The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (17 page)

Vietnam changed everything. Anthropology, which twenty years earlier had volunteered itself in the service of a wartime nation, became intensely suspicious of American imperialism, for while World War II had been a “good” war, Vietnam was considered a bad one.
In 1965, Project Camelot, a U.S. Army–funded social science research program designed to explore the likelihood of insurrection and revolt in various Latin American countries, drew international attention to the clumsiness of American foreign policy and the growing rift between the U.S government and social scientists increasingly outraged over Vietnam. The creators of Camelot set out to
develop “a general social systems model” that could “predict and influence politically significant aspects of social change in the developing nations of
the world.”
What they really wanted was to win the Cold War, and that meant tamping down leftist insurgencies, a task that would be much easier if the Army could predict where such uprisings might occur.

The Special Operations Research Office of American University, known as SORO, enlisted social scientists to conduct field research paid for by the Defense Department.
But before the project even got off the ground, an assistant professor of anthropology named Hugo G. Nutini traveled to Chile, where he met with a high-level university administrator to expound on the benefits of participating in Project Camelot. What Nutini presumably didn’t know was that a Norwegian social scientist named Johan Galtung, who was working in Chile, had already drawn the attention of Chilean academics to Camelot’s “imperialist features.”
If the U.S. military wanted social scientists to help it understand when the United States might usefully intervene in the political affairs of Latin American nations, Galtung wondered, why didn’t they also ask when it might be appropriate for Latin American countries to intervene in the affairs of the United States? A leftist Chilean newspaper denounced Camelot as a thinly veiled attempt at U.S. espionage. The American ambassador to Chile cabled his outrage at the project’s having been undertaken without his knowledge or participation, the Defense Department swiftly canceled the initiative, and congressional hearings ensued.
A key lesson of Camelot—that competition between the State and Defense Departments can lead to foreign policy disasters—would have to be learned all over again in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The story of Project Camelot was not a confrontation of good versus evil,” the sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz wrote in 1967, yet it has often been presented that way.
Camelot—admittedly suspect, ethically problematic, and potentially a cover for spying—appears never to have achieved any of its goals.
Perhaps its most significant negative outcome for social scientists was that, for a time, it made working in
Chile and other Latin American countries more difficult. At least one PhD student doing fieldwork in Chile had his research confiscated, and Camelot became a running joke among Latin Americans. For Horowitz, one of the noteworthy things about Camelot was the idealism that drove its participants.
They were united, he wrote, by “a profound conviction of the perfectibility of mankind.” They sought to “create a social science of contemporary relevance,” and even if they were uncomfortable with military sponsorship, they felt that “the Army had to be educated.” This was exactly the rationale articulated by McFate and Fondacaro in building the Human Terrain System forty years later. But Horowitz’s contention decades earlier that the U.S. military could not be viewed purely as an instrument for social good remains pertinent. As Horowitz wrote, the assumption “that people in power need only be shown the truth in order to do the right thing is unacceptable.”

The blowup that ended Camelot did little to resolve Horowitz’s central and most lasting question: “Just what are the limits and obligations, no less than the rights, to investigate the viscera of another society on behalf of a government foreign to that society?”
A few years later, in 1970, a group of students opposed to the Vietnam War published documents lifted from the files of an anthropologist at a California university that detailed the involvement of a number of anthropologists and other social scientists in U.S.-funded counterinsurgency research in Thailand.
Social scientists had been asked to supply “up-to-date information” on the “location of tribal villages, the number and ethnic identity of the inhabitants, [and] their migratory history.” The Thai and U.S. governments specifically wanted information that anthropologists might not normally have collected, at least not in a systematic way: map coordinates for villages; names of village leaders; how long they had lived there; the names, occupations, and racial affiliation of residents; and whether they had weapons.
The purloined documents revealed that the U.S. government was “less interested in the economic, social, or
political causes of discontent than in techniques of neutralizing individual or collective protest,” the anthropologists Eric Wolf and Joseph Jorgensen wrote. “The days of naïve anthropology are over. It is no longer adequate to collect information about little known and powerless people; one needs to know also the uses to which that knowledge can be put.” Anthropology had to
“disengage itself from its connection with colonial aims or it will become intellectually trivial,” they wrote. “The future of anthropology, its
credibility,
depends upon sustaining the dialectic between knowledge and experience. Anthropologists must be willing to testify in behalf of the oppressed peoples of the world, including those whom we professionally define as primitives and peasants.”

