The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (14 page)

Loyd’s field notes were infused with the doubt of someone well acquainted with Afghanistan.
“He said there were no other elders (did he just not want to name them?),” she wrote that fall. “The Malik system seem [
sic
] to be working in his village (bears further investigation—probably force of personality to some extent). There is no single Noorzai
leader in Maiwand; each village chooses a Malik (Does Malik vary from tribe to tribe?).” Loyd understood the nature of covert rebellion as well as anyone; it worked the same way whether Afghans were opposing the Taliban or the Americans. People might be
“very cautious about expressing their resistance openly when they perceive the power of the dominant group to be very strong,” Loyd had written in her Wellesley thesis years earlier. But “[a]way from public scrutiny, when they are among their own, the peasants carry on an entirely different dialogue.” Between what people said and what they really thought lay a category of behavior that Loyd had described as “partially veiled and partially open.” This type of activity unfolded in public, but took “disguised or anonymous forms,” its revolutionary intent “veiled within multiple levels of meaning.” People talked in jokes, metaphors, folktales, songs, and codes. “In this way,” Loyd had written, “subversive meanings may be denied if necessary.”

One Human Terrain draft report that fall recorded a conversation between the team and a group of Afghans. The Taliban planted mines at night, the Afghans said, but the village elders didn’t know who was actually laying the bombs in the roads. They welcomed the Americans to their village, as long as they came to talk and didn’t kick down doors.

‘How do you define security?’ Cooper asked.

‘Peace, so the children can grow up without war,’ one of the Afghans said. ‘There has been too much war.’

“We felt these people would have talked a lot more given more time,” Loyd wrote. “They were just starting to open up.”

F
or a very long time,
war and anthropological fieldwork have been intertwined.
T. E. Lawrence’s success during the Arab Revolt is legendary, and it is easy to see why. He had studied history at Oxford, hiked across the deserts and mountains of the Middle East, spent years on an archeological dig in Syria, and served with the British Army in Cairo, and he used everything he knew about Arab culture to influence the Hejaz in Britain’s interest.
“The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them,” the man known as Lawrence of Arabia wrote in 1917.

The anthropologist who helped create the Human Terrain System was born Montgomery Carlough in 1966, but you had to go back before that to understand who she was. Her life story was so colorful that it was easy to get caught up in the details, to lose sight of how she, of all people, had landed at the center of a bold attempt to transform
the Army into an organ of cultural knowledge and sensitivity. Her personal history could be distracting, but ignoring it wasn’t an option. It held clues to why the Human Terrain System evolved as it did. She was born of contradictions: California beatnik counterculture, a familial fascination with the primitive “other,” and a quiet but persistent strain of military DNA that was as mainline American as it got. She embodied at once the forces that drove the military and anthropologists apart and the desires and imperatives that have historically drawn them together.

The story of Montgomery McFate, née Carlough, began far from the American heartland, where she would live for a time as the Human Terrain System’s senior social scientist.
Her mother had been the half-Mexican granddaughter of a man who lost everything in the Mexican Revolution. Unable to care for his many daughters, he had sent them to family scattered around Latin America, and three, including McFate’s grandmother, Mequilita, to a distant relative in New Orleans. Mequilita Ramirez was an exotic beauty. “My grandmother really looked very Indian, very South American Indian,” McFate told me. “If you look at pictures of her, she definitely does not look at all Caucasian.”

Mequilita Ramirez’s line of descent slowly whitened. She married a much older man who played coronet in Marine Corps bandmaster John Philip Sousa’s orchestra, according to family lore. Their daughter, Frances Poynter, had dark skin, long black hair, and prominent cheekbones, which made her look vaguely Mediterranean, but still more Caucasian than her mother. She grew up in New Orleans, where she worked as a telephone operator and a window display designer for department stores. McFate didn’t know much about this period of her mother’s life, except that Poynter was warm, outgoing, and free-spirited, that she enjoyed the companionship of black musicians and felt at home in the jazz scene.

Sometime around 1950, Frances Poynter and her husband, Cecil
Westerberg, made their way to the San Francisco Bay area. They bought property near the Mount Tamalpais ridgeline in Muir Woods and opened a small business—McFate thought it might have been a restaurant. At some point, Westerberg, who went by the nickname Barney,
got arrested for dealing marijuana. As part of his rehabilitation, he learned to carve wood. “He basically changed his name and created an entire fictive biography for himself,” McFate told me. Instead of Cecil Westerberg, he became Barney West.

