The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  Paula Loyd, Don Ayala, and Clint Cooper had trained in Kansas before their deployment, so in February 2009, I flew out to Leavenworth. The training consisted of four to five months of classroom work that included basic social science and research methods, military rank structure, and courses on culture and history tailored to Iraq or Afghanistan. There was also a period of several weeks known as “immersion,” when trainees bound for Afghanistan spent time at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, studying Dari and talking with Afghan-Americans, while those headed for Iraq undertook a special course at the University of Kansas.

  The program’s administrators told me that the most interesting part of the training cycle would be the final week, when proto–Human Terrain Team members took part in a practical exercise to test what they had learned. The exercise was called Weston Resolve, named for the town of Weston, Missouri, near Leavenworth, where some of it took place. The Human Terrain System’s press handler, former Army intelligence officer Lieutenant George Mace, described Weston Resolve to me as “a practicum in doing ethnography in any kind of village.” Mace was a veteran of the first Human Terrain Team in Iraq, and when I phoned him from my rental car after landing in Kansas City, he quickly directed me to the National Public Radio station on my FM dial. Reporters visiting from Washington were under no circumstances to be subjected to Middle America’s standard menu of conservative talk, Christian preaching, and country music, at least not when they were writing about a project that billed itself as a politically liberal fringe movement within the Army. My minder that week in Kansas was Major Robert Holbert, an Army reservist and former high school social studies teacher who had served on the first Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan, and who embodied the offbeat, left-leaning vibe the program sought to project. A convert to Islam with a shaved head, Holbert drove a Saab and listened to the Sex Pistols.

  Human Terrain System training took place in the basement of a brick mini-mall in downtown Leavenworth called the Landing. It stood a couple of blocks from the railroad tracks and the Missouri River, which lunged along thick and sullen behind a stand of trees. The old federal prison and the sprawling Army garrison that anchor the town lay about a mile to the northwest. Fort Leavenworth is home to mid-career master’s programs for officers; it is where the nation’s biggest service contemplates its past and tries to get ahead of its future. The Human Terrain System laid claim to this spirit of military intellectualism, but if the rolling lawns of the base conjured a gracious university, the Landing had the dismal, downtrodden feel of an underfunded community college. Trainees shuffled between classes in a warren of bare rooms whose windows, if they had any, looked out on a parking lot.

  The trainees I met that week were to leave for Iraq or Afghanistan within a few months. They included a former soldier who spoke Dari; a female information operations expert who had advised the military in Iraq and at the Pentagon; a middle-aged Lebanese-American woman who spoke Arabic; a cultural anthropologist and self-published novelist who had done fieldwork among male prostitutes, homeless alcoholics, and drug users; a quiet, levelheaded Army captain with a law degree; and a flamenco guitarist with a PhD in theology who had done counterterrorism work for the FBI that she declined to describe in detail. Weston Resolve was an elaborate game that began with the imagined secession from the United States of a big swath of territory between the Dakotas and Missouri. In keeping with this fictional turn of events, separatist groups and criminal elements were supposedly making trouble in eastern Kansas, burglarizing a pharmacy in Leavenworth, among other misdeeds. The United States government feared that crime syndicates and terrorists would commandeer this unstable new quadrant of the heartland for their own ends, and they sought to bring the revolt under control. The trainees’ job was to figure out as unobtrusively as possible what kind of people lived along the Kansas-Missouri border and to gather information about their customs, values, and beliefs. They would deliver their findings in the form of a military briefing to retired officers and National Guardsmen hired to play the role of battlefield commanders.

  The exercise began early on an icy morning in a parking lot a few blocks from the Landing. I followed the trainees around as they interviewed a young woman making smoothies at a local gym, a man on an exercise bike, mall walkers, college students, and people eating lunch at the food court on the nearby military base. The trainees asked people about their greatest successes and failures, whether it was appropriate in their culture for a little girl to talk to an older man she didn’t know, and what they had worried about most in the last month.

