The Tender Soldier

A True Story of War and Sacrifice

Vanessa M. Gezari

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781439177402
• eBook ISBN: 9781439177419
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

A "sharp-eyed look at the complexities of war" ( Parade ), that explores the inner workings of the Human Terrain System, a Pentagon program that sends civilian social scientists into war zones to help soldiers understand local culture. On the day Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008, a small group of American civilians took their optimism and experience to a village west of Kandahar, Afghanistan. They were part of the Pentagon's controversial attempt to bring social science to the battlefield, driven by the notion that you can't win a war if you don't understand the enemy and his culture. The field team in Afghanistan that day included an intrepid Texas blonde, a former bodyguard for Afghan president Hamid Karzai, and an ex-military intelligence sergeant who had come to Afghanistan to make peace with his troubled past. But not all goes as planned. In this tale of moral suspense, journalist Vanessa Gezari follows these three idealists from the hope that brought them to Afghanistan through the events of the fateful day when one is gravely wounded, an Afghan is dead, and a proponent of cross-cultural engagement is charged with his murder. Through it all, these brave Americans ended up showing the world just how determined they were to get things right, how hard it was to really understand a place like Afghanistan where storytelling has been a major tool of survival, and why all future wars will involve this strange mix of fighting and listening.Vanessa Gezari is the only journalist to have gained access to the lives of people inside this troubled Army program, including the brilliant, ambitious figures who conceived it. This true story of war and sacrifice will upend your ideas about what really went wrong in Afghanistan.

1. ELECTION DAY

November 4, 2008

In the desert west of Kandahar, the nights were dark and chilly and the stars looked close enough to touch. At midday, the summer sun could kill you, but it was fall now, the dry air smelling of hay and woodsmoke. The Americans had landed three months earlier. They ate precooked food, used portable toilets, and slept in green canvas tents in a gravel lot behind walls that some soldiers judged too low to stop an inventive attacker. Stray cats rubbed up against their legs.

One morning that November, a platoon of soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Regiment of the Army’s 1st Infantry Division left the base on foot. The autumn sky was clear and bright, and the soldiers thought their mission would be an easy one. As some of the first Americans to patrol Maiwand District, a sandy stretch of farmland deep in the Afghan south, the Third Platoon of Comanche Company was building a detailed map of the settlements at the heart of the area, where most of Maiwand’s people lived. On this day they would be photographing the northern quadrant of Chehel Gazi, a village that began about five hundred yards outside the walls of their base.

Three civilians joined the patrol that day. They were part of an experimental Army project called the Human Terrain System, which was designed to help soldiers understand local culture. Before leaving the base, they stood together in a tight circle, holding hands, heads bowed, as they did before every mission.

‘God protect us and bless us for this day,’ one of the men said.

His name was Clint Cooper, and he was tall and thickly built with a straw-colored goatee and pink, freckled skin. As a younger, leaner man, he’d been roguishly handsome, but war trauma and suburban fatherhood had blunted his features, and now little about him stood out. A former military intelligence soldier and interrogator, he spoke Pashto, one of Afghanistan’s two main languages, and he could eavesdrop on Afghans without their having the slightest inkling. On this morning, he and his teammates left the base with the soldiers of Third Platoon. They passed Hesco bags filled with crushed stone, rings of concertina wire, concrete blast walls, and Afghan security guards smiling in borrowed uniforms and baseball caps. Cooper walked toward the rear of the patrol, while his teammate, Don Ayala, strode ahead.

Ayala had a boxer’s physique—bulging biceps, meaty forearms, trim waist—and the soulful eyes of a matinee idol. A forty-six-year-old former Army Ranger, he had come to Afghanistan for the first time six years earlier as a contract bodyguard protecting Afghan president Hamid Karzai. Now he scanned the landscape, looking for anything that didn’t fit. They’d been warned there might be suicide bombers out here.

As they left the base and walked toward the highway, the land unfolded around them like bleached cloth. They passed a shallow wadi where Afghans burned trash. Women in burqas moved like shadows along the edges of the road, where children scavenged and played. The third member of the Human Terrain Team had a particular affection for these women and children. Paula Loyd walked with Cooper, at the center of the column of soldiers. She was thirty-six, slim and bottle-blond, with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, a master’s in diplomacy and conflict resolution, and years of experience in Afghanistan. She had joined the Army after graduating from Wellesley College, and in 2002, her reserve unit had been called up and deployed to Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban. She had organized development projects, met Afghan women confined to their homes, watched Afghan girls eagerly returning to school. The people crept into her heart, and the country kept calling her back. She had spent most of her professional life there, working for aid and development organizations and the United Nations. Loyd was an idealist, but she wasn’t naïve. She knew the score, knew who had fought on which side in Afghanistan’s litany of wars, who was corrupt, which commanders were dealing drugs. Yet she remained optimistic. She was one of the Human Terrain System’s best-qualified field social scientists, and on this day she was beat.

