The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (47 page)

The Human Terrain System’s press handler:
Lieutenant George Mace, interview by author, February 18, 2009.

Fort Leavenworth is home to mid-career master’s programs:
The Command and General Staff College, which Army majors attend before being promoted to lieutenant colonel, is at Fort Leavenworth, as is the School of Advanced Military Studies, which offers “a second year of intermediate, master’s-level education,” and several other advanced military schools. When General Petraeus was named commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, he “wasn’t entirely sure what his new command even did,” Cloud and Jaffe write. “Digging into the Internet, he learned that he’d have responsibility for running the Army’s nationwide network of training centers and schools. He would also oversee the drafting of Army doctrine.” Cloud and Jaffe,
The Fourth Star,
216–18. See also “School of Advanced Military Studies Reflects and Looks Forward After 25 Years,”
http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/Events/SAMS25th/index.asp
, accessed July 17, 2012; “Command and General Staff School,”
http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/cgss/index.asp
, accessed July 17, 2012; and “Combined Arms Center—Overview,”
http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/overview.asp
, accessed July 17, 2012.

They included a former soldier who spoke Dari:
The trainees were Joe Stringer, Cas Dunlap, Mary Thompson, Steve Lacy, AnnaMaria Cardinalli, and a cultural anthropologist who asked not to be identified.

Weston Resolve was an elaborate game:
Holbert, interviews by author, February 25, 2009, and August 19, 2012.

“I’ve lived in Leavenworth my whole life”:
Interview with Lindsay Driscoll, twenty-two, of Leavenworth County, Kansas, by Human Terrain trainee Joe Stringer, February 25, 2009.

One of the few Human Terrain social scientists:
Ted Callahan, “Ein Ethnologe im Krieg,”
GEO,
May 5, 2010, 51–70. The article ran in German; I am quoting from the pre-publication final draft that Callahan submitted in English, with many thanks to Callahan for sharing this with me.

found their training in Kansas disappointing:
Ayala, interview by author, August 19, 2009, and Clint Cooper, interview by author, April 22, 2010. “I think it was a waste of time for the most part,” Cooper said of his training in Leavenworth. “I might sound arrogant, but there wasn’t much they had to teach me. And Paula and everybody else felt the same way. The things they were teaching, like MAP-HT and military rank structure, things like that were just kind of useless. . . . It was nice to go to Omaha and talk a little about culture [and] language with the Afghans. . . . And they had a couple of HTS people that came back, and they talked to us a little bit, and they told us some of their experiences in the field. But even that, we could see that they weren’t necessarily doing things how we wanted to do things, or how they should be done.”

Ayala in particular:
Ayala, interview by author, August 19, 2009. “I was hoping to learn more,” Ayala told me. “But  . . . I saw a lot of flaws in this training program. They had all the right classes but  . . . there were days we showed up at training [and] they said, ‘Have a reading day, because the instructor is not going to be here.’ The schedules were conflicting, so we had a lot of downtime because they just weren’t organized. And it was a new program so you got to give them the benefit of the doubt on that. But time after time, you would try to see development, it wasn’t happening. And the biggest discouragement was the quality of people that were in there.”

Like many former soldiers, he viewed:
“Those people who were opposed to it had no knowledge of what takes place in a combat zone and they had no knowledge on the concept of the mission itself,” Ayala told me. “My concern wasn’t what the anthropology community thought. I think it’s for each individual what they want to do with their lives.” He continued: “If I was an anthropologist, it [wouldn’t] matter what I was providing, it [would matter] how could I be helping the situation. I think they should have looked at it that way instead of saying, ‘It’s unethical.’ What’s unethical about it? You can help save lives.” Ayala, interview by author, August 19, 2009.

understood that his job was to take photographs:
Ayala, interview by author, August 19, 2009. Ayala told me: “They tried to appease the anthropology community and the [American Anthropological Association] that, ‘Let’s not use the word
intel.
We’re not here to provide intel.’ But that’s all it is.”