From its conception until at least the mid-twentieth century, anthropology had considered itself a scientific discipline based on objective observation.
McFate had studied anthropology at a university where many senior professors “really believed that anthropology was a science,” she told me. As a scientist, she
wasn’t “supposed to be making moral arguments.” Yet McFate’s view made her an outlier. The dominant trend in late-twentieth-century anthropology has been toward a subjectivity that is morally and often politically responsive to the people observed.

In 2007, the American Anthropological Association declared its opposition to the Human Terrain System, calling the program “an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.”
Paula Loyd’s college anthropology professor, Sally Engle Merry, served on the executive board that helped draft the statement. Indeed, Loyd had harbored no illusions about how her former teacher would view her work with the Human Terrain System. ‘I don’t think Sally Merry would approve of this,’ she had told her old college friend Stefanie Johnson before leaving for Afghanistan in the late summer of 2008. In fact, Merry remembered her former student fondly, and her views on the use of cultural knowledge in war were more nuanced than Loyd might have
guessed.
“It’s a really hard question,” Merry told me. “I’m not a fan of war, and I don’t think war as a way to produce peace makes much sense. But I also think the military is in a very difficult box, and people are trying to do the right thing. I just wish we could find a way to use the knowledge anthropology can produce to bring these wars to an end.”

McFate’s house in Weston, Missouri, was full of Orientalist art. A painting of a camel train moving across the desert hung near an image of a pale-skinned European who had “gone native” by donning a robe and Arab headdress. Some anthropologists privately wondered if McFate had simply stopped paying attention to developments in anthropology after the early twentieth century, but McFate had always been a pragmatist. Since childhood, she had been looking for a way to survive. In the military cultural knowledge boom of the early years of the twenty-first century, she found one.

B
ack in Maiwand, Don Ayala
had just put a bullet in the head of the handcuffed Afghan who had set Paula Loyd on fire. Specialist Justin Skotnicki heard the shot. He looked and then he couldn’t look.
He turned away. ‘Oh fuck!’ he said. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’

A few steps down the path, the platoon leader turned. He saw Ayala standing with his pistol in his hand, saw the Afghan slumped in the dirt, blood pouring from his head.

‘Are you serious?’ Lieutenant Pathak yelled.

Ayala looked squarely at him. ‘Yes, I am.’

‘I have to confiscate your weapons.’

Ayala handed Pathak his rifle and pistol and headed down the path toward where Cooper still knelt on the ground beside Loyd. Cooper hadn’t moved this whole time, not even when he heard a scattering of gunfire behind him, Afghan police firing off rounds to clear the
highway. Not when he heard the single gunshot from down the path in the shadow under the trees.

The medic was applying clear gel to Loyd’s burned skin. Ayala saw her lying there and felt a stab in his gut as he took in her raw, pink skin, her nose melted to a nub, her lips and eyebrows gone. She lay there shaking as the medic leaned over her. ‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘I’m cold.’

Ayala walked over and stood behind Cooper, talking low so only his teammate could hear him.
‘I just shot the guy,’ Ayala said. ‘I killed him. They took my gun.’

Cooper reached back and squeezed Ayala’s calf in what he meant as a reassuring gesture. He rose unsteadily, turned, and embraced Ayala.
‘You did the right thing,’ Cooper told him, but Ayala felt a rush of protectiveness for this big mess of a man, broken and desolate as a child.

‘Paula’s doing great,’ Ayala heard the medic say, and the words jolted him. ‘Okay, all right, Paula, you’re looking good,’ Ayala said. ‘You’re fine.’

He and Cooper stepped apart and began gathering up her helmet and body armor.

‘Clint, don’t leave me,’ she murmured, shivering as the medic tried to soothe her. An Afghan police truck pulled up with an old mattress in back and the men lifted her onto it. Cooper climbed up after her and Ayala was about to follow, but the soldiers told him to stay where he was. He watched them drive away.