She had been up all night working on a report about the governor of Maiwand, a former religious leader who had fought the Soviets years earlier, and she wasn’t thrilled about the timing of this patrol. But she and her teammates didn’t set the agenda. They were straphangers: if they wanted to get off base, they had to take whatever opportunities came up. Ayala’s easy rapport with soldiers meant that he was often the one who got the Human Terrain Team space on patrols. This mission had arisen with little warning, and when he’d mentioned it to Loyd earlier that morning, she had immediately said yes. After hearing Afghans complain about the high price of flour in Maiwand, she and Cooper had decided to create a consumer price index. That morning’s patrol to Chehel Gazi would give them a chance to interview shoppers coming and going from the nearby bazaar. Loyd, Cooper, and Ayala had lived and traveled together for months. They had gotten to know each other’s rhythms, learned to laugh at each other’s jokes even when they weren’t funny. But as their boots clicked brightly against the hardtop, Loyd told Cooper that she was irritated with Ayala for not giving them more notice about this patrol.

‘You just need to talk to him,’ Cooper told her as they walked. ‘I’m sure he’s open to suggestions.’

‘I don’t want to hurt his feelings,’ Loyd said.

Cooper glanced over at her. He could tell she was tired, but he knew she wanted to be out here. All of them lived for getting off base, especially Loyd. The American soldiers had noticed with surprise that she treated Afghans with genuine warmth, and that Afghans responded in kind. Children flocked to her on patrols, men invited her in to visit with their wives. The soldiers that morning wore digital camo, helmets, and body armor, and carried M4 assault rifles. Cooper and Ayala wore Army uniforms and carried guns, but Loyd did neither. As always, she was unarmed and dressed in civilian clothes: slacks and a long-sleeved shirt under her body armor. She had coiled her shimmering blond hair beneath a military-issue helmet.

They crossed the highway and followed the sloping ground toward the district governor’s compound with its walled garden, where the governor worked under police guard. A small stream ran in front of the compound, shaded by mulberry trees and edged on one side by a stand of bamboo. Farther down, men washed in the stream before praying at a little mosque, but here, close to the highway, plastic bags and pomegranate rinds choked the narrow channel. The soldiers fanned out along the lane, some photographing buildings, doorways, and intersections while others formed a human wall to protect them.

Chehel Gazi belonged to the landscape, to the green vineyards and pale dunes rolling away behind it, to the grit and trash of the bazaar on its western edge and the highway that marked its northern boundary. Its compounds and courtyards lay behind high, smooth walls that seemed to grow from the yellow mud like ancient earthworks. Only their doors and gates, made of wood or brightly painted metal, marked them as homes. A sand path ran alongside the little stream where the soldiers stood, but it felt more like an alley, edged on one side by compound walls and on the other by the stand of mulberry trees rooted along the banks of the irrigation channel. The village was named for this channel, or more precisely, for its source. Chehel Gazi means “forty meters,” the depth at which someone digging a well there would hit an underground aquifer. The village owed its relative prosperity to this water, which fed its vineyards and nourished its people and animals. Its nearness to the road and the bazaar, the economic hub of the district, both enriched it and exposed it to traffic with the outside world, to new ideas, to sin and danger. The bazaar was a gathering place for people from across the south, a place where information was traded and where the usual protections of a closed, communal society did not apply. The Taliban were in the bazaar every day, the district governor had told the Americans. ‘Chalgazi Village has Taliban living within it,’ a local policeman had told Ayala and the soldiers a week earlier.

It was the morning of November 4, 2008, election day back home, when a citizenry frustrated by seemingly endless violence and spending in Iraq and a lack of focus in Afghanistan would go to the polls to choose a new president. Barack Obama had campaigned on the notion that Afghanistan was the good war, the war the nation needed to fight as opposed to the war it had chosen. If he were elected, America’s Afghan campaign would be reconsidered with new optimism and energy. For the first time in years, the nation’s attention was turning to a conflict long waged on autopilot, and the soldiers and Human Terrain Team members in Maiwand that morning constituted an advance party. In the minds of some, they were America’s last best hope for changing the course of its longest war.

For years, soldiers had been arriving in Iraq and Afghanistan with little or no knowledge about the people who lived there. But the longer they stayed on the ground, the more problematic this became. Infantrymen in their teens and twenties had become de facto ambassadors, trying to barter political agreements between tribal leaders and drive a wedge between civilians and an enemy that was all but indistinguishable from them. Shock and awe had given way to the newly rediscovered military strategy known as counterinsurgency, which promised a smarter, more humane way of fighting. The strategy’s greatest champion, General David Petraeus, had recently taken charge of Central Command, where he oversaw American military efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus spoke of Afghanistan’s “human terrain” as the decisive battleground for U.S. forces, and by “human terrain,” he meant the Afghan people.

