The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  “Know the people, the topography, economy”: Kilcullen, “Twenty-Eight Articles,” 103. For a discussion of Kilcullen, Lawrence, and the ramifications for the contemporary debate, see González, “Towards Mercenary Anthropology?,” 14–19, and Kilcullen, “Ethics, Politics and Non-State Warfare,” Anthropology Today 23, no. 3 (June 2007), 20.

  “Remain in touch with your leader as constantly”: Lawrence, “27 Articles.”

  When the anthropologist Clifford Geertz: I was led to Geertz’s description of “rapport” in Bali by its mention in David B. Edwards, “Counterinsurgency as a Cultural System,” Small Wars Journal, December 27, 2010. Edwards, an anthropologist who has worked extensively among Afghans, cites Geertz to make a different point about his own fieldwork. See Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, 412–16.

  But Geertz’s aim and the ultimate product: Ibid., 416–17. The difference between intelligence work and anthropology begins with “rapport,” which in anthropology cannot be engineered or forced. For intelligence soldiers and interrogators, the relationship is transactional. Not so with anthropology, or not so simply. “Fieldwork is always and inevitably an exercise in hope over experience, the hope being that you can pass through the barrier of culture and language to feel and understand what the world looks like for someone from some place else, which experience tells you rarely if ever happens,” writes Edwards. While intelligence gathering and anthropology may look alike, and while anthropology and archeology have often served as covers for spying, their inner workings are fundamentally different. And yet, not even this settles the question, for the spy can never escape the basic humanness of his encounter with his source, and the more skilled he is, the less he wants to escape it. The relationship between a spy and his “asset” is “the most intense personal relationship in one’s life, more intense even than with one’s spouse,” retired CIA agent Glenn Carle writes. “I cannot state forcefully enough how crucial it is in an interrogation, when developing an asset—when establishing any textured and worthy human relation—to sustain and foster the other person’s honor, sense of personal independence and control, integrity, and trust. . . . Perversely, interrogation and treason, like love, rest upon personal bonds and trust.” Although McFate often downplayed or elided entirely the differences between ethnography and intelligence, other practitioners, like Kilcullen, felt differently. “Intelligence officers in a counterinsurgency environment are engaged in something that’s very akin to ethnography, but it’s not the same thing,” Kilcullen told me. Edwards, “Counterinsurgency as a Cultural System,” 6; Glenn L. Carle, The Interrogator: An Education (New York: Nation Books, 2011), 76, 233–34; Kilcullen, interview by author, September 14, 2010.

  The nineteenth-century Bureau of Ethnology: Dustin M. Wax, “The Uses of Anthropology in the Insurgent Age,” in Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency, edited by John D. Kelly, Beatrice Jauregui, Sean T. Mitchell, and Jeremy Walton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 153–55.

  Early American military leaders also sought: As Patrick Porter writes in his excellent study of the Western obsession with Eastern ways of war: “Paradoxically, war can drive cultures closer together.” Porter, Military Orientalism: Eastern War Through Western Eyes (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 33.

  But the settlers took far more than they gave: In tracing the history of the U.S. military’s use of sociocultural knowledge, the authors of one study of the Human Terrain System write of nineteenth-century General George Crook’s fascination with and “respect for” his Apache enemies. But Crook’s methods were far from friendly. He believed that “the ultimate weapon against the nomadic Native Americans was cultural. By enticing them into a pastoral and monetary economy that diminished their poverty it was also possible to destroy their ability to sustain decentralized and autonomous operations indefinitely.” Lamb et al., “Human Terrain Team Performance: An Explanation, draft,” forthcoming 2013, 11.

  Under the management of the U.S. government: Beginning in the 1870s and continuing well into the twentieth century, Indian children were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where they were abused, forbidden to speak their native languages, and systematically robbed of their cultural heritage. See Bear, “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many.”

  In 1919, the celebrated: Franz Boas, “Scientists as Spies,” Nation, December 20, 1919.

