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for his own good. He pissed people off by being chosen, as a junior captain, for staff jobs that would ordinarily have gone to officers above him. His extended tour in Korea also meant that he missed the chance to jump into Grenada with his fellow Rangers in Operation Urgent Fury, one of the Cold War’s most celebrated combat missions. “The more experienced you get in Korea, the more they want to send you back to Korea,” Fondacaro told me.He spent thirteen years there, returning to the States intermittently for advanced courses at several Army schools and a two-year Pentagon tour in the Special Technical Operations Division, a largely “black,” or classified, organization.
    Fondacaro’s immersion in Korea made him intimately familiar with the history of American policy failures in Asia. He began to understand why some people viewed the United States as the world’s leading hypocrite, a nation that preached democratic principles while supporting leaders like Ferdinand Marcos and Ngo Dinh Diem.He knew that Ho Chi Minh had begged the United States for support in freeing hispeople from the domination of the French, borrowing words from the Declaration of Independence to express Vietnamese aspirations for self-rule, and that American leaders had turned away. Like his Korean comrades, Fondacaro grew frustrated by the persistent shortsightedness of American foreign policy. “How is it that we get driven to a last-minute, midnight decision with two lieutenant colonels in the Pentagon that say, ‘Hey, 38th Parallel looks good to me, Joe,’ and we decide the fate of a nation?” Fondacaro asked me during one of our conversations. “This is our legacy.”
    When Fondacaro returned to the States as a colonel in 2001, he was asked to conduct an Army-wide study to figure out what the capabilities of the twenty-first-century soldier should be. Later, he would view this as a sort of military ethnography, but he wasn’t thinking about anthropology then, not yet. He sent teams to survey, interview, and conduct focus groups with soldiers and officers around the world. The results convinced him of what he called the Army’s “tribal nature.” It was a sprawling organization atomized into cliques whose members identified primarily as logisticians or supply officers or engineers rather than as combat soldiers, but asymmetrical warfare was making those divisions obsolete. “Those days when you’re a logistics guy or you’re a transportation guy and all you do is move ammo from the rear, those days are over, because you can be attacked anywhere along the way,” he told me. “It’s a 360-degree battle. That requires a different kind of soldier.”The future soldier he envisioned would operate more like a Special Forces commando than a member of the conventional Army. Like the Marine Corps creed—“every Marine a rifleman”—this new brand of fighter should embody a “warrior ethos,” Fondacaro argued. Every soldier, no matter his job description, would need combat and small-unit leadership skills.
    Then–Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki grew interested in the study and urged Fondacaro on, enlisting him as an informaladviser.But Shinseki was on the wrong side of power. He had testified before Congress that several hundred thousand troops would be needed for peacekeeping and reconstruction in post-invasion Iraq, angering then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who favored a much smaller force. Shinseki was more clear-eyed than his boss, but he was marginalized for disputing the official line, and he quietly retired in the summer of 2003. Fondacaro considered Shinseki his strongest supporter.He blamed his failure to make general on Shinseki’s fall, but the great majority of Army colonels never earn a star. After Army politics frustrated his attempts to land a job he coveted in Afghanistan, Fondacaro was sent to serve his last tour at a little-known organization called the Army Capabilities Integration Center,