The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  Among the misapprehensions Grau and his colleagues: Kipp, interview by author, July 2, 2010. Grau had been chipping away at the notion that technology would guarantee future military success for some time. “Future war may indeed be a computer-driven battle between high-technology systems,” he wrote in 1997, but “there are limits to technology. . . . All the answers are not in the application of new technology.” Lester Grau, “Bashing the Laser Range Finder with a Rock,” Military Review (May–June 1997), http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/techy.htm, accessed June 26, 2012.

  In the late summer of 2001, Kipp and Grau tried to warn the Army: “The siren song of technology is that it will eliminate the fog and friction of war,” Kipp and Grau wrote. “The reality is that the military’s application of technology has usually created its own fog and friction. . . . Technology promises much—the paperless office, the perfect intelligence picture, the rapid destruction of enemy forces, the collapse of civilian morale—but it rarely delivers. . . . Cookie-cutter solutions do not work universally in different theaters, on different terrain, or against different forces and cultures. . . . The side with the greater ability to adapt, exercise initiative, and enforce tactical and operational innovations discovered during combat will enjoy success.” Kipp and Grau, “The Fog and Friction of Technology,” Military Review (September–October 2001), http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/fog/fog.htm, accessed June 26, 2012.

  No longer would American soldiers see the enemy’s tanks: Kipp, interview by author, July 2, 2010. When the Army’s high-tech 4th Mechanized Infantry Division arrived in Iraq in 2003, kitted out with every kind of computerized sensor, its equipment found neither enemy tanks nor high levels of detectable radio traffic, Kipp told me: “There’s just [the enemy] exercising initiative by an RPG and run, or an IED, and we’re blind, and we’re stuck.” The 4th ID was celebrated at the time as the “only division in the Army fully ‘digitized’ to carry out computerized warfare.” See Michael Killian, “Mechanized Infantry Ships Out,” Chicago Tribune, March 28, 2003.

  The enemy would fight and disappear into an urban landscape: Kipp, interview by author, July 2, 2010, and Grau and Kipp, “Urban Combat: Confronting the Specter,” Military Review (July–August 1999), http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/urbancombat/urbancombat.htm, accessed June 26, 2012. “ ‘Don’t go there’ remains the best advice for urban combat,” Grau and Kipp wrote. “However, urban sprawl, the high-tech battlefield and the expeditionary role for US Armed Forces make this axiom problematic. . . . An urban combat training center . . . should be developed to teach urban tactics, techniques and procedures. Such a training center would need to incorporate training models that include social, cultural, ethnic and political dynamics as well as urban terrain features.” Emphasis is mine.

  The Taliban had ruled brutally, massacring ethnic minorities: On the Taliban’s massacre of Hazaras, see among many others Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower (New York: Vintage, 2007), 304.

  But in the fall of 2001, Afghans allied: “War Crime in Afghanistan,” Physicians for Human Rights, http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/issues/mass-atrocities/afghanistan-war-crime, accessed August 10, 2012. See also Scott Horton, “Dasht-e-Leili, Ten Years Later,” Harper’s, December 13, 2011. In Kabul, the bodies of Arabs and Pakistanis were found hanging in a pleasant downtown park, their mouths stuffed with dollars. See Kate Clark, “2001 Ten Years On: How the Taleban Fled Kabul,” Afghanistan Analysts Network, November 13, 2011, http://www.aan-afghanistan.org/index.asp?id=2237, accessed August 10, 2012.

  Old tribal structures had been ravaged by war: “In Afghanistan, power is rarely transparent,” Noah Coburn, an anthropologist who has written about political power in Afghanistan, told me. “This is a very old game in Afghanistan,” where there is a pattern of “stronger individuals allowing a weak person to ascend to a position that appears powerful, whereas most of the real power is behind the scenes.” This subterfuge shields the genuinely powerful from direct responsibility for what happens under them and protects them from blood feuds, among other benefits. Coburn, interview by author and email correspondence, July 24–25, 2011.

  The Taliban were excluded: “Talking About Talks: Toward a Political Settlement in Afghanistan,” International Crisis Group, Asia Report N°221, March 26, 2012, 9.

