The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  The anthropologist who helped create the Human Terrain System was born Montgomery Carlough in 1966, but you had to go back before that to understand who she was. Her life story was so colorful that it was easy to get caught up in the details, to lose sight of how she, of all people, had landed at the center of a bold attempt to transform the Army into an organ of cultural knowledge and sensitivity. Her personal history could be distracting, but ignoring it wasn’t an option. It held clues to why the Human Terrain System evolved as it did. She was born of contradictions: California beatnik counterculture, a familial fascination with the primitive “other,” and a quiet but persistent strain of military DNA that was as mainline American as it got. She embodied at once the forces that drove the military and anthropologists apart and the desires and imperatives that have historically drawn them together.

  The story of Montgomery McFate, née Carlough, began far from the American heartland, where she would live for a time as the Human Terrain System’s senior social scientist. Her mother had been the half-Mexican granddaughter of a man who lost everything in the Mexican Revolution. Unable to care for his many daughters, he had sent them to family scattered around Latin America, and three, including McFate’s grandmother, Mequilita, to a distant relative in New Orleans. Mequilita Ramirez was an exotic beauty. “My grandmother really looked very Indian, very South American Indian,” McFate told me. “If you look at pictures of her, she definitely does not look at all Caucasian.”

  Mequilita Ramirez’s line of descent slowly whitened. She married a much older man who played coronet in Marine Corps bandmaster John Philip Sousa’s orchestra, according to family lore. Their daughter, Frances Poynter, had dark skin, long black hair, and prominent cheekbones, which made her look vaguely Mediterranean, but still more Caucasian than her mother. She grew up in New Orleans, where she worked as a telephone operator and a window display designer for department stores. McFate didn’t know much about this period of her mother’s life, except that Poynter was warm, outgoing, and free-spirited, that she enjoyed the companionship of black musicians and felt at home in the jazz scene.

  Sometime around 1950, Frances Poynter and her husband, Cecil Westerberg, made their way to the San Francisco Bay area. They bought property near the Mount Tamalpais ridgeline in Muir Woods and opened a small business—McFate thought it might have been a restaurant. At some point, Westerberg, who went by the nickname Barney, got arrested for dealing marijuana. As part of his rehabilitation, he learned to carve wood. “He basically changed his name and created an entire fictive biography for himself,” McFate told me. Instead of Cecil Westerberg, he became Barney West.

  West told people that he had served in the merchant marine and been shipwrecked on a Polynesian or Micronesian island. During his time on the island, he said, the natives had taught him how to carve wood. This was in the early 1960s, a decade after the publication of Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, when Elvis Presley starred in Blue Hawaii and Hula-Hoops and tiki bars were the rage. In McFate’s view, America’s cultural obsession with Polynesia stretched back even further, to Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. “The cultural eye,” McFate told me, “was focused on Polynesia.”

  Poynter and West moved to Sausalito, a city just north across the bay from San Francisco, and started a little woodworking shop called Tiki Junction, where West carved giant, iconic tikis that he sold to Trader Vic’s, a Polynesian-themed restaurant chain; McFate’s mother painted the carvings. West, a handsome, muscular man with a handlebar moustache, relied on his story of shipwreck and native tutelage to give the carvings authenticity, and to patrons of Trader Vic’s, mai tais in hand, they were indistinguishable from the real thing. He had found a way to turn mid-twentieth-century America’s fascination with the primitive to profit, but the cultural artifacts he supplied were “all fake,” McFate told me. “It was all made by Barney, painted by my mom.”

  McFate’s mother and West eventually divorced, and in 1957, Frances Poynter bought a surplus wooden Navy barge for a dollar. The barges had been used to tow ammunition to Hawaii during the war; now they were being torn apart for scrap. Poynter docked her barge in Richardson Bay, in a nascent houseboat community known as Gate 5. She divided it into apartments, renting out two and living in the third. Most of the walls in McFate’s childhood home were made from driftwood that her mother had collected from the beach after storms. Frances Poynter knew nothing about fireplace construction, but she built a fireplace out of river rocks and a giant industrial smokestack. McFate found it kind of beautiful, but also deeply weird, like the sailboat some friends of her mother’s built with a telephone pole for a mast and a barrel from a fun-house ride for a table. Gate 5 residents shared a profound confidence in their ability to remake their environment, even when they lacked the most basic technical training.

