The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

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  McFate spent two years in community college before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. On her first day of classes, her mother suffered a fatal stroke, and McFate inherited the houseboat and responsibility for its tenants. She finished the semester, dropped out of school, and moved back to Sausalito to settle her mother’s affairs. In 1987, after living briefly with a boyfriend in Las Vegas, she returned to Berkeley as a social sciences major. She created her own academic program, taking classes on German cinema, modern poetry, the anthropology of death, and women in literature. She walked around campus in a fur-collared horsehide jacket, black jeans, and lace-up boots, her hair in dreadlocks.

  Berkeley had a democratic education program that allowed students to design their own classes. McFate and a friend created one called “Punks on Film,” which began with the roots of punk and ended with its commodification when a faux-punk band called Pain appeared on an episode of the TV series CHiPs. McFate’s interest in what she called “the commodification or fetishization of the body” led her to write her senior thesis on Nazi aesthetics. She wanted to explore how certain images—like a close-up shot of a soldier’s helmet and jawline in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens—take on symbolic importance. “I was really interested in the way that propaganda worked,” McFate told me. The morality of the Nazis intrigued McFate less than the symbols by which they perpetuated power. “To me, the interesting question was, ‘How did they do it and what was the effect?’ In what way does art—if you think it’s art—in what way does imagery become a manifestation of power?”

  Like the adolescent who had watched with fascination as her houseboat neighbors fought the law, the adult McFate had an uncanny ability to distance herself from the moral concerns of war and view the thing coldly. She also shared her mother’s impatience with lazy hippie leftism. Liberal Berkeley kids partying on their parents’ dime annoyed her. After graduation, she spent part of her mother’s life insurance settlement traveling with a friend. In Northern Ireland, she visited the Milltown Cemetery on Falls Road, where IRA volunteer Bobby Sands and other hunger strikers are buried. She had viewed the Irish Republican Army as terrorists, and was surprised and intrigued to learn that people in Belfast saw things differently. To them, Britain was an occupier and the republicans were legitimate defenders of their territory. An old man gave her a tour of the cemetery, and in the Sinn Féin bookstore she bought a book published by the republican National Graves Association that gave a detailed account of how the movement memorialized death. She was taken aback by the IRA’s political and cultural cohesion. “You think, Okay, these people are a bunch of terrorists,” she told me, “and then you go there and you find out, well, they’ve got an incredible body of literature, an incredible body of music, and they’ve got all these incredibly complex rituals associated with death.”

  McFate, too, was intrigued by death’s rituals. Back home, she got a job at Chapel of the Chimes, a historic Oakland funeral home, and returned to KALX, the Berkeley radio station, where as a student she had hosted a show. She applied to a handful of graduate programs in anthropology. Having grown up poor, she was petrified of going into debt. She chose Yale because it offered her the most generous financial aid package.

  Yale turned out to be a good fit for McFate in other ways, too. Since 1949, the university has been home to the Human Relations Area Files, a database of cultural and ethnographic information used by social scientists and members of the U.S. military and intelligence communities in times of war. One of McFate’s advisers was John Middleton, a British-born Africanist who had served in World War II and studied at Oxford under E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Known as a “traveler, raconteur, casual pistol-shot . . . and determined drinker,” Evans-Pritchard had been deeply embedded in the colonial politics of his day. He led Anuak tribes against the Italians on the Ethiopian border during World War II at Britain’s behest, and his 1949 book on Libya, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, helped convince the United Nations to endorse the head of the Sanusi order as Libya’s king. “It helped of course that most of my research was carried out in a country, the Sudan, at that time ruled by the British and with a government and its officers friendly disposed to anthropological research,” Evans-Pritchard wrote near the end of his life.

  This was the tradition in which McFate was trained. Yet even at Yale, anthropology’s late-twentieth-century self-consciousness and its desire to distance itself from its colonial past determined which texts were considered important and which weren’t. McFate and her fellow students learned to connect anthropologists of the British colonial era to the imperial project and, in doing so, to criticize their own discipline. Like everyone else, McFate wrote papers arguing that structural functionalism was invalid because it objectified and dehumanized the subjects of anthropological observation. But the pragmatist in her rejected this argument. Instead, a key question of the colonial era absorbed her: what utility did this early anthropology have for the British? “Why weren’t we reading Sir Richard Burton? In many ways, he was one of the first anthropologists,” McFate told me. “Of course, he was a spy and he was working for the British Empire. But he was an astute observer of life around him.”

  McFate was still thinking about what she had seen in Belfast. For her PhD dissertation, she wanted to explore the link between the Irish Republicans’ “heavy narrative about the blood and the soil” and the way the IRA legitimated political violence. But when she proposed this as a dissertation topic, fellow students and professors at Yale told her she belonged in the political science department, because war was political, not cultural. “We say in anthropology that the utensils you use to eat your food, the sexual practices that are common in your culture, the way you rear your children, and the art you produce is a matter of culture,” McFate told me. “But somehow, violence—violence in pursuit of political power or economic resources—is somehow not cultural? Like, everything’s cultural except war? Because as an anthropologist, we can’t study war—why is that?”

