by Joe Klein
This was sometime in late summer of 2006. He came back the next weekend, and the next. There was an immediate mesh, Robin thought, a million shared synapses—their own little world. They were entirely there for each other, full attention every weekend. There were others along for their ride, of course. There was Jake Wood—really good guy, she thought, the center of the show, much more out-there than Clay. The two of them were total charmers, each in his own way—preternatural best friends; you could spot the bond a mile away.
Clay deployed in January 2007, and in the blink of an eye—by early March—he was home again with his wounded wrist. Robin visited him in the hospital and met his parents. Eventually, their weekend life resumed, and Robin didn’t notice much of a difference in Clay. But he did begin to spend a lot of time with the mother of one of his friends who had died.
Audrey Nitschka—Blake Howey’s mom—had operated the Hotel Howey in her home for Blake’s Marine friends before they deployed to Iraq. She lived in Glendora, just east of Pasadena, and was thrilled to have Blake’s friends sleeping all over the living room floor and playing flag football in the backyard whenever they had liberty from 29 Palms. Audrey was recently divorced, kind . . . and cool; she knew how to handle Marines, and these Marines were still kids. They called her “Mom,” and they needed a mom; they adopted her seven-year-old daughter, Taylor. They left boxes of their belongings in her garage before they deployed.
How outrageous that Blake was the first to die. His best friend, Nathan Windsor, called and said, “I know I can never replace Blake, but I’ll be your substitute son, Mom, and I’ll be Taylor’s big brother.” Windsor was killed two weeks later. And Clay was shot in the wrist a few days after that.
Clay had never been part of the Hotel Howey scene; he spent his weekends at the beach with Robin. But he called Audrey soon after he returned from Iraq, while he was still in the hospital, and asked if he could visit her.
“Of course,” she said.
He seemed to hesitate. “There’s a guy here in the hospital who knew Blake. Can he come with me?”
“Of course,” she said.
Sergeant Rosenberger was terrified to meet Howey’s mom. He and Blake had been in the same Humvee the night Blake died on Route Reds. They should have stopped to check the bridge for IEDs, but they were running late. The squad they were supposed to be rescuing was still out in the boonies, stuck in the mud in the dark. He had ordered Blake not to stop, to drive on, straight into the IED. He was responsible for her son’s death. He had to apologize to Audrey.
Audrey had heard others, Blake’s friends, blame Rosenberger as well, and she didn’t know how she’d react to him. But now, with the culprit—a shattered twenty-three-year-old boy—in her living room, she couldn’t summon the slightest twinge of anger. “It was my fault,” Rosenberger said. “I don’t expect you to ever forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive,” Audrey said. “It’s war. It’s crazy.”
Clay was amazed and touched by that. Howey had been his bunkmate, a close friend—and Rosenberger may well have screwed up—but people screwed up all the time, and Clay’s reaction had been the same as Audrey’s: Rosenberger was a good guy; he had insisted on confessing his guilt to Howey’s mom. There was no way Clay could be angry with him. His job now was to help Rosenberger through this; that’s just what you did.
And he had a responsibility to Howey’s mom as well. She had handled herself with such grace. When the rest of their unit came home from Iraq in the summer of 2007, Clay brought Blake’s squadmates to see her—and, as in the past, they stayed; Hotel Howey reopened for business. These kids were as close as she would ever get to Blake again. She watched them asleep on the floor in the family room at night, twitching and groaning, sometimes shouting, refighting their wars. She had to be careful when they were asleep; if she came through the door loudly on her way in or out, they’d be up with a start—Clay would be up punching. He’d nearly decked her once when she’d had to wake him. He slept with his combat knife; the others slept with guns. They seemed obsessed with their guns. She didn’t understand that at all; guns scared her. She asked Clay why, after all the scary, terrible violence, he and the others still talked so much about guns and went off to the range to shoot them.
“It’s a release,” he said. “You want to go to the range with me? I’ll show you how to shoot.”
