The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  A few years later, when the Foreign Military Studies Office’s Soviet expert: Kipp, interview by author, July 2, 2010. The reservist who joined AF1 was Captain Roya Sharifsoltani. See Mike Belt, “Military Veteran: Knowing War Zone’s Culture Important,” LJWorld.com, November 16, 2007, http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/nov/16/military_veteran_knowing_war_zones_culture_importa/, accessed July 16, 2012.

  Since 2005, the Foreign Military Studies Office: Jerome E. Dobson, “AGS Conducts Fieldwork in Mexico,” Ubique: Notes from the American Geographical Society 26, no. 1 (February 2006), and “México Indígena: Final Report (Short Version for the Web),” http://uaslp.academia.edu/MiguelRobledo/Papers/1073836/THE_AGS_BOWMAN_EXPEDITIONS_PROTOTYPE_DIGITAL_GEOGRAPHY_OF_INDIGENOUS_MEXICO, accessed September 15, 2012.

  the project was the brainchild of Jerome E. Dobson: CV of Jerome E. Dobson, http://www2.ku.edu/~geography/peoplepages/Dobson_D.shtml, accessed July 6, 2012.

  Dobson viewed geography as a key source of intelligence: Jerome E. Dobson, “Foreign Intelligence Is Geography,” Ubique: Notes from the American Geographical Society 25, no. 1 (March 2005).

  In 2006, Dobson and other members: Jerome E. Dobson, “Fort Leavenworth Hosts AGS Council,” Ubique: Notes from the American Geographic Society 27, no. 3 (December 2006).

  With the Bowman Expeditions, Dobson: The United States and its allies won the war, but for most Americans, geography was reduced to the study of maps and capitals. Geography lost public support and almost disappeared from academia after World War II, Dobson wrote, in part because a German geographer had served as Hitler’s chief geopolitical strategist. In 2006, Dobson wrote of his concern that geography was losing out to cultural anthropology in the contest to influence national policy. He made no secret of his view that geography could and should be used to improve intelligence. The Bowman Expeditions, he wrote, “came about because I, like so many others, am troubled over intelligence failures and bipartisan blunders that lead to conflict. Most of the missing knowledge is not secret, insider information that should be classified. What’s missing is open source geography of the type we teach routinely in regional geography courses, and it’s based on the type of fieldwork and data analyses that geographers do routinely in every region on earth. I firmly believe the only remedy is to bring geography back to its rightful place in higher education, science policy, and public policy circles.” Later, the American Geographical Society and the Bowman Expedition geographers would seek to distance themselves from the Human Terrain System. In 2009, after a nongovernmental organization representative and a group of geographers criticized members of the first expedition, México Indígena, for allegedly failing to tell Mexicans whose land they surveyed that the research was funded by the Department of Defense, the Geographical Society wrote: “The program has never requested nor has it received any funding from the controversial Human Terrain System (HTS) program, whose design differs in crucial ways from our posted guidelines.” See Dobson, “Foreign Intelligence Is Geography,” 2; “AGS Conducts Fieldwork in Mexico,” 2; and “The American Geographical Society’s Bowman Expeditions Seek to Improve Geographic Understanding at Home and Abroad: Spotlight on México Indígena,” http://www.amergeog.org/newsrelease/bowmanPR-en.pdf, accessed July 6, 2012.

  Don Smith had met with then-Colonel John W. “Mick” Nicholson: Smith told me the meeting actually took place in the fall of 2005. Smith, interview by author, February 19, 2013. See also Lamb et al., “Human Terrain Team Performance: An Explanation, draft,” forthcoming, 2013, 36.

  That summer, Smith and others at the Foreign Military Studies Office: Prinslow, interview by author, July 12, 2010, and Smith, interview by author, February 19, 2013. Prinslow looked to his World Basic Information Library network for qualified reservists, but the library was never envisioned as an operational group whose members would be sent to a conflict zone. Until then, they had essentially been doing Internet research.

  That fall, the men of the Foreign Military Studies Office: Kipp et al., “The Human System: A CORDS for the 21st Century,” 8–15.

  In the years when the Human Terrain System was being developed: Rick Atkinson, “Iraq Will Be Petraeus’s Knot to Untie,” Washington Post, January 7, 2007.

