The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (33 page)

She had gone to Harvard Law School:
McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010.

Cabayan enlisted McFate to work on a project:
Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009, and McFate, interviews by author, January 28, 2009, and June 30, 2010. See also Montgomery McFate and Steve Fondacaro, “Reflections on the Human Terrain System During the First Four Years,”
Prism
2, no. 4 (September 2011), 66.

“About tribes alone, we got fifteen totally different answers”:
McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010. “It was a real moment of epiphany to look at that stuff because it really indicated to me that the way the intelligence community works right now in the United States, they are not focused on general social issues or general social structures or phenomena,” McFate told me. “They’re interested in targets for a lethal or kinetic action. So the information that they have about the society is not a collection requirement, or generally, it hasn’t been a collection requirement. If they collect on it at all, it’s just  . . . kind of secondary, after the fact. . . . The broader notion of strategic intelligence was a concept that was popular in the 1940s and fifties, and to a degree, into the 1960s, but [in 2004, it] had not been really something that many intelligence agencies focused on.”

Cultural Preparation of the Environment was an open-source:
Cabayan described Cultural Preparation of the Environment to me this way: “Just picture this in your mind: You’ve never been to Timbuktu. All of a sudden, you land in Timbuktu. What would you want to know? Where are the hospitals, where are the roads, who are the key people in Timbuktu? Who are the ones who are on my side, who are the ones who are not friendly to me? What’s the incidence of IED attacks? That’s really what it was. It wasn’t for civilians. It was for the military commander in charge so that he or she will absolutely know all the [cultural] information that was acquired, but we also put in the IED attack[s]  . . . and it was all there for them and it was searchable, so [if] they wanted to know about all the friendly sheiks, we were supposed to have the sheiks come up with their biographies.” Cabayan, interview by author, December 7, 2009. The idea of layering typical intelligence about enemy threats with demographic and cultural information in a single database was what made Cultural Preparation of the Environment unique and potentially useful, because it was becoming clear that threat-specific intelligence wasn’t useful on its own, isolated from its political, ethnic, or cultural context. Cabayan
did not use the term
intelligence
in describing Cultural Preparation of the Environment to me, but it is important to note that the project was not envisioned as a way to learn about tribes and culture
in the absence of
other elements of the conflict zone. Conceptually, Cultural Preparation of the Environment resembled tools like the Tactical Ground Reporting System (TIGR), which offers soldiers multilayered maps that include “routes, critical infrastructure, tribal areas and ethnic maps, recent attacks and recent changes in the terrain.” “U.S. Army: TIGR Allows Soldiers to ‘Be There’ Before They Arrive’ ”
http://www.army.mil/article/28700/tigr-allows-soldiers-to-be-there-before-they-arrive
/, accessed June 27, 2012. TIGR is now widely used in Afghanistan, “enabling collection and dissemination of fine-grained intelligence on people, places, insurgent activity and understanding the ‘human terrain.’ ” “Defense Update: Extending Intelligence to the Edge,”
http://defense-update.com/products/t/tigr_141009.html
, accessed June 27, 2012. See also James Turner, “Where 2.0: DARPA’s TIGR Project Helps Platoons Stay Alive,” April 21, 2009,
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/where-20-preview---darpas-tige.html
, accessed June 27, 2012.

McFate had been intrigued:
McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010. When McFate read the anthropologist Jeffrey A. Sluka’s
Hearts and Minds, Water and Fish: Popular Support for the IRA and INLA in a Northern Irish Ghetto
in graduate school, she told me: “I thought, I can’t imagine a more useful book for the British Army. You just gave British intelligence an absolutely staggering amount of information. . . . Inadvertently, you just contributed to the British war effort.”

