The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  What about you? I asked.

  Spen turned to me sharply. “This is my first time to actually live in Afghanistan, and I don’t really even live in Afghanistan,” he said. “I live on an American base with lots of young men from all over the United States, a lot of wonderful young men, but I don’t live with Afghans. I hang out with the interpreters, who aren’t even local. They’re actually all from Kabul.” He traveled to Afghanistan two or three times a week when he went out on patrols with the soldiers around Maiwand. “I go to Afghanistan for half the day and I come back,” he told me. “Other people have claimed I’m an expert after I’ve told them I’m not. The whole notion of being an expert I find very entertaining, because I think that’s part of the problem of the U.S. situation in Afghanistan: we’re being misled by a lot of self-proclaimed experts.” Unconventional approaches were one thing, and maybe a good thing, but expertise was something else. “People are being misled about what this program brings to the table, and I personally think that needs to be corrected,” Spen told me. “A soldier doesn’t want to be out in the field and think that he’s got a rifle that can shoot a thousand yards and then find out it can actually shoot five hundred.” He was right about the lack of expertise, but the Army mostly didn’t know the difference. For many young soldiers I met, cultural finesse still amounted to the response of a turret gunner one day on patrol in Maiwand, when an approaching car failed to heed the Americans’ signals to slow down. The gunner remembered the Pashto word for stop.

  “Wadarega, motherfucker!” he bellowed, pointing his .50-caliber machine gun at the Afghan driver’s head.

  That spring, the Human Terrain System was riven by an administrative change that surprised and angered many field team members. Previously, they had worked on contract. They were not technically part of the Army, nor were they employed directly by the Defense Department. Instead, they worked for private defense companies with varying pay scales and benefits. Like the original members of AF4, many were paid very well, easily earning between $250,000 and $350,000 for a year of training and deployment. But in early 2009, the Human Terrain System ran up against a new Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. military and the government of Iraq that did away with legal immunity for foreign contractors. Under the new agreement, contractors working for U.S. forces in Iraq would be subject to Iraqi law. An official from the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command emailed Human Terrain Team members and gave them a choice. They could sign on as Department of the Army civilian employees, a change that would cut their pay by as much as half; or they could quit. They had just ten days to decide. Morale among Human Terrain Team members, already low, plunged deeper. Many had already deployed to dangerous places and were counting on generous salaries. Some were just in it for the money. About a third of the project’s field team members quit in disgust. The rest stayed on, but stayed mad. They had a lot of complaints, and they talked to anyone who would listen.

  * * *

  In the spring of 2009, the Obama administration announced a new approach to the war in Afghanistan. The insurgency was spreading unchecked, and beating it back would require big changes. Obama had already agreed to send 21,000 more troops, bringing the total number of American forces in Afghanistan to more than 60,000; he also promised to send more qualified civilians, whose expertise was urgently needed on everything from economics and the rule of law to agriculture and development. Training for Afghan security forces would be expanded, and the Afghan government would be encouraged to reintegrate low-level Taliban. Ties between the drug trade, the insurgency, and highly placed Afghan officials would be ferreted out and cut. The United States would make a better case for the war at home, expand its diplomatic efforts abroad, and engage more frankly with Afghans and Pakistanis in the hope of winning their trust. The Obama administration called it an “integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy.” It came too late.