The thing was, Clay was right. It was a release. Pulling the trigger, the noise, the violence of it, trying to kill the damn target—it did make her feel better on some deep level that she couldn’t understand. She bought herself a pistol and a gun locker and made her Marines check their weapons at the door. Eventually she would own five pistols.
Audrey didn’t see Clay very often during 2008. He was in sniper school and then in Afghanistan, and he was spending most of his weekends with Robin. He kept in touch, told her all about Robin, about how athletic she was, good to go for long bike rides and hiking and surfing. But Audrey sensed something was missing.
For her part, Robin couldn’t see much difference in Clay after he came home from Iraq. Their weekend world didn’t change at all. Or maybe, just a little, when Jake and Jeff Muir came home from Iraq in August—it became more about the Band of Brothers, less about Clay and Robin, which was understandable but annoying. But Clay was still there with her most weekends—and then he was getting ready to deploy again. She had no idea that he had been diagnosed with PTSD. She didn’t ask him about Iraq. Her impression was that you weren’t supposed to talk about it—unless Clay wanted to, and he never mentioned it. He seemed strong. He was proud of graduating from sniper school. And now he was pestering her, “What’s your ring size? What’s your ring size?”
She tried to back him off. What did they really know about each other? They said, “I love you,” which was absolutely true—on weekends. He seemed the sort of guy she’d want to spend her life with—but did you just get engaged, get married, without spending a week using the same bathroom? They never talked about the future; he never talked about what he would do when he left the Marines. She was a hard worker, but she didn’t talk to Clay about what she did for a living (telemarketing, not much income yet, but she had ambitions). He didn’t know that side of her at all. And yet, he was all over her, saying they needed to be together, that if they got married and something happened to him in Afghanistan, she’d receive his benefits.
He was sweet. And she did think she loved him. “Yes,” she finally told him, “but let’s keep it a secret until you get home. Then we can have a real wedding.” They were married at a courthouse in Orange County. Then he was gone for what seemed a very long time.
While Clay was in Afghanistan, Robin found her trade: selling Herbalife products and convincing other women to sell them for her. The term of art for this sort of business is “multilevel marketing”; detractors say it resembles a Ponzi scheme—and while Herbalife had pyramidal elements, Robin believed that there were, at bottom, a range of nutritional and skin care products that people, especially women interested in losing weight, found helpful. For Robin, it wasn’t the door-to-door selling as much as it was the promise of building a sales force. She dived into it; with Clay gone, there wasn’t much to distract her.
When Clay came home in late October 2008, he moved in with Robin in Brentwood and very quickly noticed that she had changed. She was distracted, busy, colder somehow. She gave him orders, chores, and nagged him to get his act together, get a life. “The woman I came home to,” he told his mother, “is not the woman I left.”
True enough, Robin thought. But someone had to take out the trash and clean the dishes. Clay seemed to think that she could have long, leisurely lunches with him every day, as they’d had on weekends past; he seemed offended that he wasn’t getting her full attention. Robin was on her computer, on her phone, out driving around to her sales reps all the time. Years later, she would be unable to remember many details of their time together.
She did notice that he didn’t s
leep very much. He would try. He would lie down in bed with her for ten minutes, and then he would be up and out, saying, “This ain’t gonna happen,” and he’d go to the living room, where he would stare out the window or read a book. If he had nightmares, she never heard them. She knew he was taking some sort of calm-down medicine prescribed by the VA, but a lot of people she knew were taking calm-down medicine. He wanted more from her than she could give—or maybe, he just didn’t know what he wanted; or maybe, she wasn’t prepared to give very much; or maybe, all of the above. They began to fight. He would accuse her of not caring about him; she would tell him to get his act together, go to school, start working, do something. The fights ended, as often as not, with him storming out of the house and going for a long bike ride or drinking with his old crew in Huntington Beach, most of whom were jerks, she thought. She didn’t have the luxury of storming out; she had a business to build.
They went to Texas for Christmas in 2008 and spent some time with Clay’s dad and then with his mom. Both Stacy and Susan, separately, came to the same conclusion about Robin: she wasn’t a bad person, but she wasn’t very warm either, and Clay had always gravitated toward warm. She seemed far more interested in her computer and her work than she did in socializing with them or being with Clay. All the gifts she gave them that Christmas were Herbalife products.
