'Professor' pays a heavy price in Afghanistan

SECOND OF TWO PARTS

updated 11:31 a.m. ET March 9, 2009

MEDWAY, Mass. - Editor's note: This is the second part of a two part series. The first is: One man's odyssey from campus to combat

After seven nights sleeping on the ground, and seven days without a hot shower, Master Sgt. Rachael Ridenour was beat.

But when the Blackhawk helicopter touched down at Forward Operating Base Salerno, Ridenour and teammate Tom Garcia shouldered their packs, and headed straight for the plywood hut with plywood furniture that served as the Human Terrain team's office. It was time to meet their new colleague.

They expected a jetlagged and lost-looking newbie. But the man in the button-down Oxford shirt who rose from behind a computer to shake their hands talked in overdrive. He used vocabulary that made clear he was no soldier. In the two days he'd spent waiting for them to return from their mission, Michael Bhatia told them, he'd already begun two research projects.

Heading back to the barracks, Ridenour and Garcia assessed the new guy.

"He needs to hurry up and get tired or it's going to be a long year keeping up with him," she said.

The AF-1 team would need that energy. The last rotation had left the team without a social scientist as it sought to establish its role at FOB Salerno, a U.S. Army beachhead within a dozen miles of Afghanistan's mountainous border with Pakistan.

The addition of Bhatia — soon nicknamed "The Nutty Professor" by his colleagues — brought the team to its full strength of five. But it remained a tiny add-on to a large and highly structured military operation.

Bhatia would have to make a place for himself. The many months he'd spent in Afghanistan as an academic provided unique insight on where to start. But from the moment he returned, it was clear he was on new and treacherous ground.

"Hard day for the 82nd, yesterday a company commander and driver were killed by an IED in Paktika," Bhatia e-mailed his mentor, Jarat Chopra, on his first morning back in the country. "I don't think I'm expected to duck, but to protect myself."

First mission
In November of 2007, FOB Salerno was home to the 82nd Airborne Division's 4th Brigade Combat Team.

In Khost and surrounding provinces, the 82nd, hailing from Fort Bragg, N.C., was devoting much of its manpower to patrols and reconstruction. By building schools and roads and working to ensure Afghans' safety, the Army hoped to build support in areas that might otherwise be lost to insurgents.

With its second rotation in place, the Human Terrain team worked to define its role.

"The brigade was still trying to figure out how to properly use us, and I think we were still trying to figure that out, too," Garcia said.

The team found its place by asking questions about subjects soldiers normally overlook.

Garcia — an "east Texas country boy," who had logged 16 years in the Air Force as a cryptological linguist — was working to make himself an expert on the theft of goods from military convoys, interviewing drivers and others to figure out what was stolen, why and where.

Ridenour — a career military policewoman who had spent a tour in Iraq coordinating fuel distribution in the country's northern Kurdish stronghold — was working to become the team's expert on the local economy, tracking the price Afghan locals paid for cooking oil, flour and other staples.

A week before Thanksgiving, Bhatia joined them in his first mission with the team, to neighboring Paktika Province.

Team leader Lt. Col. Pat Cusick knew the area well. He'd served in Paktika as deputy commander of an Army reconstruction team. It was not an easy place to read, Cusick knew. In meetings between the military and tribal leaders, the villager who spoke was frequently an underling acting as mouthpiece for a silent elder.

But it became clear to Cusick — watching his new charge work — that Bhatia already understood that. Village leaders, initially skeptical, opened up to the new arrival who spoke to them of Paktika's history.

"I wish I knew this two years ago," Cusick told himself, as he listened to the conversation between elders and Bhatia.

The mission to Paktika paid dividends. Ridenour gathered enough information about rising food prices to warrant a briefing for commanders, titled "The Perfect Storm," warning the Army that the area might eventually face a food shortage unless it opened the border to trade with Pakistan.

Meanwhile, Bhatia was zeroing in on his own line of research — gauging the insurgency by tracking attacks not on the military, but on local leaders who were combatants' rivals for power.

One afternoon, Garcia and Bhatia sat across a table from a local district commissioner. Which village elders had been assassinated in the area, Bhatia asked the man. What religious leaders had been threatened?

In a little more than an hour, Bhatia filled several of the lined pages in his tan field notebook.

"No one has ever asked me those questions before," the local official told the men as they rose to leave. "These questions should've been asked a long time ago."

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