Profile

by nina burleigh

Montgomery McFate, anthropologist and military adviser, at home in Washington, D.C. Montgomery McFate, senior adviser to the Department of Defense in a controversial effort to put anthropologists in the service of , long ago went undercover. This former California-hardcore-punk-scene denizen’s only nod to that past life is her tightly cropped dyed- blonde hair. The pantsuits McFate now wears could easily be from Hillary Clinton’s closet, and she Mhas gold studs, not safety pins, in her ears. The daughter of beatnik parents, McFate grew up on a decommissioned World War II barge and now lives in a well- appointed Washington, D.C., apartment where she and her U.S. Army vet husband recently played host to the Swedish defense attaché. Yet at 41, Montgomery McFate apparently still can’t resist the lure of transgression. Though coy about it, she’s said to be the brains behind the blog I Luv a Man in Uniform, where Pentagon Diva feverishly debates the relative hotness of various Department of Defense wonks. agency But whether her colleagues

at the DOD, or anyone else, really artist . e . h believe she is Pentagon Diva is of . t little concern to her. She has much for

more important work to do.

For the past five years, McFate, hannan

McFate’s a Yale- and Harvard-educated

cultural anthropologist, has been jacquie : Mission on a self-described evangelical makeup

mission to help the U.S. and

government better understand the Can a former punk rocker raised on a houseboat cultures of Iraq and Afghanistan. hair . change the way america fights? meet the pentagon’s McFate wants to make sure

newest weapon in the wars in iraq and afghanistan larsen that American “war fighters”— Pentagon-speak for the troops—are erika equipped with the kind of : photo

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knowledge that field anthropolo- a $20 million project, awkwardly gists gather, say, about the isolated “I was named the Human Terrain System. tribes of Papua New Guinea and As senior adviser, McFate vets the share with one another in books interested in ground teams. Her ideal hire, she and lectures. “A lot of people says, has a PhD in Middle Eastern think this information is out the intellectual studies, is fluent in Arabic and there,” she says. “That’s not true.” also happens to have trained with At the simplest level, there’s this connection the Navy Seals. And, yes, she has oft-cited example: American found a few. guards at checkpoints should between these McFate’s work has won her know that Iraqis regard a hand accolades (including a Distin­ held up with palm facing out as a two worlds— guished Public Service Award sign to approach, not to stop. And from the navy) and the support of then there’s the big picture: that anthropologists some very prominent members the ’ plan to disman- of the military establishment. tle every aspect of Saddam and armies.” “She is the person I would hold Hussein’s government relied on responsible for getting the the assumption that a stable of the secretary of defense; she Department of Defense to really bureaucracy had been in place spent 18 months interviewing talk about why it is and was to begin with—a fatal mistake, hundreds of soldiers returning important to understand the McFate believes. “If we had known from Iraq and Afghanistan about culture in a place like Iraq,” says more about Iraq then, we’d have cultural miscues and dangerous retired navy commander Lilia realized that the whole country miscommunications. Ramirez, a program director at the had already been ripped apart “For example, Iraqi Shias fly Department of Homeland Security under Saddam Hussein,” she says. black flags, which have symbolic and one of McFate’s mentors at “That kind of misunderstanding religious meaning,” McFate says. the ONR. “And she has really should never happen again.” “Some marines told me that, connected well with the marines early in the war, they attacked and soldiers.” taking flak at home unnecessarily because they Many fellow anthropologists, McFate wasn’t always this clear misinterpreted this as a sort of however, are less enthusiastic about her “mission” in life, but opposite of surrender—a sign that about McFate’s work, troubled she’d long been fascinated by the read ‘Shoot here!’ by the idea of linking humanistic notion of making social science “If the military is trying to scholars to the national security relevant to the military. “I was rebuild a country, fight an insur- apparatus. They fear that her interested in the idea of an intellec- gency and establish civil order, efforts will undermine American tual connection between these two common sense dictates that they anthropologists’ safety and different worlds—anthropologists ought to know as much as possible credibility overseas. and armies,” she says, noting that about the environment—physical “The Pentagon hopes that Margaret Mead, among others, had and social—in which they are can be to the war on worked on government projects operating,” she says. Not only terror what physics was to during World War II. “Anthropolo- did McFate identify gaps in the the . If that happens, gists even use the same language military’s cultural knowledge, but our discipline will never be the as intelligence services—words she proposed filling them by send- same,” says Hugh Gusterson, a pro- such as local knowledge and infor- ing teams of social scientists into fessor of anthropology at George mant.” In 2003 McFate began the field to act as military staff Mason University. “I have no issue exploring these connections dur- advisers. In a Department of with anthropologists doing a ing a fellowship at the Office of Defense scrambling to resolve the one-day briefing with U.S. troops Naval Research, and her work growing crisis in Iraq, her idea before they leave for Iraq,” he there led to a study for the office caught on fast; the initiative is now adds. But projects such as McFate’s