  She ultimately prevailed, conducting her fieldwork in Belfast and London. Her first draft, she told me, was distinctly pro-IRA, written in the voice of “an angry Berkeley undergraduate,” criticizing the British for advancing their colonial ambitions in Ireland. But when a friend at Sandhurst, the British military academy, asked to read it, McFate quailed. On closer examination, she decided it was biased and immature. She threw it out and started over.

  Her dissertation is remarkable for its engaging tone, its clinical detachment from the human costs of fighting, and its affirmation of the durability and inexorability of war. It marked the beginning of a process, through which McFate would come to see anthropology as a “natural” practice for soldiers, and to view war itself as a kind of anthropology. She was drawn to the paradoxical relationship between empathy and killing: that you had to know your enemy to fight him effectively, but that knowing him also made you love him. In her dissertation, she asked whether “good anthropology” might lead to “better killing.” It was a dangerous question but, for her, a necessary one.

  Even before McFate finished her dissertation, she had grown tired of anthropology. “I wanted to do something in the world, not just write about it,” she told me. She was interested in international law and the laws of war, so she applied to Harvard Law School and almost quit her anthropology program when she got in. At an adviser’s urging, she finished her dissertation and started at Harvard the following fall. During her final year there, a friend introduced her to a young Army officer named Sean Sapone, who wanted to study anthropology. They corresponded, and over Valentine’s Day weekend in 1997, Sapone came up to Cambridge and they met in person. “We just really hit it off,” McFate said. One night they were having dinner and she told him she had an intuition that they were going to get married. “He put his fork down and he said, ‘Okay,’ just like that,” McFate told me. By the end of the weekend, they were engaged. They married ten months later.

  Sapone depl
oyed to Germany and McFate (whose original married name was Montgomery Sapone) graduated and took a job as a litigation associate at the San Francisco offices of Baker & McKenzie, where she had interned in law school. She needed the money to pay off student loans, and at the time, she told me, she thought that tax litigation was “absolutely the most interesting thing in the world.” But her interest waned, and she soon quit and moved to Germany to join Sapone. His unit, the Air Defense Artillery, struck her as “a narrow, cliquish tribe,” and she judged the Army a throwback: “It was like time stopped in 1957.” Friendships between officers’ wives were governed by their husbands’ rank. One wife tried to convert her to fundamentalist Christianity over coffee. A colonel asked if she was pregnant yet. “I totally failed as an Army wife,” McFate told me. When she fumed over the colonel’s assumption that she would immediately start popping out babies, Sapone urged her to remember that the officer’s experience had shaped his worldview. ‘You—anthropologist—can’t be offended by that,’ McFate recalled Sapone telling her. ‘You’ve lived in Berlin, you’ve lived in London, you’ve lived in Las Vegas, you’ve lived in Northern Ireland, but you’ve never lived in the middle of the country.’

  While Sapone worked, McFate learned to cook Vietnamese food and published her law school thesis on mercenaries and the laws of war. Somewhere along the way, the couple changed their last name to McFate, Sean Sapone’s mother’s maiden name. Montgomery McFate worked for her mother-in-law’s company for a time. Her job involved Internet research and gathering information about “a lot of different public policy issues,” she said, but this period of her life would later return to haunt her. McFate’s mother-in-law was accused of being a corporate spy who infiltrated citizen activist groups at the behest of the gun lobby. McFate allegedly helped by collecting and analyzing intelligence and providing “confidential litigation support research.” When Sean left the Army, they moved to Washington, D.C., where McFate took a contract job with the CIA, traveling to Europe to conduct research on Muslim minorities. She was not a clandestine agent, but neither did she tell her interview subjects that she worked for an intelligence agency. She moved on to the RAND Corporation, and in 2003, to the Office of Naval Research, which had supported the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict half a century earlier. McFate started to wonder in earnest how anthropology might contribute to the needs of a military she had grown to respect.

  In Washington, she began a concerted networking campaign. She met a Navy anthropologist and a former British intelligence officer, both of whom would become players in the cultural knowledge boom of the next few years. She sought out officials working on low-intensity conflict in the Pentagon and introduced herself to rising counterinsurgency star David Kilcullen. She and her husband hosted dinner parties at their apartment in the capital’s Adams Morgan neighborhood, inviting ambassadors, generals, and military intellectuals. McFate eventually started a blog called “I Luv a Man in Uniform,” where, under the pseudonym “Pentagon Diva,” she composed tongue-in-cheek paeans to the sex appeal of military thinkers like H. R. McMaster.