  Poynter met McFate’s father, Martin Carlough, at a festival in Golden Gate Park. A handsome former marine and itinerant carpenter nine years younger, Carlough was also a diagnosed schizophrenic who lived on the streets and self-medicated with PCP, LSD, and belladonna. He spent most of McFate’s childhood in and out of mental hospitals, where, like Barney West years earlier, he underwent electroshock therapy. The treatment ruined his mind, and he became a kind of zombie with damaged, clawlike hands. McFate remembers him as a “terrifying presence,” very tall with a shaved head and a pink denim jacket that said on the back, in rhinestone letters, “I am God.” When she was six or seven, he killed her cat by breaking its neck and throwing it off the deck of the barge. “Just run-of-the-mill family horror,” she told me, with a little laugh.

  Although McFate’s parents were married briefly, her father didn’t live with them. He would come by the barge to ask her mother for money or food. For a time, he lived in a cave nearby, in a dugout beneath a dock that he lined with tinfoil and cardboard. When McFate was about ten, he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, and her mother had to go down to the morgue and identify his body. Frances Poynter’s lover, a local shipyard owner, became McFate’s primary father figure. Though he was wealthy, he lived in a broken-down house and wore overalls. He let her smoke his pipe and told her she could have as much homemade liquor as she wanted, so long as she poured it over ice cream; she perused his collection of Playboys with interest. The houseboat community was ungoverned and chaotic, she told me, “the opposite from what you would find on an Army base, where there’s a lot of social-norming going on, a lot of social control that is exerted just within the community.” Craving order, McFate begged her mother to let her join the Girl Scouts, but Poynter objected. She advised her daughter never to join anything.

  In addition to drawing rent from the barge apartments, McFate’s mother molded Easter Island–style heads from cement and sold them. For a while, she made what McFate described as “these Egyptian sort of plaque-looking things” that were plaster and painted. The fabrication of anthropological artifacts—culture as curio—was a family obsession, but the cement heads proved less profitable than West’s tikis, and McFate and her mother subsisted mostly on beans and rice. When McFate was eleven or twelve, one of her mother’s friends tried to convince Poynter to apply for food stamps. She refused. “She would not take anything from the government,” McFate told me. “I remember getting mad at her about it. ‘Would you prefer that we don’t have enough to eat? You’re going to turn down charity on principle, and who’s going to benefit from that? I’m hungry.’ ” Her mother was stubborn, McFate said, unwilling to compromise her principles for practical good. To McFate, this seemed ridiculous, even immoral. The important thing was to stay alive.

  McFate’s mother had a complex relationship to authority and to the antiauthoritarian culture that surrounded her. Apolitical and deeply suspicious of government, she nevertheless viewed hippies with disdain. Poynter was one of the few houseboat dwellers in Gate 5 with a legal lease, one of the few who paid for electricity instead of snaking a cable up the street and siphoning it off the lines at the Mohawk gas station. Yet several times,
including one Christmas Eve, building inspectors posted “Condemned” notices on the barge. “She was very aware of how tenuous her hold on the property was and how on the margins we were,” McFate recalled. When Marin County judged the community of houseboat dwellers and squatters at Gate 5 a giant floating health hazard—the boats were pumping raw sewage into the bay—Poynter supported efforts to bring the place up to code. And when a development company announced its intention to turn Gate 5 into an upscale yacht harbor, Poynter, by most conventional definitions a radical, came to be viewed by her neighbors as something of a stooge.

  The developers declared that people like Poynter, who had legal leases, could stay; everyone else had to get out. But they didn’t understand “the context they were operating in,” McFate told me, “ironically, much like the military in Afghanistan. So their solution was, ‘We’re just going to start building.’ ” The developers brought in a pile driver and went to work. At night, some Gate 5 insurgents blocked in the pile driver with a big ammunition barge. The resistance boat, known as the Red Barge, became a floating rebel campground. When the Marin County sheriff’s department came down to remove the holdouts, a maritime battle ensued, with Gate 5 residents storming the authorities in rowboats and the cops fighting back with high-pressure fire hoses.