A few days after they returned to California, Clay and Robin had a pretty bad fight. “Why don’t we go live in Texas?” he said. “I can go to school there and you can do your work.”
“Texas?” They had barely tried living in California, Robin thought. They didn’t know how to live together yet. “Why?”
“It’s home,” Clay said. “I feel safer there.”
Safer? What did that mean? “You can go back and live in Texas, but I’m building a network here, and I’m going to stay here.”
It descended from there to free-range shouting and Clay storming out with his bike and without any money or identification or a helmet. He sped along Wilshire Boulevard toward the beach, pushing hard in the sunshine, trying to let out the frustration. A Jeep was crowding him, and he began to shout at the driver: “I have a right to be here, too.” The driver shouted right back: “You’re slowing everybody down.” Fuck you. No, fuck you. Asshole . . . and the driver swerved into Clay’s bike, or maybe Clay swerved into the car, but the jolt was violent and Clay was knocked down, out cold, and the Jeep didn’t bother to stop.
He awoke in the emergency room at UCLA with a severe concussion and a chipped tooth. He was extremely foggy, but he remembered Robin’s phone number, and she came with his wallet. The doctors wanted to do some tests, an MRI of his brain—and the tests came back strange. They said that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury. Totally weird: two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he rings up a TBI on Wilshire Boulevard. “They say there are three damaged spots on my brain,” he told his mother.
“How do you feel?” Susan asked.
“Scattered,” he said. “I’m having trouble remembering words.”
He apologized to Robin. He still loved and needed her. He wanted to stay married. He proposed that he and Robin spend the next two years in California—he’d finish college there—and then they’d talk about going home to Texas. He applied to Loyola Marymount University, a tough Jesuit school, and got in—he wanted to be a physician’s assistant, a paramedic of some sort. Robin was heartened by these efforts, and yes, she was willing to go ahead with the wedding, which Clay’s dad agreed to pay for.
They were married that spring in a lovely glass chapel in the mountains overlooking the ocean. Jake was best man. Clay asked his surrogate mom Audrey Nitschka to give a speech. She tried to talk about how Clay had been so kind, how he’d brought Blake’s friends home to her, and then she started to cry. “I’m sorry,” she told Clay later. “I was pretty drunk.”
It was a sunny day, a perfect setting; the Marines were blinding and beautiful in their brass buttons and dress blues. Robin was hopeful that a corner had been turned.
Clay seemed okay. He had found comfort that spring riding his bike with other veterans, part of an organization called Ride 2 Recovery, led by a former professional cyclist named John Wordin whom Clay had found through the VA. They’d had a good conversation and then a good ride down to the Santa Monica pier. “I’m really a mountain biker,” Clay said.
“Okay, we’ll do one of those up in Topanga, too,” Wordin said. “But if you really want to have some fun, you should come on one of our challenge rides.”
The challenges were week-long, 350-mile structured rides—from San Francisco to Los Angeles, for example. They were limited to two hundred wounded veterans and were almost always fully subscribed. The veterans would ride for six hours a day and take frequent breaks, sometimes visiting schools, newspapers, or community centers along the way, telling their story. Wordin was a calm and devoted presence; each evening during the challenge, he would run a conversation—about what they’d experienced that day, about their troubles, about what they wanted to forget and get past. He told Clay about the shop he’d set up in his garage, where he built bikes for amputees and even for some paraplegics. “It’s a lot of guys like you and some who are much worse off,” Wordin said. “They’re all folks who enjoy the outdoors and haven’t found their way back to civilian life. You said you had trouble sleeping? Nobody has trouble sleeping during a challenge ride.”
Clay was a strong rider and a natural leader, and he became a regular on the rides. He was great in the evening group meetings as well, doing his eloquent Clay thing, talking about the friends he’d lost, how he should have been the one who died, how he had suicidal thoughts but programs like Ride 2 Recovery were helping him through.
