LITTLE ROCK — Some things have changed for soldiers far from home in time of war: Letters from family members are now novelties, reports Bobby Ampezzan in Wednesday’s Family section. Correspondence still gives soldiers (and family) great pleasure, but instant communication is a portal home that’s sometimes hard to navigate from a war zone.
The 2007 movie Transformers opens with a soldier coming off an airstrip just back from a mission, sweaty and dirty, and plopping down at a computer fitted with a webcam to see his wife and the baby he’s never met in real-time video. The connection fails when a giant shape-shifting killer robot interferes with the signal.
Today’s preferred way to correspond from the States with our soldiers in the Middle East is Internet phone calls through voice-over-internet-protocol, commonly called VoIP. Popular servers include Skype, iChat and Yahoo! Messenger. Google has introduced a video chat feature for its e-mail service, too. The opportunity to see faces, however delayed by broadband capacity is a big improvement
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