Book reviews

The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice
Vanessa M. Gezari ’97
Simon & Schuster, $25

Reviewed by Jonathan Dee ’84

Jonathan Dee is the author of several novels, including The Privileges and A Thousand Pardons.

Warfare and anthropology may seem like strange bedfellows, but their relationship dates back to Lawrence of Arabia—who advocated “unremitting study” of the Arab world as the only way to learn to influence it—and beyond. This old idea was briefly resuscitated during our war in Afghanistan, in the form of a little-known program (ominously named the Human Terrain System) “designed to plant civilian social scientists, including anthropologists, in frontline military units to act as cultural translators to soldiers, marines, and their commanders.” For a while it succeeded brilliantly, until it became an institutional victim of its own success.

The intrepid young war correspondent Vanessa Gezari refers to this, in an afterword, as “the best story of my life,” and she has certainly done right by it in The Tender Soldier, her conscientious, passionately written, exhaustively researched biography of an idea at once simple and radical. Gezari—who clearly knows Afghanistan more intimately than some of the poorly trained “experts” with whom she was embedded—takes a panoramic view not only of the country and its history but of the thorny ethical issues involved in the notion of developing “a more culturally conscious way of war.”

The book is full of vivid characters, but none is more memorable than the brave team at the center of Gezari’s narrative: three talented and selfless people who, on Election Day 2008, tragically ran up against the limits of the good they were able to do in a chaotic situation.