  In the first few years after the invasion, many Afghans welcomed the presence of international forces in their country. The Taliban had grown corrupt and widely detested; the militia leaders who opposed them were remembered for brutalizing civilians during the factional battles of the civil war. The economy was a disaster, and millions of Afghans had fled the country to avoid destitution and oppression. An invasion is rarely something to celebrate, but the Taliban’s expulsion promised an end to Afghanistan’s isolation and fed hopes that the country could reinvent itself as a functioning member of the global community. In those years, Afghanistan opened itself readily to foreigners, but the wounds of September 11 were still fresh, and most American soldiers treated Afghans with disdain. In a place of ritualized politeness, the Americans’ aggressive behavior was particularly distasteful, but there was more. Because American soldiers didn’t know Afghanistan’s history or understand its culture, they were often misled by informants with an axe to grind, which caused them to hunt, jail, and kill the wrong people. With the Taliban in hiding and a newly installed, progressive, Western-friendly Afghan government seeking to influence villagers who had been ruling themselves for as long as they could remember, the United States chalked up the war as a win and turned its attention to Iraq. As one year slipped into the next, Afghan farmers seeded their fields with opium, the early optimism that had briefly buoyed the government gave way to corruption, and the insurgency grew. By 2009, even pro-Western Afghans had come to view the United States and its allies with skepticism. The war had been so poorly managed that it was hard to know whether any strategy at this late stage could save the Americans and the Afghans from themselves.

  That summer, then–Secretary of Defense Robert Gates fired the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General McKiernan, making him the first general to be removed from command of a theater of combat since 1951. McKiernan was said to be too plodding and conventional to undertake the new strategy, but he and his predecessors had never enjoyed much latitude for bold moves in Afghanistan. General Stanley McChrystal, then director of the Pentagon’s joint staff and a veteran of the Special Operations Forces, took McKiernan’s place. McChrystal had spent two years supervising kill-and-capture teams targeting high-level insurgents in Iraq. In his assessment of the Afghan war that summer, he proved willing to tell unpleasant truths. “[M]any indicators suggest the overall situation is deteriorating,” he wrote. The insurgency was “resilient and growing,” fed by “a crisis of confidence among Afghans . . . that undermines our credibility and emboldens the insurgents.” A perception that the United States was not committed to the long fight left Afghans disinclined to side with the international community against the insurgents. “The key take away from this assessment,” McChrystal wrote, “is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way we think and operate.”

  McChrystal observed that U.S. and NATO troops were ill-equipped to wage counterinsurgency. “Pre-occupied with protection of our own forces, we have operated in a manner that distances us—physically and psychologically—from the people we seek to protect,” he wrote. “The insurgents cannot defeat us militarily, but we can defeat ourselves.” Members of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, known as ISAF, didn’t understand local languages and cultures. “The complex social landscape of Afghanistan is in many ways much more difficult to understand than Afghanistan’s enemies,” McChrystal wrote. “Insurgent groups have been the focus of U.S. and allied intelligence for many years; however, ISAF has not sufficiently studied Afghanistan’s peoples, whose needs, identities and grievances vary from province to province and from valley to valley. This complex environment is challenging to understand, particularly for foreigners. For this strategy to succeed, ISAF leaders must redouble efforts to understand the social and political dynamics of . . . all regions of the country and take action that meets the needs of the people, and insist that [Afghan] officials do the same.” Noting that key ISAF officers should be trained in local languages and serve long enough tours to make use of what they had learned, McChrystal issued an injun
ction to the forces under his command that would have been unthinkable in the early years of the war, when the stated mission of the U.S. military was simply to kill and capture members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda: “All ISAF personnel must show respect for local cultures and customs and demonstrate intellectual curiosity about the people of Afghanistan.”

  That summer, ten thousand American marines landed in Helmand, the first wave of a troop surge that would build through mid-2010. A small number of British forces had been struggling and losing ground for years in the rural southwestern province, where the insurgency had dug in and metastasized. A new Human Terrain Team, known as AF6, was sent to work with the marines at their main base, a sprawling desert outpost called Camp Leatherneck. The team’s leader was Steve Lacy, a thoughtful, serious Army officer and lawyer I’d met during my visit to Leavenworth. With him were Cas Dunlap, an information operations specialist, and the former FBI analyst, flamenco guitarist, and theology PhD, AnnaMaria Cardinalli. I wrote to ask Lacy if I could visit and spend a few weeks with his team. He agreed.