Clay entered Loyola Marymount in the fall of 2009. He was ten years older than most of the other students, which was weird and a little uncomfortable—to feel old at such a young age—but the kids looked up to him, and that meant something. He was asked to speak at the school’s Veterans Day celebration. He talked about the war—simply, without the oo-rah—and about how he had come to believe that Iraq and Afghanistan were mistakes. Lives were being lost. People were coming home with PTSD, people like him—he talked about having suicidal thoughts at times. But he was working his way through that. He was in counseling, and he had Robin. “She’s my rock,” he said. “I’d never make it through without her.”
Robin was there and moved by his eloquence. He had that audience, she thought, and if he could do that, why couldn’t he do everything else?
That fall, Clay burrowed deeper into the veterans’ movement; he joined Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), which was the best-known of his generation’s advocacy groups. It had begun as a protest organization in 2004, led by an Army Captain named Paul Rieckhoff. “We love the Army but hate the war,” Rieckhoff had said, which summed up the military experience for more than a few troopers who had volunteered after 9/11 and found themselves fighting a war that made no strategic or military sense. There was a difference between IAVA and the Vietnam generation of veterans’ protest groups: IAVA quickly developed a pragmatic agenda that could be cheered by the war’s supporters and opponents alike. Rieckhoff had been infuriated by the fact that his company had inadequate body armor in Baghdad and that their Humvees were soft-skinned, with no steel protection. His unit actually had to raid the Baghdad junkyards to find pieces of metal that they’d strap to the sides of their vehicles. So IAVA mounted a lobbying campaign that shamed the Department of Defense and the Congress into providing more effective body armor and up-armored Humvees. As time went on, Rieckhoff would lead teams of veterans to Washington each year for Storm the Hill missions to lobby for an expanded G.I. Bill of Rights, more money and attention to the problems of traumatic brain injury and PTSD, and reform of the Veterans Administration, which was an impossible bureaucratic muckswamp that swallowed applications for disability benefits and couldn’t seem to spit them out. Rieckhoff was controversial because of his nonstop advocac
y and his willingness to call out malfeasance at the VA, especially under the cloudy rule of former four-star General Eric Shinseki, who was appointed by Barack Obama and disappeared into a deep public relations hole, overwhelmed by the bureaucracy, unwilling (or perhaps unable) to advocate for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were flooding the system with fresh wounds and unprecedented problems. Rieckhoff—huge, bald, energetic, and smart—pierced the vacuum Shinseki created and emerged as the most effective spokesman for his generation of veterans.
Hearing that Clay Hunt was a talented speaker, Rieckhoff invited him to attend Storm the Hill 2010—and Clay convinced IAVA to let Jake come along. Before that, though, IAVA asked Clay to do some speaking in California. He became something of a poster boy for PTSD; he was in two televised public service announcements. “I’ve seen and done things that people should not have to see or do,” he said in one. But it was his presence more than his words: Robin watched the TV spot and saw flickers of that same smile, the clear-eyed decency. She still loved that Clay. But he wasn’t there, with her, very often.
School was hard. He was having real problems holding his attention in class, writing essays, taking tests, remembering anything. He told Audrey Nitschka that he wasn’t sure if it was the traumatic brain injury, his old ADHD, or the combination of drugs the VA was giving him, but something was making him screwy. He was having erectile problems, too, he admitted. But he was trying, really trying, to keep it together.
And then, on January 12, 2010, the earthquake struck Haiti. Clay was Jake’s first call. “You in?”
“Shit. I’ve got to go to Houston for my stepbrother’s wedding. But I’ll get down there. I’ll find a way.”
Haiti was a bright-line for Robin. She knew Clay was desperate to go with Jake—it was the sort of saddle-up, let’s-go thing that Clay laid on her all the time. When they returned home to California from the wedding, Clay devoured Jake’s blog reports and photos from the scene of the earthquake. There weren’t many posts—Team Rubicon had been there for only two days—but Clay kept reading them over and over. “You coming to bed?” Robin asked.
