The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  Fondacaro graduated from West Point in 1976: For more on the West Point Class of 1976, see Dreazen, “A Class of Generals.” For Petraeus, see Cloud and Jaffe, The Fourth Star, 18, and Danielle Burton, “10 Things You Didn’t Know About David Petraeus,” U.S. News & World Report, March 27, 2008.

  He spent thirteen years there, returning to the States intermittently: Fondacaro told me that in addition to the Command and General Staff College, he was chosen to attend the School of Advanced Military Studies and later the U.S. Army War College, receiving three master’s degrees. The work of the Special Technical Operations Division has included what the military calls “offensive information warfare,” such as hacking into the computer and communications networks of American enemies. William M. Arkin, “Phreaking Hacktivists,” Washington Post, January 18, 1999. “Dozens of special access (or ‘black’) programs are monitored” at Special Technical Operations, Arkin writes. “These include the United States’s own hacking activities; strategic psychological, concealment and deception operations; and ‘directed energy warfare.’ The latter includes special weapons and capabilities, such as high-powered microwave weapons, that could be used to disable enemy communications, computing, and the production and distribution of electricity.” Fondacaro said that the organization’s work was very broad, encompassing all government jobs requiring the highest level of classification. In contrast to his time in Korea, he and his colleagues at Special Technical Operations “were very much involved with what was happening in the Middle East,” he told me.

  He knew that Ho Chi Minh had begged the United States: For Ho’s repeated attempts to interest the Americans in Vietnamese liberation in 1945 and 1946, see Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1989), 146–53: Ho “was not asking for independence, just autonomy. No one from the American delegation or any of the other Allied delegations would receive him [at the Paris Peace Conference of 1945]. Ho discovered that Wilson’s self-determination applied only to the Czechs and Poles and other white peoples of Eastern Europe who had been under German and Austro-Hungarian domination, not to the brown and yellow peoples of Asia or to the blacks of Africa. . . . Ho sent Truman and Truman’s first secretary of state, James Byrnes, eleven telegrams and letters of appeal over an eighteen-month period after his establishment of a Vietnamese government in Hanoi. None was acknowledged. . . . He offered to turn Vietnam into ‘a fertile field for American capital and enterprise.’ He hinted that he would give the United States a naval base at Cam Ranh Bay, one of the finest natural deep-water harbors in the world . . . if only the United States would protect the Vietnamese from the French. . . . Ho had been sending his letters and telegrams to a file drawer for historians. The United States had abandoned the Vietnamese and the other peoples of Indochina well before he cited the American Declaration of Independence and the P-38s dipped low over Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi. . . . The State Department classified all of Ho Chi Minh’s letters and telegrams and the memorandum of his last conversation with a first secretary at the Paris embassy Top Secret and locked them away. They were not to be published until a quarter of a century later in the Pentagon Papers.”

  The future soldier he envisioned: Shinseki did not respond to requests for comment; his support for Fondacaro is based on Fondacaro’s account. Fondacaro said he was actually asked to conduct two studies, the first under the auspices of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, and a second commissioned by Shinseki. See Vernon Loeb, “Army Plans Steps to Heighten ‘Warrior Ethos,’ ” Washington Post, September 8, 2003. As Loeb notes, concern over hyperspecialization within the Army intensified after insurgents attacked the 507th Maintenance Company in Nasiriyah, Iraq, in March 2003, killing eleven U.S. soldiers and capturing six, including Private Jessica Lynch. In a more conventional battle, the unit would likely have stayed in the rear, but in Iraq, as the Army was learning, there was no “rear.” An Army investigation found that soldiers in the 507th “were unable to defend themselves because their weapons malfunctioned, possibly due to ‘inadequate individual maintenance in a desert environment.’ ” See also “U.S. Army Official Report on 507th Maintenance Co.: An Nasiriyah, Iraq,” http://www.why-war.com/files/article07102003a.pdf, accessed July 3, 2012.

