Character Analysis: The Ugly American

This essay was written using characters from the book, “The Ugly American”, with the purpose of comparing and contrasting three characters and describing their successes and failures as they apply to the SO imperatives. I have also tied the characters actions and the use of the SO imperatives into some of my own personal experiences while in Special Forces.
Ambassador Gilbert Macwhite was my favorite character and was not hard to choose with his simple understanding that the American way of life does not fit into every culture. My second choice was Father Finian, a Catholic priest that uses his influential talents to build a relationship with nine local anticommunist men in the fight against communism. Choosing a third character was a bit …show more content…
The tactics used by the LRA and the large area of operations in Africa was not conducive for gaining sufficient human intelligence. The area that the LRA were operating in was larger than the size of Texas. That, coupled with the rough terrain of jungle and savannah and almost non-existent cell phone service, made it impossible to get timely intelligence. The LRA kidnapped women and children and those people would then become part of the organization by coercion, fear, or religious brainwashing and would regularly kill anyone that tried to escape or leave the organization. Those that would manage to escape or defect would usually be far from home and not always accepted back into the villages. This created an environment where people would not be willing to provide information about where they had been taken from or what they had done. In addition to that, the LRA leaders would not show anyone else in the group a map or tell them where they were at. It would sometimes take weeks and months for an individual to find his way back home and at that time any limited information he was willing to provide was already too old to be useful. We were only able to gather limited intelligence through ISR platforms. The LRA dressed to look just like any other African native in the area and traveling by foot in groups was common to many other groups of people in the area making it difficult to simply identify them by flying over. Without sufficient intelligence, the area of operations was too large to locate and target the