  “I’ve lived in Leavenworth my whole life and it’s very trashy,” the girl behind the smoothie counter told them. “That’s my personal opinion.”

  “What’s the most offensive thing you’ve seen someone do in public?” one of the trainees asked.

  “Shoot someone,” the girl said.

  “What’s the worst thing a friend can do?”

  “Go behind my back and cheat with my boyfriend that I’d had for two years.”

  The Human Terrain System had been sold to the Army as a means of providing cultural knowledge to battlefield commanders. But as I watched the trainees interview residents near the Kansas-Missouri border, it became clear that whatever information they would be providing did not stem from any special knowledge of Iraqi or Afghan culture. Practitioners like Loyd, a former soldier with extensive experience in nongovernmental organizations and significant time on the ground in Afghanistan, were rare. I met only a few trainees with comparable experience during my visits to Leavenworth and my time with Human Terrain Teams in Afghanistan. Instead of offering cultural expertise, the Human Terrain System was training recruits to parachute into places they’d never been, gather information as quickly as possible, and translate it into something that might be useful to a military commander. One of the few Human Terrain social scientists I met with relevant experience, a PhD candidate in anthropology who had done his dissertation fieldwork in Afghanistan, would describe his Human Terrain work as “windshield ethnography.”

  Clint Cooper and Don Ayala had found their training in Kansas disappointing, as had nearly every other Human Terrain Team member I would speak with. Ayala in particular told me that the courses were ill-conceived and flimsy, but the quality of his fellow trainees discouraged him most. Thrown together at the Landing were former intelligence officers, defense industry contractors, social scientists of various and often conflicting persuasions, military reservists, and immigrants with language skills. They would have been an awkward group under any circumstances, but Ayala was appalled by their lack of discipline. People ate and answered cell phones during class, coming and leaving as they pleased, sniping and complaining as if they were still in high school. Almost anything could lead to an overheated argument, particularly the question of whether the Human Terrain Teams would be gathering intelligence. If someone mentioned the word intel, a social scientist would say, ‘We’re not supposed to be doing intel!’ and an ex-military guy would say, ‘What’s the big deal?’ and someone else would say, ‘Okay, well, then, we’ll just call it information.’

  To Ayala, these disputes were as baffling as they were irritating. Like many former soldiers, he viewed the anthropologists’ concerns as narrow and irrelevant. If they could help Iraqis and Afghans, what were they waiting for? At the same time, he understood that his job was to take photographs, collect demographic information, log villagers’ concerns, count their livestock, research their water sources, and bring all that back to the military unit to which he was attached. The military could use the information any way it wanted—for development projects or to find and destroy the enemy. People who didn’t get that had obviously never been to Iraq or Afghanistan and had no concept of what they’d signed up for. The project’s determination not to use the word intelligence struck him as an unvarnished attempt to appease the academic community from which it hoped to recruit, a community that had already grown suspicious of the enterprise. The Human Terrain Syste
m’s administrators masked the realities of deployment because they didn’t want to scare social scientists, Ayala told me, but their coyness had consequences. Bhatia and Suveges had been killed while Ayala was in training. He had attended their memorial services in Leavenworth before heading to Afghanistan himself. He came to believe that the program’s murkiness about its goals was part of the problem. “This is what was getting people killed out there,” he would tell me later. “Bottom line, you can’t sugarcoat anything. This is a combat zone.”

  The project’s nebulousness of purpose wasn’t something people talked about loudly or often, but the suspicion that it played a role in the injuries and deaths of Human Terrain Team members never went away. Everyone said that those deaths were unavoidable, that this was war and in war people got killed. But it didn’t help that teammates often shared little beyond a very general understanding of what they were doing and why. In the words of one former Human Terrain Team member, they specialized in “that touchy-feely thing that no one understood.” Some thought they were part of a humanitarian aid mission. Others thought they were there to tell the commander why local people supported the insurgency. Still others saw it as a chance to play spy. Philosophical disagreements split the teams, making a difficult job even harder. Human Terrain Team members were going into active conflict zones to do things that variously resembled ethnographic research, intelligence gathering, psychological operations, and humanitarian aid. Holbert, who worked in the training directorate when Loyd and her teammates were preparing to deploy, agreed with Ayala. “If you go into a totally unknown area with an unclear mission, bad things are going to happen,” Holbert told me.

