Cardinalli and Flo arranged themselves on the floor across from a woman in a red sequined dress and matching headscarf. The woman had curly dark hair and black eyes, and her forehead was tattooed with blue ink. She wore thick sets of red and gold bangles, and her feet were dirty and calloused. She held a baby with a blue pacifier on her lap and eight other children of varying ages clustered around her. They were Kuchis, nomadic herders whose regular migrations had been disrupted by war and drought. Many Kuchis were now settled, but putting down roots had made their traditional herding impossible. Some had been industrious enough to farm or find work in villages, making bricks, doing manual labor, or driving taxis. Others, like the residents of Settlement 1, were desperately poor.
Cardinalli opened her bag of medicines. The Afghan man immediately assumed she was a doctor—the Marines had, after all, brought a doctor to visit his family before. He asked Cardinalli to feel his wife’s stomach, which had been hurting since she had given birth to her latest set of twins. She had borne ten children in all, the man told us, and her stomach tissue had stretched. It hurt when she did chores around the house. They’d been told that she needed an operation, but they couldn’t afford it.
“Tell him that I’m not a doctor, but I’m a medic, a nurse,” Cardinalli told Flo. She wasn’t a medic or a nurse. She and her teammates had taken an emergency first aid course before deployment, learning to clear an airway, bandage a bullet wound, and apply a tourniquet. “Obviously I can’t do an operation,” Cardinalli continued, “but what I can give her is things that can help relieve the pain.” She dug into her backpack and pulled out a container of Icy Hot, a cream for arthritis and joint pain. She handed it to the Afghan man. “If the tissue hurts—when it’s hurting—rub this cream on,” Cardinalli said. “It’ll feel hot at first, but then it will help the tissue. It’ll ease the pain on the inside.”
The man took the cream. The woman asked for food for her baby. Cardinalli offered them a handful of honey sticks and four strawberry protein bars from the chow hall on base, suggesting they dissolve the bars in milk. The woman said she was always in pain. Cardinalli handed her some pink tablets, a generic form of Pepto-Bismol. Flo dug into her bag and pulled out a pile of scarves. She handed them to the woman and her daughters.
Cardinalli scanned the room, gazing at the embroidery on the wall. “Her work is very beautiful,” she told the man. “Americans would pay good money for it.” She began asking questions. Where did they get their news? From Lashkar Gah, the man said. Did the woman listen to the radio? Yes, the man told her. What kind of programs did she like? Programs for women, songs with a fast beat for women to dance to. Cardinalli dutifully recorded his answers in her notebook. The woman said nothing.
When they were done, the man walked us to the door. Outside, the marines were ornery. One of the kids had been goading the dog to bite them.
“Next time that fucking dog gets near, we’re going to kill his fucking dog,” a twenty-one-year-old lance corporal from Texas said.
An Afghan man in a tunic and vest appeared and led us to the next compound, which lay about five hundred yards away. I asked the man what he thought about the Americans.
“It depends which Americans,” he said. “Some are tough and aggressive with us and as Pashtuns we feel kind of threatened by them.”
“Tell him we’re not here to threaten,” Cardinalli put in. “We’re here to help.”
At the next house, children swarmed the marines. “You guys are a lot better than those other fucking brats,” the lance corporal from Texas said.
This place was poorer than the other compound, and more ragged. Eight children crowded the room where we sat. One little girl had tangled, matted hair and glassy eyes. A boy tried to grab my water bottle. The patriarch was big and unkempt, with a loud voice and a gray beard. He wore a dirty green tunic unbuttoned at the top, a white turban, and old black shoes.
“Did you guys bring me dollars?” he asked Cardinalli and Flo once they were inside. “It doesn’t matter if you speak Farsi or Pashto, I just need the medicine,” he told them. “Every time I stand up I get dizzy.”
“When you stand up and get dizzy, that’s because your blood doesn’t have enough water, it doesn’t have enough fluid, so it doesn’t reach your head in time,” Cardinalli told him confidently.