  But within months of Saddam Hussein’s toppling, buried bombs: Rick Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘The IED Problem Is Getting Out of Control. We’ve Got to Stop the Bleeding,’ ” Washington Post, September 30, 2007. Radio-controlled IEDs had begun to plague U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, but at that time there were relatively few of them.

  The Army sent thousands of jammers to Iraq and Afghanistan: Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘The IED Problem Is Getting Out of Control,’ ” and Rick Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘There Was a Two-Year Learning Curve . . . and a Lot of People Died in Those Two Years,’ ” Washington Post, October 1, 2007. Atkinson writes that by 2007, more than thirty thousand jammers of various kinds had found their way to Iraq.

  Beating IEDs became the Defense Department’s second-highest priority: Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘The IED Problem Is Getting Out of Control.’ ”

  In an experiment designed by the Pentagon’s joint staff: Hriar Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009, and Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘There Was a Two-Year Learning Curve.’ ”

  The cameras had missed it entirely: Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009. The experiment, known as IED Blitz, was “a complete failure,” Cabayan told me. “Not a single IED was detected.”

  Analysts found they could use surveillance video: Ibid. The technique, known as “backtracking,” was another technological fix, but Cabayan called it the “silver lining” of IED Blitz because it pushed him and others to “figure out how to connect IED emplacers within a social network, within the context of a population that is partly supporting them.” It was this kind of thinking that would lead to the creation of Cultural Preparation of the Environment and, by extension, the Human Terrain System.

  This kind of thinking was unfamiliar to the conventional Army: The U.S. military had lost most of what it had learned in Vietnam, Cabayan told me: “The Colin Powell Doctrine, you go in with overwhelming force, you win, and you get out. You don’t need culture to do that. So it was all lost. The Army and the Marines had to relearn something that had gone out of their training.”

  Retired Army Major General Robert H. Scales wrote: Major General Robert H. Scales, “Culture-Centric Warfare,” Proceedings, U.S. Naval Institute, October 2004.

  Few young soldiers knew how to gather cultural intelligence: Remarks by Major General John Custer at the Fourth Annual U.S. Army Culture Education and Training Summit, Tucson, AZ, April 19, 2010. “Everything that you and I grew up with is irrelevant,” Custer told his audience. “I’m an anachronism, and many of you are too. . . . The world has changed. Culture . . . will be a critical factor in everything we do, and let’s face it, some of our failures in the past have been directly related to our lack of cultural understanding.” Custer compared the role of cultural knowledge in contemporary counterinsurgency to that of chemical weapons in World War I, nuclear bombs in World War II, and satellites in the Cold War. “We are going to fight in sewers,” Custer said. “We are going to fight clans. We are going to fight warrior-based societies forever. That’s the way of the world.”

  Slight and animated with an irreverent manner: Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009; David Schwoegler, “Pentagon Recognizes Hriar Cabayan’s Decade of Service,” Newsline (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) 32, no. 11 (May 7, 2007), 2; and “DOE Pulse: Science and Technology Highlights from the DOE National Laboratories,” no. 235, May 21, 2007, http://www.ornl.gov/info/news/pulse/pulse_v235_07.htm, accessed June 27, 2012. Cabayan became an adviser to the joint staff in time to evacuate the Pentagon when a plane struck it on September 11, 2001. Later, he would receive the Joint Distinguished Civilian Service Award, the highest civilian a
ward that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs can bestow. The secrecy of his weapons work was well known, but he would come to believe that broad sharing of information and open-source intelligence among academics, military officers, and analysts was the only way to save soldiers’ lives and succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Born in Armenia, he had been raised in Syria: Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009: “I am an Armenian and spent a lot of time in the Middle East before I came over. That was when I was young, so I’m very attuned to cultural things.” For his time in Syria, see Schwoegler, “Pentagon Recognizes Hriar Cabayan’s Decade of Service,” 2.

  In the winter of 2004, Cabayan met with an Army lieutenant colonel: Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009. The other physicist was Nancy Chesser, a contractor who worked often with Cabayan. For Cabayan and McFate’s first meeting, Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009, and Montgomery McFate, interviews by author, January 28, 2009, and June 30, 2010.

