by Joe Klein
“Yeah, in a minute.”
The next thing she knew, it was the middle of the night, and Clay was waking her up brusquely and saying, “You need to take me to the airport.”
“Ohhh-kayyy,” she said, trying to convey her frustration. But she could tell that Clay wasn’t in the mood for a discussion. This was Band of Brothers business. They rode to the airport in silence. Robin couldn’t trust herself to open her mouth; she didn’t want to send him off to a dangerous place angry. So she hugged him at the airport and said, “I love you,” and let him go.
But her anger festered, and when he came home, jubilant, stoked by all the good things they’d done in Haiti—he told her about the incredible Doc Griswell and the medic Mark Hayward and said he wanted to be a medic, just like Doc Army; he was full of new plans—she let him have it. “Clay, you just walked out of this house—you woke me up in the middle of the night and told me to drive you to the airport. That’s not right,” she said. “We’re married. That’s not what married people do. You didn’t even discuss it with me. We could have done it together, we could have planned it . . .”
“There was no time for that,” he said. “I had to go right then.”
“But you could have talked to me about it, shared it with me . . .”
And then she stopped. She could see Clay was crushed. He had been glowing, more excited than she’d ever seen him—and she had been a total buzzkill. She sensed that she had crossed an invisible line, betrayed him somehow. It was going to be hard to recover from this. A few days later, he was gone again—off to Washington, D.C., with Jake for IAVA’s Storm the Hill campaign to lobby for better veterans’ benefits.
A blizzard had just dumped nearly two feet of snow on Washington; another would arrive in a few days with ten inches more—the D.C. locals called it Snowpocalypse. The twenty-eight Storm the Hill veterans who had gathered to lobby Congress were pretty much confined to quarters at night—which forced them to commandeer the hotel bar, probably what they would have done anyway. They were hungry for one another’s company.
They arrived on Super Bowl Sunday and had a day of orientation, dividing into four-person teams—Clay was in Delta Team; Jake was in Fox. They learned how to make presentations to the congressional staffers they’d be visiting, the details of the issues they’d be raising, and how to deal with the media. They were given talking points; they divided each presentation into four sections, so each of the vets would have a role. They were asked to act and dress respectfully. The men would wear jackets and ties; the women, nothing flashy. Clay chose a champagne tie to go with his white shirt and dark suit. His role in Delta Team was to tell a story about a friend he had met through Ride 2 Recovery, a Vietnam veteran who’d had to fill out a twenty-six-page disability claims form when he came home from the war forty years ago. “I came home from Afghanistan last year, suffering from PTSD,” Clay said. “And guess what? I had to fill out a twenty-six-page paper form to apply for my disability. And there was no way to keep track of it. It just disappeared somewhere in the VA. If my parents can send me a FedEx package from Houston to Santa Monica, and I can track it all the way on my phone, shouldn’t we be able to keep track of our disability claims?”
Clay was articulate and persuasive without being angry, thought his assigned roommate, Anthony Pike. Jake was also effective, but fiercer than Clay. He’d gotten into a confrontation with the conservative Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, who—to tell the truth—had been asking for it. “You know what’s wrong with your generation of veterans? You just want stuff,” Coburn said. “You guys come in here with all these plans for policy change. But you know what you didn’t come here with: a plan to pay for it.”
Jake wanted to assault the guy, but he kept his temper, sort of. “Senator, with all due respect, it’s not our job to figure out how to pay for it. That’s your job. That’s why you were elected to the Senate.”
The other veterans were blown away by the energy and style of the two Team Rubicon guys. Jake was always at the heart of the action when everyone gathered at the hotel bar at night. Clay would hang back, except when Haiti came up—and then he was transformed, jazzed about the joys of being out there with fellow veterans, part of a team again, actually helping people. Storm the Hill was sort of like that, too, but without the physical challenge. Pike was envious of Clay’s Haiti experience, and he wasn’t alone. Rieckhoff began to tout Team Rubicon when he did media interviews. TR was the answer to Senator Coburn’s complaint: it was veterans doing good for themselves and their communities.
And Clay became the model. He was candid about the problems he’d suffered through, the suicidal thoughts he’d had—but he hadn’t sequestered himself in a dark room. He was out in the world, doing something about it. He was enthusiastic—and flat-out, unalloyed enthusiasm was not a common symptom of PTSD; he was attending college to develop medical skills that he could use on TR missions. Jake was the face of Team Rubicon, but it was Clay—vulnerable, kind, with that killer smile—who captured the hearts of the IAVA staff.
