The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  Even if they hadn’t exactly wanted to die: McFate, interview by author, December 17, 2009. See also Burleigh, “McFate’s Mission”: “ ‘After all of those people died, I was like, whoa, this has to end, I can’t be involved in this anymore.’ ”

  Actually, Nietzsche famously wrote that hope: Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, http://www.lexido.com/EBOOK_TEXTS/HUMAN_ALL_TOO_HUMAN_BOOK_ONE_.aspx?S=71. Accessed March 4, 2013.

  When she talked about choosing life over death: Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1954), 562–63.

  Moral dogmatism was “naïve”: Ibid., 490–91.

  Like McFate, for whom the realization that different perspectives: Ibid., 501: “My demand upon the philosopher is known, that he take his stand beyond good and evil and leave the illusion of moral judgment beneath himself.” I interpret Nietzsche’s “demand” as an injunction to readers in general. McFate told me: “When you’re little, you live in a very circumscribed environment and there is an assumption that reality ends at the borders of your perception. But it’s quite a moment when you realize that no, there are multiple realities and everybody in the world has their own, and it’s infinite. In a way, it’s kind of what leads to anthropology: the recognition that your perceived reality in the way in which you organize your experience in the world is just one possibility among an infinite number of possibilities. And, also not to judge, because there is no right answer. What worked for my mother and what worked for the people that I grew up with in that crazy community at Gate 5, it was their personal choice and it was what they wanted and it was the right thing for them. It wasn’t the only way, and it wasn’t the right way.” McFate, interview by author, December 17, 2009.

  “One has renounced the great life”: Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 465, 489.

  For a time, their interest centered on the Donner Party: McFate, interview by author, December 17, 2009, and “American Experience: The Donner Party,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/introduction/donner-introduction/, accessed June 13, 2012.

  McFate spent two years in community college: McFate, interviews by author, December 17, 2009, and June 30, 2010; Tate, interview by Sara Breselor, July 20, 2012. See also Stannard, “Montgomery McFate’s Mission,” and Burleigh, “McFate’s Mission.” Frances Carlough’s obituary, Marin Independent Journal, September 4, 1985, is at http://www.sfgenealogy.com/boards/mcobits/archive8/9889.html, accessed July 25, 2012. McFate is identified in the obituary by her nickname, Mitzy.

  Berkeley had a democratic education program: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010, and “DeCal,” http://www.decal.org/, accessed June 13, 2012. For more on “Punks on Film,” see “Mitzy,” http://www.vicious-world.de/0002.htm, accessed June 15, 2012.

  The morality of the Nazis intrigued McFate less: “I was more interested in the mechanisms than I was in the moral equation of it,” McFate told me. “I was more interested in how [the Nazis] did it, and not trying to make a judgment about the rightness or wrongness of it, because I think we can all say that it’s just flat out morally wrong.”

  Liberal Berkeley kids partying on their parents’ dime: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010. See also Burleigh, “McFate’s Mission”: “McFate had little use for students ‘living there and taking acid on their parents’ money.’ . . .”

  In Northern Ireland, she visited the Milltown Cemetery: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010.

  Back home, she got a job at Chapel of the Chimes: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010. See also “Chapel of the Chimes Oakland: Our History,” http://oakland.chapelofthechimes.com/about-us/our-history, accessed July 25, 2012.

  Since 1949, the university: The Human Relations Area Files evolved from the Institute of Human Relations, founded at Yale in 1929. In 1937, “a small group of researchers attempted to design a system for classifying or indexing the cultural, behavioral, and background information on a society,” according to the organization’s website. The institute tailored its research to the needs of and supplied information to the U.S. military and intelligence communities during and after World War II. David Price, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 91–92; David Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 77–78; and “Human Relations Area Files: About HRAF: History & Development,” http://www.yale.edu/hraf/about.htm, accessed June 14, 2012.

