The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (43 page)

The first was that deploying social scientists to war zones:
“Because HTS identifies anthropology and anthropologists with U.S. military operations, this identification—given the existing range of globally dispersed understandings of U.S. militarism—may create serious difficulties for, including grave risks to the personal safety of, many non-HTS anthropologists and the people they study.” “American Anthropological Association Executive Board Statement on the Human Terrain System Project,”
http://www.aaanet.org/issues/policy-advocacy/Statement-on-HTS.cfm
, accessed June 15, 2012. For specific reference to intelligence work and the danger of anthropologists being viewed as spies, see Andrew Bickford, “Anthropology and HUMINT,” Network of Concerned Anthropologists,
The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual,
135–51.

that, on principle, anthropology should not be used:
Marshall Sahlins, “Preface,” Network of Concerned Anthropologists,
The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual,
v–vii. See also González, Hugh Gusterson, and David Price, “Introduction: War, Culture, and Counterinsurgency,” 8–20, and Greg Feldman, “Radical or Reactionary? The Old Wine in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual’s New Flask,”
The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual,
77–80.

The last, and in some ways the most compelling:
I am paraphrasing the anthropologist Hugh Gusterson here, from the documentary film
Human Terrain,
produced and directed by James Der Derian, David Udris, and Michael Udris (2010): “Most anthropologists these days see culture as something that’s fluid, that’s contested, it’s constantly changing, it’s very difficult to define. So there used to be a time in the fifties when academic anthropologists thought that you could write a sort of cultural grammar book. They thought of culture as being like a language, and you could write the semantics and the grammatical rules of a culture. You’ll find very few respected academic anthropologists who would subscribe to that theory today.
So what we do is we tell interesting stories from the field to each other, we try and tell very complicated, multilayered, partly contradictory stories about those stories, to show how different people within a culture might interpret an event or an interaction somewhat differently, and how cultural
meanings are constantly on the move.
Now I think the reason the Pentagon has become interested in culture is that they subscribe to that 1950s version of culture. If culture is complex, multilayered, and contradictory, it’s really not much use to them. They want culture in the wallet, right, that you can put in a wallet-size card. They want culture that you can put into a computer program. So the irony is, I think, that the military is interested in a version of culture that doesn’t exist.” (Emphasis is mine.) For the statement that “anthropology is not predictive,” I am drawing on Rob Albro, interview by author, September 1, 2010, and Clifford Geertz,
The Interpretation of Cultures
(New York: Basic Books, 1973), 26.

“The questions they are asking”:
Kerry Fosher, interview by author, February 24, 2013.

“Of all the modern social sciences”:
Edward Said, “Introduction,” in Rudyard Kipling,
Kim
(Middlesex: Penguin, 1987), 32–33.

Colonel Creighton, the ethnographer and spymaster:
Kipling,
Kim,
166–67.

Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that anthropology:
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Anthropology: Its Achievement and Future,”
Current Anthropology
7, no. 2 (1966), 126.

Around the time that McFate and others:
Packer writes that Kilcullen studied “political anthropology.” Kilcullen told me that in Australia, this is closer to the American discipline of political science than to cultural anthropology, but that he relied on a “qualitative, interpretive” methodology similar to that used by anthropologists when researching his dissertation. His doctorate is actually in politics. Kilcullen, interview by author, September 14, 2010. See also Packer, “Knowing the Enemy”; “Center for a New American Security: Dr. David Kilcullen,”
http://www.cnas.org/kilcullen
, accessed June 16, 2012; “The University of New South Wales: UNS Works,”
http://www.unsworks.UNSunsw.edu.au/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=UNSWORKS&docId=unsworks_3240
, accessed June 16, 2012; and González, “Towards Mercenary Anthropology?,” 14.

In 2006, he wrote a tip list:
Kilcullen, “Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency,” Edition 1, March 2006. The list was initially circulated by email and later published in
Military Review,
May–June 2006, 103–18. See also Packer, “Knowing the Enemy.” For the allusion to Lawrence, Kilcullen, interview by author, September 14, 2010, and Lawrence, “27 Articles.”

“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.