The Foreign Service Journal, April 2014

66 April 2014 | the foreign Service journal Exploring Unknown Human Terrain The Tender Soldier Vanessa M. Gezari, Simon & Schuster, 2013, Kindle Edition/$12.04, 368 pages. Reviewed by Jim DeHart On Nov. 4, 2008, in a village not far from Kandahar, an Afghan attacker doused a promising 36-year-old American named Paula Loyd with gasoline and set her afire. A teammate, Don Ayala, helped subdue the man and rescued him from a beating, then changed course and put a bullet through his brain. Nine weeks later, as Ayala awaited trial for second-degree murder, Loyd died of her wounds. One American life was lost, a second changed forever, on the same day that American voters half a world away elected their next president. Vanessa Gezari tells Loyd and Ayala’s stories, and assesses the controversial program that brought them to that Afghan village. As members of a U.S. Army Human Terrain Team, Loyd and Ayala were participants in an ambitious effort by the Pentagon to bring social science knowl- edge to the battlefield. Gezari’s thoughtful account of the program and its members is founded on insights gleaned from her time as a reporter in Afghanistan (2002- 2004) and a half-dozen return visits while researching the book. Ayala, a former Army Ranger and one- time contract bodyguard for President Hamid Karzai, was a good guy to have at one’s side in dangerous times. Gezari describes his journey from Afghanistan to a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., where (spoiler alert!) he is spared a prison sentence for manslaughter and sentenced to five years probation. But the heart of the book is Paula Loyd. Gezari recalls her life with sympa- thy and affection, hailing her as “a brave and gentle woman with a Wellesley degree, a soldier’s devo- tion to her country, and a fierce curiosity about the world.” After graduating fromWellesley in 1995 with a degree in anthro- pology, Loyd enlisted in the U.S. Army. “Morally and politically,” explains Gezari, “her sympathies lay with the grunts.” Following a deployment to Kanda- har, Loyd earned a master’s degree in diplomacy and conflict resolution from Georgetown University, then returned to Afghanistan in 2004. She first worked for the U.S. Agency for International Devel- opment in Zabul province, then for the United Nations in Kabul. When the U.S. Army launched its new Human Terrain System program in 2007, this remarkable young woman seemed the ideal recruit. In counterinsurgency, the taking and holding of physical terrain is ephemeral; the real battleground is the local population—the “human terrain” in Pentagon-speak. In Afghanistan, U.S. commanders were tasked with bringing the locals closer to their government. In the process, some Afghans would need to be killed and captured, and others given support. To distinguish between the two groups, U.S. commanders needed help untangling complex loyalties and relationships at the local level. Trained anthropologists like books Paula Loyd were expected to furnish the “cultural intelli- gence” needed for this effort. But while Loyd had spent most of her brief professional life in Afghanistan working for aid and development organiza- tions, a startling number of her colleagues had never before set foot in the country. “Instead of offering cultural expertise,” Gezari says, “the Human Terrain System was training recruits to parachute into places they’d never been, gather informa- tion as quickly as possible and translate it into something that might be useful to a military commander.” While researching this book, Gezari was dumbfounded to meet one social scientist wholly unfamiliar with the dis- tinctions between Pashtun and Hazara—a most basic level of cultural knowledge that any reader of The Kite Runner would possess. Across the board, few of Loyd’s counterparts seemed up to what was indeed a profoundly challenging assign- ment. In Gezari’s telling, the Human Terrain System programwas hyped from the start. Without funding, no Pentagon program will get off the ground; and to get fund- ing, the benefits have to be stated in the strongest possible terms. “Overselling is pretty much required,” she observes. It was never going to be easy to find scores of Americans both steeped in Afghan cul- ture and willing to pull war-zone duty. The author finds deeper meaning in the imbalance between our civilian and military institutions. “The military was America’s all-purpose tool: war was America’s foreign aid; war was America’s international diplomacy. Contractor-run programs to help the armed forces under- stand their new sphere of influence grew faster than summer weeds.” Loyd and Ayala were participants in an ambitious effort by the Pentagon to bring social science knowledge to the battlefield.