I had no idea what she was talking about, and the big man wasn’t listening. He asked again for medicine. The kids moved around uneasily in the shadows, where a thin, dark-haired woman sat. She had a shrill voice and a crescent tattooed on her forehead; more blue ink patterned her lower lip and chin. Cardinalli was asking the man about his ailments. She gave him two packages of cough drops, a bag of vitamin C tablets, and a tin of Carmex.
“That’s all I get?” he asked.
The woman wanted skin lotion. Cardinalli told her to rub Carmex on her face. Flo handed out Sprite, Snapple, and grapefruit juice from the base cafeteria. Cardinalli wanted to know if they had trouble sleeping. She was holding a package of motion sickness pills. They had no problem sleeping, the man said. Cardinalli handed the woman a knee strap and an elbow band for athletic injuries.
The man wanted more. Cardinalli handed over all that was left of her plastic bag full of medicines, hurriedly explaining that he shouldn’t eat a cold pack meant for icing athletic injuries. When there was nothing more to give, they remembered the book bags and shoes in the Humvees outside. The man wanted those, too. He walked them out. A few cornstalks grew in front of the house. Cardinalli asked what he did for work.
“I don’t do anything,” the man said. “No food, no water. We just grow a few things here.”
“Does he have any other training or education?” she asked Flo.
The man ignored the question. “Tell these Americans not to destroy our country,” he told Flo.
The man’s children had streamed out with us, and now I watched them grab the schoolbags and shoes.
“Some people really get the idea about self-sustainment,” Cardinalli said, “and some don’t.” She turned to the Afghan man. “What do the ladies do mostly during the day?” she asked hopefully. “How do they spend the day?”
“There’s nothing to do,” the man said.
“Do they have any hobbies or talents, like sewing?”
He waved the question away. When he was gone, I told Cardinalli what he had said about the Americans destroying his country.
“They live in the security that we provide. They moved here because of us,” Cardinalli said testily. “So we’re destroying their country!” We climbed back into the Max Pro. “It just sucks the life out of you, doesn’t it?” Cardinalli asked me. “You end up kind of—sad.”
She was not wrong about the complicated, parasitic relationship between the Afghans of Settlement 1 and the foreign troops who had taken up residence in Helmand. A trickle of mostly transitory Afghans—nomads, internally displaced people, returning refugees—had settled on the unwelcoming dirt around the American and British bases. Some undoubtedly hoped to benefit from their newfound proximity to foreigners, but the nature of that benefit was mixed. On the way back to Leatherneck, we stopped at a compound next to a stand of green vegetation. The plants were rooted in blackish mud, and a cornfield stretched along one side of the property. It was the only cultivated area in a sea of desert.
“This is the compound that flourishes from shit runoff,” someone announced. I looked around and saw a dark stream. The Afghans were growing vegetables in the sewage runoff from the nearby military bases.
“We’ve told him about the health risks,” one of the marines said. “He moved here because of it. Says it’s good fertilizer.”
On the way back to the base, I asked a sergeant whether he thought giving out Crocs, notebooks, beans, and tea could sway local opinion about the Americans.
“Some of them like us, some of them don’t,” he told me. “I really don’t know if we’ve had much effect changing people’s minds.”
He was right. When L
acy and I stopped by Fox Company’s tent the following afternoon, we learned that a military convoy had hit a buried bomb just south of the second compound Cardinalli had visited; the marines had found two other explosives buried in the road nearby. It was likely that the old man in the compound had seen the insurgents burying the bomb near his house, or at least heard about it. He had taken everything Cardinalli had to give, but he had said nothing to warn the Americans.
A fresh Human Terrain Team showed up at Leatherneck a few days later. AF7 was bound for Camp Dwyer, another base in Helmand. One morning, I found the new arrivals seated in a semicircle around Dunlap, who was briefing them about the area. The team’s two social scientists, a fresh-faced young woman and a slight man in a black mock turtleneck, leaned in. A female Army major sat next to a young man in a T-shirt. The team leader, a silver-haired retired Marine officer, stood listening. Dunlap was telling them about the pro-NATO night letters she’d written for the British psychological operations guys.
“What are night letters?” one of the new team members asked.
