Isegoria

As US casualties in Iraq went into four figures, John Dolan (a.k.a. Gary Brecher, The War Nerd) explains, the Army was finally ready to grit its teeth and deal with the eggheads again — including a woman he knew back at Berkeley, who turned out to be something of a con artist, now operating under a new name:

That was the beginning of the Human Terrain System.

In 2005, a very bad year for the Army in Iraq, “Dr. Montgomery McFate” and her shadowy colleague, Andrea V. Jackson (try finding a photo of Andrea) started a pilot project, COR-HTS, designed to put anthropological know-how, assuming there be such a thing, to the US armed force’s use. They could have hired any man or woman from A-town for about one-millionth the price, and they’d have said, “Have you tried learning the lingo, talking to people? Oh, and another thing that helps is keeping track, you know, finding out who lives where. The big thing to remember, though, is to make sure you know which families have been in the struggle down the generations; find the head of the house and see what he’ll take to sit home for a while.”

But that’s not how the Army does things, or the US in general. It’s about the last thing any American would do, in fact. They went with a huge program, HQ’d in Fort Leavenworth —because when you think of a base to prep people for the Sunni Triangle you naturally just think “Kansas! Put it in Kansas!”

Then they provided Mitzy and Andrea, two suspiciously academic women (by Army standards) with a minder, a man who has to be seen to be believed. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce Col. Steve Fondocaro.

Sometimes I think physical comedy is the essence of America, most of all when it thinks it’s being serious. Fondocaro… well, look at him. You know he was there to calm down the tankers and junior Pattons who didn’t want to know about this softly-softly stuff.

The mix worked, and the US military, in its usual way, ruined it by demanding an instant 400% increase in the slow development the program needed. Just as the services had ruined an earlier CI campaign, the Green Berets, by tossing thousands of shake-and-bake commandos into what was originally a slow, village-based program, the Army decided to hire every unhireable Humanities Ph.D. in the US (which, by this time, was pretty much all of them) to go talk to Pashtun patriarchs and Sunni elders in Anbar about how we might make the occupation more comfortable for them.

Mitzy hit her peak, and it was quite a peak, in 2007, when Petraeus’ Counterinsurgency 101 reforms made the US Iraq effort slightly less spectacularly clueless, and the casualty counts started to go down. Suddenly the woman I knew as Mitzy was everywhere. I got an email from a reporter at SFGate Magazine. He’d written a gushing profile of Mitzy, and wanted to do a followup. She’d mentioned, he said, that I had “taught her the rhetoric of terrorism” at UC Berkeley. I’d never taught any such course, and wasn’t happy about the fact that I’d been airbrushed out of her history now that she was respectable and I was nobody. So I wrote back to say that I doubted we understood “terrorism” in the same way. The reporter’s response began with the exclamation, “Goodness!” and I understood how far I’d wandered from acceptable American discourse. I could hardly read the rest; just kept thinking, “How can you write the word ‘goodness’ with an exclamation point after it?”

How Mitzy, who had a real houseboat tongue on her, managed to talk to these people without offending them every second word, I never understood. But then she’d always been a jargon-sponge, a joiner.

As she rose in the big, bad military/think-tank world, she drew the hatred of the anthro professors guild. Which was annoying, because I had good cause, decades of cause, to hate North American professors, and didn’t want to agree with them about anything. It was especially irksome that Mitzy’s chief accuser was a Canadian leftist anthropologist named Maximilian Forte, a classic of the breed, a privileged white male who makes a tidy sum talking about white male privilege. Worse yet, he taught at Concordia, which was notorious at Berkeley for hiring only the most insufferable, canting, progressive hypocrites among our grad students. A more loathsome group of people it would be difficult to find, and yet I knew they were right. This is a common feeling for Berkeley vets, agreeing with the whole agenda of people whose very names and voices trigger your gag reflex.

What finally brought Human Terrain crashing down onto the, er, human terrain inhabited by us nobodies was opposition from the other side, the hardcore tankers who loathed the idea of doing anything resembling touchy-feely CI warfare. They didn’t want to send their guys to learn Pashtun and learn to wipe their asses with a rock, they wanted to wargame the Fulda Gap, like the good old days. Fuck the wars that actually happen, those bug hunts; they dreamed of the good old Cold War, when nothing real ever eventuated.

And they had their ammunition when Mitzy’s crusading Ph.D.s started dying in ways horrible enough to get publicity. One of them, Michael Bhattia, died from an IED in Khost; Nicole Suveges, “a funny, kind person” according to her HTS death notice, was blown to bits in Sadr City in Baghdad.

But the most cinematic, grotesquely comic, most utterly horrible death was Paula Loyd’s. She—also a nice, funny person who joked “I always wanted plastic surgery” after being burned over 60% of her body, was set on fire by a Pashtun man in southern Afghanistan. Loyd was one of the decent Ph.D.s, you could tell that just reading her nightmare story; a nice person who took the job with HTS because there weren’t any other jobs for our crowd anymore. A nice, blond, middle-class, moderate-feminist American… sent to a Pashtun village in Kandahar Province, Mullah Omar’s home turf. The Children’s Crusade seems like sound military strategy compared to this.

Loyd, her notebook or recorder ready, asked a man named Abdul Salam about the price of kerosene. Salam happened to be carrying a tin of kerosene. The temptation must have been too great; he poured it over Loyd and set her on fire.

After she fell screaming in agony, the grotesque comedy continued. Loyd’s bodyguard, angry that he’d failed to do his job, clotheslined Salam, tied him up. Some soldiers told the bodyguard Loyd was horribly maimed. The bodyguard took out his sidearm and shot Salam in the head. For which, believe it or not, the bodyguard was tried for murder.

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