  The standoff began when McFate was about eleven years old and carried on intermittently for years. The developers hired Samoan security guards, enormous men who camped on the back of her mother’s barge, and this surreal battle with its shifting cast of outlandish characters became the defining experience of McFate’s young life. At times, it frightened her. A man known as Teepee Tom, who lived in a deerskin lean-to that he’d mounted on Styrofoam blocks so it would float, fired his rifle through her bedroom window (the bullet lodged harmlessly in a broken upright piano). But the war also intrigued her. “People really drew sides,” she told me; it was absorbing to watch. Meanwhile, a private drama played out on the barge, where Poynter drank cheap vodka and drifted in and out of a desultory maternal role. Many days, McFate didn’t want to go home, not knowing what she would find: “Would my mother have actually cooked dinner or would she be basically passed out in vomit?” McFate spent hours in the evenings at a bus stop on Bridgeway, a big road in Sausalito, doing her homework beneath a streetlight like a child in one of the underelectrified villages of the developing world. Passing cops sometimes mistook her for a child prostitute.

  By middle school, McFate was beginning to be aware of a different, more stable and predictable world beyond Gate 5. She befriended a classmate who lived in Marin City, a predominantly black community that had been built to house shipyard workers during World War II. The housing projects of Marin City were beautiful to McFate. She envied her friend’s comparative wealth and, even more, his family’s conventionality. He had a father who lived at home, where pink lacy curtains covered the windows. As a target of schoolyard mockery a few years earlier, McFate had realized with surprise that not everybody’s father jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. It took her slightly longer to figure out that her friend from Marin City wasn’t part of a privileged black class that ruled America. The knowledge that there were other worlds and, indeed, that multiple realities existed beyond the borders of her own perception, soon became one of McFate’s chief consolations. Understanding—even empathy—was, for her, a defensive posture, one that followed her into adulthood. If you believe that war is inevitable, she told me, “you will never be surprised by it. If you think it’s inevitable, you can take some kind of activity to stop it or mediate it or moderate it. But if you think that war isn’t part of human nature, you’re constantly going to be surprised and disappointed by human beings.”

  The writer Cintra Wilson, McFate’s oldest and closest friend, grew up in a houseboat community near Gate 5 that was comparatively gentrified. In her novel Colors Insulting to Nature, Wilson introduces the character Lorna Wax, based loosely on McFate, by noting that she “had an unconventional childhood. She lived in Sausalito, in a cluster of ramshackle houseboats made locally famous by a legion of hippie squatters who fought off gentrification (and subsequent eviction) in the 1970s by staging a riot. Long-haired men shouting in rubber dinghies were teargassed on the news; braless mothers hit police with oars. Finally, after months of bloody foreheads and pro-bono legal wrangling, the houseboat community was written off as an intractable nuisance by the city and left to fester. Dead, rusty cars filled the unpaved parking lot; children with dirty mouths and no pants ran barefoot on splintering gangplanks.”

  Wilson described the houseboat communities of their childhood to me as a “social experiment,” of which Gate 5 was the most extreme iteration. “We were essentially raised by pirates,” she told me. In the houseboat community where Wilson lived for a time with a jazz musician mother and a father who taught art at Chico State, the men banded together to bring the houseboats up to code, while at Gate 5, the county’s request that people install sewage pumps sparked riots. Wilson recalled visiting McFate on her mother’s barge, with its wide-plank floors and weird art. The two became friends in elementary school, but went to different middle schools. When they met up again at Tamalpais High, McFate picked a fight with Wilson. “She was just sort of a terror,” Wilson told me. “She was the first punk rocker Marin County had ever seen.”

  McFate dressed almost entirely in black, and she hardly fit in at tony Tamalpais. But she was good at school, and its uncomplicated logic—the more she studied, the better she did—was a welcome respite from the unpredictability of the rest of her life. As far back as high school, Wilson told me, McFate seemed to have an understanding of what Wilson called “mortal consequences.” McFate wasn’t giggly and silly like other teenaged girls. “She might have done dumb things, but it was more like clinical experiments, like ‘I am making a conscious experiment right now,’ ” Wilson told me. “She never lost control.” Having grown up in an environment with few rules, McFate found “safety in discipline,” Wilson told me. “She had no structure, so she had to impose it on herself. In a different life, I think she would have had a brilliant military career.” As a teenager, McFate had a recurring dream in which she was a soldier leaving a village where she had fought, passing a fountain filled with dead leaves. She “would be overcome with these tremendous feelings of having been through this ordeal and people having died,” Wilson recalled. The dream “seemed to inform her character in some way.”

