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The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice
The Tender Soldier A True Story of War and Sacrifice Author:Vanessa M Gezari In this gripping story of three tough-minded American civilians carrying out the most audacious military social science experiment since Vietnam, journalist Vanessa Gezari shows how their humanity is tested and their lives are changed forever when a lone Afghan attacks one of them in an open market.On the day Barack Obama was elected president i... more »n November 2008, a small group of American civilians took their idealism and experience to Afghanistan. They were part of the Pentagon?s most daring and controversial attempt since Vietnam to bring social science to the battlefield, a program called the Human Terrain System that is driven by the notion that you can?t win a war if you don?t understand the enemy and his culture. Developed by an eccentric anthropologist raised among hippie squatters in San Francisco and a patriotic ex-soldier determined to change the way America fights, the field team in Afghanistan that November day included an intrepid Texas blond, a former bodyguard for Afghan president Hamid Karzai, and an ex-military intelligence sergeant who had come to Afghanistan to make peace with his troubled past. But not all goes as planned. In this tale of moral suspense, Vanessa Gezari follows these three idealists from the hope that brought them to Afghanistan through the events of the fateful day when one is gravely wounded, an Afghan is dead, and a proponent of cross-cultural engagement is charged with his murder. Through it all, these brave Americans ended up showing the world just how determined they were to get things right, how hard it was to really understand a place like Afghanistan where storytelling has been a major tool of survival, and why all future wars will involve this strange mix of fighting and listening. Gezari is the only reporter who has been given such access to the lives of the people inside the troubled Human Terrain System, to the brilliant, ambitious, and mercurial figures who conceived it, and to the top military brass who believed in it. The Tender Soldier is the first and only account of a historic, little-known mission. It is a true story of war and sacrifice in the best tradition of The Good Soldiers and The Things They Carried, with an ending that will leave you breathless and upend your ideas about what really went wrong in the war.« less