  The deaths of Bhatia and Suveges made Ayala angry. In 2008 and for several years afterward, trainees got no operational security training in Kansas, no survival skills beyond a brief medical course, no firearms training. “As a member of a 5-person HTS team, you will be safely attached to a brigade combat team,” read a cheerful 2008 recruitment brochure from BAE Systems, the big defense contractor that hired Human Terrain Team members. But what could being “safely attached” to a United States military unit in Afghanistan possibly mean? Some military units gave their Human Terrain Team members guns, but often the civilians had little or no idea how to use them. When Ayala completed his training, he told me, the Human Terrain System gave him a certificate saying that he had completed five days of weapons training. Everyone else in his class—about sixty-five people—got the same piece of paper. He knew how to shoot, of course he did, but that wasn’t the point. “The only range I saw during the training course was a driving range at a golf course,” he told me later.

  I had expected to find wide-eyed hopefulness and team spirit at the Landing. Instead, trainees indiscreetly alerted me to who was disliked and disrespected. On my first morning there, the cultural anthropologist in the group I was observing told me he didn’t want anyone to know who he was. When I reminded him that I was a reporter and pointed out that the information he had already given me—including his surname and the name of a university where he had taught—would likely identify him, he grew agitated. “I’m an anthropologist,” he told me. “I have a lot of anthropologist friends, and I don’t want to get a bunch of emails telling me I’m the scum of the earth for joining this program.” When we met again many months later in Afghanistan, he would tell me that he had always been “well to the right” of his colleagues, and that he felt the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan had been justified. But like so many others, he had his own reasons for being there. “I’m not interested in doing anything to defend this program,” he told me. “This program deserves to go down in flames. But it’s an opportunity to do something good now.”

  Maybe because of the recent deaths, including Loyd’s, the Landing in February 2009 had a tense, fevered quality. It was deep winter and cold, and when my days of interviews ended I drove the arrow-straight farm roads with relief, taking in the flat yellow fields, the freight trains chugging past heaped with coal, the chilly emptiness of the landscape.

  * * *

  In March 2009, I flew to Kandahar to embed with AF4, the Human Terrain Team to which Loyd, Ayala, and Cooper had belonged. The team had been reconstituted since Loyd’s attack. A sixty-four-year-old psychologist from Texas had taken her place, a middle-aged former marine had filled Ayala’s spot, and a young man with a master’s degree in Central Asian studies had replaced Cooper. Unlike their predecessors, none of them had ever been to Afghanistan.

  I wanted to believe in the Human Terrain System’s capacity to make the U.S. military smarter, but the more time I spent with the team, the more confused I became. The psychologist, a tall man with wire-rimmed glasses named Karl Slaikeu, was a can-do type who had apparently figured out how to solve Maiwand’s security problems before ever setting foot in Afghanistan. One afternoon, I watched as he tried to convince two Canadian soldiers and a USAID officer who had been in Afghanistan far longer than he had that he understood the place better than they did. Later, I asked one of the Canadians what he thought of the Human Terrain Team members. “I don’t know where they got these guys,” the Canadian soldier told me, shaking his head. Slaikeu had been issued an assault rifle but neither the Human Terrain System nor the Army had trained him to use it. He’d gone out and shot on a range near his home in Texas, and one of his teammates had taken him to shoot on a military range in Afghanistan. The former marine who had replaced Ayala went by the nickname Banger. He wore a thick beard, carried copious ammunition, and sometimes advised Slaikeu not to chamber a round when we traveled in armored vehicles for fear the bespectacled social scientist’s gun might fire by mistake when we went over a bump.