West told people that he had served in the merchant marine and been shipwrecked on a Polynesian or Micronesian island. During his time on the island, he said, the natives had taught him how to carve wood. This was in the early 1960s, a decade after the publication of Thor Heyerdahl’s
Kon-Tiki,
when Elvis Presley starred in
Blue Hawaii
and Hula-Hoops and tiki bars were the rage. In McFate’s view, America’s cultural obsession with Polynesia stretched back even further, to Margaret Mead’s
Coming of Age in Samoa.
“The cultural eye,” McFate told me, “was focused on Polynesia.”

Poynter and West moved to Sausalito, a city just north across the bay from San Francisco, and started a little woodworking shop called Tiki Junction, where West carved giant, iconic tikis that he sold to Trader Vic’s, a Polynesian-themed restaurant chain; McFate’s mother painted the carvings. West, a handsome, muscular man with a handlebar moustache, relied on his story of shipwreck and native tutelage to give the carvings authenticity, and to patrons of Trader Vic’s, mai tais in hand, they were indistinguishable from the real thing.
He had found a way to turn mid-twentieth-century America’s fascination with the primitive to profit, but the cultural artifacts he supplied were “all fake,” McFate told me. “It was all made by Barney, painted by my mom.”

McFate’s mother and West eventually divorced, and in 1957, Frances Poynter bought a surplus wooden Navy barge for a dollar.
The barges had been used to tow ammunition to Hawaii during the war;
now they were being torn apart for scrap.
Poynter docked her barge in Richardson Bay, in a nascent houseboat community known as Gate 5. She divided it into apartments, renting out two and living in the third. Most of the walls in McFate’s childhood home were made from driftwood that her mother had collected from the beach after storms. Frances Poynter knew nothing about fireplace construction, but she built a fireplace out of river rocks and a giant industrial smokestack. McFate found it kind of beautiful, but also deeply weird, like the sailboat some friends of her mother’s built with a telephone pole for a mast and a barrel from a fun-house ride for a table. Gate 5 residents shared a profound confidence in their ability to remake their environment, even when they lacked the most basic technical training.

Poynter met McFate’s father, Martin Carlough, at a festival in Golden Gate Park. A handsome former marine and itinerant carpenter nine years younger, Carlough was also a diagnosed schizophrenic who lived on the streets and self-medicated with PCP, LSD, and belladonna. He spent most of McFate’s childhood in and out of mental hospitals, where, like Barney West years earlier, he underwent electroshock therapy. The treatment ruined his mind, and he became a kind of zombie with damaged, clawlike hands. McFate remembers him as a “terrifying presence,” very tall with a shaved head and a pink denim jacket that said on the back, in rhinestone letters, “I am God.” When she was six or seven, he killed her cat by breaking its neck and throwing it off the deck of the barge. “Just run-of-the-mill family horror,” she told me, with a little laugh.

Although McFate’s parents were married briefly, her father didn’t live with them. He would come by the barge to ask her mother for money or food. For a time, he lived in a cave nearby, in a dugout beneath a dock that he lined with tinfoil and cardboard. When McFate was about ten, he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, and her mother had to go down to the morgue and identify his body. Frances Poynter’s
lover, a local shipyard owner, became McFate’s primary father figure. Though he was wealthy, he lived in a broken-down house and wore overalls. He let her smoke his pipe and told her she could have as much homemade liquor as she wanted, so long as she poured it over ice cream; she perused his collection of
Playboy
s with interest. The houseboat community was ungoverned and chaotic, she told me, “the opposite from what you would find on an Army base, where there’s a lot of social-norming going on, a lot of social control that is exerted just within the community.” Craving order, McFate begged her mother to let her join the Girl Scouts, but Poynter objected. She advised her daughter never to join anything.