Bhatia and Suveges had been killed while Ayala was in training:
Ayala, interview by author, May 4, 2009.

“that touchy-feely thing that no one understood”:
Cas Dunlap, interview by author, August 23, 2012.

“If you go into a totally unknown area”:
Holbert, interview by author, August 19, 2012.

trainees got no operational security training in Kansas:
For the lack of firearms training and other practical preparation for a conflict zone, Ayala, interviews by author, May 4 and August 19, 2009. The Human Terrain System training regimen has since been revised, and prospective field team members now spend nine weeks at Fort Polk, Louisiana, “where they are trained in basic combat techniques, life on a Forward Operating Base and Combat Outpost, and other necessities for living and operating in a war zone.” Lamb et al., “Human Terrain Team Performance: An Explanation, draft,” forthcoming 2013, 20, and Steve Lacy, interview by author, December 2, 2012.

“As a member of a 5-person”:
“BAE Systems: Human Terrain System,” recruiting pamphlet, November 3, 2008. The brochure also emphasizes the “positive, lasting impact” that Human Terrain Team members can have by helping to create an “unclassified” database that will be “easily accessible to organizations and individuals involved in stability operations.” Though program administrators often referenced such a database, I saw no evidence of it during the time I spent with Human Terrain Teams in Afghanistan between early 2009 and the end of 2010; instead, they stored their reports on a secret system accessible to members of the military and others with a government-issued clearance.

gave their Human Terrain Team members guns:
John Green and Sonya Brown, interviews by author, January 21, 30, and 31, 2010. When he resigned from the Human Terrain System in 2009, anthropology grad student Ted Callahan noted among his concerns the “[c]omplete lack of tactical training (to include weapons training), which puts HTS personnel and the military units supporting them at greater risk.” Callahan, “HTS Assessment,” correspondence. On the issue of firearms training, Callahan wrote: “HTS needs to confront the issue of weapons. Most participants will opt to be armed in Afghanistan, yet HTS irresponsibly shifts the burden to the host [brigade] of ensuring that HTS personnel are qualified to carry a weapon. This allows management to dodge the tricky (for some) ethical issue of civilian academics being armed by saying that it is ‘an individual decision.’ However, in many cases, the [brigade] will assume that HTS personnel are qualified to be issued a weapon, without independently verifying it. At a minimum, training should involve basic weapons handling, shooting, and maintenance, for both the M9 [pistol] and the M4 [rifle].”

When Ayala completed his training:
Ayala, interviews by author, May 4 and August 19, 2009. “I thought it was very fraudulent,” Ayala told me. “It was a liability. . . . We all said, ‘One day this will come back and bite them in the butt.’ ”

On my first morning there:
Interview with an anthropologist who asked to be identified
only as “Dr. Wilson,” February 24, 2009. Wilson subsequently quit the program. He later rejoined and was severely wounded when a buried bomb exploded beneath him during a patrol in southern Afghanistan.

When we met again many months later:
Dr. Wilson, interview by author, September 25, 2009.

The team had been reconstituted:
Karl Slaikeu, interview by author, March 21, 2009; Stephen James “Banger” Lang, interview by author, March 22, 2009; and “Spen,” interview by author, April 2, 2009. For Slaikeu and Lang having never been to Afghanistan, see Gezari, “Rough Terrain.” For Slaikeu taking Loyd’s place on the team and Lang taking Ayala’s, Slaikeu, interview by author, April 7, 2009.

The psychologist was a tall man with wire-rimmed glasses:
Slaikeu was six foot three. For this and other elements of his appearance, see Gezari, “Rough Terrain.” By the time Slaikeu arrived in Afghanistan, he told me that he had been thinking about the “oil spot” theory of spreading security in a conflict zone “for years.” During his Human Terrain training at Fort Leavenworth, he was “delighted to find” that this approach was a key counterinsurgency technique, and he latched on to it. At the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, ahead of his deployment, Slaikeu’s obsession with the “oil spot” approach prompted colleagues to start calling him “Oil Spot Spock.” By the time he landed in Maiwand, he had drafted the better part of a paper on the strategy’s utility in Afghanistan. “It was rather bold of me to think of writing such a paper so early in the game,” Slaikeu told me self-deprecatingly, but I saw little evidence that being in Afghanistan significantly changed his view of what was needed there. His embrace of the “oil spot” approach, like so many initiatives proposed by newcomers seeking to make their mark on the war, seemed aimed at impressing higher-ups rather than addressing the very complicated problems Afghans faced in Maiwand. Slaikeu, interview by author, April 7, 2009.

