Read The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice for Free Online Page A

When it was over, McFate asked him what he was doing there. “I think I’m in the wrong briefing,” he said, “but it sounded interesting, so I decided to stay.”
    The colonel was Steve Fondacaro, an iconoclastic, wiry Army Ranger with close-cropped gray hair and the tenaciousness of a terrier, who had lately become convinced that the United States was its own worst enemy in Iraq.Fondacaro was determined to do whatever it took to defeat the arrogance and bureaucratic inertia that were suffocating the Army he loved, an Army that had defined him since West Point and given him thirty years of workaholic bliss. But he had another problem, one he couldn’t do anything about. Most soldiers are required to leave the Army after three decades of service. Fondacaro was staring down the barrel of forced retirement.
    Born in New York to a mother of Puerto Rican descent and an Italian-American father, Fondacaro had grown up all over the country but mainly in Fresno, California. When he was born, his family hadlived on 114th Street in East Harlem; but his father, a physical therapist, was soon drafted to fight in Korea, and the family moved to follow him. The elder Fondacaro spent twenty-eight years in the Army, retiring as a colonel. Steve Fondacaro was the middle child of three boys and the only one to reach a normal adult height. His brothers, Phil and Sal Fondacaro, are diastrophic dwarfs who played Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. But for as long as he could remember, Steve Fondacaro had wanted to go to West Point, and to war.
    He entered the academy in 1972, toward the end of the Vietnam War, when public opposition to the military reached an all-time high. But Fondacaro had no reservations. He suspected that his antiwar peers knew less about the conflict in Vietnam than he did, having grown up in a military family, and he knew that to be young and hip and make conversation at a bar in those days you had to bad-mouth Nixon. “That’s where I first began to understand how little research anybody does,” he told me. “Wisdom is defined, in my view, as in the Chinese proverb: a wise man is a man who is fully aware of how much he does not know.”
    At West Point, Fondacaro particularly enjoyed his classes in military history and Sosh, the academy’s independent-minded social sciences department.The department has long served as an intellectual incubator for officers willing to dispute the official line, and since the 1980s, it has been a particularly important site of debate over the Army’s role in Vietnam. As a result, Sosh recurs in the intellectual genealogies of today’s leading counterinsurgency advocates, many of whom have taught there.Fondacaro graduated from West Point in 1976, along with Stanley McChrystal, Raymond Odierno, David Rodriguez, and William Caldwell IV, all of whom would go on to hold command positions in Iraq or Afghanistan. David Howell Petraeus, whom everyone called “Peaches,” finished two years earlier. Instead of a fancy engineering specialization, Fondacaro chose the infantry. “It’s the most enrichinglife experience,” he told me. “Nothing else appealed to me other than being in combat.”
    He went to Ranger school, then trained for two years as a platoon leader in Panama before joining the 1st Ranger Battalion. He made captain and was sent to Korea for what he thought would be a year of company command, but when he got off the plane, a general commandeered him to serve in a staff job normally given to a higher-ranking officer. There Fondacaro helped organize logistics for Team Spirit, a massive yearly U.S.–South Korean military training exercise. He eventually got his company command, at a post along the demilitarized zone, where he says he led combat patrols to stop North Korean infiltrators on sabotage missions. During this period, he met Insuk Kim, the Korean woman he would marry and with whom he would have two children.
    By his own account, Fondacaro was a bit too sharp and outspoken