a quiet urgency to the work. Afghanistan veterans are still young on paper, but the details fade fast. Hard drives fail. Phones get upgraded. Coordinates blur. 

“Whatever your politics, citizens elect leaders who make decisions that affect those who serve,” Kehler said. “If you want to understand what that means, go look. There are IEDs and gunfights and months of living behind sandbag walls. Even if you were not physically wounded, very few people came back without some kind of mental injury,” Kehler said. He laughed at how invincible twenty-three felt and how forty looks back at that with better eyes.

Maybe the best argument for Project Athena is the smallest one. Most of us are not writing books. We have regular stories that matter to us and the people who love us. A photo of a plywood hooch that leaked when it rained. A broken culvert marker that kept you up at night. The day your convoy turned around because a mine plow hit another device, and then the next vehicle did, too, and the whole plan fell apart. On their own, those notes feel minor. Together, across a country we will never fully understand, they look a lot like truth.

Visit Project Athena to make an account and upload your own stories and photos.

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