  Camp Leatherneck occupied an expanse of fine sand and rock that Afghans call the Desert of Death. Windstorms blew dust everywhere, under the flaps of tents, even between your teeth. Young men wrestled like gladiators on the rocky ground outside the gym, and in the Marine female officers’ tent, competition for bottom bunks was fierce. One night, an officer scolded me for borrowing her ladder to climb up to my déclassé top bunk. The Taliban were out there, but in here, life sucked. The base was crawling with officers, all trying to out-politic or out-asshole one another. The atmosphere grated on everyone’s nerves, and the guys on little exposed firebases in the countryside felt lucky to be away from it. The Human Terrain Team worked in a small, dark tent near the command center, sharing space with members of the Marines’ fledgling Female Engagement Team. A group of translators sat nearby, crafting propaganda broadcasts for the American-run radio station on base, and the profane tirades of a senior officer could be heard through a makeshift wall. The tent was dusty and cramped, but the members of AF6 felt lucky to have desks. In the early months of their deployment, Lacy and his teammates had worked in their living quarters or in Internet cafés on Leatherneck and Camp Bastion, the British base nearby.

  AF6 had been sent to Helmand too early. The team landed at Leatherneck at 3 a.m. in late April 2009, more than a month before the main Marine force arrived. Cardinalli immediately headed to Kandahar, temporarily joining the Human Terrain Team in Maiwand, where her then-fiancé, whom she’d met during training in Kansas, was also stationed. Dunlap flew north to Bagram, where she found two Human Terrain Teams whose members spent most of their time walking the kilometer that separated their offices so they could talk to each other. Dunlap was eager to get out and work with Afghans and help soldiers; she had suffered through training, but the possibilities of the job excited her. “I knew that if I got hold of some work, if I ever got a hold of that piece of meat, I would just gnaw it to the bone,” she told me. She found no opportunities in Bagram.

  A month later, Lacy summoned them both back to Helmand, where the Marines were settling in and exciting research possibilities were beginning to open up. But right away, more problems arose. The Marine colonel supervising the Human Terrain Team didn’t know what the team was supposed to do, but to be fair, neither did anyone else. Lacy and his teammates were figuring it out as they went along. AF6 had begun with four members, but one had immediately quit and returned to the States, and of the three who remained, two were women. The Marines disliked the idea of sending civilian women out on patrols in their new area. Unable to conduct the village and area assessments they had anticipated, Cardinalli and Dunlap headed to Lashkar Gah, Helmand’s capital, where the British forces weren’t afraid to work with them. There, Cardinalli put together a report on homosexual behavior among Pashtun men, while Dunlap made herself useful advising British soldiers about the nuances of Taliban night letters. Night letters were threatening missives left in villages overnight for Afghans to find in the morning. The Taliban used them to intimidate Afghans so they wouldn’t cooperate with NATO and the Afghan government. They worked because they belonged to the place; they had long been a tool of revolutionary forces in Afghanistan and Iran. They also testified to the insurgents’ eerie intimacy with the villages and the countryside. In the morning, no one knew whether the letters had been left by an outsider or whether the author was one of their own.

  A few days after I arrived at Leatherneck, I joined Cardinalli and a Marine unit known as Fox Company for an early-morning patrol to a cluster of compounds just outside the gates of the base. Cardinalli had olive skin, glasses, and long dark hair, which on this day she hid beneath a khaki bandana. She had grown up in New Mexico, where she told me she had been something of a prodigy, finishing high school at thirteen and recording her first album at fifteen. At Notre Dame, she had written a PhD dissertation linking the musical and liturgical traditions of the Penitentes, a Catholic lay confraternity in northern New Mexico, to those of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval Spain. When hijacked planes hit New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, Cardinalli had wanted to help. But given her background in music and theology, a practical role in the Global War on Terror wasn’t immediately apparent. Nevertheless, she got to thinking about the connection between her research on the Penitentes and intelligence work. In her dissertation, she had written that the “secrecy” of the Penitentes made their communities difficult for an outsider to penetrate. Later, she would describe her dissertation research as “directly relevant to current intelligence and counterterrorism issues” and say that while working on it, she had “employed a variety of techniques typical of intelligence, investigative, and ethnographic work.” She connected her research on the Penitentes to penitential themes in Shiite Islam and served as an intelligence analyst, deploying briefly to Iraq. “Being an activist type, I had a lot of preconceptions about how the military operated,” she told me. Yet she was touched by the work U.S. soldiers were doing to improve Iraqi lives.