McFate lost no time advancing her view:
McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010, and “ONR Conference Makes Case for Study of Cultures,”
OrigiNatoR,
December 13, 2004. The conference, held in November 2004, drew some 250 people, “more than double the number originally expected, from the services, defense agencies, CIA and DIA, the State Department, and from the staffs of key Congressional committees,” the Office of Naval Research newsletter noted. “The more unconventional the adversary, the more we need to understand their society and underlying cultural dynamics,” McFate said, according to the newsletter. “To defeat non-Western opponents who are transnational in scope, non-hierarchical in structure, clandestine in their approach, and operate outside of the context of nation-states, we need to improve our capacity to understand foreign cultures and societies.” According to one conference participant: “Intelligence analysts don’t have time to think—they have become reporters, while tensions between anthropologists and counterintelligence specialists have become unbearable.”

The U.S. military and policy community’s ethnocentrism:
McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture,”
Joint Force Quarterly
38 (July 2005), 42–43,
http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/jfq_pubs/1038.pdf
, accessed September 15, 2012.

Coalition forces arrested Iraqis:
David Kilcullen, “Ethics, Politics and Non-State Warfare,”
Anthropology Today
23, no. 3 (June 2007), 20.

Shia Muslims who flew black flags for religious reasons:
McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture,” 43–44. The Marines were not totally off
base, though they may have relied too heavily on their experience in Falluja, where black flags were an inauspicious sign. “Now at least we knew what the black flags were for,” Dexter Filkins wrote “The insurgents had spotted us, and they were signaling their friends to come: Come to the fight. It’s here.” Filkins,
The Forever War
(New York: Vintage 2008), 190.

She was briefing military officials in Tampa one day in 2005:
McFate, interviews by author, January 28, 2009, and June 30, 2010, and Steve Fondacaro, interview by author, January 28, 2009.

Fondacaro was determined to do whatever it took:
Fondacaro, interviews by author, January 28, 2009, and June 19, 2010.

Born in New York to a mother of Puerto Rican descent:
Unless otherwise noted, biographical information and quotes from Fondacaro in this section are from Fondacaro, interviews by author, June 16 and 19, 2010. See also “IMDb: Phil Fondacaro,”
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0284496
/, accessed June 28, 2012, and “Sal’s Music Instruction: Meet Sal,”
http://www.salsmusicinstruction.com/Meet_Sal.html
, accessed June 18, 2012.

He entered the academy in 1972, toward the end of the Vietnam War:
A year earlier, in 1971, Lieutenant William Calley had been convicted of murdering civilians at My Lai, the
New York Times
had published the Pentagon Papers, and a Harris poll had shown for the first time that most Americans opposed the war. Doug Linder, “An Introduction to the My Lai Courts-Martial,”
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/Myl_intro.html
, accessed July 2, 2012. By 1972, President Richard Nixon had agreed to withdraw seventy thousand troops from Vietnam. Fondacaro recalled that after he and his fellow West Point cadets marched in the Memorial Day parade in New York City during his plebe year, they had to clean the spit off their uniforms. Whether antiwar protesters actually spat on soldiers remains a subject of debate, but other members of Fondacaro’s West Point class have also spoken of being subject to intense hostility, including spitting and egg throwing. See Yochi J. Dreazen, “A Class of Generals,”
Wall Street Journal,
July 25, 2009. For the controversy over spitting on soldiers, see Jeremy Lembcke,
Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam
(New York: NYU Press, 2000).

The department has long served as an intellectual incubator:
David Cloud and Greg Jaffe,
The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army
(New York: Crown, 2009), 53–67. Proponents of counterinsurgency who have taught at Sosh include Andrew Krepinevich, author of
The Army and Vietnam;
John Nagl; and General David Petraeus, who wrote his PhD dissertation while he was an instructor there. See Cloud and Jaffe,
The Fourth Star,
61–67, and “Center for a New American Security: Dr. John A. Nagl,”
http://www.cnas.org/nagl
, accessed July 2, 2012. For a recent example of Sosh’s procounterinsurgency leanings, see Elisabeth Bumiller, “West Point Is Divided on a War Doctrine’s Fate,”
New York Times,
May 27, 2012.

Fondacaro graduated from West Point in 1976:
For more on the West Point Class of
1976, see Dreazen, “A Class of Generals.” For Petraeus, see Cloud and Jaffe,
The Fourth Star,
18, and Danielle Burton, “10 Things You Didn’t Know About David Petraeus,”
U.S. News & World Report,
March 27, 2008.