  During a conversation with the commander of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, McFate suggested that cultural misunderstandings had caused difficulties for marines in Iraq. ‘I don’t have any facts about that,’ she recalled the general telling her. ‘I’d like you to do a study.’ She started interviewing marines, and later soldiers and sailors, returning from Iraq. Somewhere along the way, she heard Hriar Cabayan’s name and wrote it down, but she never got around to calling him. One day, out of nowhere, he called her. He was looking for an anthropologist. Could she come to the Pentagon?

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  McFate and Cabayan weren’t the only ones thinking about anthropology’s utility for counterinsurgency and intelligence gathering. Around the time they began working together on Cultural Preparation of the Environment, the military and intelligence communities were eyeing the social sciences with an intensity not seen in thirty years. In 2005, the CIA posted an employment ad on the website of the American Anthropological Association, seeking someone to help its analysts understand terrorist groups and social and cultural responses to disease, migration, and other crises. That the CIA would try to hire anthropologists—and that the American Anthropological Association would allow the agency to advertise on its website—outraged some anthropologists. One of them, David Price, suggested that the association was ignoring “the CIA’s history of torture, terror and covert global support for anti-democratic movements.” In 2006, Roberto J. González, an associate professor at San José State University, asked the association to publicly oppose the use of anthropological knowledge in torture. News of the Abu Ghraib scandal was still fresh, and González’s effort was inspired by reports that Army interrogators had relied on anthropologist Raphael Patai’s 1973 book, The Arab Mind, to identify cultural taboos that could be exploited during interrogation.

  Anthropologists tend to be overwhelmingly politically liberal, and few supported the administration of George W. Bush or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet more than politics was at work here. To many anthropologists, using cultural insights to wage war was like using a screwdriver to pry open a door: it indicated the commission of a crime. Beginning in 2007, a small group of anthropologists carried on a vigorous argument with McFate and other champions of anthropology as a tool for counterinsurgency. McFate’s critics advanced three main arguments. The first was that deploying social scientists to war zones, particularly to gather military intelligence, could endanger the people being studied and lead all anthropologists to be viewed as spies. The second was that, on principle, anthropology should not be used to subjugate unruly people while expanding American power. The last, and in some ways the most compelling, was that anthropology is not predictive and does not yield the kind of data useful for military operations. Instead, it produces stories about stories that are as ambiguous as they are illuminating. The anthropologist Kerry Fosher, who works for the Marine Corps, described the disconnect between most anthropologists and the defense establishment as “profound.” She compared the defense and intelligence communities to an organization that calls in a group of physicists and asks them to determine how fast the sun orbits the earth, or that summons a group of doctors to save a dying patient, with the stipulation that they must use only leeches and mercury. “The questions they are asking and the data they want are fundamentally at odds with reality,” Fosher told me.

  That the U.S. military was rediscovering anthropology as if for the first time inspired cynicism in many anthropologists, who remembered the past all too well. “Of all the modern social sciences, anthropology is the one historically most closely tied to colonialism,” wrote Edward Said, “since it has often been the case that since the mid-nineteenth century anthropologists and ethnologists were also advisors to colonial rulers on the manners and mores of the native people to be ruled.” Colonel Creighton, the ethnographer and spymaster who grooms Kipling’s Kim for his role in the nineteenth-century Great Game, tells the boy: “There is no sin so great as ignorance.” One day, he will pay Kim for “knowledge of what is behind those hills—for a picture of a river and a little news of what the people say in the villages there.” Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that anthropology “is the outcome of a historical process which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent human beings have had their resources plundered and their institutions and beliefs destroyed, whilst they themselves were ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage, and contaminated by diseases they were unable to resist. Anthropology is the daughter to this era of violence: its capacity to assess more objectively the facts pertaining to the human condition reflects, on the epistemological level, a state of affairs in which one part of mankind treated the other as an object.”

  Around the time that McFate and others were developing the Human Terrain System, the Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen began working for the State Department a
nd as an adviser to General Petraeus in Iraq. Kilcullen had studied political anthropology and done his doctoral research on Muslim and Timorese insurgents in Indonesia as an officer in the Australian army. In 2006, he wrote a tip list that was widely read by U.S. officers deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. The list was a self-conscious allusion to a similar document composed nearly one hundred years earlier by T. E. Lawrence, Britain’s celebrated ethnographer-spy.

  Kilcullen’s list raised the question McFate had stumbled on years earlier in writing her dissertation: what was the difference between ethnography and intelligence? Was there a difference? “Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion and culture,” Kilcullen wrote. “Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader and ancient grievance.” T. E. Lawrence had wanted to influence the Arabs’ behavior, and he knew that he would be most successful by making them forget he was British, or that he was even there. “Remain in touch with your leader as constantly and unobtrusively as you can,” Lawrence wrote. “Live with him, that at meal times and at audiences you may be naturally with him in his tent. Formal visits to give advice are not so good as the constant dropping of ideas in casual talk.” For the British military adviser, “complete success” came “when the Arabs forget your strangeness and speak naturally before you, counting you as one of themselves.”