  Petraeus saw the move: Cloud and Jaffe, The Fourth Star, 216–17.

  Between 2005, when he arrived at Leavenworth: John A. Nagl, “Foreword to the University of Chicago Press Edition,” The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), xiv.

  It argued that in this new, old kind of war: The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 39–40.

  “Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is”: Ibid., 48–50.

  The manual brought together military intellectuals: Sarah Sewall, “Introduction to the University of Chicago Press Edition: A Radical Field Manual,” ibid., xxi, xxv–xxvi.

  The manual was a barn burner: Nagl, “Foreword,” ibid., xvii. Copies of the manual were found in Taliban training camps in Pakistan, Nagl notes.

  It laid out a plan for winning over Iraqis and Afghans: In an unprecedented effort to invest American civil society in the strategy, the military invited “journalists, human rights advocates, academics” and others to vet a draft of the manual, Nagl wrote. “James Fallows, of the Atlantic Monthly, commented at the end of the conference that he had never seen such an open transfer of ideas in any institution, and stated that the nation would be better for more such exchanges.” Conrad Crane, the manual’s master conductor, was featured in Newsweek as a “Man to Watch” in 2007. Ibid., xvi–xvii. See also Cloud and Jaffe, The Fourth Star, 218–20.

  This would turn out to be a winning strategy: When General Stanley McChrystal was asked to assess the Afghan war in 2009, he recruited a team of Washington intellectuals, strategists, and policy makers to help sell his argument back home.

  What the manual downplayed: See U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 174–77. Although the manual does not draw attention to the role of lethal force, General Stanley McChrystal’s terrorist-targeting teams were arguably as important to stabilizing Iraq as the development projects and political negotiations undertaken by surge troops. Between the summer of 2010 and the spring of 2011, at the height of the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, Petraeus doubled the number of kill/capture missions in that country. Classical counterinsurgency had been all but abandoned in Afghanistan for lack of political will by mid-2011, but there is no question that the strategy is inherently schizoid in nature. In Afghanistan in 2010, Michael Hastings reported hearing General McChrystal tell a Navy SEAL: “ ‘You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight. . . . I’m going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though.’ ” Intelligence gathered in counterinsurgency can help soldiers decide where it is best to build a school, but it also tells them who to kill. If the intelligence is good, it may lead to killing fewer people, supporting the notion that counterinsurgency is a more precise and humane way of war. But if it is flawed, the detentions and killings remain as inhumane as they would be in any conventional fight. See “Iraq After the Surge I: The New Sunni Landscape,” International Crisis Group, Middle East Report N°74, April 30, 2008, 2; “Kill/Capture,” PBS Frontline, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kill-capture/, accessed July 6, 2012, and transcript, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/afghanistan-pakistan/kill-capture/transcript/, accessed July 6, 2012; and Michael Hastings, “The Runaway General,” Rolling Stone, July 8–22, 2010.

  Montgomery McFate’s articles: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010.

  “If you don’t get it about this stuff”: General Petraeus, interview by author, October 31, 2010.

  McFate’s contribution to the manual turned out to be substantial: The intelligence chapter’s lead author was Kyle Teamey, a former Army intelligence captain who had graduated from Dartmouth, served with John Nagl in Iraq, and later helped develop the DARPA intelligence system TIGR. Team
ey pulled the chapter together while studying for a master’s at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. About thirty-five people contributed to the chapter in some way, he told me, and pointed out McFate’s submission on pages 84–100. Teamey, interview by author, August 25, 2010. See also Kyle Teamey and Jonathan Sweet, “Organizing Intelligence for Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, September–October 2006, 24–29; Mari Maeda, “TIGR: An Introduction,” DARPA, March 2010; and “Liquid Light: About Us,” http://liquidlightinc.com/about.html#teamey, accessed July 6, 2012.

  an active local insurgency led by Jalaluddin Haqqani: For more on the Haqqanis and their history with the Americans, see Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 157; Mark Mazzetti, Scott Shane, and Alissa J. Rubin, “Brutal Haqqani Crime Clan Bedevils U.S. in Afghanistan,” New York Times, September 24, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/world/asia/brutal-haqqani-clan-bedevils-united-states-in-afghanistan.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all; and Dan Froomkin, “Jalaluddin Haqqani, Once CIA’s ‘Blue-Eyed Boy,’ Now Top Scourge for U.S. in Afghanistan,” Huffington Post, October 7, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/07/haqqani-network-afghanistan_n_987762.html. For Sirajuddin, see http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorinfo/sirajuddin-haqqani/view, accessed August 12, 2012.