After a week in Washington, buoyed by the support, convinced that he’d really turned a corner this time, Clay went home, where Robin was waiting, still frustrated, still hoping to have a real conversation about their life together. He wanted to tell her how good he felt, how the other vets not only had his back but also seemed to respect him for what he was doing. He knew what he was going to do now: he would work for and with other veterans. They would do great things. He would go out and proselytize for IAVA and help get Team Rubicon off the ground. He would go back to Haiti; there would be other Team Rubicon missions, other Ride 2 Recovery challenge rides. He and John Wordin were planning a challenge to honor Blake Howey.
“What about school?” Robin asked. “You’re already behind.”
“I can’t handle this,” he exploded, suddenly knowing his own mind. “You have no fucking idea . . . I want a divorce.”
“A divorce?” Robin was infuriated. “Three months ago, you told the whole world that I was your rock. You remember? Veterans Day? And now you want a divorce?”
“You’re just not fucking there for me. You even saw me with the gun out and you didn’t do anything about it.”
“You always have the gun out,” she said. It was reflexive, onanistic: he was always cleaning it, oiling it, going off to the shooting range—how was she to know that he was actually thinking about using it on himself? He never told her what he was thinking.
And yet other people knew what Clay was thinking and feeling without asking. Audrey Nitschka knew; Jake and his girlfriend, Indra Petersons, certainly knew. All his friends knew that he could dive very deep, very quickly, into an extremely dark place; the exhilaration of Haiti and Storm the Hill was simply the other side of the coin.
As for Clay, there wasn’t time or space or, if the truth be told, very much desire for him and Robin to hash out their situation. He was adamant about the divorce; Robin, indignant.
Within a matter of days, there was a massive earthquake in Chile, and he was gone again.
Chapter 5
THE HERO’S JOURNEY
“Mike,” Eric Greitens said. “They’re honoring Gold Star families at the Soldiers Memorial downtown. I want you to represent us.”
“Really?” Mike Pereira asked warily, sensing a setup.
“Yes,” Eric said. And yes, it was a setup. Challenging Mike’s post-traumatic stress was part of Eric’s training program in the months after Pereira arrived in St. Louis in August 2009. He knew Mike was uncomfortable in public with people he didn’t know; he would be especially frazzled in public with people he didn’t know who had lost their children in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Why not?” Eric could see the gears spinning, the tension rising.
“Because I don’t know that I can keep it together. I don’t know what I can do for them. I’m going to be thinking about . . .”
“Yea
h, but this isn’t about you,” Eric said gently. “This is about those families. They need our support; they need to know we’re here. We have to get the word out. Look, Mike, if you’re going to work here, you’re going to have to handle a lot of uncomfortable situations—and if you’re going to work with people who have PTSD, you’ve got to understand that we don’t accept any excuses, not even from you. You know that. You’re serving others here. You’re going to that ceremony.”
Mike knew that Eric was right, of course. He knew this was a test he was going to have to pass, part of the relentless tutorial that he was getting from Eric. There had been reading assignments, starting with the Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey. “It’s the first book ever written about a soldier coming home from a war,” Eric said. “It’s a journey.”
Mike latched on to that—the idea that he was on a journey upward toward enlightenment. Eric asked him to read other books about the mythic quest: The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford, Iron John by Robert Bly. They all pointed in one direction: the hero went on an adventure; along the way he faced challenges, suffered, and died a spiritual death, and only then, on the way home, he began to rebuild strength and character while suffering through even more perilous adventures. Eric introduced Mike to his favorite poem by Aeschylus, famously recited by Robert Kennedy in the Indianapolis ghetto after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.:
He who learns must suffer,
And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget,
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despite, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
So Mike went to the Soldiers Memorial, and soon he was spending hours with the Gold Star families who showed up at the office, which became a gathering place for veterans and their spouses and families as word of The Mission Continues spread through St. Louis. Eric would invite them—and students, and people he’d met in the business community—to clean playgrounds and refurbish schools and community centers. The projects would draw media attention, and media attention drew more candidates for fellowships—and others, veterans and civilians, who just wanted to be part of something good.
Mike had bureaucratic responsibilities, which he performed with no relish; his main concern was helping veterans who were having problems, especially those he sensed were heading down the suicide slide. He would stalk them, working the hardest with those who were least prepared for a Mission Continues fellowship; he would work with them for months, trying to get them to write an acceptable application essay.
One of Mike’s first projects was Ian Smith, who had been a close intel analysis buddy of his in Germany. Ian was now in Nashville, working three jobs—mowing lawns, delivering pizzas, serving as the janitor at a local church, while carrying a 4.0 average at Volunteer State Community College. But he wasn’t sleeping very well; he needed booze to get himself down. And he wasn’t treating his girlfriend, Christy, very well; he was never violent, but his temper was horrific. He was sleeping with a gun every night. He had gained sixty pounds. He was disconsolate.
