The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  By 2006, Don Smith had met with then–Colonel John W. “Mick” Nicholson, who commanded a brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, and pitched the idea of embedding a team of cultural analysts in his unit. Nicholson, whose brigade was headed to eastern Afghanistan, made the first official request for a Human Terrain Team, known in military speak as an Operational Needs Statement. That summer, Smith and others at the Foreign Military Studies Office were recruiting reservists to staff a prototype field team. They were also looking for money: tens of millions of dollars to cover start-up costs.

  That fall, the men of the Foreign Military Studies Office publicly described the components of a potential “human terrain team” in greater detail than anyone had before. The proposed five-member teams would include “experienced cultural advisors familiar with the area in which the commanders will be operating” and a “qualified cultural anthropologist or sociologist competent with Geographic Imaging Software and fluent enough in the local language to perform field research.” The program would put special emphasis on finding social scientists who had lived, studied, or taught in the region to which they would be deployed. Each team would also include a research manager with a “military background in tactical intelligence” who would “integrate the human terrain research plan with the unit intelligence collection effort”; and a “human terrain analyst,” also with a military intelligence background, who was a “trained debriefer.”

  The idea of installing a team of cultural experts in a military unit resonated within an Army that was doing some serious soul-searching. In the years when the Human Terrain System was being developed, Petraeus, then a three-star general who had led the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul and supervised the training of Iraqi security forces, was stationed at Fort Leavenworth, where he ran the Combined Arms Center. Petraeus saw the move from commanding a division in Iraq to the prairies of Kansas as a disappointment and a potential career setback. It turned out to be anything but. Between 2005, when he arrived at Leavenworth, and 2007, when he took command of American forces in Iraq, Petraeus oversaw the drafting of the Army’s first revision of counterinsurgency doctrine in more than twenty years. For an organization accustomed to shock and awe, the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual was counterintuitive in the extreme. It argued that in this new, old kind of war, political advances were far more important than military victories. “Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is,” the manual advised. “Sometimes, doing nothing is the best reaction. . . . Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot. . . . Tactical success guarantees nothing.” The manual brought together military intellectuals and civilian academics like Harvard’s Sarah Sewall, who called it a “radical” document that inverted decades of conventional military emphasis on force protection by suggesting that soldiers and marines had to assume greater risks to succeed in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. “In this context, killing the civilian is no longer just collateral damage,” Sewall wrote in the manual’s introduction. “The costs of killing noncombatants finally register on the ledger.”

  The manual was a barn burner. Released online in December 2006, it was downloaded more than 1.5 million times. It laid out a plan for winning over Iraqis and Afghans, but by speaking in humble, measured tones, it also sought to marshal the support of America’s powerful intellectual elite, the journalists, academics, social scientists, and think tankers whose backing would be necessary to the success of any long-running and politically costly campaign. This would turn out to be a winning strategy, and the counterinsurgency set would use it repeatedly in the years to come. The manual’s wildly positive reception in the press signaled a desire, particularly among American liberals, to walk back from the Bush administration’s aggressive wartime rhetoric and to quiet lingering misgivings over the conflict in Iraq and, to a lesser degree, the war in Afghanistan. For while many Americans agreed that Islamic militants deserved whatever pain the U.S. military might inflict on them, the growing global perception of the United States as an arrogant occupier rankled. Americans saw themselves, or wanted to see themselves, differently: as a nation sacrificing young lives and billions of dollars to defend its ideals and better the world. Counterinsurgency had reemerged in part because the military had realized that American arrogance, real and imagined, was fueling uprisings. What the manual downplayed was that counterinsurgency wasn’t a bloodless way of war. It meant winning over those who were susceptible to being won over and removing America’s most determined enemies from the battlefield. And for the strategy to work, every piece of it had to be executed well. Bad cultural knowledge would lead to bad intelligence. Bad intelligence could mean detaining or killing the wrong people. Pretty soon, the Army would be back where it started.