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are “using culture to grease the danced the night away; Wilson skids for occupation.” would later model a character on “The bottom line is that the McFate in her novel Colors Insulting needs of anthropology and the to Nature. In the book a girl named needs of military action are Lorna serves as the common- radically at odds,” reads one sense-talking ballast for the main angry post on the blog Savage character—in a relationship that Minds: Notes and Queries in closely resembled the real-life one Anthropology. “McFate is arguing the two friends had when they for an enlightened tyrrany [sic], were growing up. Wilson says she’s but a tyranny nonetheless.” not surprised to find her old pal working for the DOD. anarchy on the Bay “Very early on in her girlhood, Strains of opera and the aroma of she developed Teen Beat–style McFate’s an increasingly fragrant lamb stew and Neal Cassady, and sold fake first wave of crushes on the movers and shakers waft in from the kitchen, where Polynesian wooden statues to scholar- at the center of exclusive, hermetic McFate’s husband, Sean, 38, is Trader Vic’s for a living. advisers and usually male-dominated have hit cooking. The apartment is filled Mitzy did her homework in the the ground subcultures—punk rock, for with nineteenth-century Asian relative peace of a bus stop bench, in Iraq and example, and its charismatic lead- art. Two pampered Siamese cats, prompting cops at one point to Afghanistan; ers,” Wilson says. “Her intellectual soon she’ll Tosca and Lakme, slink around suspect that the solitary little girl be joining crushes turned toward more behind Japanese screens and pad with the long light-brown hair them. complex and exclusive social over the Oriental rugs in the living was a child prostitute. A beloved orders: the Ivy League, the military. room. Smoking American Spirits grandmother (“the only stable At heart, she was always a fan. She one after another—“They don’t person in my life when I was really adores tough people with have the weird chemicals the growing up,” she says) lived with big brains, burning ambitions. . . . others have”—McFate reminisces them on the barge for a time, but She brilliantly found a way to make about her offbeat childhood: “In she died when McFate was eight. this her profession.” the world I lived in, there was no Her father, who had served in the The punk scene lost its appeal bedtime, no dinner or breakfast. Marine Corps during the Korean when some of Mitzy’s friends began No one helped you get to school on War, was mentally ill and spent doing hard drugs, sometimes with time, because your parents were most of the years she knew him fatal results. “After all of those out all night or waking up in bed unemployed and living in a shack people died, I was like, whoa, this with someone new. I spent a lot of made of tinfoil. He committed has to end, I can’t be involved in this time trying to get out of my house.” suicide when she was 10. anymore,” McFate says. The only child of Frances By her teens, Mitzy was finding After working her way through Poynter and Martin Carlough, kindred spirits in the early 1980s two years of community college, she Mitzy, as she was known, grew up punk scene. “I was a very good was accepted at the University of on a disused military barge moored student in high school,” she says. California, Berkeley. “We should try in Bay that her “I took it very seriously. I would go to have a really nice summer,” her mother divided into three loftlike out all night, sleep on the street for mother told her after casting her dwellings, two of which were about two hours, then wake up own astrological chart that spring. rented out. Money was scarce, and take the bus to school still “I think I’m going to die at the end as were order and predictability. wearing my pink vinyl outfit.” of it.” Poynter practiced sidereal Mitzy attended the same grade And she did, on McFate’s first astrology (the kind that’s “actually school as Grace Slick’s daughter day at Berkeley. “She had a mas- useful for predicting things,” and made a lifelong friend of the sive coronary,” McFate states flatly. McFate insists), hung out with beat novelist and social critic Cintra She finished the semester, then legends Lawrence Ferlinghetti Wilson. She and Cintra slam- took a year off to sell the barge and