  Early in my visit, when I was just getting to know the Human Terrain Team members, I accompanied Banger and some soldiers to a barbecue at a nearby Afghan army base. I liked Banger. He was refreshingly unpretentious. He had grown up on a farm in Iowa, and his understanding of rural, agrarian culture gave him a winning ease with the Afghan farmers he met on patrols. The Americans had organized the barbecue to celebrate the Persian New Year, Nowruz, and to boost the morale of the local Afghan army unit they were mentoring. They brought boxes of burgers, Rice Krispies treats, soda, and Gatorade, but the Afghans had other ideas. They invited the Americans to join them on a patch of gravel near the kitchen, where the cooks were about to slaughter a goat for lunch. Banger and I went along to watch.

  We were deep in the Afghan south, but I noticed that many Afghan soldiers at the base were Tajiks from the north. The commander came from Logar, near Kabul. This was not unusual; the Afghan army has had much greater success recruiting Tajiks than it has Pashtuns. As we stood there, two Afghans dressed in Army fatigue pants and plain T-shirts grabbed a goat that had been loping around the yard, bound its feet with a thick yellow hose, and pushed it to the ground. One man held the goat’s feet while the other laid his hands on its head and moved two fingers along its throat. The goat bleated softly. The man at the animal’s head brought a blade to its neck, and with a quick, heavy thrust, sliced its windpipe in half. Blood poured onto the ground. When the wound had run dry, the two men dragged the goat to a piece of burlap, where one of them nicked the animal’s skin along its back leg and put his mouth against the opening. He blew until the goat’s body swelled like a beach ball, then sliced its inflated skin down the middle. He began to methodically skin the animal, slicing the connective tissue so the skin and flesh separated easily. Banger and I watched in fascination.

  The men who slaughtered and skinned the goat were dressed like the other soldiers, but they had smooth brown faces and the Asiatic features of Hazaras, an Afghan ethnic group concentrated in the center of the country. Hazaras have long occupied the lowest rung in Afghanistan’s ethnic hierarchy, so it was no surprise that these men had the job of butchering an animal and cooking for the other soldiers. In Kabul, Hazara men haul carts like oxen and many Hazara women work as cooks and housemaids. I said something about this to Banger.

&nb
sp; “What?” he said.

  “Hazaras always get the worst jobs.”

  “Huh?”

  It took me a few seconds to realize that he had no idea what I was talking about.

  “Look at those men,” I told him, motioning toward the cooks. “Do you see any difference between them and the others?”

  He thought about it. “I guess,” he said.

  Afghan tribal structures are complex and fragmented, but the fact that there are three major ethnic groups who control various regions of the country and don’t always get along is about as basic as Afghan cultural knowledge gets. That Hazaras make up an often oppressed minority is not difficult to understand if you have spent five minutes observing the country. Not knowing this is like not knowing that the Afghan mujaheddin fought the Soviets in the 1980s, that Afghan village women generally don’t socialize with men outside their families, or that most Taliban are Pashtun. It would have been one thing if Banger had been an ordinary soldier. But soldiers and officers often described him and his teammates to me as “cultural experts.” Banger had never before been to Afghanistan, but he had worked at the Army Culture Center and sat through five months of Human Terrain System training. I wondered how he had come so far without knowing what a Hazara was. A year later, after a lengthy deployment in southern Afghanistan, Banger emailed me: “You should interview me now! I have learned a great deal. I can also differentiate between Hazara and Pashto.” He was learning on the ground, just as soldiers did.

  A more culturally knowledgeable member of AF4 was the thirty-one-year-old who had been hired to replace Clint Cooper. He spoke some Pashto and asked that I identify him only by his nickname, “Spen,” an Afghan approximation of “whitey.” I had been warned by other members of the team that Spen was a disgruntled naysayer and that I shouldn’t put much stock in what he told me. But as we walked the uneven gravel that covered the desert ground at Ramrod, Spen told me of his initial hope for the Human Terrain System and his subsequent disappointment. By far the most serious problem, in his view, was the utter lack of specific cultural knowledge or expertise among Human Terrain Team members.