  The field manual, known in Army speak as FM 3-24, was a committee effort. Montgomery McFate’s articles on adversary cultural knowledge and the use of anthropology in war had drawn the attention of prominent military thinkers, and she was tapped to cowrite a section on cultural knowledge in counterinsurgency. At first, her contribution was to be marginal, a brief appendix. But at a meeting with the manual’s authors, Petraeus declared that the section on culture should be moved to the heart of the manual. He considered cultural knowledge an obvious and central intelligence requirement for counterinsurgency. “If you don’t get it about this stuff, you don’t get it about counterinsurgency,” he would tell me later. “Not understanding the human terrain has the same effect on your operations that not understanding the physical terrain has on conventional military operations. If you don’t really appreciate the physical terrain and its impact on your operations, you don’t succeed. If you don’t understand the human terrain in the conduct of population-centric counterinsurgency operations, you don’t succeed.” McFate’s contribution to the manual turned out to be substantial: sixteen pages at the heart of the chapter on intelligence.

  The University of Chicago Press published the field manual in 2007. That February, the first-ever Human Terrain Team arrived in Khost, a green and prosperous province along the Afghan-Pakistani border with an active local insurgency led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a onetime CIA favorite and hardened war veteran from the days of the anti-Soviet resistance, who was now giving the Americans hell. That first team had come together in a rush. In 2006, Smith left the Human Terrain System and Fondacaro, back from Iraq and retired from the Army, took over as program manager. He secured $20 million from the counter-IED task force to build five experimental Human Terrain Teams, and recruited some of the first field team members, who joined at least two others brought in earlier by Smith and his colleagues. Nicholson’s brigade, which had originally requested a team, was on its way back to the States, but Fondacaro’s old friend Votel had moved into a command position with the 82nd Airborne Division, which was sending a brigade to Khost. The first Human Terrain Team joined them.

  If the Human Terrain System had been looking to plant its flag in a place of long-standing significance to the insurgency, it couldn’t have chosen better than Khost. It was there, in the fertile bowl-shaped plateau and the mountains along the Pakistani border, that Osama bin Laden had built roads and caves to support U.S.-backed anti-Soviet resistance fighters in the 1980s. In 1986, bin Laden had established his first terrorist training camp for Arab volunteers there, arming them with weapons supplied by the CIA. Years later, he would issue a fatwa from Khost calling on Muslims to kill Americans all over the world. In 1998, after twin bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people, the Clinton administration fired American cruise missiles at bin Laden’s Khost training camps. At least twenty-one presumed jihadist volunteers died, but the tall, wily Saudi leader lived to fight another day, and the camps were rebuilt. Some of the September 11 hijackers trained in Khost. The Human Terrain System denied that it was an intelligence program, but its first team was not sent to the quiet fringes of the fight. If the insurgency could have been said to have a heartland, Khost was it.

  T
he members of AF1, as the team was known, possessed a rare set of specialized skills. Their leader was a former Special Forces officer, and the team’s social scientist, who asked reporters to identify her only as Tracy, was a West Point graduate who had studied anthropology and described herself as a “high risk ethnographer.” The brigade commander, Colonel Martin “Marty” Schweitzer, threw his support behind the team. In one community, Tracy pointed out that the Haqqani network was gaining strength because an uncommonly large number of widows depended on their sons for support. With few jobs available, many young men were forced to join the insurgency to earn money. On the advice of the Human Terrain Team, soldiers started a job-training program that put the widows to work and cut the insurgents’ supply of recruits. Tracy and her teammates advised commanders on the need to unite the Zadran, a large and influential tribe in eastern Afghanistan. The more atomized the Zadran were, the more likely its members would be to fight each other instead of acting as the single, stalwart force that the Americans needed against the insurgents, Tracy argued. It was a good idea, but one that would be forever complicated by the fact that Haqqani, the leader of the anti-American insurgency in Khost, was himself a Zadran. The Human Terrain Team connected soldiers with local leaders and even convinced the Army to refurbish a mosque on the American base, a project that was credited with cutting insurgent rocket attacks. For Tracy and many soldiers who worked with her, the payoff for this kind of knowledge was uncomplicatedly positive. ‘It may be one less trigger that has to be pulled here,’ Tracy told a reporter. ‘It’s how we gain ground, not tangible ground, but cognitive ground.’

