The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (16 page)

Her dissertation is remarkable for its engaging tone, its clinical detachment from the human costs of fighting, and its affirmation of the durability and inexorability of war. It marked the beginning of a process, through which McFate would come to see anthropology as a “natural” practice for soldiers, and to view war itself as a kind of anthropology. She was drawn to the paradoxical relationship between empathy and killing: that you had to know your enemy to fight him effectively, but that knowing him also made you love him. In her dissertation, she asked whether
“good anthropology” might lead to “better killing.” It was a dangerous question but, for her, a necessary one.

Even before McFate finished her dissertation, she had grown tired of anthropology. “I wanted to do something in the world, not just write about it,” she told me. She was interested in international law and the laws of war, so she applied to Harvard Law School and almost quit her anthropology program when she got in. At an adviser’s urging, she finished her dissertation and started at Harvard the following fall.
During her final year there, a friend introduced her to a young Army officer named Sean Sapone, who wanted to study anthropology. They corresponded, and over Valentine’s Day weekend in 1997, Sapone came up to Cambridge and they met in person. “We just really hit it off,” McFate said. One night they were having dinner and she told him she had an intuition that they were going to get married. “He put his fork down and he said, ‘Okay,’ just like that,” McFate told me. By the end of the weekend, they were engaged. They married ten months later.

Sapone deployed to Germany and McFate (whose original married name was Montgomery Sapone) graduated and took a job as a litigation associate at the San Francisco offices of Baker & McKenzie, where she had interned in law school. She needed the money to pay
off student loans, and at the time, she told me, she thought that tax litigation was “absolutely the most interesting thing in the world.” But her interest waned, and she soon quit and moved to Germany to join Sapone. His unit, the Air Defense Artillery, struck her as “a narrow, cliquish tribe,” and she judged the Army a throwback: “It was like time stopped in 1957.” Friendships between officers’ wives were governed by their husbands’ rank. One wife tried to convert her to fundamentalist Christianity over coffee. A colonel asked if she was pregnant yet. “I totally failed as an Army wife,” McFate told me. When she fumed over the colonel’s assumption that she would immediately start popping out babies, Sapone urged her to remember that the officer’s experience had shaped his worldview. ‘You—anthropologist—can’t be offended by that,’ McFate recalled Sapone telling her. ‘You’ve lived in Berlin, you’ve lived in London, you’ve lived in Las Vegas, you’ve lived in Northern Ireland, but you’ve never lived in the middle of the country.’

While Sapone worked, McFate learned to cook Vietnamese food and published her law school thesis on mercenaries and the laws of war. Somewhere along the way, the couple changed their last name to McFate, Sean Sapone’s mother’s maiden name. Montgomery McFate
worked for her mother-in-law’s company for a time. Her job involved Internet research and gathering information about “a lot of different public policy issues,” she said, but this period of her life would later return to haunt her. McFate’s mother-in-law was accused of being a corporate spy who infiltrated citizen activist groups at the behest of the gun lobby. McFate allegedly helped by collecting and analyzing intelligence and providing “confidential litigation support research.” When Sean left the Army, they moved to Washington, D.C., where McFate took a contract job with the CIA, traveling to Europe to conduct research on Muslim minorities. She was not a clandestine agent, but neither did she tell her interview subjects that she worked for an intelligence agency.
She moved on to the RAND Corporation, and in 2003, to the Office
of Naval Research, which had supported the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict half a century earlier. McFate started to wonder in earnest how anthropology might contribute to the needs of a military she had grown to respect.

In Washington, she began a concerted networking campaign. She met a Navy anthropologist and a former British intelligence officer, both of whom would become players in the cultural knowledge boom of the next few years.
She sought out officials working on low-intensity conflict in the Pentagon and introduced herself to rising counterinsurgency star David Kilcullen. She and her husband hosted dinner parties at their apartment in the capital’s Adams Morgan neighborhood, inviting ambassadors, generals, and military intellectuals.
McFate eventually started a blog called “I Luv a Man in Uniform,” where, under the pseudonym “Pentagon Diva,” she composed tongue-in-cheek paeans to the sex appeal of military thinkers like H. R. McMaster.

