The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  He started kicking the handcuffed Afghan in the face. Before Ayala could react, Jack had kicked the man into the stream, jumped into the water, and begun pounding him with his fists.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Ayala yelled at Jack. ‘What’s going on?’ Later, Jack would remember Ayala scolding him, saying something like: ‘Hey, Jack! You don’t know about our culture. You can’t just kick people in the face—it’s not allowed.’ But at this moment, Jack Bauer was out of breath, shaken, and terrified. He tried to speak, but his tongue refused to take the shapes required by the English language.

  ‘Slow down,’ Ayala told him. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘He burned Paula!’ Jack yelled, grabbing her name from the air.

  Ayala hauled the cuffed Afghan out of the stream and threw him hard against the wall. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he told Jack. He turned to some soldiers standing nearby: ‘What’s going on over there?’

  ‘Paula’s burned,’ Specialist Skotnicki told him. ‘They’ll be evacuating her soon. It looks like she’s going to be okay. You can go see her if you want.’

  Ayala didn’t say anything, but Skotnicki saw his face twist. Ayala was thinking about the conversation he’d overheard between the lieutenant and the sergeant about turning the man over to the local police. The police out here were compromised, he knew. A few days earlier, they had told Cooper they were scared to patrol without American escorts. They didn’t even get paid most of the time, which meant they were for sale. If they gave the captive to the police, Ayala thought, he would be free in matter of days, weeks at most.

  The handcuffed Afghan lay panting in the dirt and now Jack Bauer was speaking to him, softly and angrily, in his own language: ‘What’s going on? Why did you burn that girl?’

  ‘I’m crazy,’ the man on the ground muttered. ‘I’m crazy. Don’t speak to me. I’m crazy.’

  Shaken, Ayala moved to stand over the Afghan captive. He turned to another interpreter, the one the Americans called Tom Cruise, who was standing nearby. ‘Ask him why he did this,’ Ayala said.

  Tom Cruise asked, but the man just lay there. The interpreter asked again. Silence. And a third time. ‘Why don’t you answer the question?’ Tom Cruise yelled.

  Finally, the Afghan spoke. ‘I’m crazy,’ he said. ‘I cannot control myself. Sometimes I’m walking naked in the night.’

  Ayala’s mind was working. He looked at the man on the ground. The Afghan lay in the fetal position, his head facing east toward the wall, his feet toward the water. His clothes were wet and dirty from the stream and the struggle. His hands were still cuffed behind his back.

  Ayala turned to Jack Bauer. He had something to say to the man on the ground. ‘Tell this guy he’s the fucking devil,’ Ayala said.

  He pulled out his pistol and pressed the muzzle against the handcuffed man’s temple. He pushed the man’s head toward the ground. He squeezed the trigger.

  2. WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW WILL KILL YOU

  The path that brought Loyd, Ayala, and Cooper to Maiwand wound through decades of lost knowledge. In the thirty-three years since the last Americans had been airlifted out of Saigon, most of the Army had turned its back on the failures of Vietnam and vowed never to fight another war like it. The United States had broken the Soviet Union and chased Iraq out of Kuwait without major ground combat. Technology increasingly allowed the Army to fight from a distance, and the Pentagon poured money into computerized battlefield sensors, satellite systems, and unmanned drones. The United States had become the world’s foremost military power. The Army wasn’t a finely tuned instrument, but it could crush any force that challenged it.

  The roots of the Human Terrain System are ambiguous and contested, stained with bad blood and accusations of impure motives, its origin myths embellished by ambitious and therefore potentially unreliable narrators who, nevertheless, each holds a piece of the story. Its elements evolved simultaneously and organically from various corners of the defense establishment and flourished in the atmosphere of ferment that grew out of the Army’s realization that it was losing the war in Iraq. To understand how that came to be, you have to go back in time.

