The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (5 page)

Cultural Preparation of the Environment was an open-source intelligence tool designed to reduce violence by understanding the sea in which the enemy swam.
McFate had been intrigued by the common ground between anthropology and intelligence since she was researching her doctoral dissertation about British soldiers and Irish Republican Army fighters and realized that anything she wrote about how either side operated could help its adversary. It struck her then that as an anthropologist interested in war, her work could be read by “anyone, anywhere and used for their purposes,” she told me. Since Vietnam, many anthropologists had grown highly suspicious of the U.S. military’s adventures in far-flung places, whose people were often the subject of ethnographic study. But McFate viewed these concerns as naïve. “If you really want to control or constrain the ability of people to use anthropological materials for the purposes of war, you should not write” ethnographic studies, she told me. “And you certainly shouldn’t publish” them.

McFate lost no time advancing her view that the military needed anthropology in the worst way. She organized a conference on the national security benefits of knowing your enemy and wrote a string of military journal articles in which she emphasized the role of anthropology in the colonial conquests of the nineteenth century and its necessity for contemporary military commanders.
The U.S. military and policy community’s ethnocentrism had led to miscalculations in Vietnam, the
Soviet-Afghan War, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and Iran, McFate argued. In Iraq and Afghanistan, cultural misunderstandings had proved absurdly simple and deadly.
Coalition forces arrested Iraqis for having weapons, but they didn’t understand that most Iraqis had weapons. They detained hundreds of people because they couldn’t make sense of kinship systems, and lost track of detainees because they misunderstood Arabic naming conventions.
Shia Muslims who flew black flags for religious reasons were viewed as enemies by marines, who associated white flags with surrender and black flags with its opposite. At checkpoints, the American hand signal for “stop”—arm extended, palm out—meant “welcome” to Iraqis, who hit the gas and got shot. “Across the board, the national security structure needs to be infused with anthropology, a discipline invented to support warfighting in the tribal zone,” McFate wrote.
She was briefing military officials in Tampa one day in 2005 when a colonel in battlefield camouflage walked in and sat at the back of the room. When it was over, McFate asked him what he was doing there. “I think I’m in the wrong briefing,” he said, “but it sounded interesting, so I decided to stay.”

The colonel was Steve Fondacaro, an iconoclastic, wiry Army Ranger with close-cropped gray hair and the tenaciousness of a terrier, who had lately become convinced that the United States was its own worst enemy in Iraq.
Fondacaro was determined to do whatever it took to defeat the arrogance and bureaucratic inertia that were suffocating the Army he loved, an Army that had defined him since West Point and given him thirty years of workaholic bliss. But he had another problem, one he couldn’t do anything about. Most soldiers are required to leave the Army after three decades of service. Fondacaro was staring down the barrel of forced retirement.

Born in New York to a mother of Puerto Rican descent and an Italian-American father, Fondacaro had grown up all over the country but mainly in Fresno, California. When he was born, his family had
lived on 114th Street in East Harlem; but his father, a physical therapist, was soon drafted to fight in Korea, and the family moved to follow him. The elder Fondacaro spent twenty-eight years in the Army, retiring as a colonel. Steve Fondacaro was the middle child of three boys and the only one to reach a normal adult height. His brothers, Phil and Sal Fondacaro, are diastrophic dwarfs who played Ewoks in
Return of the Jedi.
But for as long as he could remember, Steve Fondacaro had wanted to go to West Point, and to war.

He entered the academy in 1972, toward the end of the Vietnam War, when public opposition to the military reached an all-time high. But Fondacaro had no reservations. He suspected that his antiwar peers knew less about the conflict in Vietnam than he did, having grown up in a military family, and he knew that to be young and hip and make conversation at a bar in those days you had to bad-mouth Nixon. “That’s where I first began to understand how little research anybody does,” he told me. “Wisdom is defined, in my view, as in the Chinese proverb: a wise man is a man who is fully aware of how much he does not know.”

