'Professor' pays a heavy price in Afghanistan

Clueless to military culture and dynamics
By January, Bhatia's colleagues had confirmed an amusing and occasionally worrisome contradiction in the Professor's character.

He certainly knew his stuff. At times, though, he could be remarkably oblivious. Bhatia had never been a soldier, and sometimes he was clueless to both military culture and dynamics.

On a mission in the village of Zormat, Garcia watched with a mix of admiration and alarm as Bhatia's marketplace interviewing quickly drew a crowd of nearly 50.

"There's about a million things that go through your head," said Garcia, who recalls scanning the crowd's clothing for lumps that could have signaled a bomb. "Whoever was out with Michael, that was part of our job, to bring him back in. Hey, don't forget we're out here in the middle of the combat zone."

Garcia, hired for the team as a civilian after a long Air Force career, didn't seem to have much in common with Bhatia. But they forged an unlikely bond. Garcia was part American Indian. Bhatia's father was from India. They became unlikely brothers. Bhatia called his colleague "feather, not dot." Garcia called his partner "dot, not feather."

Away from Salerno, Bhatia wore Army fatigues, a combat helmet and sometimes carried an M-4 carbine. But back on base, team members teased him when they spotted red argyle socks peeking out of his combat boots. They laughed even harder when he failed to see what was funny about that.

Ridenour tried to school him in the ways of the Army. In the military, she explained, once you're accepted as an expert, you no longer have to prove your argument. Just boil down your findings to three or four bullet points. But Bhatia — who had once written a 70,000-word draft chapter for his eight-chapter doctoral thesis — was ever the scholar.

His teammates teased him about his verbosity, ordering him a shirt with the slogan, "If I'm talking, you'd better be listening."

Over time, his quirks and those of other team members generated tension.

Workdays stretched to 14 hours, seven days a week. Even the few hours in between confined team members to very close quarters. Bhatia and Garcia slept four feet apart and right next to the rear door of a bunkhouse filled with soldiers. Garcia got annoyed when Bhatia snored. Bhatia got annoyed because Garcia woke up at 5 a.m.

Finally, the team's irritation boiled over. At a meeting in the team's makeshift office, Ridenour passed out copies of a Myers-Briggs personality test. They would come to terms with each other's strengths and weaknesses by filling out the questionnaire.

"We figured out how to become a family," Garcia said, "and after that, that's what we did become."

Criticized as 'mercenary anthropologists'
On one wall of their shack at the base, the team stapled articles sent by colleagues stationed back at Fort Leavenworth.

Critics were not letting up in their condemnation of the Human Terrain project. The team kept score, posting what they considered the most outrageously off-base characterizations of their work.

"Mercenary anthropologists," one critic called them. "The Army's new secret weapon," another said.

Ridenour, Bhatia and the others read them aloud with a mix of frustration and laughter.

"Our school of thought was 'come work with us for a week,'" Ridenour said. "If you really think I'm a spy, if you really think I'm a mercenary, come see what we do."

Still, Bhatia bridled at the criticism. Before leaving, he'd told his family and friends of his irritation with academics who claimed to know a country, without ever leaving the capital city. Now his ethics and work were being questioned by people who had never set foot in Afghanistan.

"Some academics have created a polemical enemy image ... rather than actual learning what the HTT does," Bhatia e-mailed his mentor, Chopra, in January 2008. "We're not involved in lethal targeting at all."

But the team members were almost too busy to dwell on the criticism.

Winter had set in. On a mission over the New Year, they'd worked in temperatures that dropped to 20 below. Now, in February and March, they stayed put at Salerno, working on projects for the brigade commander. When the 82nd rotated out of Afghanistan, the team waited for instructions from the new command of the 101st Airborne.

"It was kind of frustrating because we all wanted to be out," Cusick said.

But there were reasons to look ahead. Bhatia e-mailed friends the testimony the Fourth Brigade's commander had delivered to Congress, vouching for the Human Terrain project's results. Come July, he told friends, he'd be back for two weeks of home leave.

Before that, though, there was work to do.

On April 30, the Human Terrain Team got long-awaited clearance. Bhatia and Garcia packed fast. The next morning, they'd finally get out from behind the wire.

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