The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (48 page)

But in early 2009, the Human Terrain System:
Steve Fondacaro, interview by author, June 16, 2010, and Campbell Robertson and Stephen Farrell, “Pact, Approved in Iraq, Sets Time for U.S. Pullout,”
New York Times,
November 16, 2008. For specific consequences for Human Terrain System field team members of Iraqi descent, who would have had to disclose the location of any relatives living in Iraq, putting them at risk, see Clinton et al., “Congressionally Directed Assessment of the Human Terrain System,” 141. For changes contractors faced under the agreement, see “New Status of Forces Agreement Subjects Government Contractors to Iraqi Law,”
http://www.gibsondunn.com/publications/pages/NewStatusofForcesAgreementSubjectsGovernmentContractorstoIraqiLaw.aspx
, accessed July 20, 2012.

An official from the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command emailed:
“Memorandum: Offer/Acceptance of Employment as Human Terrain Analyst GG-12,” Robert Reuss, Defense Intelligence Senior Leader, Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2, Headquarters United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, February 9, 2009. This deadline may have been extended—the Center for Naval Analyses study says team members were given a month. Clinton et al., “Congressionally Directed Assessment of the Human Terrain System,” 141.

About a third of the project’s field team members quit in disgust:
Noah Shachtman, “Mass Exodus from ‘Human Terrain’ Program; At Least One Third Quits,”
Wired: Danger Room,
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/04/htts-quit
/, accessed July 25, 2012. See also Clinton et al., “Congressionally Directed Assessment of the Human Terrain System,” 76.

In the spring of 2009, the Obama administration:
“Obama’s Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, March 2009,” remarks by President Barack Obama, March 27, 2009,
http://www.cfr.org/pakistan/obamas-strategy-afghanistan-pakistan-march-2009/p18952?breadcrumb=%2Fpublication%2Fby_type%2Fessential_document
, accessed July 20, 2012.

Obama had already agreed to send 21,000 more troops:
Obama, “Obama’s Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, March 2009,” remarks, March 27, 2009,
http://www.cfr.org/pakistan/obamas-strategy-afghanistan-pakistan-march-2009/p18952?breadcrumb=%2Fpublication%2Fby_type%2Fessential_document
, accessed July 20, 2012. For the total number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan being more than 60,000 after the addition, see Karen DeYoung, “Obama Announces Strategy for Afghanistan, Pakistan,”
The Washington Post,
March 28, 2009. Nine months later, after General Stanley McChrystal took command, the president would approve an additional “surge” force of 30,000 troops, bringing the total number of forces in Afghanistan to more than 100,000 by the summer of 2010. Eric Schmitt, “Obama Issues Order for More Troops in Afghanistan,”
New York Times,
November 30, 2009. See also “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” December 1, 2009,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-address-nation-way-forward-afghanistan-and-pakistan
, accessed July 20, 2012.

Training for Afghan security forces:
See Obama’s March 27, 2009, speech and “White
Paper of the Interagency Policy Group’s Report on U.S. Policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Spring 2009,
http://www.cfr.org/pakistan/white-paper-interagency-policy-groups-report-us-policy-toward-afghanistan-pakistan/p18959
, accessed July 20, 2012.

As one year slipped into the next:
A kitchen fire can be tackled with a small extinguisher, General Stanley McChrystal told Congress that year, but a house fire requires bigger guns. “In Afghanistan, the insurgency grew as they recovered after 2001,” McChrystal told the House Armed Services Committee. “Their shadow governance, their presence among the people, was not met by increases in Afghan national security force strength levels or in coalition forces. So what I’m saying is, we lagged behind that.” Remarks by General Stanley McChrystal before the House Armed Services Committee, December 8, 2009,
http://www.isaf.nato.int/article/transcripts/transcript-u.s.-house-armed-services-committee-hearing-on-afghanistan.html
, accessed July 20, 2012.

By 2009, even pro-Western Afghans:
Vanessa M. Gezari, “The Secret Alliance,”
New Republic,
August 19, 2011.

That summer, then–Secretary of Defense Robert Gates fired the commander:
“Officials said it appeared that General McKiernan was the first general to be dismissed from command of a theater of combat since Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War.” See Yochi J. Dreazen and Peter Spiegel, “U.S. Fires Afghan War Chief,”
Wall Street Journal,
May 12, 2009, and Chandrasekaran,
Little America,
53.