One afternoon, I watched as he tried to convince:
Meeting with Slaikeu, Lang, Canadian CMIC officers, and USAID representative Brian Felakos, March 23, 2009.

Later, I asked one of the Canadians:
A Canadian soldier who asked not to be identified, interview by author, March 23, 2009.

Slaikeu had been issued an assault rifle:
Slaikeu, interviews by author, March 21 and April 7, 2009. “There was no weapons training,” Slaikeu told me. “There was no operational security training.” His teammate, Lang, agreed: “We had no weapons training in the program, and no discussions about operational security, no discussions about many different things.” Lang, interview by author, April 8, 2009. Said a third team member: “We were told we were going to get weapons training. . . . But as it turns out, we did not get any weapons training. It was optional. I think some companies would give a five-hundred-dollar reimbursement for  . . . like, a Saturday-afternoon or maybe a two-day shooting course for five hundred dollars  . . . which is better than nothing, but come on.” “Spen,” interview by author, April 2, 2009.

The former Marine who had replaced Ayala went by the nickname Banger:
Observation and conversation with Lang, March and April 2009.

Early in my visit, when I was just getting to know the Human Terrain Team members:
The barbecue took place on March 21, 2009. See Vanessa Gezari, “Kill the Goat,” Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, April 1, 2009,
http://pulitzercenter.org/blog/untold-stories/kill-goat
, accessed July 19, 2012.

He had grown up on a farm in Iowa:
Lang, interview by author, March 22, 2009.

The commander came from Logar, near Kabul:
Lieutenant Abdul Saboor, interview by author, March 21, 2009.

Hazaras have long occupied the lowest rung:
See, for example, Thomas Barfield,
Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 17–27.

A year later, after a lengthy deployment:
Lang, correspondence, July 12, 2010.
Pashto
is the language spoken by members of the
Pashtun
ethnic group.

A more culturally knowledgeable member of AF4:
“Spen,” interview by author, April 2, 2009. Although Spen’s familiarity with the region meant that he operated like a social scientist on the team, he was technically a Human Terrain Analyst, as Cooper had been. Like other Human Terrain Team members, he had found the training “tremendously lacking.” Among his concerns was the absence of any physical fitness test for deploying team members, and in this he was not alone. “There are people in this program who are going to put people’s sons and daughters in danger because they’re too slow, they’re too old, or too fat to be out embedded with a group of soldiers. I think [physical fitness] should be part of the hiring process,” Spen told me.

By far the most serious problem, in his view:
Ibid.

“Wadaregah,
motherfucker!”:
Notes from a patrol with soldiers of the 2–2, March 21, 2009.

Like the original members of AF4, many were paid very well:
The $250,000–$350,000 figure is based on interviews and published accounts, but in reality the number may have been even higher. The BAE program manager for the Human Terrain System told the Center for Naval Analyses that under the contractor system, “a Senior Social Scientist with 1 year of field research experience could make $390K–$420K with differentials and overtime. . . . As government employees, he estimates they would get about $200K–$250K with differentials and overtime.” The study also notes that Department of Army Civilians were subject to a “pay cap which limited total pay, overtime and comp time to $234,000 per year.” Salaries varied depending on which contractor the team members worked for, but Karen Clark, the program’s chief of staff during this period, confirmed the range cited here. Clinton et al., “Congressionally Directed Assessment of the Human Terrain System,” 88, 142; Gezari, “Rough Terrain”; and Hugh Gusterson, “Do Professional Ethics Matter in War?”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
March 4, 2010.