  “traveler, raconteur, casual pistol-shot”: Thomas Barfield, The Dictionary of Anthropology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 170. Evans-Pritchard was a complex figure. John Middleton, his former student, remembered him as much more nuanced and sensitive to the problems of colonialism than Barfield’s description suggests. “You’ve got to remember that when Evans-Pritchard was young, he was a Marxist—probably a parlour one,” Middleton said in 1999. “So to accuse him of being a dirty colonialist reptile is silly; he was nothing of the sort. He did accept, I suppose, that the colonial empire was there, and the people on the ground who ran it were usually ‘gentlemen.’ I think to accuse people like him of consciously abetting a colonial system is naïve and self-serving. . . . I remember being taught by Evans-Pritchard, Fortes, and Forde that our mere presence in another community alters that community, that the community’s own members share the task of ethnography with us. . . .” Indeed, Middleton himself appears, by the end of his life, to have grown sharply critical of the imperialism he observed as an officer in the British Army in Africa. “There was a colonial system in power. It was a very unpleasant one and a very immoral one—nobody had any right to rule over and to preach to other people,” he said. “But it was there. It doesn’t help to shout about it today in order to feel morally superior. . . . The administrators were in the main humane and decent people, but they were caught up in a horrible situation.” He also viewed the cultural knowledge gathered by colonial administrators with disdain: “It’s comic now when you go back and see how the British misinterpreted what they saw. . . . Looking back, it’s antediluvian the views that people had of Africa.” Deborah Pellow, “An Interview with John Middleton,” Current Anthropology 40, no. 2 (April 1999), 220, 228–29.

  He led Anuak tribes against the Italians: Barfield, The Dictionary of Anthropology, 170. “As anthropology,” Barfield writes, Evans-Pritchard’s book on Libya “fails.” But as “political manifesto the book worked.”

  “It helped of course that most of my research”: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “Some Reminiscences and Reflections on Fieldwork,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 4 (1973), 10–11. Thanks to the anthropologist Tom Fricke for assigning this in his “Almost Ethnography” course at the University of Michigan, which I had the pleasure of auditing as a Knight-Wallace Fellow in 2011.

  Instead, a key question of the colonial era absorbed her: Anthropology of that era “doesn’t necessarily decontextualize the society from the position of a British colonial administrator,” McFate told me. “He doesn’t need to understand the deeper nuances of the penis gourd. He needs to understand how to administer.” See also Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1990), 1–5.

  “We say in anthropology”: It’s worth noting that even when McFate was in graduate school, some anthropologists were writing about conflict, including Jeffrey A. Sluka, whose book about Northern Ireland she read during her research, and Allen Feldman, whose work she greatly admired. Other anthropologists, however, have also been accused of writing war out of their ethnographies, notably Clifford Geertz. See Price, Anthropological Intelligence, xi, 283.

  Her first draft, she told me: “I’m not writing a dissertation to say that the IRA are right or the British are right, so if you sense a kind of moral ambiguity in there, that’s because I was undertaking this as a scientific
project, not as a moral project,” McFate told me. “It’s my role to refrain from judgment, to be a cultural relativist, or if I have a [moral] position, not to drag it in, because it’s irrelevant to what I’m writing about as science.”

  whether “good anthropology” might lead to “better killing”: Montgomery Cybele Carlough, “Pax Britannica: British Counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland, 1969–1982” (PhD diss., Yale University, December 1994), 156. “To know is to love,” McFate wrote, “but during wartime to know is also to kill.”

  During her final year there, a friend: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010. See also Burleigh, “McFate’s Mission.” McFate and Sapone married on New Year’s Eve 1997 and divorced in 2010. Sapone declined my request for an interview; my account of their life together is drawn from interviews with McFate.

