The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (15 page)

The writer Cintra Wilson, McFate’s oldest and closest friend, grew up in a houseboat community near Gate 5 that was comparatively gentrified.
In her novel
Colors Insulting to Nature,
Wilson introduces the character Lorna Wax, based loosely on McFate, by noting that she “had an unconventional childhood. She lived in Sausalito, in a cluster of ramshackle houseboats made locally famous by a legion of hippie squatters who fought off gentrification (and subsequent eviction) in the 1970s by staging a riot. Long-haired men shouting in rubber dinghies were teargassed on the news; braless mothers hit police with oars. Finally, after months of bloody foreheads and pro-bono legal wrangling, the houseboat community was written off as an intractable nuisance by the city and left to fester. Dead, rusty cars filled the unpaved parking lot; children with dirty mouths and no pants ran barefoot on splintering gangplanks.”

Wilson described the houseboat communities of their childhood to me as a “social experiment,” of which Gate 5 was the most extreme iteration. “We were essentially raised by pirates,” she told me. In the houseboat community where Wilson lived for a time with a jazz musician mother and a father who taught art at Chico State, the men banded together to bring the houseboats up to code, while at Gate 5, the county’s request that people install sewage pumps sparked riots. Wilson recalled visiting McFate on her mother’s barge, with its wide-plank floors and weird art. The two became friends in elementary school, but went to different middle schools. When they met up again at Tamalpais High, McFate picked a fight with Wilson. “She was just sort of a terror,” Wilson told me. “She was the first punk rocker Marin County had ever seen.”

McFate dressed almost entirely in black, and she hardly fit in at tony Tamalpais.
But she was good at school, and its uncomplicated logic—the more she studied, the better she did—was a welcome respite from the unpredictability of the rest of her life. As far back as high
school, Wilson told me, McFate seemed to have an understanding of what Wilson called “mortal consequences.” McFate wasn’t giggly and silly like other teenaged girls. “She might have done dumb things, but it was more like clinical experiments, like ‘I am making a conscious experiment right now,’ ” Wilson told me. “She never lost control.” Having grown up in an environment with few rules, McFate found “safety in discipline,” Wilson told me. “She had no structure, so she had to impose it on herself. In a different life, I think she would have had a brilliant military career.” As a teenager, McFate had a recurring dream in which she was a soldier leaving a village where she had fought, passing a fountain filled with dead leaves. She “would be overcome with these tremendous feelings of having been through this ordeal and people having died,” Wilson recalled. The dream “seemed to inform her character in some way.”

McFate started working when she was fifteen, giving her mother most of the money she earned. She frequented punk clubs in San Francisco, staying out all night, “and having sex with boys and girls,” she told me. One of her friends at the time, a girl named Elizabeth, came from a home as offbeat and dysfunctional as McFate’s. Elizabeth’s mother was a filmmaker who never had any food in the house except vitamins, grapefruit, and, in the freezer, LSD. Two strippers were always sunbathing naked on the roof. Elizabeth moved into the Golden Eagle Hotel, where she succumbed to heroin addiction and hepatitis and eventually sank into a coma.
She was the first in a series of friends McFate would lose to drugs, suicide, crime, and accidents. One was shot in the head; another died of a brain aneurism. Two boyfriends in a row committed suicide. McFate realized that she and her friends were behaving self-destructively.
Even if they hadn’t exactly wanted to die, they had “allowed death to happen to them. There was no brake mechanism on their train, and so once they started down the hill, they were not going to stop until they crashed into something.” Her
well-honed survival instincts kicked in. She called her boyfriend and told him she wouldn’t be seeing him again. Soon afterward, he died of a heroin overdose.

As a teenager, McFate told me, fighting to stay alive was harder than dying. Dying was like “lazily slipping into the mud.” Nihilism was “the disease that was floating around. It was very easy to catch.” But McFate has always viewed herself as fundamentally optimistic. “I could always see that there was, not necessarily a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but at least there was something at the end of the rainbow,” she told me. “It might be a lump of coal, but you could always hope, and that’s what Nietzsche says is the definition of happiness, right? Or actually, the definition of sadness is the opposite of hope, or the absence of hope.”