Patiently, Dunlap explained.
The social scientist in the turtleneck spoke up. “Why don’t they just put it in the mailbox,” he asked, “rather than hang it up somewhere and see if they see it?”
Dunlap paused, unsure how to respond. “It’s traditional,” she finally said. “It’s like a proclamation. This is the way they pass messages to the community.”
AF7 had arrived at the beginning of a long-awaited troop surge in one of the most important parts of the country for the U.S. military, and they didn’t know that mailboxes were all but obsolete in Afghanistan. Cardinalli had handed out Icy Hot to a woman with a medical condition that stemmed from having given birth to ten children in a country with dismal health care and a soaring maternal mortality rate. Was this really the best we could do?
* * *
Counterinsurgency was the fad of the moment, and it was all about protecting the Afghan people. But the Marines had landed in Helmand eager for a fight. In the summer and fall of 2009, the brass at Leatherneck obsessively planned the invasion of Marja, which some were calling the next Falluja. Meanwhile, a group of marines in the verdant, sandy Helmand River valley were learning plenty about local culture. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bill McCollough, had served in Iraq’s Anbar Province, where Sunnis had risen up against Al Qaeda. Before coming to Afghanistan, he and his men had spent three months boning up on Islam, Afghan culture, and Pashtunwali, the traditional code of the Afghan south. Eighty of McCollough’s marines had studied Pashto, the main language spoken in Helmand, and they could be found practicing with Afghan petitioners who approached the gates of their small firebases. After landing in the farming district of Nawa in June 2009, they had beaten back the Taliban and transformed a deserted bazaar into a busy shopping center. They patrolled on foot day and night, sometimes sleeping in cornfields; helped resolve local disputes; and threw money at bridge repairs and irrigation projects that the Afghans badly needed. Along the way, they got to know the place well. The company I visited lived on a small stretch of rocky dirt near the bazaar, where they slept on cots in the dust or in tents open to the night air. They bought chicken, rice, and onions from local shopkeepers and cooked over campfires.
Marines are perhaps best known for killing, but McCollough’s battalion exemplified the service’s long-standing interest in cultural intelligence. An expeditionary force, amphibious and adaptable, Marines have a history of engagement in small wars. They landed 180 times in thirty-seven countries between 1800 and 1934, supporting “native troops” and taking on routine police and judicial functions until they could be turned over to the “native agencies to which they properly belong.” A Marine Corps intelligence officer had to know the enemy leaders in his area and track their movements, but he was also expected to understand the vagaries of local politics, the workings of the economy, social mores, and “the attitude and activities of the civil population and political leaders insofar as those elements may affect the accomplishment of the mission.” That is a much broader definition of intelligence than the one traditionally favored by the Army, where some believe that “intelligence” refers solely to information used to target the enemy.
A few months before my visit to Helmand, Marine Corps Major Ben Connable had written that the Human Terrain System was a flimsy and transitory undertaking that devoured scarce resources yet was ill-equipped to meet the military’s crying long-term need for better cultural intelligence. In Quantico, Virginia, the Marine Corps’s Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning was housed in trailers next to the railroad tracks. For Connable, the trailers symbolized the military’s fleeting interest in initiatives that should have been ensconced in brick and cement. The military was engaged in a heady romance with all things culture-related, but what would happen when the moment passed and the money dried up? The Human Terrain System was a contractor-heavy, boutique operation that relied on field teams’ ostensible separation from the intelligence cycle to recruit civilian social scientists; conceptually and practically, it was unsustainable. An Arabic speaker, Connable had served in Iraq and seen firsthand the consequences of Americans’ paltry understanding of the people they were trying to win over. But he believed servicemen and -women were smart and capable enough to learn this stuff on their own. They didn’t need to outsource it to civilians. The military ought to take the problem seriously enough to invest in a durable, long-term solution, he argued. The Human Terrain System was just an expensive distraction.