  The American Anthropological Association: “Boas did not call for anthropologists to contribute their linguistic skills, field-research abilities, and cultural knowledge to the production of propaganda to the war,” Price writes, “but his students did.” It is worth noting that Mead, Benedict, and Bateson each contributed in different ways to Allied efforts during World War II and to American war-related efforts afterward. It is also true that, as Price notes, Boas “did not argue that science must not be used for harm during times of warfare. He did not argue that using anthropological skills and knowledge for purposes of warfare was wrong. He did not argue that anthropologists should never work for military and intelligence agencies in any professional capacity.” In a largely ceremonial act that nonetheless indicates how times have changed, the American Anthropological Association repealed Boas’s censure in 2005. See Price, Anthropological Intelligence, 13–22, and “From the Archives: Editorial Note,” Anthropology Today 21, no. 3 (June 2005), 27.

  In 1941, the AAA passed a resolution: “Report: Proceedings of the American Anthropological Association for the Year Ending December, 1941,” American Anthropologist 44, no. 2 (April–June 1942), 281–93, quoted in Price, Anthropological Intelligence, 23.

  More than half the anthropologists: Price, Anthropological Intelligence, 37.

  They wrote handbooks for soldiers: Ralph L. Beals, F. L. W. Richardson, Julian H. Steward, Jr., and Joseph E. Weckler, “Anthropology During the War and After,” Memorandum Prepared by the Committee on War Service of Anthropologists, Division of the Anthropology and Psychology National Research Council, March 10, 1943, cited in Price, Anthropological Intelligence, 26.

  They worked in military intelligence and at internment camps: Price, Anthropological Intelligence, xvii, 37–42, 153.

  Although some anthropologists expressed doubts: Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, “Mead, Bateson and ‘Hitler’s Peculiar Makeup’—Applying Anthropology in an Era of Appeasement,” History of Anthropology Newsletter 13, no. 1 (1986), 3–8, quoted in Price, Anthropological Intelligence, 35–36.

  Vietnam changed everything: Seymour J. Deitchman charts this change in his fascinating account of the U.S. government’s attempts to apply social science to defense and foreign policy problems in the 1960s. Seymour J. Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), especially 37, 66, 137.

  In 1965, Project Camelot: Ibid., 116, 139–67, 255–87. Deitchman notes that Camelot’s original conception would have taken it beyond Latin America to study coups and uprisings in Iran, Egypt, Korea, and elsewhere (145). See also The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship Between Social Science and Practical Politics, edited by Irving Louis Horowitz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 3–5, 11–17, 47–49.

  develop “a general social systems model”: From the description of Project Camelot sent to social scientists by the Office of the Director of the Special Operations Research Office of American University, quoted in Horowitz, The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot, 4–5. Deitchman, then special assistant (counterinsurgency) in the Defense Department’s Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering, writes that when he saw those words on the Camelot task statement after the scandal exploded, “I knew that the whole idea of doing research in Latin America was in trouble, and possibly dead.” Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes, 159.

  What they really wanted was to win the Cold War: The rationale for Camelot and related research is laid out most clearly in two
government reports quoted in Deitchman: “Behavioral Sciences and the National Security,” Report No. 4, prepared for the Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, December 6, 1965; and Ithiel de Sola Pool et al., “Social Science Research and National Security,” Research Group in Psychology and the Social Sciences, Smithsonian Institution, March 5, 1963. See Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes, 23–24, 29–35.

  But before the project even got off the ground: Horowitz, The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot, 11–13. That Camelot exploded in Chile is ironic, as Horowitz points out, because Chile was never among the countries proposed for study by Camelot researchers (see also Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes, 157). Nutini was a former citizen of Chile, but he was neither an employee nor a staff member of Project Camelot when he made his 1965 visit. He was essentially freelancing. He had been assigned a small task by the Project, but he “somehow managed to convey the impression of being a direct official of Project Camelot and of having the authority to make proposals to prospective Chilean participants.” Horowitz, The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot, 12.