  Smith left the Human Terrain System: Smith and Fondacaro disagreed about how to take the project forward. For the initial $20 million from the Joint IED Defeat Organization, McFate and Fondacaro, “Reflections on the Human Terrain System During the First Four Years,” 66, and Lamb et al., “Human Terrain Team Performance: An Explanation, draft,” forthcoming, 2013, 37.

  Fondacaro’s old friend Votel: Lamb et al., “Human Terrain Team Performance: An Explanation, draft,” forthcoming, 2013, 41.

  It was there, in the fertile bowl-shaped plateau and the mountains: Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin, 2004), 156–57, and Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Islam, Oil, and the New Great Game in Central Asia (New York: Tauris, 2000), 132.

  In 1986, bin Laden had established: Rashid, Taliban, 132, and Coll, Ghost Wars, 157.

  Years later, he would issue a fatwa from Khost: Rashid, Taliban, 134.

  At least twenty-one presumed jihadist volunteers died: Coll, Ghost Wars, 409–11, and Rashid, Taliban, 134. For the revival of the Khost training camps, Mark Fineman, Bob Drogin, and Josh Meyer, “Camps Are Rubble but Their Threat Remains,” Los Angeles Times, December 18, 2001.

  Some of the September 11 hijackers trained in Khost: For a detailed description of Khost as a place whose history “reads like a timeline of the ‘global war on terror,’ ” see Steve Featherstone, “Human Quicksand: For U.S. Army, a Crash Course in Cultural Studies,” Harper’s, September 2008, 61. For Khost as a training ground for U.S. hijackers, see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/afghanistan-pakistan/kill-capture/transcript/.

  The members of AF1, as the team was known: Tracy, interviews by author, December 15, 2009, and December 15, 2012.

  In one community, Tracy pointed out: The community with more widows than usual was in Ghazni Province. Tracy, interview by author, December 15, 2012. See also Rohde, “Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones,” and Scott Peterson, “U.S. Army’s Strategy in Afghanistan: Better Anthropology,” Christian Science Monitor, September 7, 2007.

  It was a good idea, but one that: See Mazzetti, Shane, and Rubin, “Brutal Haqqani Crime Clan Bedevils U.S. in Afghanistan.”

  The Human Terrain Team connected soldiers with local leaders: Gezari, “The Base, the Mosque and the Olive Trees,” Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, February 18, 2010, http://pulitzercenter.org/blog/untold-stories/afghanistan-base-mosque-and-olive-trees, accessed July 6, 2012.

  ‘It may be one less trigger that has to be pulled here’: Peterson, “U.S. Army’s Strategy in Afghanistan.”

  She was ‘taking the population and dissecting it’: Ibid.

  Colonel Schweitzer would become: A later iteration of the brigade’s Human Terrain Team included Michael Bhatia, a young scholar who had done extensive and impressive research on warring factions and security policy in Afghanistan and was one of the most qualified people ever to deploy with a Human Terrain Team. Bhatia was killed in Khost in 2008. Schweitzer called him “the smartest human being I’ve ever spoken to in my life.” Schweitzer, interview by author, July 14, 2009.

  He credited Tracy and her team with reducing: This was a bit of rhetorical sophistry. To make the statement accurate, Schweitzer would have had to serve two tours in Khost that were identical in every way except for the presence of the Human Terrain Team. A million factors, from weather to political unrest, economic conditions, and the timing of religious holidays, can affect the level of violence, making it all but impossible to attribute such a large reduction in combat operations to a single factor. Tracy agreed that the drop in fighting during her team’s tenure in Khost proved only “correlation,” not “causality.” Tracy, interview by author, December 15, 2012. For Schweitzer’s comments, see “Statement of Colonel Martin P. Schweitzer, Commander, 4/82 Airborne Brigade Combat Team, United States Army, Before the House Armed Services Committee, Terrorism & Unconventional Threats Sub-Committee and the Research & Education Sub-Committee of the Science & Technology Committee,” 110th Congress, 2nd Session, Hearings on the Role of the Social and Behavioral Sciences in National Security, April 24, 2008.

