08/30/2026
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.