  Between the disaster of Vietnam and the attacks of September 11, small wars went on, but even when American interests were at stake, Americans often weren’t the ones fighting them. In Afghanistan in the 1980s, the CIA funneled billions of dollars in weapons to Afghan mujaheddin attacking the Soviets and their Afghan proxies. Technology didn’t defeat the Soviets, though Stinger missiles helped. In the end it was men—bearded fighters with rifles, trusted networks of local contacts, and an uncanny sense of the landscape—who drove the Soviets out and laid the foundation for America’s Cold War victory.

  In Somalia and Haiti, the conventional Army collaborated with the Marines and Special Forces, but some soldiers realized they didn’t have the cultural knowledge and language skills they needed. Troops returning from the strange, uneven battlefields of the 1990s told their colleagues that the military had to change. “What we need is cultural intelligence,” retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who had served in Vietnam and Somalia, said in 1994. “What makes them tick? Who makes the decisions? What is it about their society that’s so remarkably different in their values, in the way they think, compared to my values and the way I think in my western, white-man mentality?”

  For the most part, the defense establishment didn’t listen. Instead, it focused on technology at the expense of history, viewing irregular battles as a distraction from the conventional war that might always be imminent. The Pentagon and the congressional representatives who ensured its funding had plenty of reasons to be more interested in fast planes and fancy weapons systems than the inchoate stuff of language and culture. But at the Foreign Military Studies Office, a small organization at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, that for more than two decades has served as an in-house think tank for the Army, a handful of scholars had long viewed the service’s wholesale embrace of technology as a dangerous mistake. Long before anyone envisioned an American war in Afghanistan, Lester Grau, a Vietnam veteran and Russia specialist at the Foreign Military Studies Office, was researching Soviet combat tactics and the tactics employed by U.S.-backed Afghan mujaheddin against their Soviet enemies. Grau’s work was prescient, but much of the wisdom supplied by the Foreign Military Studies Office died on the pages of military journals before it reached the battlefield. By the time the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, some former anti-Soviet resistance fighters had become key American enemies, but American infantrymen were innocent of the past. History would only be revived later, in the panic that followed rising insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, Grau’s books of battlefield case studies from the Soviet-Afghan War are required reading for American small-unit and noncommissioned officers deploying to Afghanistan.

  Among the misapprehensions Grau and his colleagues sought to dispel in the years before the American invasion of Afghanistan was what Jacob Kipp, a Russia historian and former director of the Foreign Military Studies Office, called the “myth of technology.” In the late summer of 2001, Kipp and Grau tried to warn the Army that in future wars, technology would be at best a distraction, at worst a fatal obstacle. No longer would American soldiers see the enemy’s tanks ranged on a hillside and know exactly where he stood. The enemy would fight and disappear into an urban landscape, and it wasn’t just urban terrain that would challenge the military, but “the social nature of cities.” Then came the September 11 attacks, and America went to war in Afghanistan with aerial bombings directed by a handful of elite ground troops and CIA paramilitaries. The Americans’ chief allies were Afghan militia leaders who wielded considerable power but whose fighters were known to have raped, looted, and slaughtered civilians during the factional battles of the 1990s. In the months after the American invasion, some Afghans wondered openly when these men would be charged with war crimes. Instead, they were rewarded with top jobs in the new government.

  The murdero
us lawlessness of the Afghan civil war had prepared the ground for the Taliban’s ascendance. The Taliban had ruled brutally, massacring ethnic minorities, torching farmland, destroying the nation’s cultural heritage, and terrorizing everyone with repressive edicts and abundant punishment. Now the Americans had arrived, and Afghans hoped things might change. But in the fall of 2001, Afghans allied with U.S. forces shot and suffocated to death hundreds of Taliban prisoners in shipping containers, drove them into the desert, and dumped the bodies in a mass grave. Years of uninterrupted war had made killing a reflexive act for some Afghans, and they played American forces like the box accordions to which they sang sad love songs at parties. Old tribal structures had been ravaged by war, and those who seemed to be in charge often weren’t. American air strikes and other high-tech weaponry became tools in grudge matches between rivals whose enmity had nothing to do with the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

  The Taliban were excluded from the United Nations–sponsored Bonn Conference in 2001. The United States and its Afghan allies viewed them as enemies to be captured or killed, not political players with whom they would ultimately have to reconcile. Victory in Afghanistan had seemed quick and easy, but the war would be very long. Elsewhere, another conflict was already brewing. The invasion of Iraq in early 2003 looked like a stunning military success. But within months of Saddam Hussein’s toppling, buried bombs—known in military jargon as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs—ripped into Humvees. The earliest ones were low-tech in the extreme, made from explosives looted from ammunition dumps and activated by doorbell buzzers. They tore legs and arms off soldiers, sank metal deep in brain tissue, slashed femoral arteries. By the fall of 2003, the number of IED attacks in Iraq had risen to one hundred a month. By February 2004, it neared one hundred a week.

  The Army sent thousands of jammers to Iraq and Afghanistan to interrupt the radio signals emitted by remote detonation devices and deployed blimps with closed-circuit cameras to monitor roads. Beating IEDs became the Defense Department’s second-highest priority after capturing Osama bin Laden. Yet for all the money and talk, the men who made and planted the bombs continued to elude the Pentagon. In an experiment designed by the Pentagon’s joint staff, spy aircraft, unmanned drones, and a turboprop plane with ground-penetrating radar circled over a twenty-kilometer stretch of road north of Baghdad for ten weeks, looking for bombs. But sandstorms and blowing trash got in the way of the cameras, and smart insurgents planted bombs on days when bad weather grounded the planes. Eight drones crashed; the radar on one of the surveillance planes failed. One day in November, nearly all the surveillance assets focused on a small section of the road where everything seemed normal. Two hours later, a bomb exploded there, killing one soldier and severing another’s leg. The cameras had missed it entirely.

  In a roundabout way, this high-tech experiment fed curiosity within the Pentagon about insurgent social networks, a decidedly low-tech line of thinking that the Army had mostly failed to explore. Analysts found they could use surveillance video to trace cars and people arriving at a bomb site before an explosion or leaving afterward. When the images were comprehensive enough, they could figure out which building a bomber had emerged from or which house he went home to. The next logical consideration was what he might be doing after he went inside that house and closed the door, when the camera couldn’t see him anymore. Who was this man? Where had he grown up? Who did he love, and who loved him? And most of all, what had made him detonate that bomb?

  This kind of thinking was unfamiliar to the conventional Army. Getting inside someone’s head required knowing something about him, but language ability and cultural knowledge were low on the list of requirements for deploying soldiers. By 2004, some senior military officers were beginning to talk about this openly. Retired Army Major General Robert H. Scales wrote that year that success in a place like Iraq required “intimate knowledge of the enemy’s motivation, intent, will, tactical method, and cultural environment,” which American soldiers invariably lacked. Intelligence was, in Scales’s view, the weakest link. Few young soldiers knew how to gather cultural intelligence or understood why it was important. Most had never left the United States and spoke no foreign language except Spanish. “Ninety-nine percent have never spoken to another person in their lives who doesn’t think exactly like they do,” the commander of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center would tell an audience of culturally astute soldiers, social scientists, and defense contractors years later. “They come to me, and in 16 weeks, I’m supposed to make them an intelligence analyst. Culture is incredibly important to that, and they have no background whatsoever.”

  The Pentagon’s joint staff assigned one of its biggest brains to fight the IED epidemic. Dr. Hriar Cabayan was a science and technology adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Slight and animated with an irreverent manner, he had been trained as a physicist and worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for more than two decades. Known to his colleagues as Doc, Cabayan knew more about the people America was fighting among than most others at the Pentagon because he had not led an isolated life. Born in Armenia, he had been raised in Syria, where he was educated by Jesuit nuns before coming to the United States.

  In the winter of 2004, Cabayan met with an Army lieutenant colonel who had just returned from a tour in Diyala Province, north of Baghdad. Cabayan asked the officer what tool he most wished he’d had in Iraq. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Adamson said that he had needed a way to store everything he’d learned about tribal structure and local culture, about the sheiks and other Iraqis he’d gotten to know during his tour, so he could pass it along to the next guy. At the time, the only way information made it from one unit to another was by word of mouth, or through emails the previous commander had left behind that the new commander had no time to read. When one military unit went home, local knowledge went with it. Cabayan was working on the problem with another physicist. Neither of them knew much about the social sciences, so Cabayan asked around. Someone mentioned an anthropologist working for the Navy. “I called her up,” Cabayan told me. “Montgomery McFate. She was an obscure anthropologist at the Office of Naval Research. Nobody paid attention to her.”

  McFate drove over to the Pentagon. When she walked into Cabayan’s office, he took one look at her and thought, This is going to be a short conversation. An anthropologist, as far as he knew, was someone with unkempt hair and no sense of style. McFate had on lipstick and wore her hair pixie-short and carefully coiffed. She must be a bureaucrat, Cabayan thought, but within ten minutes, she’d won him over. McFate didn’t look the way Cabayan had expected an anthropologist to look, and she didn’t think like most anthropologists, either. She had gone to Harvard Law School, married an Army officer, and held a string of research and policy fellowships. Before joining the Office of Naval Research, she had worked as a contract researcher for the CIA.

  Cabayan enlisted McFate to work on a project that would later be called Cultural Preparation of the Environment. It was a piece of technology: an ethnographic database that could be loaded onto a laptop and used by soldiers in the field. They began to build a prototype, concentrating on Diyala Province, where Adamson had served. McFate and her colleagues put out a call for information to all the intelligence agencies in the U.S. government, asking about society and politics in Diyala. “About tribes alone, we got back fifteen totally different answers,” McFate told me later. The military was gathering intelligence, but it was “mainly on bad people, places, and things.” Like the Army, intelligence agencies in the aftermath of September 11 had turned their attention to targeting the enemy, paying far less attention to the demographics, politics, economies, and cultures through which he moved.

  Cultural Preparation of the Environment was an open-source intelligence tool designed to reduce violence by understanding the sea in which the enemy swam. McFate had been intrigued by the common ground between anthropology and intelligence since she was researching her doctoral dissertation about British soldiers
and Irish Republican Army fighters and realized that anything she wrote about how either side operated could help its adversary. It struck her then that as an anthropologist interested in war, her work could be read by “anyone, anywhere and used for their purposes,” she told me. Since Vietnam, many anthropologists had grown highly suspicious of the U.S. military’s adventures in far-flung places, whose people were often the subject of ethnographic study. But McFate viewed these concerns as naïve. “If you really want to control or constrain the ability of people to use anthropological materials for the purposes of war, you should not write” ethnographic studies, she told me. “And you certainly shouldn’t publish” them.

  McFate lost no time advancing her view that the military needed anthropology in the worst way. She organized a conference on the national security benefits of knowing your enemy and wrote a string of military journal articles in which she emphasized the role of anthropology in the colonial conquests of the nineteenth century and its necessity for contemporary military commanders. The U.S. military and policy community’s ethnocentrism had led to miscalculations in Vietnam, the Soviet-Afghan War, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and Iran, McFate argued. In Iraq and Afghanistan, cultural misunderstandings had proved absurdly simple and deadly. Coalition forces arrested Iraqis for having weapons, but they didn’t understand that most Iraqis had weapons. They detained hundreds of people because they couldn’t make sense of kinship systems, and lost track of detainees because they misunderstood Arabic naming conventions. Shia Muslims who flew black flags for religious reasons were viewed as enemies by marines, who associated white flags with surrender and black flags with its opposite. At checkpoints, the American hand signal for “stop”—arm extended, palm out—meant “welcome” to Iraqis, who hit the gas and got shot. “Across the board, the national security structure needs to be infused with anthropology, a discipline invented to support warfighting in the tribal zone,” McFate wrote. She was briefing military officials in Tampa one day in 2005 when a colonel in battlefield camouflage walked in and sat at the back of the room. When it was over, McFate asked him what he was doing there. “I think I’m in the wrong briefing,” he said, “but it sounded interesting, so I decided to stay.”