He spent thirteen years there, returning to the States intermittently:
Fondacaro told me that in addition to the Command and General Staff College, he was chosen to attend the School of Advanced Military Studies and later the U.S. Army War College, receiving three master’s degrees. The work of the Special Technical Operations Division has included what the military calls “offensive information warfare,” such as hacking into the computer and communications networks of American enemies. William M. Arkin, “Phreaking Hacktivists,”
Washington Post,
January 18, 1999. “Dozens of special access (or ‘black’) programs are monitored” at Special Technical Operations, Arkin writes. “These include the United States’s own hacking activities; strategic psychological, concealment and deception operations; and ‘directed energy warfare.’ The latter includes special weapons and capabilities, such as high-powered microwave weapons, that could be used to disable enemy communications, computing, and the production and distribution of electricity.” Fondacaro said that the organization’s work was very broad, encompassing all government jobs requiring the highest level of classification. In contrast to his time in Korea, he and his colleagues at Special Technical Operations “were very much involved with what was happening in the Middle East,” he told me.

He knew that Ho Chi Minh had begged the United States:
For Ho’s repeated attempts to interest the Americans in Vietnamese liberation in 1945 and 1946, see Neil Sheehan,
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
(New York: Vintage, 1989), 146–53: Ho “was not asking for independence, just autonomy. No one from the American delegation or any of the other Allied delegations would receive him [at the Paris Peace Conference of 1945]. Ho discovered that Wilson’s self-determination applied only to the Czechs and Poles and other white peoples of Eastern Europe who had been under German and Austro-Hungarian domination, not to the brown and yellow peoples of Asia or to the blacks of Africa. . . . Ho sent Truman and Truman’s first secretary of state, James Byrnes, eleven telegrams and letters of appeal over an eighteen-month period after his establishment of a Vietnamese government in Hanoi. None was acknowledged. . . . He offered to turn Vietnam into ‘a fertile field for American capital and enterprise.’ He hinted that he would give the United States a naval base at Cam Ranh Bay, one of the finest natural deep-water harbors in the world  . . . if only the United States would protect the Vietnamese from the French. . . . Ho had been sending his letters and telegrams to a file drawer for historians. The United States had abandoned the Vietnamese and the other peoples of Indochina well before he cited the American Declaration of Independence and the P-38s dipped low over Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi. . . . The State Department classified all of Ho Chi Minh’s letters and telegrams and the memorandum of his last conversation with a first secretary at the Paris embassy Top Secret and locked them away. They were not to be published until a quarter of a century later in the Pentagon Papers.”

The future soldier he envisioned:
Shinseki did not respond to requests for comment; his support for Fondacaro is based on Fondacaro’s account. Fondacaro said he was actually asked to conduct two studies, the first under the auspices of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, and a second commissioned by Shinseki. See Vernon Loeb, “Army Plans Steps to Heighten ‘Warrior Ethos,’ ”
Washington Post,
September 8, 2003. As Loeb notes, concern over hyperspecialization within the Army intensified after insurgents attacked the 507th Maintenance Company in Nasiriyah, Iraq, in March 2003, killing eleven U.S. soldiers and capturing six, including Private Jessica Lynch. In a more conventional battle, the unit would likely have stayed in the rear, but in Iraq, as the Army was learning, there was no “rear.” An Army investigation found that soldiers in the 507th “were unable to defend themselves because their weapons malfunctioned, possibly due to ‘inadequate individual maintenance in a desert environment.’ ” See also “U.S. Army Official Report on 507th Maintenance Co.: An Nasiriyah, Iraq,”
http://www.why-war.com/files/article07102003a.pdf
, accessed July 3, 2012.

But Shinseki was on the wrong side of power:
Eric Schmitt, “Pentagon Contradicts General on Iraq Occupation Force’s Size,”
New York Times,
February 28, 2003, and Thom Shanker, “New Strategy Vindicates Ex-Army Chief Shinseki,”
New York Times,
January 12, 2007.