Back at the base, they laid her on a cot in the aid station, and she started talking again. ‘How does it look?’ she asked the young medic who had been treating her. ‘Don’t hold back. Just be honest with me.’

‘I can’t tell,’ he told her haltingly. ‘I don’t know.’

What he and the other medics knew was that
third-degree burns covered 60 to 70 percent of her body—her face, neck, arms, and legs.

‘Call Frank,’ she said. ‘I want to talk to Frank.’

She started giving Cooper instructions. He could hardly move fast
enough. Her cell phone was in the pocket of her backpack. Muggeo’s number was in the contact list. She calculated the time difference between Afghanistan and St. Thomas, where her mother lived. Muggeo was in Georgia. ‘Call him first,’ she told Cooper. ‘I don’t want to worry my mom. And make sure the colonel gets my report. I don’t want to have stayed up all night typing for nothing. Jeez, I hope this doesn’t affect my typing ability.’

Her hands were a mess. The medics wrapped each finger separately in burn pads so her skin wouldn’t stick and tear. They gave her an IV, pumped her full of antibiotics and pain relievers, and loaded her onto a helicopter. The belly of the Chinook was lined with rudimentary seats, baggage stacked down the middle, and they laid her stretcher on the floor. She was covered in burn blankets and lotion, and Cooper knelt beside her. As the helicopter spun up, he leaned in close. The rotors and the wind were so loud that he had to yell to make himself heard:
‘They’re taking us to FOB Bastion’—a British base in Helmand with a good field hospital. He wasn’t sure she heard him, or that she understood, but he wanted her to know she wasn’t alone, so he stroked her hair, the only part of her that felt safe to touch.

The flight was mercifully short. An Army burn specialist from Germany happened to be at Bastion, and while he examined Loyd, medics swabbed the dirt and rocks from Cooper’s knees. His pants were torn and stained with his own blood from where he had dived forward to pull Loyd into the water. His uniform stank of gas, smoke, and sweat. He searched her phone for Muggeo’s number.

At 2 a.m. at Fort Benning, the phone rang. Muggeo answered it, but heard only silence. He turned over and drifted off until it rang again. ‘Paula? What happened? Is everything okay?’

‘Frank, it’s Clint. Paula’s been hurt. She’s alive.’

The connection was unsteady and long pauses separated his words.
Muggeo listened, his brain dim with sleep. She’d been burned, Cooper told him. Muggeo tried to take this in. If anyone knew her way around southern Afghanistan it was Loyd, and if anything were to happen to her, it wouldn’t have been this, an attack that fell outside every known pattern of the insurgency.

‘We’re evacuating her,’ Cooper told him. ‘She wants you to call her mother, but don’t call her too early. Don’t wake her up.’

‘Tell her I’ll be there for her,’ Muggeo said, and hung up.

They put Loyd on a flight to Germany, and in the air Cooper slipped a jade pendant from her neck. It had been a gift from Muggeo, and Cooper knew it was important to her. Now he feared it would get lost with all this moving around, all these people touching her. At the Army hospital in Landstuhl, someone gave him clean clothes and sent him to a quaint rooming house for the relatives of wounded soldiers, where an old woman cooked him pancakes and he started speaking German without thinking about it. The contrast between this house and the place he had just left was almost too much for him. He lay exhausted on the bed, leaden with guilt.

They flew on to Texas, and in the solid roar of the engine over the Atlantic, Loyd lay immobilized on a stretcher, wrapped in gauze. Goggles covered her eyes and she was tiny and unrecognizable but for the exposed flesh around her chest and shoulder where her body armor had covered her skin. They touched down at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where Loyd’s mother waited, a chaplain by her side.

Cooper was afraid to see Muggeo. He had let Loyd down, had allowed this terrible thing to happen to her, and he half expected Muggeo to punch him. Instead, Muggeo invited him out to a steak house for dinner, joking lamely but good-naturedly that Paula wouldn’t approve—there wasn’t much for a vegetarian to like about a steak house. The next morning in the hospital elevator, Cooper reached into his pocket and
pulled out the jade pendant. Muggeo’s eyes reddened as he reached for it.