  But Shinseki was on the wrong side of power: Eric Schmitt, “Pentagon Contradicts General on Iraq Occupation Force’s Size,” New York Times, February 28, 2003, and Thom Shanker, “New Strategy Vindicates Ex-Army Chief Shinseki,” New York Times, January 12, 2007.

  He blamed his failure to make general on Shinseki’s fall: “The problem was I was the prime guy for the Chief of Staff for the Army when the Secretary of Defense had cut his legs out from underneath him,” Fondacaro told me. “So you kind of go down that hole, too. I wasn’t going to get any help from Shinseki. I got the nominations, but there was no way I was going to get” promoted to general.

  An acquaintance from his Ranger days had been tapped: Created in October 2003, the Army counter-IED task force evolved into the Joint IED Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO. Votel is now a lieutenant general; in 2011, he was named head of the Joint Special Operations Command. See also Colonel William G. Adamson, U.S. Army, “An Asymmetric Threat Invokes Strategic Leader Initiative: The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization,” Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Defense University, 2007, and Lieutenant Colonel Richard F. Ellis, Major Richard D. Rogers, USAF, and Lieutenant Commander Bryan M. Cochran, U.S. Navy, “Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO): Tactical Successes Mired in Organizational Chaos; Roadblock in the Counter-IED Fight,” Joint Forces Staff College, Joint and Combined Warfighting School–Intermediate, Class #07-02, March 13, 2007, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA473109, accessed July 3, 2012.

  Votel asked Fondacaro to lead a small group: The group included “about twenty-four Delta operators, plus Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine, and EOD guys, and we were in direct combat with units, helping them with their training,” Fondacaro told me. He learned that commanders were frustrated by massive amounts of information that didn’t add up to meaning. “The intel world has oceans of data. This commander needs a glass of water that’s specific to time, space, and his mission. That’s his problem. He doesn’t have the people that could cull through the ocean to find the drops of water that are relevant to his solution set. And the pathway to that is research.”

  They ranged from the useless to the bizarre: Fondacaro, interviews by author, January 28, 2009, and June 19, 2010. The wackiness of early experimental attempts to counter IEDs in Iraq is legendary and well documented. They included harnessing honeybees to the undercarriage of military vehicles so they could use their well-developed scenting organs to sniff out buried bombs. One soldier mounted a toaster on a long pole attached to the front of his Humvee in the hope of triggering a buried bomb’s heat sensor before the vehicle passed over it, and a high-powered microwave emitter called BlowTorch was sent back when it didn’t work. See Atkinson, “Left of Boom: ‘You Can’t Armor Your Way out of This Problem,’ ” Washington Post, October 2, 2007. “A review of 70 IED countermeasures found that only half had been tested in the US before being shipped overseas, and that fewer than one-third were evaluated after arriving in the theater,” Atkinson wrote.

  As he listened to the contractors pitch it: McFate and Fondacaro, interviews by author, January 28, 2009, and Fondacaro, interview by author, June 19, 2010. McFate did not accompany Cultural Preparation of the Environment into the field for the first time. That job fell to a contractor from the MITR Corporation, a major nonprofit government and defense organization that helped develop it, and Andrea Jackson, who was charged with gathering cultural and demographic information for the database. Jackson worked for the Lincoln Group, the Pentagon contractor best known for planting pro-U.S. news stories in Iraqi media outlets, where they were passed off as independent reporting. The Lincoln Group already had a network of Iraqi employees in Baghdad, some of whom were
sent to conduct on-the-ground research in Diyala, which was then loaded onto the Cultural Preparation of the Environment laptop. It remains unclear what the researchers told people from whom they gathered the information for CPE about who they represented and where it would end up. Some observers have also alleged that their data was falsified. Lamb et. al., “Human Terrain Team Performance: An Explanation, draft,” forthcoming 2013, 32. For Lincoln’s propaganda work, see Mark Mazzetti and Borzou Daragahi, “U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press,” Los Angeles Times, November 30, 2005; and http://www.democracynow.org/2006/8/21/i_was_a_propaganda_intern_in; http://harpers.org/archive/2006/09/0081195. For Jackson’s Lincoln affiliation, see Jackson and McFate, “An Organizational Solution for DOD’s Cultural Knowledge Needs,” Military Review, July–August 2005, and Unclassified Briefing on Cultural Preparation of the Environment, February 2006.