In addition to drawing rent from the barge apartments, McFate’s mother molded Easter Island–style heads from cement and sold them. For a while, she made what McFate described as “these Egyptian sort of plaque-looking things” that were plaster and painted. The fabrication of anthropological artifacts—culture as curio—was a family obsession, but the cement heads proved less profitable than West’s tikis, and McFate and her mother subsisted mostly on beans and rice. When McFate was eleven or twelve, one of her mother’s friends tried to convince Poynter to apply for food stamps. She refused. “She would not take anything from the government,” McFate told me. “I remember getting mad at her about it. ‘Would you prefer that we don’t have enough to eat? You’re going to turn down charity on principle, and who’s going to benefit from that? I’m hungry.’ ” Her mother was stubborn, McFate said, unwilling to compromise her principles for practical good. To McFate, this seemed ridiculous, even immoral. The important thing was to stay alive.

McFate’s mother had a complex relationship to authority and to the antiauthoritarian culture that surrounded her. Apolitical and deeply suspicious of government, she nevertheless viewed hippies with disdain.
Poynter was one of the few houseboat dwellers in Gate 5 with a legal
lease, one of the few who paid for electricity instead of snaking a cable up the street and siphoning it off the lines at the Mohawk gas station. Yet several times, including one Christmas Eve, building inspectors posted “Condemned” notices on the barge. “She was very aware of how tenuous her hold on the property was and how on the margins we were,” McFate recalled. When Marin County judged the community of houseboat dwellers and squatters at Gate 5 a giant floating health hazard—the boats were pumping raw sewage into the bay—Poynter supported efforts to bring the place up to code. And when a development company announced its intention to turn Gate 5 into an upscale yacht harbor,
Poynter, by most conventional definitions a radical, came to be viewed by her neighbors as something of a stooge.

The developers declared that people like Poynter, who had legal leases, could stay; everyone else had to get out. But they didn’t understand “the context they were operating in,” McFate told me, “ironically, much like the military in Afghanistan. So their solution was, ‘We’re just going to start building.’ ” The developers brought in a pile driver and went to work. At night, some Gate 5 insurgents blocked in the pile driver with a big ammunition barge. The resistance boat, known as the Red Barge, became a floating rebel campground. When the Marin County sheriff’s department came down to remove the holdouts, a maritime battle ensued, with Gate 5 residents storming the authorities in rowboats and the cops fighting back with high-pressure fire hoses.

The standoff began when McFate was about eleven years old and carried on intermittently for years. The developers hired Samoan security guards, enormous men who camped on the back of her mother’s barge, and this surreal battle with its shifting cast of outlandish characters became the defining experience of McFate’s young life. At times, it frightened her.
A man known as Teepee Tom, who lived in a deerskin lean-to that he’d mounted on Styrofoam blocks so it would float, fired his rifle through her bedroom window (the bullet lodged harmlessly
in a broken upright piano). But the war also intrigued her. “People really drew sides,” she told me; it was absorbing to watch.
Meanwhile, a private drama played out on the barge, where Poynter drank cheap vodka and drifted in and out of a desultory maternal role. Many days, McFate didn’t want to go home, not knowing what she would find: “Would my mother have actually cooked dinner or would she be basically passed out in vomit?” McFate spent hours in the evenings at a bus stop on Bridgeway, a big road in Sausalito, doing her homework beneath a streetlight like a child in one of the underelectrified villages of the developing world. Passing cops sometimes mistook her for a child prostitute.

By middle school, McFate was beginning to be aware of a different, more stable and predictable world beyond Gate 5.
She befriended a classmate who lived in Marin City, a predominantly black community that had been built to house shipyard workers during World War II.
The housing projects of Marin City were beautiful to McFate. She envied her friend’s comparative wealth and, even more, his family’s conventionality. He had a father who lived at home, where pink lacy curtains covered the windows. As a target of schoolyard mockery a few years earlier, McFate had realized with surprise that not everybody’s father jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. It took her slightly longer to figure out that her friend from Marin City wasn’t part of a privileged black class that ruled America. The knowledge that there were other worlds and, indeed, that multiple realities existed beyond the borders of her own perception, soon became one of McFate’s chief consolations. Understanding—even empathy—was, for her, a defensive posture, one that followed her into adulthood. If you believe that war is inevitable, she told me, “you will never be surprised by it. If you think it’s inevitable, you can take some kind of activity to stop it or mediate it or moderate it. But if you think that war isn’t part of human nature, you’re constantly going to be surprised and disappointed by human beings.”