The Human Terrain System was designed to plant civilian social scientists, including anthropologists, in frontline military units to act as cultural translators to soldiers, marines, and their commanders. It wasn’t just that Americans dealt rudely with Afghans because they didn’t know the first thing about their culture. It was that, too often, they detained and killed the wrong people, alienating others and fueling the insurgency. Success hinged on winning hearts and minds, but it also depended on good intelligence, for counterinsurgency was comprised of two distinct and seemingly contradictory kinds of activity. The first involved humanitarian aid and development, psychological operations, and political persuasion to soften local resistance, build relationships, and gather intelligence. The second used that intelligence to guide everything from food handouts to detentions and targeted killings. The Human Terrain System was a soft tool, but it was part of a hard and complicated battle.

The Human Terrain Team and the soldiers split up. Loyd and Cooper lingered near the district headquarters, close to the highway and the bazaar, while Ayala and another group of soldiers kept walking farther along the path edging the stream, stopping at a small footbridge beyond the trees. Ayala sat on the bridge in the sun, bantering with the soldiers and handing out candy to children. There was something intoxicating about this place, so often patrolled that it had come to feel familiar, so close to the base that it almost had to be safe. Water lapped the edges of the channel. Near the bazaar, in an open space at the intersection of two sandy lanes, Loyd and Cooper handed out pens and candy to kids on their way to school.

Their regular translator wasn’t with them that day. Instead, they were working with an interpreter the Americans called Jack Bauer after the terrorist-hunting hero of the television show 24. The soldiers gave funny nicknames to all their interpreters to mask their identities—Rock Star, Tom Cruise, Chuck Norris, even Ron Jeremy after a well-known porn star. Jack Bauer was a twenty-three-year-old Pashtun with a dark pompadour, crooked teeth, and liquid puppy-dog eyes. He often translated for the young captain in charge of Comanche Company, but he had gotten to know Loyd, Ayala, and Cooper because the Human Terrain Team shared a tent with the Afghan interpreters on the small firebase near the district center. The tent was divided by a plywood partition, Americans on one side, Afghans on the other. Sometimes Loyd dropped by the interpreters’ side to say hello. Once, she and Ayala invited Jack and some other interpreters to watch The Da Vinci Code on someone’s laptop. Loyd had asked Jack about his family, what he did before, how long he had been working with the soldiers.

Jack liked this American woman. She was very friendly and kind, equally eager to talk to soldiers, interpreters like him, or Afghans she met on the street. But he didn’t entirely understand what she and her teammates were doing out there. They told everyone they were civilians, not soldiers, and Loyd seemed eager to hand out wheat seed to farmers so they wouldn’t plant opium poppy. Jack thought that Ayala and Cooper were her bodyguards. He had seen her talking to Afghan soldiers and police during meetings at the district governor’s office, and the few times he’d worked with her, he had noticed that she always carried candy, and that kids came running when they saw her. A few days earlier, he had seen some kids swarming around her and spoken up.

‘Hey, Paula, this isn’t the United States,’ he’d told her. ‘In this country, it’s very dangerous. Actually, this province is very dangerous. Don’t give candy to the kids.’

Loyd had stiffened. ‘Jack, you’re the interpreter,’ she had told him. ‘You just interpret what I say. You’re not my boss.’

‘Yes,’ he had told her. ‘Okay.’

He had thought she was angry with him, but back at the base she’d sought him out, made a point of saying hello, asked if he was mad at her. Of course not, he’d told her. Still, those children worried him. She didn’t carry a gun. “The enemy will use different weapons in different ways,” he would say later. “We can’t identify which people is civilian, which people is the Taliban.”

Jack’s words signaled his mistrust of the situation he’d gotten himself into. He had been raised in Kabul, where young men listened to Bollywood soundtracks, wore tight jeans, and exchanged shy glances with girls. Kandahar was a different story—older, rougher, a universe of men without women—and Maiwand was the countryside. The Afghans he met there were nothing like the people he knew back home. On the rare occasions when Maiwand revealed itself to him, it always managed to remind him how little he knew. The insurgents talked to each other on field radios, and Jack and the other interpreters were given the job of monitoring the conversation and reporting back to the Americans. During patrols, a soldier would hand the interpreters a scanner, and they would listen to insurgents watching them from somewhere nearby. ‘We saw the American forces leave their base,’ an insurgent would say to one of his comrades on the radio. ‘They went through the bazaar. We saw them walking near that small mountain.’ The interpreters couldn’t see the Taliban, but the Taliban could see them. It was eerie, and there was an element of psychological play to it; the insurgents knew the Americans were listening, knew they would be unnerved by the awareness that they were being watched. Whenever the insurgents wanted to convey something really important they would switch to cell phones, which were harder to monitor. Sometimes Jack heard insurgents talking on the radio about planting bombs near the road, and he and the other interpreters would lean in close and try to figure out where they could possi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Map of Afghanistan
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• 1. Election Day
• 2. What You Don’t Know Will Kill You
• 3. The Tender Soldier
• 4. Maiwand
• 5. The Anthropology of Us and Them
• 6. Hearts and Minds
• 7. Crime and Punishment
• 8. Good Intentions
• 9. The Devil You Don’t Know
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About Vanessa M. Gezari
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright