One man's journey from campus to combat

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Michael Bhatia (inset) poses in rural Afghanistan. Bhatia, an academic, was killed in Afghanistan last May while working for the Human Terrain System program.


One man's journey from campus to combat
By Adam Geller, The Associated Press
Monday, March 9, 2009

MEDWAY, Mass. — On the overcast New England morning Michael Bhatia came home, 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, 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 before boarding.

Bhatia was joining the Human Terrain System, a Pentagon experiment to re-engineer battle against Afghan and Iraqi insurgents by teaming soldiers and scholars. Human Terrain set off a war of its own in academia: Critics, particularly anthropologists, argued that researchers risked betraying the people they studied by feeding information to the military.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=61212