During a conversation with the commander of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, McFate suggested that cultural misunderstandings had caused difficulties for marines in Iraq.
‘I don’t have any facts about that,’ she recalled the general telling her. ‘I’d like you to do a study.’ She started interviewing marines, and later soldiers and sailors, returning from Iraq.
Somewhere along the way, she heard Hriar Cabayan’s name and wrote it down, but she never got around to calling him. One day, out of nowhere, he called her. He was looking for an anthropologist. Could she come to the Pentagon?

*  *  *

McFate and Cabayan
weren’t the only ones thinking about anthropology’s utility for counterinsurgency and intelligence gathering. Around the time they began working together on Cultural Preparation of the Environment, the military and intelligence communities were eyeing
the social sciences with an intensity not seen in thirty years.
In 2005, the CIA posted an employment ad on the website of the American Anthropological Association, seeking someone to help its analysts understand terrorist groups and social and cultural responses to disease, migration, and other crises. That the CIA would try to hire anthropologists—and that the American Anthropological Association would allow the agency to advertise on its website—outraged some anthropologists. One of them, David Price, suggested that the association was ignoring “the CIA’s history of torture, terror and covert global support for anti-democratic movements.” In 2006, Roberto J. González, an associate professor at San José State University, asked the association to publicly oppose the use of anthropological knowledge in torture. News of the Abu Ghraib scandal was still fresh, and González’s effort was inspired by reports that Army interrogators had relied on anthropologist Raphael Patai’s 1973 book,
The Arab Mind,
to identify cultural taboos that could be exploited during interrogation.

Anthropologists tend to be overwhelmingly politically liberal, and few supported the administration of George W. Bush or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet more than politics was at work here. To many anthropologists, using cultural insights to wage war was like using a screwdriver to pry open a door: it indicated the commission of a crime.
Beginning in 2007, a small group of anthropologists carried on a vigorous argument with McFate and other champions of anthropology as a tool for counterinsurgency. McFate’s critics advanced three main arguments.
The first was that deploying social scientists to war zones, particularly to gather military intelligence, could endanger the people being studied and lead all anthropologists to be viewed as spies. The second was
that, on principle, anthropology should not be used to subjugate unruly people while expanding American power.
The last, and in some ways the most compelling, was that anthropology is not
predictive and does not yield the kind of data useful for military operations. Instead, it produces stories about stories that are as ambiguous as they are illuminating. The anthropologist Kerry Fosher, who works for the Marine Corps, described the disconnect between most anthropologists and the defense establishment as “profound.” She compared the defense and intelligence communities to an organization that calls in a group of physicists and asks them to determine how fast the sun orbits the earth, or that summons a group of doctors to save a dying patient, with the stipulation that they must use only leeches and mercury.
“The questions they are asking and the data they want are fundamentally at odds with reality,” Fosher told me.

That the U.S. military was rediscovering anthropology as if for the first time inspired cynicism in many anthropologists, who remembered the past all too well.
“Of all the modern social sciences, anthropology is the one historically most closely tied to colonialism,” wrote Edward Said, “since it has often been the case that since the mid-nineteenth century anthropologists and ethnologists were also advisors to colonial rulers on the manners and mores of the native people to be ruled.”
Colonel Creighton, the ethnographer and spymaster who grooms Kipling’s Kim for his role in the nineteenth-century Great Game, tells the boy: “There is no sin so great as ignorance.” One day, he will pay Kim for “knowledge of what is behind those hills—for a picture of a river and a little news of what the people say in the villages there.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that anthropology “is the outcome of a historical process which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent human beings have had their resources plundered and their institutions and beliefs destroyed, whilst they themselves were ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage, and contaminated by diseases they were unable to resist. Anthropology is the daughter to this era of violence: its capacity to assess more objectively
the facts pertaining to the human condition reflects, on the epistemological level, a state of affairs in which one part of mankind treated the other as an object.”