  While Sapone worked, McFate learned to cook: Montgomery Sapone, “Have Rifle With Scope, Will Travel: The Global Economy of Mercenary Violence,” California Western International Law Journal 30, no. 1 (Fall 1999), 1–43.

  worked for her mother-in-law’s company for a time: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010, and James Ridgeway, Daniel Schulman, and David Corn, “There’s Something About Mary: Unmasking a Gun Lobby Mole,” Mother Jones, July 30, 2008. McFate says she only worked for her then mother-in-law’s company for eight or nine months while in Germany and after she and Sean returned to the States.

  She moved on to the RAND Corporation: For Mead, Benedict, and the Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures project under the auspices of the Office of Naval Research, see “The Institute for Intercultural Studies: Postscript to September 11—What Would Margaret Mead Say?” http://www.interculturalstudies.org/Mead/beeman.html, accessed June 14, 2012. See also Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux, eds., The Study of Culture at a Distance (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), and Montgomery McFate, “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious Relationship,” Military Review, March–April 2005, 32.

  She sought out officials working on: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010, and David Kilcullen, interview by author, September 14, 2010.

  McFate eventually started a blog: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010. See also Sharon Weinberger, “Do Pentagon Studs Make You Want to Bite Your Fist?” Wired, Danger Room, June 17, 2008, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/06/do-pentagon-stu/, accessed June 15, 2012; and Louisa Kamps, “Army Brat,” Elle, April 2008.

  ‘I don’t have any facts about that’: The commander was General Thomas D. Waldhauser, according to McFate.

  Somewhere along the way, she heard Hriar Cabayan’s name: McFate, interviews by author, January 28, 2009, and June 30, 2010, and Hriar Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009.

  McFate and Cabayan weren’t the only ones: See, for example, Ike Skelton and Jim Cooper, “You’re Not From Around Here, Are You?” Joint Forces Quarterly, January 2005.

  In 2005, the CIA posted an employment ad: David Price, “America the Ambivalent,” Anthropology Today 21, no. 5 (December 2005), and Roberto J. González, “We Must Fight the Militarization of Anthropology,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2, 2007. See also Seymour M. Hersh, “The Gray Zone,” New Yorker, May 24, 2004.

  Anthropologists tend to be overwhelmingly politically liberal: One 2003 survey found that among anthropologists, Democrats outnumbered Republicans as many as thirty to one. Other studies of social scientists’ political leanings have found the imbalance less striking but still significant: “we estimated that the Democratic–Republican ratio for active social-science and humanities faculty nationwide is probably at least 8:1,” according to one. In a survey of members of academic anthropological and sociological associations, researchers found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans twenty-one to one. See “Survey Project: Policy Views of Academics: Excel File of the Democrat to Republican Ratios,” http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/klein/survey.htm, accessed June 15, 2012; Christopher F. Cardiff and Daniel B. Klein, “Faculty Partisan Affiliations in All Disciplines: A Voter-Registration Study,” Critical Review 17, nos. 3–4 (2006), 239; and Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern, “Professors and Their Politics: The Policy Views of Social Scientists,” Critical Review 17, nos. 3–4 (2006), 263–64.

  Beginning in 2007, a small group of anthropologists: For several years, McFate had been publishing articles in military journals about the need for anthropology in contemporary counterinsurgency, including McFate, “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency,” and McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture,” Joint Forces Quarterly 38 (July 2005). The public exchange between McFate and critical anthropologists began in 2007, with González, “Towards Mercenary Anthropology?” Anthropology Today 23, no. 3 (June 2007), 14–19. Responses from McFate and Kilcullen appeared in the same issue of Anthropology Today. The Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which believes that “anthropologists should not engage in research and other activities that contribute to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq or in related theaters in the ‘war on terror’ ” and that “anthropologists should refrain from directly assisting the US military in combat, be it through torture, interrogation, or tactical advice,” was also born in the summer of 2007. See “Network of Concerned Anthropologists: Download the Pledge,” https://sites.google.com/site/concernedanthropologists/, accessed June 15, 2012; and Network of Concerned Anthropologists, The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual: Or, Notes on Demilitarizing American Society (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009), 18.