McKiernan was said to be too plodding:
That the war was profoundly underresourced is clear from Obama’s March 2009 remarks on the strategy, McChrystal’s assessment, and from dozens of other official and press accounts. McKiernan had been asking for more troops in Afghanistan for months before Obama took office, but President George W. Bush declined to act on the request in the final days of his second term, leaving the decision to Obama. See Chandrasekaran,
Little America,
50.

General Stanley McChrystal, then director:
Between 2006 and 2008, McChrystal commanded the Joint Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command Forward. Much of the command’s work during that time involved targeting high-level insurgents in Iraq, and McChrystal was sometimes personally involved in the raids. Forces under McChrystal’s command were credited with capturing Saddam Hussein and finding and killing Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. See “Biography of General Stanley McChrystal,” Council on Foreign Relations,
http://www.cfr.org/afghanistan/biography-general-stanley-mcchrystal/p19396
, accessed July 20, 2012; and “In Hunt for Terrorists in Iraq, General Is No Armchair Warrior,”
Washington Times,
October 2, 2006.

“All ISAF personnel must show respect”:
McChrystal’s exhortation may seem obvious, but it is hard to convey how earth-shattering it was for an American commanding general in Afghanistan to write these words in an official document that was leaked to the
Washington Post’
s Bob Woodward, albeit in the eighth year of the war.

A small number of British forces:
This is based on interviews with marines during a three-week trip to Helmand in September 2009, especially members of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, in Nawa. See also Chandrasekaran,
Little America,
45–46, 48–50.

The team’s leader was Steve Lacy:
Lacy had been a captain when I met him in Leavenworth. By the time I saw him in Afghanistan, he had been promoted to major.

Camp Leatherneck occupied an expanse of fine sand and rock:
The Desert of Death, or Dasht-e-Margo in Pashto. See Kristina Toderich and Tsuneo Tsukatani, “Water/Pasture Assessment of Registan Desert (Kandahar and Helmand Provinces),” Discussion Paper No. 606, Kier Discussion Paper Series, Kyoto Institute of Economic Research, October 2005,
http://www.kier.kyoto-u.ac.jp/DP/DP606.pdf
, accessed July 20, 2012; and Declan Walsh, “Desert of Death Takes Its Toll on Beleaguered Troops,”
Guardian,
July 7, 2006.

AF6 had been sent to Helmand too early:
Dunlap, interview by author, August 23, 2012.

Dunlap flew north to Bagram:
Ibid.

The Marines disliked the idea:
The concept of a Marine Female Engagement Team, known as a FET, was still germinating. Some Marine officers looked at the women on the Human Terrain Team and assumed it was just another version of the FET. They figured both teams would serve the same purpose: to reach out to Afghan women, provide medical and other services, and gather whatever intelligence they could about local politics and the insurgency.

Unable to conduct the village and area assessments:
AnnaMaria Cardinalli, “Pashtun Sexuality,” Human Terrain Team (HTT) AF6, Research update and Findings, 2009, and Dunlap, interview by author, August 23, 2012. For years in various parts of the country, night letters had supported a highly effective insurgent campaign to intimidate local people into resisting the advances of NATO forces and the fledgling Afghan government. Dunlap showed the British how to craft responses that would appeal to Afghans’ concerns for local sovereignty, their hatred of Pakistanis, and their adherence to central tenets of
Pashtunwali,
the traditional code of the Afghan south. Dunlap, “Shabnamah 1SEP09 Babaji wNotes,” a sample coalition night letter to be distributed in Babaji to counter Taliban propaganda, correspondence. For background on the use of night letters in Afghanistan, see “Lessons in Terror: Attacks on Education in Afghanistan,” Human Rights Watch, July 2006,
http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/afghanistan0706.pdf
, accessed August 20, 2012. See also Declan Walsh, “ ‘Night Letters’ from the Taliban Threaten Afghan Democracy,”
Observer,
September 18, 2004.