Actually, Nietzsche famously wrote that hope is “the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of Man.” But McFate’s intellectual dance with Nietzsche was real and influential.
When she talked about choosing life over death, she might have been quoting from
Twilight of the Idols,
in which Nietzsche wrote that “[s]aying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems” elevates man, “[
n
]
ot
in order to be liberated from terror and pity  . . . but in order to be
oneself
the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity.”
Moral dogmatism was “naïve,” Nietzsche wrote, for “[r]eality shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the abundance of a lavish play and change of forms.” Accordingly, the philosopher and his fellow “immoralists” have “made room in our hearts for every kind of understanding, comprehending and approving. We do not easily negate; we make it a point of honor to be
affirmers.
”
Like McFate, for whom the realization that different perspectives could be equally valid was a source of comfort amid chaos, Nietzsche asked his readers to transcend good and evil, leaving behind “the illusion of moral judgment.” Even war, that most terrible of things to the Western humanist thinker and the typical American
anthropologist, had for Nietzsche its benefits.
“One has renounced the
great
life when one renounces war,” he wrote. “[E]ven in a wound there is the power to heal.”

McFate’s determination to survive drew her to zombie movies, especially those with stories of siege and endurance. In
Night of the Living Dead,
humans holed up in an abandoned house are besieged by zombies that feed on human flesh, “and you can be besieged by anyone,” McFate told me. “The undead are just a metaphor for the forces in your life or in the world that are attempting to harm or cannibalize you, and the siege is a metaphor for resistance and triumph.” In graduate school, McFate and her roommate, Brian, nursed various obsessions. For a while, they were fascinated by the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Another time it was Jeeves and Wooster, and they were reading P. G. Wodehouse to each other in the kitchen.
For a time, their interest centered on the Donner Party, the group of nineteenth-century pioneers snowed under in the Sierra Nevada mountains, some of whom resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. They read books about the disastrous expedition and watched movies about it. “Brian would always say, ‘I think you definitely would be the last survivor. You’d have no problem eating human flesh,’ ” McFate told me, laughing. “And I was like, ‘You know, actually, it’s perfectly true.’ ”

*  *  *

McFate spent two
years in community college before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. On her first day of classes, her mother suffered a fatal stroke, and McFate inherited the houseboat and responsibility for its tenants. She finished the semester, dropped out of school, and moved back to Sausalito to settle her mother’s affairs. In 1987, after living briefly with a boyfriend in Las Vegas, she returned to Berkeley as a social sciences major. She created her
own academic program, taking classes on German cinema, modern poetry, the anthropology of death, and women in literature. She walked around campus in a fur-collared horsehide jacket, black jeans, and lace-up boots, her hair in dreadlocks.

Berkeley had a democratic education program that allowed students to design their own classes. McFate and a friend created one called “Punks on Film,” which began with the roots of punk and ended with its commodification when a faux-punk band called Pain appeared on an episode of the TV series
CHiPs
. McFate’s interest in what she called “the commodification or fetishization of the body” led her to write her senior thesis on Nazi aesthetics. She wanted to explore how certain images—like a close-up shot of a soldier’s helmet and jawline in Leni Riefenstahl’s
Triumph des Willens
—take on symbolic importance. “I was really interested in the way that propaganda worked,” McFate told me.
The morality of the Nazis intrigued McFate less than the symbols by which they perpetuated power. “To me, the interesting question was, ‘How did they do it and what was the effect?’ In what way does art—if you think it’s art—in what way does imagery become a manifestation of power?”