At West Point, Fondacaro particularly enjoyed his classes in military history and Sosh, the academy’s independent-minded social sciences department.
The department has long served as an intellectual incubator for officers willing to dispute the official line, and since the 1980s, it has been a particularly important site of debate over the Army’s role in Vietnam. As a result, Sosh recurs in the intellectual genealogies of today’s leading counterinsurgency advocates, many of whom have taught there.
Fondacaro graduated from West Point in 1976, along with Stanley McChrystal, Raymond Odierno, David Rodriguez, and William Caldwell IV, all of whom would go on to hold command positions in Iraq or Afghanistan. David Howell Petraeus, whom everyone called “Peaches,” finished two years earlier. Instead of a fancy engineering specialization, Fondacaro chose the infantry. “It’s the most enriching
life experience,” he told me. “Nothing else appealed to me other than being in combat.”

He went to Ranger school, then trained for two years as a platoon leader in Panama before joining the 1st Ranger Battalion. He made captain and was sent to Korea for what he thought would be a year of company command, but when he got off the plane, a general commandeered him to serve in a staff job normally given to a higher-ranking officer. There Fondacaro helped organize logistics for Team Spirit, a massive yearly U.S.–South Korean military training exercise. He eventually got his company command, at a post along the demilitarized zone, where he says he led combat patrols to stop North Korean infiltrators on sabotage missions. During this period, he met Insuk Kim, the Korean woman he would marry and with whom he would have two children.

By his own account, Fondacaro was a bit too sharp and outspoken for his own good. He pissed people off by being chosen, as a junior captain, for staff jobs that would ordinarily have gone to officers above him. His extended tour in Korea also meant that he missed the chance to jump into Grenada with his fellow Rangers in Operation Urgent Fury, one of the Cold War’s most celebrated combat missions. “The more experienced you get in Korea, the more they want to send you back to Korea,” Fondacaro told me.
He spent thirteen years there, returning to the States intermittently for advanced courses at several Army schools and a two-year Pentagon tour in the Special Technical Operations Division, a largely “black,” or classified, organization.

Fondacaro’s immersion in Korea made him intimately familiar with the history of American policy failures in Asia. He began to understand why some people viewed the United States as the world’s leading hypocrite, a nation that preached democratic principles while supporting leaders like Ferdinand Marcos and Ngo Dinh Diem.
He knew that Ho Chi Minh had begged the United States for support in freeing his
people from the domination of the French, borrowing words from the Declaration of Independence to express Vietnamese aspirations for self-rule, and that American leaders had turned away. Like his Korean comrades, Fondacaro grew frustrated by the persistent shortsightedness of American foreign policy. “How is it that we get driven to a last-minute, midnight decision with two lieutenant colonels in the Pentagon that say, ‘Hey, 38th Parallel looks good to me, Joe,’ and we decide the fate of a nation?” Fondacaro asked me during one of our conversations. “This is our legacy.”

When Fondacaro returned to the States as a colonel in 2001, he was asked to conduct an Army-wide study to figure out what the capabilities of the twenty-first-century soldier should be. Later, he would view this as a sort of military ethnography, but he wasn’t thinking about anthropology then, not yet. He sent teams to survey, interview, and conduct focus groups with soldiers and officers around the world. The results convinced him of what he called the Army’s “tribal nature.” It was a sprawling organization atomized into cliques whose members identified primarily as logisticians or supply officers or engineers rather than as combat soldiers, but asymmetrical warfare was making those divisions obsolete. “Those days when you’re a logistics guy or you’re a transportation guy and all you do is move ammo from the rear, those days are over, because you can be attacked anywhere along the way,” he told me. “It’s a 360-degree battle. That requires a different kind of soldier.”
The future soldier he envisioned would operate more like a Special Forces commando than a member of the conventional Army. Like the Marine Corps creed—“every Marine a rifleman”—this new brand of fighter should embody a “warrior ethos,” Fondacaro argued. Every soldier, no matter his job description, would need combat and small-unit leadership skills.