  If the U.S. military wanted social scientists: Horowitz, The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot, 13–14, and Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes, 156–59, 192–93, 225–54.

  A key lesson of Camelot: Horowitz, The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot, 16–19, and Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes, 165–68. “On the one hand, the DOD was condemned for trying to learn something about its task, since if it tried to do so this implied it was seeking control of foreign policy,” Deitchman writes. “On the other hand, the military were condemned for being insensitive to the nuances of international affairs and diplomacy. Either way, the DOD was out of line.” Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes, 166. That this State-Defense conflict began to be noticed around the time of Vietnam, with what Horowitz calls “the rise of ambiguous politicomilitary conflicts . . . in contrast to the more precise and diplomatically controlled ‘classical’ world wars,” is not surprising. The same frustrations have been echoed by soldiers, marines, and senior military officers in Afghanistan, as have concerns that the growing strength of the military threatens civilian control over American foreign policy.

  “The story of Project Camelot”: Horowitz, The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot, 40.

  Camelot—admittedly suspect, ethically problematic: This is borne out by the accounts of Deitchman and Horowitz. See also George R. Lucas, Anthropologists at Arms (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2009), 60–62.

  Perhaps its most significant negative outcome: Horowitz, The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot, 23.

  They were united, he wrote: Ibid., 6–7, 33.

  The blowup that ended Camelot did little to resolve: Ibid., 35.

  A few years later, in 1970, a group of students: Eric R. Wolf and Joseph G. Jorgensen, “Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand,” New York Review of Books, November 19, 1970.

  Social scientists had been asked to supply: Ibid. Few of the “entry spaces” on the dummy “Village Tribal Data Card” the anthropologists found in the files left room for “the kind of information normally collected by anthropologists or data which could be kept anonymous,” Wolf and Jorgensen note. For a U.S. government perspective, see Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes, 300–306.

  The purloined documents revealed: Wolf and Jorgensen, “Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand.” The problem of never knowing exactly how information gathered under government or military auspices may be used would crop up again for the Human Terrain System, since most of the project’s reports on Afghanistan were stored in a classified database accessible to anyone with a Secret clearance. For Steve Fondacaro, the Human Terrain System’s program manager, the standard to which Wolf, Jorgensen, and other anthropologists aspired was “ridiculous.” “You can’t produce any information that could not possibly be used for harm,” he told me. “For the anthropologists to say that they have never produced any information that has resulted in harm is a lie.” Fondacaro was right, but his assertion also created a helpful layer of plausible deniability between the Human Terrain System’s management and the use of its products by intelligence operatives and others. “I can only speak for what I control,” Fondacaro told me. Steve Fondacaro, interview by author, June 16, 2010.

  “disengage itself from its connection with colonial aims”: Wolf and Jorgensen, “Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand.” See also McFate, “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency,” 36–37.

  McFate had studied anthropology at a university: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010. “Younger faculty members who were educated in the seventies and eighties have a really different viewpoint,” McFate told me. “I come from a very conservative tradition in anthropology. . . . That’s a different intellectual genealogy than most people have.”

  wasn’t “supposed to be making moral arguments”: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010.

  In 2007, the American Anthropological Association: American Anthropological Association, “Executive Board Statement on the Human Terrain System Project.”

  Paula Loyd’s college anthropology professor: Sally Engle Merry, interview by author, June 7, 2010, and Stefanie Johnson, interview by author, June 23, 2010.

  “It’s a really hard question”: Merry, interviews by author, June 7 and June 11, 2010.

  Chapter 6: Hearts and Minds

  Back in Maiwand, Don Ayala had just put a bullet: This chapter is based on interviews with Don Ayala; Clint Cooper; the Afghan interpreter known as Jack Bauer; and soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Regiment, of the Army’s 1st Infantry Division. I have also relied on federal court records and the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command’s report on the events of November 4, 2008.

