One man’s odyssey from campus to combat

First of two parts

updated 3:29 p.m. ET March 8, 2009

MEDWAY, Mass. - On the overcast New England morning Michael Bhatia came home, nearly 400 of his colleagues, family and friends turned out to meet him.

Seven months had passed since Bhatia, a 31-year-old scholar in international relations from Brown University, hefted his pack across the tarmac at Fort Benning, ready to begin his sixth journey to Afghanistan.

Every trip had come with risks, but this one was the toughest to explain. No one questioned Bhatia's commitment to Afghanistan, but many disagreed sharply with the way he'd chosen to pursue it.

"I am already preparing for both the real and ethical minefields," he e-mailed friends, hours before boarding.

Pentagon experiment
Bhatia was joining the Human Terrain System, a Pentagon experiment to reengineer the battle against Afghan and Iraqi insurgents by teaming soldiers and scholars. Human Terrain set off a war of its own in the academic world: Critics, particularly anthropologists, argued that Human Terrain researchers could not serve two masters — that they risked betraying the people they studied by feeding information to the military.

Bhatia disagreed. But the only way to know, he told friends, was to see for himself.

Even skeptical colleagues looked forward to the conclusion of his journey: If anybody could thread the ethical minefield, it was Mike.

Now, after months of waiting, Bhatia had brought colleagues from campus and the combat zone together in the same room.

They filed slowly from the oak pews of St. Joseph Church, out into the midday chill.

On the front steps, they stood shoulder to shoulder as a lone bugler sounded Taps.

The bespectacled "Professor" was home, but the gray silence offered none of the answers he'd promised. Instead, there was only the ache of the unanswerable: Why?

A story of one man's choice
This is the story of one's man choice — and its consequences — set against a war that defies easy solution. But it begins before most Americans had ever heard of the Taliban, or could place Afghanistan on a map.

In the fall of 1995, during his first week at Brown, Mike Bhatia hung a United Nations flag across his dorm room wall. That winter, he and friend Chad Stockham took a road trip to Dartmouth College, where Bhatia — who was studying Russian — spent a weekend pretending to be a Kazakh exchange student.

"He created the Borat character 10 years before Sacha Baron Cohen did," Stockham said.

There weren't many students quite like Bhatia. Friends admired his smarts, the way he'd run his hand back through dark, wavy hair while discoursing on the Middle East or the military. They were amused by his eccentricities, the way he'd walk around with sandals in the wintertime.

Walk past a used bookstore with Mike and there was no escaping a trip inside that could last for hours. This was a man who once wrote a 180-page report when the assignment called for 20.

"On the one hand he was very much an intellectual, very much an academic," friend Seth Resler said. "On the other hand, he'd come over and we'd drink beer and play Halo until 2 o'clock in the morning."

'An idealist and a realist'
On a campus with clashing factions of students backing Israel and Palestine, he was one of the only people who had good friends in both. At Brown's Watson Institute for International Studies, director Jarat Chopra was taken with the young man whose interest in international conflict went beyond wanting to do research.

"There are many intelligent students, but he was someone who already clearly was going to be able to connect an intellectual environment with a practical environment," Chopra said. "He was an idealist and a realist."

Michael Bhatia / AP A street scene shows young people playing in Afghanistan.

When Bhatia graduated in 1999, he traveled to newly independent East Timor with Chopra as UN observers and to Kosovo, to supervise elections.

Inside his first book, published in 2003, Bhatia thanked his family "for their tolerance of long absences and distracted residences."

The defining absences were spent in Afghanistan, where Bhatia first traveled a month before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He kept going back, logging one to four months at a stretch. Sometimes he walked alone, observing life in streets and marketplaces. Other times, he hired a translator for interviews with 350 combatants, the centerpiece of his research on the roots of the nation's long history of conflict.

From inside their Humvees, American soldiers too often saw Afghans as threats. But in his wanderings, Bhatia discovered Afghanistan's "daily life next to and within conflict."

"There are, in fact, many different Afghanistans," he wrote.

Years later, Chopra would recall Bhatia's passion. Once, his protege gave him a photo of Lawrence of Arabia; an all-too-telling quotation was printed inside the frame.

"The dreamers of the day are dangerous men," it read, "for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."

"Indeed," Chopra wrote, "Bhatia had the makings of a most dangerous man."

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