One man’s odyssey from campus to combat

Putting social science to work
The universe of people working in military social science is small. St. Benoit had heard about Bhatia's work in Afghanistan and sought him out. They talked for nearly four hours over dinner, adjourning to the hotel bar to discuss the idea of defusing insurgency by putting social science to work in the war zone.

"Why don't you come and do the same thing I'm doing?" — he could pursue professional and personal goals, and make a difference, St. Benoit recalled telling Bhatia.

Back in Providence, Bhatia talked enthusiastically about the conference. But at Brown, as at other campuses, professors like Catherine Lutz thought the military's attempt to harness academic brainpower threatened to cross a line.

Lutz — daughter of a Navy veteran and a researcher on cultural training in UN peacekeeping missions — was outspoken in her criticism of the Bush administration's approach to war and attempts to make scholars part of the military's campaign.

"One cannot help a mistaken mission and make it better, if it's wrong from the get-go," Lutz said in a recent interview, when she declined to speak about Bhatia.

But Bhatia, sifting through the information he'd heard about HTS, was following a different line of thinking.

'He was flat brilliant'
In late January, he called Fondacaro about the Human Terrain program.

"He just knew about Afghanistan ... about how complex it was. He was flat brilliant," recalled Fondacaro.

From the beginning, Bhatia and other Human Terrain social scientists were told explicitly that they would be going out on patrols, and that the missions could be dangerous, McFate said.

But when a recruiter from BAE Systems — the contractor that staffs civilians for Human Terrain teams — contacted Bhatia, he offered a job with limited risk, "embedded with the Brigade Combat Team but not accompanying the BCT on patrols."

"The HTS team would stay in the 'Green Zone' and collect information from returning BCT patrols," the recruiter wrote in a Feb. 14, 2007, e-mail to Bhatia. McFate said that job description was wrong, and that Bhatia knew that.

Bhatia tried to reassure family
On a long walk around Providence's East Side, Bhatia tried to reassure his sister he'd be safe. He left the impression, Tricia Bhatia said, that he wasn't going to be leaving base all that much. "I think when he got there it became a very different story."

Steven Senne / AP Tricia Bhatia, of Medway, Mass., stands in front of a drawing of her brother Michael Bhatia at the family home.

A few weeks later, an anthropological association committee examining the military's attempts to add culture to its arsenal held an open hearing on the Brown campus.

If academics refused to work in the war zone, "is there a risk that you become somewhat ethically pure but intellectually impoverished?" one of Bhatia's colleagues, James Der Derian, asked.

Bhatia, stroking his beard thoughtfully, answered with his own question.

"If you are involved, to what extent can you dictate the freedom or an ability not to provide information" to the military, he asked. "Or is that just naive?"

Training its first recruits
By late 2006, Human Terrain, based at Kansas' Fort Leavenworth, was training its first recruits. The plan called for quick deployment of two teams to Afghanistan and three to Iraq.

Bhatia kept his interest in Human Terrain hidden from most of his colleagues. But in quiet conversations, a few confidants posed tough questions.

"We spoke pretty frankly about the dangers to him," said Robert Rubinstein, an anthropologist at Syracuse University whom Bhatia admired. "One of the things that Michael wanted to know was could it do good? Could it save people?"

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