  McFate started working when she was fifteen, giving her mother most of the money she earned. She frequented punk clubs in San Francisco, staying out all night, “and having sex with boys and girls,” she told me. One of her friends at the time, a girl named Elizabeth, came from a home as offbeat and dysfunctional as McFate’s. Elizabeth’s mother was a filmmaker who never had any food in the house except vitamins, grapefruit, and, in the freezer, LSD. Two strippers were always sunbathing naked on the roof. Elizabeth moved into the Golden Eagle Hotel, where she succumbed to heroin addiction and hepatitis and eventually sank into a coma. She was the first in a series of friends McFate would lose to drugs, suicide, crime, and accidents. One was shot in the head; another died of a brain aneurism. Two boyfriends in a row committed suicide. McFate realized that she and her friends were behaving self-destructively. Even if they hadn’t exactly wanted to die, they had “allowed death to happen to them. There was no brake mechanism on their train, and so once they started down the hill, they were not going to stop until they crashed into something.” Her well-honed survival instincts kicked in. She called her boyfriend and told him she wouldn’t be seeing him again. Soon afterward, he died of a heroin overdose.

  As a teenager, McFate told me, fighting to stay alive was harder than dying. Dying was like “lazily slipping into the mud.” Nihilism was “the disease that was floating around. It was very easy to catch.” But McFate has always viewed herself as fundamentally optimistic. “I could always see that there was, not necessarily a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but at least there was somet
hing at the end of the rainbow,” she told me. “It might be a lump of coal, but you could always hope, and that’s what Nietzsche says is the definition of happiness, right? Or actually, the definition of sadness is the opposite of hope, or the absence of hope.”

  Actually, Nietzsche famously wrote that hope is “the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of Man.” But McFate’s intellectual dance with Nietzsche was real and influential. When she talked about choosing life over death, she might have been quoting from Twilight of the Idols, in which Nietzsche wrote that “[s]aying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems” elevates man, “[n]ot in order to be liberated from terror and pity . . . but in order to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity.” Moral dogmatism was “naïve,” Nietzsche wrote, for “[r]eality shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the abundance of a lavish play and change of forms.” Accordingly, the philosopher and his fellow “immoralists” have “made room in our hearts for every kind of understanding, comprehending and approving. We do not easily negate; we make it a point of honor to be affirmers.” Like McFate, for whom the realization that different perspectives could be equally valid was a source of comfort amid chaos, Nietzsche asked his readers to transcend good and evil, leaving behind “the illusion of moral judgment.” Even war, that most terrible of things to the Western humanist thinker and the typical American anthropologist, had for Nietzsche its benefits. “One has renounced the great life when one renounces war,” he wrote. “[E]ven in a wound there is the power to heal.”

  McFate’s determination to survive drew her to zombie movies, especially those with stories of siege and endurance. In Night of the Living Dead, humans holed up in an abandoned house are besieged by zombies that feed on human flesh, “and you can be besieged by anyone,” McFate told me. “The undead are just a metaphor for the forces in your life or in the world that are attempting to harm or cannibalize you, and the siege is a metaphor for resistance and triumph.” In graduate school, McFate and her roommate, Brian, nursed various obsessions. For a while, they were fascinated by the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Another time it was Jeeves and Wooster, and they were reading P. G. Wodehouse to each other in the kitchen. For a time, their interest centered on the Donner Party, the group of nineteenth-century pioneers snowed under in the Sierra Nevada mountains, some of whom resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. They read books about the disastrous expedition and watched movies about it. “Brian would always say, ‘I think you definitely would be the last survivor. You’d have no problem eating human flesh,’ ” McFate told me, laughing. “And I was like, ‘You know, actually, it’s perfectly true.’ ”