Connable had a point, but the main problem with the Human Terrain System was much more basic: about half the Human Terrain Team members I met over eighteen months in Afghanistan should never have been there. AF6 managed some modest accomplishments, but none of the Human Terrain Team members at Camp Leatherneck had the kind of expertise that field commanders told me they were looking for. Indeed, none of the members of that team had ever been to Afghanistan before their Human Terrain deployment. Because the marines in charge at Leatherneck didn’t know what the Human Terrain Team was meant to accomplish, the team members did whatever they could, and whatever came up. Dunlap, the Human Terrain analyst, wrote night letters for the British psyops team because that was where she felt most able to contribute and where her contributions were most appreciated. Cardinalli’s report on homosexuality among Pashtun men was used by a Marine intelligence sergeant to shame a young man he was questioning. Major Steve Lacy, the leader of AF6, found that the only way he could gain traction within the Marine command culture in Helmand was by meeting the operational needs of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which in the fall of 2009 was primarily concerned with the impending invasion of Marja, the small farming community that had become a getaway zone for insurgents fleeing other parts of the province.
That fall, a Marine officer asked Lacy to begin collecting cultural information and “open source intelligence” in preparation for the invasion of Marja. In a September 30 field report, Lacy detailed his interview with an Afghan police sergeant and landowner from the northern area of Marja, who identified the location of his home there and of a onetime police checkpoint, both of which had been taken over by insurgents. The Afghan marked the areas inhabited by several Pashtun subtribes, but he also supplied the name of the Taliban commander who had moved into his house and allegedly turned it into a bomb factory. The report included grid coordinates for important places in Marja, including the home of a local leader who had been killed by the Taliban; the home of an elder that had been occupied by the Taliban; a gas station used by insurgents “for refueling and as a gathering place”; and a Taliban checkpoint on the road to Lashkar Gah, “where the Taliban are reported to collect taxes from local residents.” The source supplied the radio call sign for a Taliban commander who controlled most of eastern Marja and pointed out a minefield and a bridge rigged with explosives that the insurgents planned to use against ISAF forces. He also described the location of an insurgent campsite, a cemetery, a
cell phone tower, several mosques, a school, and a number of key traffic intersections. This was not the sort of cultural information the Human Terrain System had told commanders and the public it would be gathering; it sounded more like the Phoenix Program in Vietnam than a gentle effort to learn about local people. But this was exactly the kind of information the Marines wanted. “They have a hard time, any of these guys, distinguishing sociocultural information from intel,” Lacy told me. “To them, it’s all the same stuff, and in a way, it is. Quite frankly, intelligence, by doctrine, is not supposed to be just classified stuff.”
By late 2009, the American Anthropological Association had conducted its own study of the Human Terrain System and concluded, correctly, that the teams were not doing anthropology. The distinction was important, but it didn’t entirely solve the anthropologists’ problem. Anthropology remained poorly understood by the military, the intelligence community, and the public. Too many people still thought of the Human Terrain System as “that military-anthropology program,” and too many press accounts still described it that way. The program had encouraged this confusion, even fed on it. In doing so, one anthropologist told me, the Human Terrain System had “set the relationship between anthropology and the government back forty years.”
What most people didn’t know was that a number of anthropologists in good standing with the American Anthropological Association worked for the U.S. military and other defense and security organizations in jobs that they and their colleagues deemed ethically defensible. It wasn’t working for the military or the government that caused trouble, these anthropologists contended; it was what you did. Rob Albro, an anthropologist at American University and one of the Human Terrain System’s chief critics, acknowledged a reality that some anthropologists ignored. “The military has been given a lot of shit work for which it is not prepared,” he told me. “They’ve been given it because they are a large logistic organization. None other exists on the planet, so they get it. It’s stability operations, it’s nation building, it’s development, it’s humanitarian relief. Should they be doing these things? My feeling is, no. Are they doing these things? Of course. We have to take seriously the idea that we can, in small but significant ways, help them to do that better.” Teaching culture to soldiers and marines before they deployed was one thing—and possibly a necessary thing. Conducting in-house studies of corporate culture at a big national nuclear lab was another. And deploying to an active war zone with soldiers, in uniform and often armed, to interview local people and gather intelligence, was something else again.
The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice Page 19