Around the time that McFate and others were developing the Human Terrain System, the Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen began working for the State Department and as an adviser to General Petraeus in Iraq. Kilcullen had studied political anthropology and done his doctoral research on Muslim and Timorese insurgents in Indonesia as an officer in the Australian army.
In 2006, he wrote a tip list that was widely read by U.S. officers deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. The list was a self-conscious allusion to a similar document composed nearly one hundred years earlier by T. E. Lawrence, Britain’s celebrated ethnographer-spy.

Kilcullen’s list raised the question McFate had stumbled on years earlier in writing her dissertation: what was the difference between ethnography and intelligence? Was there a difference?
“Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion and culture,” Kilcullen wrote. “Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader and ancient grievance.” T. E. Lawrence had wanted to influence the Arabs’ behavior, and he knew that he would be most successful by making them forget he was British, or that he was even there.
“Remain in touch with your leader as constantly and unobtrusively as you can,” Lawrence wrote. “Live with him, that at meal times and at audiences you may be naturally with him in his tent. Formal visits to give advice are not so good as the constant dropping of ideas in casual talk.” For the British military adviser, “complete success” came “when the Arabs forget your strangeness and speak naturally before you, counting you as one of themselves.”

When the anthropologist Clifford Geertz and his wife arrived in a Balinese village in the late 1950s to begin fieldwork, they at first “wandered around, uncertain, wistful, eager to please.” Villagers pretended
to ignore them but were in fact watching them closely. The anthropologists were outsiders; if their study was to be fruitful, they had to find a way in. Their point of entry came when police raided an illegal cockfight that the Geertzes and all the other villagers had gone to see. The Balinese scattered and the anthropologists fled with them. Because they had not laid claim to their status as distinguished foreign researchers, but instead had acted like ordinary Balinese, the village opened to them. Their near arrest became the key to achieving what anthropologists call “rapport.” “It led to a sudden and unusually complete acceptance into a society extremely difficult for outsiders to penetrate,” Geertz wrote. This looks like Lawrence’s moment of success, too, when “the Arabs forget your strangeness and speak naturally before you.”
But Geertz’s aim and the ultimate product of his study were different: not to advance national security goals but to explore the Balinese cockfight as a “combination emotional explosion, status war and philosophical drama of central significance to the society whose inner nature I desired to understand.”

In the United States, anthropology’s tortured relationship with intelligence and war lay at the heart of the nation’s expansion.
The nineteenth-century Bureau of Ethnology sent social scientists into Indian country with military forces to document native cultures that were being constrained and transformed by war.
Early American military leaders also sought to learn about the Indians, and to fight like them.
But the settlers took far more than they gave.
Under the management of the U.S. government, Indian cultures would be all but extinguished.

In 1919, the celebrated German-American anthropologist Franz Boas alleged that four American anthropologists had used their discipline as a cover for spying during World War I. He called them out for having “done the greatest possible disservice to scientific inquiry,” noting that because of them, “every nation will look with distrust upon the visiting foreign investigator who wants to do honest work, suspecting
sinister designs.” But Boas was out of step with the mood of his time.
The American Anthropological Association, known as the AAA, quickly and publicly censured him, and two of his best-known students, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, became key contributors to American policy and planning during World War II.
In 1941, the AAA passed a resolution placing “itself and its resources and the specialized skills of its members at the disposal of the country for the successful prosecution of the war.”
More than half the anthropologists in America at the time are thought to have worked on the war effort, while many of the rest contributed part-time.
They wrote handbooks for soldiers explaining the “habits and customs” of faraway peoples and suggesting “policies to enlist the active cooperation of local or native populations.”
They worked in military intelligence and at internment camps for Japanese-Americans, censored foreign mail, analyzed the impact of Allied bombings on enemy military and civilian populations, and spied for the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, a precursor to the CIA.
Although some anthropologists expressed doubts—“Now that we have techniques, are we in cold blood, going to treat people as things?” Gregory Bateson wrote in 1941—these were quickly assuaged; Bateson himself went to work for the OSS.