  That Arab brides painted their hands with henna before marriage: Social scientists “love studying . . . marriage practices,” Fondacaro told me. “But the commander will say, ‘What the fuck? So what?’ ” Social science alone wasn’t enough, he believed. It had to be tailored to the commander’s needs.

  With violence intensifying in Iraq: During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush repeatedly stated his belief that the military should not be involved in nation building. “I’m worried about an opponent who uses nation building and the military in the same sentence,” he said in November 2000. His public statements began to change as early as 2003, when he told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute: “We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more. America has made and kept this kind of commitment before—in the peace that followed a world war. After defeating enemies, we did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments. We established an atmosphere of safety, in which responsible, reform-minded local leaders could build lasting institutions of freedom. In societies that once bred fascism and militarism, liberty found a permanent home.” See David E. Sanger, “Rivals Differ on U.S. Role in the World,” New York Times, October 30, 2000, and Terry M. Neal, “Bush Backs Into Nation Building,” Washington Post, February 26, 2003.

  Given the paltriness of America’s civilian: Budget cuts in the years after the Cold War gutted the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), forcing steep reductions in staff. By 2006, civilian agencies had received only 1.4 percent of total U.S. funding in Iraq and Afghanistan, “whereas classical counterinsurgency doctrine says that eighty per cent of the effort should be nonmilitary,” the journalist George Packer has noted. During Vietnam, USAID had fifteen thousand employees; by 2006, it had two thousand. “To staff the embassy in Baghdad, the State Department has had to steal officers from other embassies, and the government can’t even fill the provincial reconstruction teams it has tried to set up in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Packer wrote. “While correcting these shortages could not have prevented the deepening disaster in Iraq, they betray the government’s priorities.” A 2004 attempt by senators Richard Lugar and Joe Biden to set up a nation-building office within the State Department was strongly supported by the military, but the office never gained much traction, receiving only $7 million of the $100 million requested by the administration. Packer, “Knowing the Enemy: Can Social Scientists Redefine the ‘War on Terror’?” New Yorker, December 18, 2006.

  That year, “stability operations”: Department of Defense Directive Number 3000.05, “Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations,” November 28, 2005. General Colin Powell outlined the so-called Powell Doctrine after the Persian Gulf War, when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; it was based in part on his experience as a young officer in Vietnam. In 1992, he presciently suggested that the military should not be given confusing missions—advice that was ignored in Iraq and Afghanistan. “When the political objective is important, clearly defined and understood, when the risks are acceptable, and when the use of force can be effectively combined with diplomatic and economic policies, then clear and unambiguous objectives must be given to the armed forces,” Powell wrote. “We owe it to the men and women who go in harm’s way to make sure that this is always the case and that their lives are not squandered for unclear purposes. Military men and women recognize more than most people that not every situation will be crystal clear. We can and do operate in murky, unpredictable circumstances. But we also recognize that military force is not always the right answer. If force is used imprecisely or out of frustration rather than clear analysis, the situation can be made worse.” Colin L. Powell, “U.S. Forces: Challenges Ahead,” Foreign Affairs, Winter 1992–1993, http://www.cfr.org/world/us-forces-challenges-ahead/p7508, accessed July 4, 2012. The so-called Rumsfeld Doctrine, which favored a smaller, faster force with fewer troops and more technology, was also much at play in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly during the initial invasions. See Julian E. Barnes, “Army Gives Rumsfeld Doctrine a Rewrite,” Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2006, and Bruce Nussbaum, “It’s Time to Shelve the Rumsfeld Doctrine,” BusinessWeek, April 25, 2004, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2004-04-25/commentary-its-time-to-shelve-the-rumsfeld-doctrine, accessed July 4, 2012.

  In the short term, stability operations would provide security: Department of Defense Directive 3000.05 (2005), 2.