  When she walked into Cabayan’s office: Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009. Anthropologists are actually a stylish bunch; Cabayan’s assumption betrayed his unfamiliarity with their tribe. For a photo of McFate from that era, see “ONR Conference Makes Case for Study of Cultures,” OrigiNatoR, December 13, 2004, http://fellowships.aaas.org/PDFs/2004_1210_ORIGConf.pdf, accessed June 28, 2012.

  She had gone to Harvard Law School: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010.

  Cabayan enlisted McFate to work on a project: Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009, and McFate, interviews by author, January 28, 2009, and June 30, 2010. See also Montgomery McFate and Steve Fondacaro, “Reflections on the Human Terrain System During the First Four Years,” Prism 2, no. 4 (September 2011), 66.

  “About tribes alone, we got fifteen totally different answers”: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010. “It was a real moment of epiphany to look at that stuff because it really indicated to me that the way the intelligence community works right now in the United States, they are not focused on general social issues or general social structures or phenomena,” McFate told me. “They’re interested in targets for a lethal or kinetic action. So the information that they have about the society is not a collection requirement, or generally, it hasn’t been a collection requirement. If they collect on it at all, it’s just . . . kind of secondary, after the fact. . . . The broader notion of strategic intelligence was a concept that was popular in the 1940s and fifties, and to a degree, into the 1960s, but [in 2004, it] had not been really something that many intelligence agencies focused on.”

  Cultural Preparation of the Environment was an open-source: Cabayan described Cultural Preparation of the Environment to me this way: “Just picture this in your mind: You’ve never been to Timbuktu. All of a sudden, you land in Timbuktu. What would you want to know? Where are the hospitals, where are the roads, who are the key people in Timbuktu? Who are the ones who are on my side, who are the ones who are not friendly to me? What’s the incidence of IED attacks? That’s really what it was. It wasn’t for civilians. It was for the military commander in charge so that he or she will absolutely know all the [cultural] information that was acquired, but we also put in the IED attack[s] . . . and it was all there for them and it was searchable, so [if] they wanted to know about all the friendly sheiks, we were supposed to have the sheiks come up with their biographies.” Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009. The idea of layering typical intelligence about enemy threats with demographic and cultural information in a single database was what made Cultural Preparation of the Environment unique and potentially useful, because it was becoming clear that threat-specific intelligence wasn’t useful on its own, isolated from its political, ethnic, or cultural context. Cabayan did not use the term intelligence in describing Cultural Preparation of the Environment to me, but it is important to note that the project was not envisioned as a way to learn about tribes and culture in the absence of other elements of the conflict zone. Conceptually, Cultural Preparation of the Environment resembled tools like the Tactical Ground Reporting System (TIGR), which offers soldiers multilayered maps that include “routes, critical infrastructure, tribal areas and ethnic maps, recent attacks and recent changes in the terrain.” “U.S. Army: TIGR Allows Soldiers to ‘Be There’ Before They Arrive’ ” http://www.army.mil/article/28700/tigr-allows-soldiers-to-be-there-before-they-arrive/, accessed June 27, 2012. TIGR is now widely used in Afghanistan, “enabling collection and dissemination of fine-grained intelligence on people, places, insurgent activity and understanding the ‘human terrain.’ ” “Defense Update: Extending Intelligence to the Edge,” http://defense-update.com/products/t/tigr_141009.html, accessed June 27, 2012. See also James Turner, “Where 2.0: DARPA’s TIGR Project Helps Platoons Stay Alive,” April 21, 2009, http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/where-20-preview---darpas-tige.html, accessed June 27, 2012.

  McFate had been intrigued: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010. When McFate read the anthropologist Jeffrey A. Sluka’s Hearts and Minds, Water and Fish: Popular Support for the IRA and INLA in a Northern Irish Ghetto in graduate school, she told me: “I thought, I can’t imagine a more useful book for the British Army. You just gave British intelligence an absolutely staggering amount of information. . . . Inadvertently, you just contributed to the British war effort.”