Then–Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki grew interested in the study and urged Fondacaro on, enlisting him as an informal
adviser.
But Shinseki was on the wrong side of power. He had testified before Congress that several hundred thousand troops would be needed for peacekeeping and reconstruction in post-invasion Iraq, angering then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who favored a much smaller force. Shinseki was more clear-eyed than his boss, but he was marginalized for disputing the official line, and he quietly retired in the summer of 2003. Fondacaro considered Shinseki his strongest supporter.
He blamed his failure to make general on Shinseki’s fall, but the great majority of Army colonels never earn a star. After Army politics frustrated his attempts to land a job he coveted in Afghanistan, Fondacaro was sent to serve his last tour at a little-known organization called the Army Capabilities Integration Center, or ARCIC, under the Training and Doctrine Command. “Don’t ask me what they do,” Fondacaro told me. “I gave it the best I could for a year, but it was a waste of time.”

Then, just as he was about to leave the Army, Fondacaro was offered a job he really wanted.
An acquaintance from his Ranger days, then-Colonel Joe Votel, had been tapped to head a new Army task force with a mission to target the homemade bombs that were killing soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Votel asked Fondacaro to lead a small group of Special Operations and other forces helping combat troops in Iraq. Fondacaro was in his thirtieth year of service, but he got an extension and headed to Baghdad. Part of his job there was to field-test the seemingly endless stream of gadgets and prototypes that defense contractors were developing to counter roadside bombs.
They ranged from the useless to the bizarre. One device purported to find buried bombs and defuse them electromagnetically. The machine became so highly charged that it had to be neutralized by soldiers walking up behind it with a giant wooden probe. You guys are on so much dope that I can’t help you, Fondacaro thought when he saw it. This was the job he held when McFate met him at the briefing in Tampa. Eventually the database project she was working on, Cultural Preparation of the
Environment, found its way to Fondacaro’s testing unit in Baghdad.
As he listened to the contractors pitch it, he knew it wouldn’t work. ‘This is a piece of crap,’ he told them.

In Fondacaro’s view, the creators of Cultural Preparation of the Environment had missed the point. They had built a laptop stocked with cultural and demographic information for a commander who already had more gadgets than he knew what to do with—a busy officer swimming in data, but with no one to help him interpret it. The creators of Cultural Preparation of the Environment seemed to think that the commander could have a conversation with the database as if it were a human being on his staff, but that was impossible, and anyway, he wouldn’t know which questions to ask. “That’s when the light went on for me,” Fondacaro recalled. What a field commander needed were “social scientists on his staff, belonging to him. Not a dial-a-social-scientist with a fifteen-thousand-mile screwdriver from Brown University on Saturdays. He needed somebody embedded with him, part of his mission, understanding what he and his staff were going through day to day, totally integrated into his decision-making process so that the solutions offered were relevant to the situation he faced.”
That Arab brides painted their hands with henna before marriage might be of interest to a social scientist, but that marriages in many Arab communities were accompanied by celebratory gunfire was of critical importance to commanders in Iraq. “Do you think that’s something the commander maybe needs to know, so that the Apache helicopters flying over at the time the celebratory gunfire comes up don’t roll in on a marriage ceremony and kill everyone because they thought they were being fired upon, so that instead of one thousand insurgents, you now have five thousand or maybe ten thousand insurgents?” Fondacaro asked me.

By 2005, things were changing in the Army and in America.
With violence intensifying in Iraq, President George W. Bush, who had declared his disdain for nation building, embraced it as the only way to
avert disaster.
Given the paltriness of America’s civilian diplomatic and development corps, no entity but the military could undertake such a giant task.
That year, “stability operations” became one of the military’s core missions. It was a profound shift, particularly for an Army whose recent engagements had been shaped by the Powell Doctrine’s emphasis on overwhelming force and a clear exit strategy.
In the short term, stability operations would provide security, “restore essential services, and meet humanitarian needs,” but their long-term aims were much broader: “to help develop indigenous capacity for securing essential services, a viable market economy, rule of law, democratic institutions, and a robust civil society.” The military’s expanded mission meant new intelligence requirements for all the services.
Commanders were instructed to draft requirements for “numbers of personnel with appropriate language and cultural skills and proficiency levels.”
Intelligence products had to bring together information from traditional sources as well as the social sciences, “including from sociological, anthropological, cultural, economic, political science, and historical sources within the public and private sector.”