  Tracy’s contributions were quickly felt. She was ‘taking the population and dissecting it,’ an officer who worked with her said, giving soldiers ‘data points’ that helped them resolve local disputes and identify problems before they turned violent. Within months of her arrival, Tracy was hailed in the press as the ‘key ingredient’ in the U.S. military’s evolving counterinsurgency strategy: ‘a uniformed anthropologist toting a gun.’ Colonel Schweitzer would become one of the Human Terrain System’s biggest supporters. He believed that AF1 had made American soldiers and Afghans safer and sped the work of connecting Afghans to their government. When Schweitzer had arrived in Khost, only nineteen of eighty-six districts supported the Afghan government. By the end of his deployment, he estimated that seventy-two of them did. He credited Tracy and her team with reducing his unit’s combat operations in Khost by 60 to 70 percent.

  In attributing a measure of his brigade’s success to the work of the Human Terrain Team, Schweitzer helped lay the groundwork for the project’s hysterical growth spurt. By the fall of 2007, the Defense Department had authorized a $40 million expansion of the Human Terrain System that would raise the number of field teams in Iraq and Afghanistan from six to twenty-six. Where those teams would come from and how they would be trained quickly enough to meet the Army’s needs was left to Fondacaro and his bosses at the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command to figure out.

  3. THE TENDER SOLDIER

  In September 2008, Paula Loyd boarded a Chinook helicopter packed with soldiers for a flight over the deserts and mountains of southern Afghanistan. The back of the chopper yawned open to the sky, and men in flight suits with machine guns guarded the doors and windows. They sped over the wall of Kandahar Airfield, leaving behind the giant sewage tanks and spinning missile detectors that dotted the perimeter of the base like cast iron pinwheels. They flew over glimmering irrigation ditches cutting the flat brown land, over thick green fields and gardens and mud compounds and little outbuildings with holes in the walls, where farmers hung grapes to dry in the warm wind. The land unfurled beneath them, grapevines growing over dirt berms, the fish-scale shine of rivers that had once been wider and wetter. After a while, the green gave way to sand flats and dunes tufted with desert grass that rolled on, undulant and hypnotic, until jagged mountains rose to the north. As the helicopter lowered, a single black peak reared up like a fang against the sky.

  This landscape thrilled Loyd, but she came from somewhere else. She had spent her early childhood in Alamo Heights, a small city within the municipal boundaries of San Antonio, Texas, where her parents designed pension and profit-sharing plans and owned rental properties. Loyd was an only child, and although she was named after her father, Paul Loyd, who had trained bomber pilots in World War II, she gained an early reputation as the family peacemaker. Her much older half brother had children her age, and when they fought over toys, Loyd gave them her toys to settle the argument. But her generosity came at a price. When her nieces and nephews headed home after a day’s play, they took her toys with them.

  Loyd’s mother sent her to a Montessori school, but her mind wandered. She craved structure. Later, she would struggle with math. She imagined each number as a character with a distinct personality. Large numbers were families, and when she looked at an equation, she saw not a string of integers but a group of beings in conversation with one another, their interaction mediated by pluses and minuses. Math homework took hours. She grew so distracted by the story the numbers were telling that she forgot to solve the problem.

  She was quirky and bright, a ravenous reader who adored Star Wars action figures and animals, even the Persian cat that made her sneeze. Loyd’s oldest friend, Susanna Barton, was drawn to this delicate, strikingly beautiful girl with long, sandy-blond hair, always neatly braided. Loyd was different from Barton, and from any other child Barton knew. She made an effort to engage with people Barton generally had no time for, like Barton’s annoying little brother. When Barton’s grandmother came to visit, Loyd took an interest in her cooking and listened attentively to her stories. At eight or nine, Loyd and Barton started an animal rescue group, dutifully filling out paperwork to incorporate it as a nonprofit. Loyd declared herself a vegetarian a few years later, but not before asking her mother to fix her a “last supper” of the pork chops she loved.

  Loyd’s childhood home in Alamo Heights had a broad winding staircase, bright green and blue carpeting, and a turkey-shaped phone that gobbled instead of rang. Barton and Loyd played there often, knocking a ball back and forth across the Ping-Pong table and splashing around in the swimming pool with its concrete formations, waterfall, and slide. In his workroom, Loyd’s father painted miniature model soldiers two or three inches tall. The family ate in a formal dining room, where they had grown-up conversations about current events, and where Loyd was sometimes allowed to drink nonalcoholic beer or a small glass of wine.

  In fifth grade, a new girl joined them. Gretchen Wiker was a recent transplant from Germany, a self-described “nerdy girl” with the wrong clothes who still wore her hair in braids when everyone else had moved on to more sophisticated styles. Loyd immediately befriended her. “She looked past things that other people couldn’t look past,” Wiker told me. “She was friends with people other people weren’t friends with.” Once, they mixed all the spices, hot sauces, and vinegars in the kitchen and competed to see who could drink more (Loyd won). Out of nowhere, Loyd decided to give Wiker a facial and makeover and loan her the Esprit argyle sweater Wiker had coveted all through sixth grade. Loyd and her mother were always careening into airports at the last minute, overloaded with luggage, almost missing their flights. One Halloween, Wiker recalled, she and Loyd planned to hand out candy, but they quickly ran out, so they hunted around for packets of hot chocolate and quarters to give to trick-or-treaters. Wiker ate her first artichoke at the Loyds’ dining table and smoked her first cigarette with Loyd behind a nearby supermarket. For Wiker and other girls who knew her then, Loyd’s friendship had a magical quality, as if you were stepping into an alternate world every time you hung out with her.

  In some ways, Loyd was a typical preteen girl, susceptible to perms, dangly earrings, and the charms of punk boys. Without her mother’s permission, she started cutting her hair with a razor, dying it colors, and outlining her lips with black liner. When Loyd was about thirteen, her parents divorced.
Shortly thereafter, she begged her mother to take her to a place where people who looked like her—pale skin, blond hair—were outnumbered by people who didn’t. She wanted to see how people would treat her if she were in the minority. “I told her, ‘You’re a minority already. You’re an Anglo in Texas,’ ” her mother, Patty Ward, recalled. Loyd just laughed. It was an unusual request from a child, and Ward had no urgent desire to leave Texas. But all these years, she had been encouraging her daughter to explore.

  Patty Ward was effortlessly friendly. During her lunchtime walks around San Antonio, she fell into conversation with strangers and invited them back to the house for dinner. This was the early 1980s, when you could still get away with that kind of thing, and Ward called it taking in strays. Once, it was two Swedish girls who taught English and were traveling across the country by bus. Over dinner, they talked about socialized medicine with Loyd, who was young but irrepressibly curious. “She’s basically always been an anthropologist,” Ward told me. Another time, three young people walked up to Ward on the street and asked if she knew of a place they could stay while they visited the Alamo. Ward and her husband owned some rental properties around town, and one of the apartments happened to be vacant and unfurnished. The kids unrolled their sleeping bags on the floor, and Ward invited them to dinner, where one of the young men, a Rhodes scholar, talked to Loyd about geology and South Africa, where he had grown up. Some nights, Ward woke Loyd and her friends and took them outside to see a lunar eclipse or a rare star. Together, Loyd and her mother traveled the West in a motor home. One hot day in Mesa Verde, Colorado, Loyd lay inside the metal shell with the air-conditioning on, deep in a book. It was Ward who made her get out and walk through the ancient settlements, their walls covered in pictographs.