They worked because they belonged to the place:
Dunlap told me that the term
night letter
(
shabnameh
in Persian) was used to refer to the resistance tactic of large groups of people standing on rooftops at night yelling “Allah-ho-Akbar,” or “God is great,” as a means of protest. Afghans did this during the war against the Soviets; it was also a hallmark of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The concept of
shabnameh
resurfaced in Iran during the antigovernment uprisings of 2009 and 2010. Dunlap,
interview by author, August 23, 2012, and “The Iranian Night Letter,”
http://theiraniannightletter.blogspot.com
, accessed January 10, 2013.

A few days after I arrived at Leatherneck:
The patrol took place on September 4, 2009.

She had grown up in New Mexico:
Cardinalli, interview by author, February 24, 2009, and “AnnaMaria,”
http://annamaria.ws/bio.htm
, accessed July 23, 2012.

At Notre Dame, she had written a PhD dissertation:
Cardinalli, interview by author, February 24, 2009, and AnnaMaria Cardinalli-Padilla, “
El Llanto:
A Liturgical Journey into the Identity and Theology of the Northern New Mexican Penitentes and Their Spiritual Siblings” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, April 2004).

When hijacked planes hit New York and Washington:
Cardinalli, interview by author, February 24, 2009.

had written that the “secrecy”:
Cardinalli-Padilla, “
El Llanto
,” 7.

Later, she would describe her dissertation:
Dr. AnnaMaria Cardinalli, “Cardinalli Resume July 09.”

“Being an activist type, I had a lot of preconceptions”:
Cardinalli, interview by author, February 24, 2009.

It had grown out of a medical mission:
Cardinalli, “Human Terrain Team (HTT) AF-6 Patrol Report and Findings,” September 4, 2009; Captain Jennifer Gregoire, “Mission Summary,” on the August 19, 2009, FET and MEDCAP mission to Settlement 1; and Cardinalli, “Human Terrain Team (HTT) AF-6 Patrol Report and Findings,” August 18, 2009.

When the Navy doctor had finished:
“Women would not respond to questions regarding community issues, even when such questions were framed by HTT as simply an inquiry into their personal opinions and experiences,” she wrote in her patrol report. “When pressed  . . . interviewees said simply, ‘We are not comfortable answering any questions.’ ” Cardinalli, “Human Terrain Team (HTT) AF-6 Patrol Report and Findings,” August 18, 2009.

But this concern struck Cardinalli:
Ibid.

She had no medical training:
Like others on her team, Cardinalli had taken part in a brief combat lifesaving course during her Human Terrain System training cycle. I have taken two similar courses myself, but I am profoundly unqualified to hand out medicine to Afghans.

He later told me he was from Nad Ali:
Also known as Nad-i-Ali.

The Afghans were growing vegetables in the sewage runoff from the nearby military bases:
Marine Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Naler made a reference to the runoff during a briefing to the Marine commander, General Larry Nicholson, on September 13, 2009: “They’re all competing, quite frankly now for the same fertilizer, and that is commonly referred to as shit creek coming out of Bastion. That is what is fueling their agrarian society all the way down the central wadi.”

AF7 had arrived at the beginning of a long-awaited troop surge:
In Helmand and most of the south, the Afghan postal service hadn’t worked in any dependable way since before the civil war. “Night letters,” however, are mentioned with some frequency in press accounts.

Cardinalli had handed out Icy Hot:
Afghanistan had the second-highest maternal mortality rate according to United Nations figures issued in 2008 and 2009. Sayed Salahuddin, “Maternal Mortality Rate High in Afghanistan: UN,”
http://in.reuters.com/article/2009/01/26/afghan-mortality-idINISL40747920090126
, accessed July 23, 2012. The number has since declined; see “Efforts Intensify to Reach MDGs on Maternal Health,” United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, April 11, 2012,
http://unama.unmissions.org/Default.aspx?tabid=12254&ctl=Details&mid=15756&ItemID=33617&language=en-US
, accessed July 23, 2012.

Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bill McCollough:
McCollough commanded the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, in Nawa. The area was repeatedly held up by the military as a shining example of what good counterinsurgency tactics could accomplish. See Gezari, “Talking to the Enemy: How One Company of Marines Is Helping to Bring Afghan Insurgents Home,”
Slate,
October 16, 2009.