  Commanders were instructed to draft requirements: Ibid., 9. Commanders were ordered to include information on “key ethnic, cultural, religious, tribal, economic and political relationships, non-military security forces, infrastructure, sanitation and health structure, munitions facilities, border controls, and customs processes” in their intelligence campaign plans.

  Intelligence products had to bring together: According to a later revision of the directive, Department of Defense Instruction, Number 3000.05, “Stability Operations,” September 16, 2009, 15. This directive, issued under the signature of Michèle Flournoy, who was until 2012 Obama’s procounterinsurgency Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, highlights some ways in which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan changed and expanded the military’s definition of intelligence.

  That year, Maxie McFarland: Maxie McFarland, “Military Cultural Education,” Military Review, March–April 2005, 62–69.

  In McFarland’s prose, it became a solid thing: According to McFarland: “The emerging importance of cultural identity and its inherent frictions make it imperative for soldiers and leaders—military and civilian—to understand societal and cultural norms of populaces in which they operate and function. They must appreciate, understand, and respect those norms and use them as tools for shaping operations and the effects they expect to achieve.” McFarland, “Military Cultural Education,” 62. Emphasis is mine.

  McFarland had worked on the counter-IED task force: McFarland served as a special adviser to retired General Montgomery Meigs, who took over as director of the Joint IED Defeat Task Force in December 2005. The Foreign Military Studies Office, like the Human Terrain System, falls under the intelligence directorate of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. See Adamson, “An Asymmetric Threat Invokes Strategic Leader Initiative,” 48, and http://www.tradoc.army.mil/OrgChart.asp, accessed July 4, 2012.

  Kipp saw enough potential in the project to want to keep track of it: Kipp, interview by author, July 2, 2010. Kipp told me the office had no funding for such an ambitious project, but he agreed to pay Smith’s travel costs to attend meetings and get to know the players.

  Smith was an ambitious, fast-talking Army reserve captain: Details of Don Smith’s biography and his involvement with the Human Terrain System here and below are from Don Smith, interview by author, February 19, 2013; Jacob Kipp, Lester W. Grau, Karl Prinslow, and Don Smith, “The Human System: A CORDS for the 21st Century,” Military Review, September–October 2006; and “Speaker Biographies: Rule of Law and Governance as Stabilization Tools,” April 16–17, 2008.

  he came up with the idea for the program at his kitchen
table: McFate told me that her notion at the time was “kind of vague . . . nothing as specific as HTS,” but she told the story as a way of explaining the program’s evolution. The same anecdote has been recorded elsewhere: “She wrote on a cocktail napkin: ‘How do I make anthropology relevant to the military?’ ” Noah Shachtman, “Montgomery McFate: Use Anthropology in Military Planning,” Wired, September 22, 2008. For Fondacaro’s claim that it was his idea to embed civilian social scientists with combat units, Fondacaro, interview by author, June 19, 2010, and David Rohde, “Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones,” New York Times, October 5, 2007.

  McFate had written about the Army’s need: McFate and Jackson, “An Organizational Solution for DOD’s Cultural Knowledge Needs,” 18–21. McFate and Jackson argued for the creation of a “specialized organization” in the Defense Department that would conduct field research, gather cultural and ethnographic information about far corners of the world, and disseminate it to the U.S. military. Instead of reading nineteenth-century British ethnographies or searching for cultural and demographic information on Google, military staff officers would be able to turn to a group of “social scientists having strong connections to the services and combatant commands.” The organization could conduct sociocultural studies on “areas of interest” to the Defense Department and analyze cultural lessons drawn from twenty-first-century Iraq, where the British used cultural knowledge to organize “local councils to co-opt the tribal sheiks in Basra.”

  After the fall of the Soviet Union, the office had developed: Karl Prinslow, interview by author, July 12, 2010.

  The first was the World Basic Information Library: Unless otherwise noted, information about the World Basic Information Library in this section is from Prinslow, interview by author, July 12, 2010, and Prinslow, “The World Basic Information Library Program,” Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, October–December 2005, 51–53.