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settle her mother’s affairs. Back at At one point during our Berkeley as a scholarship student, “I would go out interview, Sean interrupts from McFate had little use for students the kitchen: “Sweetie, I’m worried “living there and taking acid on all night, sleep about a side dish for the lamb.” their parents’ money,” she says. She Montgomery has no suggestions, gravitated toward multidisciplinary on the street and soon the meal plan is forgotten study and took a few anthropol- with the consumption of two ogy classes, including one on the for about two bottles of red wine. We head out to rhetoric of terrorism. a nearby Lebanese restaurant. “I became interested in how hours, then go to When the maître d’ explains that people justify violence,” she says. he can’t accommodate the two “When you ask how that can school still regulars because a film crew possibly make sense to them, you will be recording a party the are forced to think subjectively.” wearing my journalist Helen Thomas is During graduate school at Yale, hosting, Sean argues with every she spent nine months in Belfast pink vinyl outfit.”member of the staff who crosses studying Irish Republican culture his line of sight. Between his for her dissertation on the British glowering and Montgomery’s in Northern in Cambridge on Valentine’s Day measured cajoling, we are soon Ireland. Not wanting to teach, but 1997. “I put down my fork and said, seated and end our evening not quite sure what she should ‘We are going to get married,’ ” together, surrealistically, as extras do instead—“I just followed my McFate recalls. “And he put down in documentarian Rory Kennedy’s intellectual interests,” McFate his fork and said, ‘OK, when?’ ” latest project. says—she entered Harvard Law They wed 10 months later. School, then almost immediately Sean McFate is stocky, dark- a new world order regretted her decision. “I thought, haired and square-jawed. Like Knowledge, according to McFate, what am I doing here? These Montgomery, he embodies always escapes the bounds people are so straight; they’re all opposing spirits: A gourmet cook of its creator. “So if you are sitting about money,” she recalls, adding and an opera fanatic with his own in the tactical operations center that she just couldn’t find a “tribe” music blog, he was most recently advising the commander, you with whom she could fit in. Her employed by the defense contrac- have a much better chance of attempts to forge friendships with tor DynCorp International to help guiding how the information is Harvard’s “human rights crowd” demobilize Liberia’s army and used,” she says. The problem, were similarly unrewarding. train a new one. The McFates are however, is that anthropology is “They are so concerned about the odd birds to find in or near the U.S. “highly ideological,” proclaims suffering of the third world, they military: They are both now, and McFate as she lights up another can’t even drink a martini,” McFate always have been, opposed to the cigarette, dismissing her critics says with a laugh. invasion of Iraq, and they make no as hidebound academics with a But she did stay, and she met secret of their disgust at the blun- strongly entrenched bias against her husband there. His tribe was ders of the current administration. the government. “For me, part of definitely not her own. Sean, a blue (Montgomery does, however, becoming a professional meant blood from Connecticut and New applaud the efforts of General rethinking all of the assumptions York, was serving as a paratrooper David Petraeus, commander of the that I had been handed as a with the Eighty-second Airborne U.S. military forces in Iraq: “He is graduate student.” and eventually attended Harvard’s doing now what should have been So the woman who once Kennedy School of Government. done in the first place,” she says. thought the Cold War was a vast A mutual friend introduced them; “The first rule of fighting counter- government lie now espouses the two e-mailed for several insurgency is, you provide security conservative notions about the months, then finally met for dinner for the civilian population.”) left-wing leanings of American

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academia. But McFate doesn’t share the other part of that worldview, which is that the 1960s are the root of all that is evil in the United States, and perhaps the world, today. “I think the 1960s were great!” she exclaims. “I think they opened up people’s perceptions, challenged the established order and created new space, and that was all tremendously good for the United States. I was always searching for order and rationality in my own life, but at the same time I took a lot from my beatnik mom and also from punk rock, which is that you have to challenge the established authority. And if the established authority is your parents, then you challenge them and find something that’s not about peace, love and understanding.” As More went to press, McFate was preparing for her first trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, where she would assess the progress of the initial wave of Human Terrain teams. Now that she’s become part of Washington culture, and at a moment when the U.S. government seems the most troubled it has been in decades, McFate feels oddly in sync with the world. “When things are breaking down, you know, it’s not always bad,” she muses over another glass of Italian red. “You can find opportunities.” After more than 40 years of searching, Montgomery McFate appears to have found her tribe. M

Nina burleigh’s new book, Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt, will be published in december by harpercollins.

Additional reporting by Michelle Ciarrocca.