  McFate lost no time advancing her view: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010, and “ONR Conference Makes Case for Study of Cultures,” OrigiNatoR, December 13, 2004. The conference, held in November 2004, drew some 250 people, “more than double the number originally expected, from the services, defense agencies, CIA and DIA, the State Department, and from the staffs of key Congressional committees,” the Office of Naval Research newsletter noted. “The more unconventional the adversary, the more we need to understand their society and underlying cultural dynamics,” McFate said, according to the newsletter. “To defeat non-Western opponents who are transnational in scope, non-hierarchical in structure, clandestine in their approach, and operate outside of the context of nation-states, we need to improve our capacity to understand foreign cultures and societies.” According to one conference participant: “Intelligence analysts don’t have time to think—they have become reporters, while tensions between anthropologists and counterintelligence specialists have become unbearable.”

  The U.S. military and policy community’s ethnocentrism: McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture,” Joint Force Quarterly 38 (July 2005), 42–43, http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/jfq_pubs/1038.pdf, accessed September 15, 2012.

  Coalition forces arrested Iraqis: David Kilcullen, “Ethics, Politics and Non-State Warfare,” Anthropology Today 23, no. 3 (June 2007), 20.

  Shia Muslims who flew black flags for religious reasons: McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture,” 43–44. The Marines were not totally off base, though they may have relied too heavily on their experience in Falluja, where black flags were an inauspicious sign. “Now at least we knew what the black flags were for,” Dexter Filkins wrote “The insurgents had spotted us, and they were signaling their friends to come: Come to the fight. It’s here.” Filkins, The Forever War (New York: Vintage 2008), 190.

  She was briefing military officials in Tampa one day in 2005: McFate, interviews by author, January 28, 2009, and June 30, 2010, and Steve Fondacaro, interview by author, January 28, 2009.

  Fondacaro was determined to do whatever it took: Fondacaro, interviews by author, January 28, 2009, and June 19, 2010.

  Born in New York to a mother of Puerto Rican descent: Unless otherwise noted, biographical information and quotes from Fondacaro in this section are from Fondacaro, interviews by author, June 16 and 19, 2010. See also “IMDb: Phil Fondacaro,” http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0284496/, accessed June 28, 2012, and “Sal’s Music Instruction: Meet Sal,” http://www.salsmusicinstruction.com/Meet_Sal.html, accessed June 18, 2012.

  He entered the academy in 1972, toward the end of
the Vietnam War: A year earlier, in 1971, Lieutenant William Calley had been convicted of murdering civilians at My Lai, the New York Times had published the Pentagon Papers, and a Harris poll had shown for the first time that most Americans opposed the war. Doug Linder, “An Introduction to the My Lai Courts-Martial,” http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/Myl_intro.html, accessed July 2, 2012. By 1972, President Richard Nixon had agreed to withdraw seventy thousand troops from Vietnam. Fondacaro recalled that after he and his fellow West Point cadets marched in the Memorial Day parade in New York City during his plebe year, they had to clean the spit off their uniforms. Whether antiwar protesters actually spat on soldiers remains a subject of debate, but other members of Fondacaro’s West Point class have also spoken of being subject to intense hostility, including spitting and egg throwing. See Yochi J. Dreazen, “A Class of Generals,” Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2009. For the controversy over spitting on soldiers, see Jeremy Lembcke, Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: NYU Press, 2000).

  The department has long served as an intellectual incubator: David Cloud and Greg Jaffe, The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army (New York: Crown, 2009), 53–67. Proponents of counterinsurgency who have taught at Sosh include Andrew Krepinevich, author of The Army and Vietnam; John Nagl; and General David Petraeus, who wrote his PhD dissertation while he was an instructor there. See Cloud and Jaffe, The Fourth Star, 61–67, and “Center for a New American Security: Dr. John A. Nagl,” http://www.cnas.org/nagl, accessed July 2, 2012. For a recent example of Sosh’s procounterinsurgency leanings, see Elisabeth Bumiller, “West Point Is Divided on a War Doctrine’s Fate,” New York Times, May 27, 2012.