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Published Aug 2013
336 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
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 in 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.
"Starred Review. Gezari's exposé is a revelatory and unique look at the war in Afghanistan." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Understanding foreign cultures is difficult. Gezari points out that America contains too few scholars familiar with Afghanistan, so many teams are clueless. Members often serve for the wrong reasons, since the civilian contractor earns $250,000-$350,000 per year...Gezari ... delivers a gripping report on another of America's painful, surprisingly difficult efforts to win hearts and minds." - Kirkus
"Bravely reported and beautifully told, The Tender Soldier is a crushing story of good intentions and war. Vanessa Gezari is an unflinching journalist, and she has written a great, angering, and heartbreaking book that in its many layers is as damning as it is honorable." - David Finkel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Good Soldiers
"Gezari's gripping tale of American idealism gone wrong is vital reading for anyone interested in America's decade of war in Afghanistan. Beautifully told, the book illuminates one of the most interesting and little known programs in recent U.S. military history." - Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR international correspondent
"Part history, part war story, part critique, Gezari writes with a stonecutter's brilliance, snapping into focus a part of the world, and a chapter in American history, that we don't fully comprehend. Citizens will read The Tender Soldier in a few nights and come away feeling smarter and enriched. This is brilliant reading and is a kind of road map by which to understand other wars, and other news reports breaking daily around us." - Doug Stanton, author of the New York Times bestseller Horse Soldiers
"The story running through the heart of The Tender Soldier is a searing reminder that wars may be waged with good intentions, but they are built upon tragedy. Vanessa Gezari explores this grim paradox with an admirable lucidity and a sharp eye for the kind of telling detail that make her account of the U.S. war in Afghanistan a moving, unforgettable read." - Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker staff writer and author of the national bestseller The Fall of Baghdad
"The Tender Soldier takes readers on an eloquent journey back through one tragic American death in Afghanistan. But its larger point is a hard-fisted critique of the U.S. military's chronic inability to understand the larger world in which it operates. It is a book worth memorizing, and repeating to U.S. decision-makers, when the next Iraq or Afghanistan presents itself - as it surely will." - Dana Priest, Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of Top Secret America
This information about The Tender Soldier was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Vanessa M. Gezari teaches narrative nonfiction and war reporting at the University of Michigan. She has written for The Washington Post, The New Republic, Slate, and others. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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