Like the adolescent who had watched with fascination as her houseboat neighbors fought the law, the adult McFate had an uncanny ability to distance herself from the moral concerns of war and view the thing coldly. She also shared her mother’s impatience with lazy hippie leftism.
Liberal Berkeley kids partying on their parents’ dime annoyed her. After graduation, she spent part of her mother’s life insurance settlement traveling with a friend.
In Northern Ireland, she visited the Milltown Cemetery on Falls Road, where IRA volunteer Bobby Sands and other hunger strikers are buried. She had viewed the Irish Republican Army as terrorists, and was surprised and intrigued to learn that people in Belfast saw things differently. To them, Britain was an occupier and the republicans were legitimate defenders of their territory. An old man gave her a tour of the cemetery, and in the Sinn Féin bookstore she
bought a book published by the republican National Graves Association that gave a detailed account of how the movement memorialized death. She was taken aback by the IRA’s political and cultural cohesion. “You think, Okay, these people are a bunch of terrorists,” she told me, “and then you go there and you find out, well, they’ve got an incredible body of literature, an incredible body of music, and they’ve got all these incredibly complex rituals associated with death.”

McFate, too, was intrigued by death’s rituals.
Back home, she got a job at Chapel of the Chimes, a historic Oakland funeral home, and returned to KALX, the Berkeley radio station, where as a student she had hosted a show. She applied to a handful of graduate programs in anthropology. Having grown up poor, she was petrified of going into debt. She chose Yale because it offered her the most generous financial aid package.

Yale turned out to be a good fit for McFate in other ways, too.
Since 1949, the university has been home to the Human Relations Area Files, a database of cultural and ethnographic information used by social scientists and members of the U.S. military and intelligence communities in times of war. One of McFate’s advisers was John Middleton, a British-born Africanist who had served in World War II and studied at Oxford under E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Known as a
“traveler, raconteur, casual pistol-shot  . . . and determined drinker,” Evans-Pritchard had been deeply embedded in the colonial politics of his day.
He led Anuak tribes against the Italians on the Ethiopian border during World War II at Britain’s behest, and his 1949 book on Libya,
The Sanusi of Cyrenaica,
helped convince the United Nations to endorse the head of the Sanusi order as Libya’s king.
“It helped of course that most of my research was carried out in a country, the Sudan, at that time ruled by the British and with a government and its officers friendly disposed to anthropological research,” Evans-Pritchard wrote near the end of his life.

This was the tradition in which McFate was trained. Yet even at
Yale, anthropology’s late-twentieth-century self-consciousness and its desire to distance itself from its colonial past determined which texts were considered important and which weren’t. McFate and her fellow students learned to connect anthropologists of the British colonial era to the imperial project and, in doing so, to criticize their own discipline. Like everyone else, McFate wrote papers arguing that structural functionalism was invalid because it objectified and dehumanized the subjects of anthropological observation. But the pragmatist in her rejected this argument.
Instead, a key question of the colonial era absorbed her: what utility did this early anthropology have for the British? “Why weren’t we reading Sir Richard Burton? In many ways, he was one of the first anthropologists,” McFate told me. “Of course, he was a spy and he was working for the British Empire. But he was an astute observer of life around him.”

McFate was still thinking about what she had seen in Belfast. For her PhD dissertation, she wanted to explore the link between the Irish Republicans’ “heavy narrative about the blood and the soil” and the way the IRA legitimated political violence. But when she proposed this as a dissertation topic, fellow students and professors at Yale told her she belonged in the political science department, because war was political, not cultural.
“We say in anthropology that the utensils you use to eat your food, the sexual practices that are common in your culture, the way you rear your children, and the art you produce is a matter of culture,” McFate told me. “But somehow, violence—violence in pursuit of political power or economic resources—is somehow not cultural? Like, everything’s cultural except war? Because as an anthropologist, we can’t study war—
why is that?
”

She ultimately prevailed, conducting her fieldwork in Belfast and London.
Her first draft, she told me, was distinctly pro-IRA, written in the voice of “an angry Berkeley undergraduate,” criticizing the British for advancing their colonial ambitions in Ireland. But when a friend
at Sandhurst, the British military academy, asked to read it, McFate quailed. On closer examination, she decided it was biased and immature. She threw it out and started over.