  He turned away. ‘Oh fuck!’ he said: “I turned away and said, ‘Oh fuck.’ ” Justin Skotnicki, interview by author, March 24, 2009. The word is repeated here because an Afghan policeman told me that he heard a soldier repeat it at least six times in the moments after Abdul Salam was shot. It seems likely these are two versions of the same event. Amir Mohammad, interview by author, January 19, 2009.

  ‘Are you serious?’ Pathak yelled: “I yelled at him for doing it and asked him for his weapons. . . . I asked ‘Are you serious?’ And he answered, ‘Yes, I am.’ ” U.S. Army Report of Investigation 08-CID369–43873–5H1.

  Ayala handed Pathak his rifle and pistol: “I relieved him of his weapons and immediately sent him away from the scene . . . ,” Pathak told Army investigators, adding that Ayala “turned [his weapons] over willingly and without reservation.” Another soldier recalled Pathak’s demeanor: “He was just like ‘damn it.’ That’s basically how everybody was.” Soldiers’ statements, Army investigation, and statement of Lieutenant Matthew Pathak, November 4, 2008, filed in federal court, May 1, 2009.

  ‘I just shot the guy,’ Ayala said: Cooper, interview by author, April 22, 2010; Ayala, interview by author, August 19, 2009; and Cooper statement to Army investigators. A soldier recalled of Ayala: “When he came closer I could hear him saying how he ‘fucked up’ and ‘I killed him’ to [Cooper]. . . . [Ayala] was distressed, like he was rambling more than actually saying it to someone. Walking around like he’d fucked up.”

  ‘You did the right thing,’ Cooper told him: “Of course I had no idea about the flex cuffs or any of that stuff,” Cooper told me. “I just thought that he shot the guy while he was running away. And if I would have known the circumstances, maybe I would have said the same thing. I probably would have. But I definitely tried to assure him, or comfort him.” Cooper, interview by author, April 22, 2010. According to Ayala, he was the one comforting Cooper: “Clint gave me a big hug and he was crying, really crying. He lost it. And I felt bad for him, because I knew he had PTSD, he had a pretty bad case of it, and I knew this just triggered it.” Ayala, interview by author, August 19, 2009.

  ‘Clint, don’t leave me’: “She kept calling my name and she begged me not to leave and to stay
with her to the hospital. I promised Paula that I would stay with her no matter what it took to do so. . . . An Afghan national police truck pulled up and we loaded Paula into the back on an old mattress. I looked back at [Ayala] and that was the last time I saw him.” Cooper statement to Army investigators. Additional details in this paragraph are from interviews with Cooper and Ayala and soldiers’ statements to Army investigators.

  ‘I can’t tell,’ he told her haltingly: Cooper, interview by author, April 22, 2010.

  third-degree burns covered 60 to 70 percent of her body: Statement of the platoon medic to Army investigators and Army medics in Maiwand, interview by author, March 24, 2009.

  ‘Call Frank,’ she said: This and other details below are from Cooper, interview by author, April 22, 2010. In his statement to Army investigators, Cooper made it sound as if this exchange happened while Loyd was still on the ground in Chehel Gazi, but he later told me that he believed she told him these things when they were in the aid station on the American base.

  ‘They’re taking us to FOB Bastion’: Cooper, interview by author, April 22, 2010, and Cooper statement to Army investigators.

  At 2 a.m. at Fort Benning, the phone rang: Frank Muggeo, interview by author, October 18, 2012, and Cooper, interviews by author, April 19–22, 2010.

  Cooper was afraid to see Muggeo: Cooper was and remains guilt-ridden. He told Army investigators: “Paula’s safety was always our number one concern. We felt a huge responsibility to protect her. We let her down.” Cooper, interviews by author, April 19–22, 2010, and Cooper statement, Army investigation.

  White bandages hid Loyd’s body: Cooper, interview by author, April 22, 2010.