  By the fall of 2007, the Defense Department: Rohde, “Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones.” McFate says the request to expand came earlier, in the spring of 2007, just as Fondacaro returned from escorting AF1 to Khost. Although Schweitzer’s praise for the team clearly could not have impressed the military in February 2007, since he was just beginning to work with them then, his remains one of the clearest and strongest military endorsements the project has received.

  Chapter 3: The Tender Soldier

  In September 2008, Paula Loyd boarded a Chinook: Loyd and her Human Terrain teammates arrived in Afghanistan on September 20, 2008, and flew out to Maiwand about a week later. Don Ayala, interview by author, August 19, 2009. The description of the landscape is drawn from my notes and photographs during flights from Kandahar to Maiwand in early 2009 and late 2010.

  She had spent her early childhood in Alamo Heights: Gretchen Wiker, interview by author, January 7, 2013; Susanna Barton, interview by author, January 17, 2013; Patty Ward, interviews by author, February 15, 2009, and December 14, 2012. For more on her childhood in Alamo Heights here and below, “Paula Loyd: A Worthwhile Life,” self-published memorial book, 2009.

  Loyd was an only child: Her full name was Paula Gene Loyd. She was named after her father and her maternal uncle, Eugene. Patty Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012. That she became known as a peacemaker, and for the story of her giving toys to her half brother’s kids, Paul Loyd, Jr., interview by author, February 15, 2009. “They always fought over toys like starving dogs would over table scraps,” Paul Loyd told me of his children. “Paula’s first efforts at conflict resolution were with them.” For Loyd’s father’s World War II service, see “Paul Loyd, Sr.: Obituary,” San Antonio Express-News, http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sanantonio/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=142309053. Accessed October 5, 2012.

  Loyd’s mother sent her to a Montessori school: “She liked structure: ‘This is your job, get it done.’ She worked very well under those circumstances,” Patty Ward told me. “She had a hard time with Montessori when she was little because this room was real open, and you just had to go pick out and do what you wanted to do.” Ward, interviews by author, February 15, 2009, and December 14, 2012.

  Later, she would struggle with math: Stefanie Johnson, one of Loyd’s friends from college, noted: “It’s no wonder that the woman who could see numbers as people and pluses and minuses as the relationship between them would choose a major that is all about different people in the world. Anthropology was her love.” Funeral of Paula Loyd, San Antonio, 2009.

  She was quirky and bright, a ravenous reader: Ward, interview by author, Decembe
r 14, 2012, and Barton, interview by author, January 17, 2013.

  Loyd was different from Barton: Barton, interview by author, January 17, 2013.

  At eight or nine, Loyd and Barton started an animal rescue group: Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012.

  Loyd’s childhood home in Alamo Heights had a broad winding staircase: Information about Loyd’s childhood here and below is from Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012; Barton, interview by author, January 17, 2013; and Wiker, interview by author, January 7, 2013.

  Gretchen Wiker was a recent transplant: Wiker, interview by author, January 7, 2013.

  In some ways, Loyd was a typical preteen girl: For Loyd’s earrings and high ’80s style, edgy haircuts, and mall crushes, “Paula Loyd: A Worthwhile Life.”

  When Loyd was about thirteen, her parents divorced: “We moved to St. Thomas because she said, ‘I want to live somewhere where you’re a different color, and see how people treat you.’ St. Thomas is 90 percent black.” Ward, interview by author, February 15, 2009. That Ward told her, “You’re a minority already,” Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012.

  “She’s basically always been an anthropologist”: Ward, interview by author, February 15, 2009.

  It was Ward who made her get out: Ward, interviews by author, February 15, 2009, and December 14, 2012, and Ward, “Dear Darlin’ Daughter,” in “Paula Loyd: A Worthwhile Life.”

  But after two years, Loyd began to worry that the island school: Ward, interviews by author, February 15, 2009, and December 14, 2012, and “Choate Grad Paula Loyd ’90 Passes Away,” The News (student newspaper of Choate Rosemary Hall), February 20, 2009, http://thenews.choate.edu/archives/2009/02/20/News/Choate_Grad_Paula_Loyd_90_.php, accessed October 5, 2012. See also Farah Stockman, “Anthropologist’s War Death Reverberates,” The Boston Globe, February 12, 2009.