  Cardinalli was now in the final days of an abbreviated tour as AF6’s social scientist, and that morning’s patrol would be her last. It had grown out of a medical mission a few weeks earlier, when Cardinalli had accompanied female marines and a female Navy doctor on a visit to the small group of houses that the Marines called Settlement 1. She had gone along on the medical mission because it offered a rare opportunity to interview Afghans in the desert around Leatherneck where few people lived. When the Navy doctor had finished talking to an Afghan family and doling out pills, Cardinalli had gotten to pose a few questions of her own, though the Afghans were not as forthcoming as she’d hoped. But the thing that struck Cardinalli most forcefully was the Navy doctor’s lack of bedside manner. The Afghans had seemed to grow visibly angry when they were handed small packets of six or eight pills. The Marines didn’t give out large quantities of medicine for good reason; they were doing all they could to prevent overdoses. But this concern struck Cardinalli as unimportant compared to the possibility that Afghans might view Americans as “stingy.” When the military doctor told people she could only give them a small number of pills, her words “were inevitably perceived by the local residents to be a lie,” Cardinalli wrote later. Afghans “view American forces to be resource-rich and . . . it is inconceivable that our supply would be so limited. Instead, local residents are forced to view the Americans with the anger of unfulfilled expectations and question the team’s motives for intruding upon their homes in order to provide something of such little benefit.” Cardinalli wanted to make things right with the people of Settlement 1. She wanted to show them that Americans were not just rich, but generous.

  Cardinalli planned to conduct a follow-up medical mission of her own. She had filled a camouflage backpack with over-the-counter cold medicine, ankle braces, Carmex lip balm, motion sickness tablets, and pain relievers. She had gathered these medicines from boxes of donations outside the chaplain’s offices around ba
se or bought them at the PX. She had no medical training beyond a brief combat first aid course, and when she told me about the mission, I wondered what the Afghans in Settlement 1 would do with all these pills and potions with their incomprehensible English instructions.

  The officer in charge of Fox Company was a thirty-eight-year-old captain named Bob McCarthy. He wore his uniform open to reveal a triangle of chest and walked with a swagger. The Marines planned to hand out child-sized Crocs, knapsacks, notebooks, cooking oil, beans, and tea. Before we set out, McCarthy told Cardinalli to make sure she took time to thoroughly explain the medicines to Afghans she met. But he also cautioned that the patrol would be short—a little over two hours. Some of us climbed into a Max Pro, a giant armored vehicle, while the rest of the marines piled into Humvees. We drove about two miles over soft dunes studded with volcanic stones and climbed down near a scattering of compounds. Cardinalli and Flo, an Afghan-American interpreter from Los Angeles, pulled out a cardboard box full of book bags and school supplies. It said “The Church of JESUS CHRIST of Latter Day Saints” on the side.

  “I would just watch the box,” McCarthy told them. Cardinalli stuffed it back into the truck.

  She and Flo made their way to the nearest compound, where an Afghan dog, long-legged and rangy, barked at them. The man of the house had a tanned, open face, a clean beard, and dark hair under a white turban. He later told me he was from Nad Ali, a place in Helmand that had seen a lot of fighting. He had bought the house and land where he and his family lived for ten thousand Afghanis, about $200. They had been there about three years, and he worked as a laborer, building mud houses. He invited us inside. Cardinalli and Flo had been here before with the female medical team. The Afghan led them through a hallway into a clean, sunlit room with mats on the floor and sleeping mattresses piled high. The walls were adorned with some of the family’s prized possessions: embroidered cloths, silver serving spoons, a plastic fork, a scrub brush, a clock, and a headless doll.