  The first was that deploying social scientists to war zones: “Because HTS identifies anthropology and anthropologists with U.S. military operations, this identification—given the existing range of globally dispersed understandings of U.S. militarism—may create serious difficulties for, including grave risks to the personal safety of, many non-HTS anthropologists and the people they study.” “American Anthropological Association Executive Board Statement on the Human Terrain System Project,” http://www.aaanet.org/issues/policy-advocacy/Statement-on-HTS.cfm, accessed June 15, 2012. For specific reference to intelligence work and the danger of anthropologists being viewed as spies, see Andrew Bickford, “Anthropology and HUMINT,” Network of Concerned Anthropologists, The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, 135–51.

  that, on principle, anthropology should not be used: Marshall Sahlins, “Preface,” Network of Concerned Anthropologists, The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, v–vii. See also González, Hugh Gusterson, and David Price, “Introduction: War, Culture, and Counterinsurgency,” 8–20, and Greg Feldman, “Radical or Reactionary? The Old Wine in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual’s New Flask,” The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, 77–80.

  The last, and in some ways the most compelling: I am paraphrasing the anthropologist Hugh Gusterson here, from the documentary film Human Terrain, produced and directed by James Der Derian, David Udris, and Michael Udris (2010): “Most anthropologists these days see culture as something that’s fluid, that’s contested, it’s constantly changing, it’s very difficult to define. So there used to be a time in the fifties when academic anthropologists thought that you could write a sort of cultural grammar book. They thought of culture as being like a language, and you could write the semantics and the grammatical rules of a culture. You’ll find very few respected academic anthropologists who would subscribe to that theory today. So what we do is we tell interesting stories from the field to each other, we try and tell very complicated, multilayered, partly contradictory stories about those stories, to show how different people within a culture might interpret an event or an interaction somewhat differently, and how cultural meanings are constantly on the move. Now I think the reason the Pentagon has become interested in culture is that they subscribe to that 1950s version of culture. If culture is complex, multilayered, and contradictory, it’s really not much use to them. They want culture in the wallet, right, that you can put in a wallet-size card. They want culture that you can put into a computer program. So the irony is, I th
ink, that the military is interested in a version of culture that doesn’t exist.” (Emphasis is mine.) For the statement that “anthropology is not predictive,” I am drawing on Rob Albro, interview by author, September 1, 2010, and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 26.

  “The questions they are asking”: Kerry Fosher, interview by author, February 24, 2013.

  “Of all the modern social sciences”: Edward Said, “Introduction,” in Rudyard Kipling, Kim (Middlesex: Penguin, 1987), 32–33.

  Colonel Creighton, the ethnographer and spymaster: Kipling, Kim, 166–67.

  Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that anthropology: Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Anthropology: Its Achievement and Future,” Current Anthropology 7, no. 2 (1966), 126.

  Around the time that McFate and others: Packer writes that Kilcullen studied “political anthropology.” Kilcullen told me that in Australia, this is closer to the American discipline of political science than to cultural anthropology, but that he relied on a “qualitative, interpretive” methodology similar to that used by anthropologists when researching his dissertation. His doctorate is actually in politics. Kilcullen, interview by author, September 14, 2010. See also Packer, “Knowing the Enemy”; “Center for a New American Security: Dr. David Kilcullen,” http://www.cnas.org/kilcullen, accessed June 16, 2012; “The University of New South Wales: UNS Works,” http://www.unsworks.UNSunsw.edu.au/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=UNSWORKS&docId=unsworks_3240, accessed June 16, 2012; and González, “Towards Mercenary Anthropology?,” 14.

  In 2006, he wrote a tip list: Kilcullen, “Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency,” Edition 1, March 2006. The list was initially circulated by email and later published in Military Review, May–June 2006, 103–18. See also Packer, “Knowing the Enemy.” For the allusion to Lawrence, Kilcullen, interview by author, September 14, 2010, and Lawrence, “27 Articles.”