“Sounds to me like you’ve got what I have,” Mike said.
“No way,” Ian said. “Nothing bad happened to me over there. I wasn’t hurt . . .”
“I wasn’t either,” Mike replied. “But just sitting there, helpless, watching my friends get blown up . . .”
Ian had certainly experienced that. His first deployment with the 101st Airborne to Mahmudiyah, in Iraq’s Triangle of Death, had been infamous: one of the soldiers in the unit had raped an Iraqi girl in front of her family, then killed the family and set them on fire. A book, Black Hearts, had been written about it. Every day, Ian sat in the TOC in Mahmudiyah, surrounded by big screens showing sky views from drones and helicopters, watching IED explosions. He lost friends on patrol almost every week. Four soldiers he knew were kidnapped by the Iraqis and later found dead. The FOB was mortared or hit by rocket-propelled grenades most days.
But still, he hadn’t been in combat. He hadn’t been hurt.
His second tour, as part of a MiTT team in Baghdad in 2007 and 2008, had been a triumph. The war had turned around by then. His team worked with an Iraqi Army unit trying to rid a mostly Sunni neighborhood of Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) forces—the Shiite militia run by Muqtada al-Sadr—and they ultimately succeeded. “I won my war,” Ian told Mike. “Why should I have PTSD?”
“I don’t know,” Mike replied. “Why do you need that gun? Why can’t you sleep without booze? Why did Christy leave you?”
Ian wasn’t budging, but Mike wasn’t giving up. He told Ian to go out and buy an Xbox and headset, so they could play Call of Duty together and talk. They spent hours on the headsets, wasting hajjis and, occasionally, talking about Ian’s situation. Mike could hear the numb in Ian’s voice. He sounded too much like Tim Nelson, who had blown his head off in Bellingham. That simply could not happen again. He tried to get Ian off the couch, over to St. Louis for a weekend. He told him about The Mission Continues—Ian thought Mike made it sound like a cult, with Eric Greitens as Jesus—but Mike kept talking about it and asking Ian about what he was doing and whether he had friends nearby, service buddies, anybody to keep him in the world.
The truth was, except for Mike, Ian was alone, the pizza boxes—the signature nutritional artifact of post-traumatic stress—piling up in his dark room. He was playing with his gun, cleaning it, loading it, putting it to his temple. He was going through the motions of his life, mowing lawns, cleaning the church. He started doing some emergency ambulance work, which he thought would add some purpose—but almost all of his runs involved moving dialysis patients to a clinic and back. He was pissed off at everyone, all those civilians who had no idea about anything.
Mike sent Ian a copy of Black Hearts, and Ian devoured it and was freaked by it. The book brought everything back in Technicolor and surround sound. His unit had been driven nuts by war. He hadn’t been outside the wire very often, but he’d been playing in the same crazy sandbox. And he simply could not understand why he was acting the way he was. Life in Nashville was cratering. Without Christy, there wasn’t enough income to keep the house; he was going to have to move into a trailer. He was pulling out the gun almost every night, playing with it. “One of these nights, I just may put a bullet in my head,” he told Mike.
“Hey, why don’tcha come this weekend?” Mike offered again, trying to sound calm. “We’re doing a service project at a children’s center, cleaning it up. It’s good. It’s like saddling up again. You get to hang with people like us, shoot the shit. No pressure. You can stay with Georgia and me. Ian, listen man, you need a road trip.”
Much to Mike’s amazement, Ian came. The service project was at the Edgewood Children’s Center in St. Louis. Ian found himself in a room with a paintbrush and a handful of other vets. They were immediately familiar to him—they looked like he did, tough and tatted on the outside, confused and angry on the inside. It was like looking in a mirror. They began to talk as they worked, basic stuff, like where they’d deployed and with which unit and “Hey, did you know so-and-so?” They told war stories and stories about coming home and stories about how retarded civilians were. They were laughing. And suddenly the room was done—it looked great!—and they started painting another. You couldn’t argue with this, Ian thought. There was no downside to painting a school for disabled kids. There was no bad in this. He understood, suddenly, the silly cliché: it’s all good.
That night he slept the sleep of the just on Mike’s couch, ten hours without nightmares. It had been how long—months? years?—since he’d slept like that. He woke up happy, pretty near euphoric. Man, he thought, if I can capture just a little bit of what we did yesterday and hold it close to my heart, I think I could do all right.
Ian moved to St. Louis, got counseling at the VA, made a living driving EMT ambulances. He started working out, lost the sixty pounds; eventually he began to run
, swim, and bike in triathlons. He became a Mission Continues fellow and then a TMC staff member. He specialized in organizing service projects all over the country. Eventually, Eric sent him to Washington to serve as a White House intern in Michelle Obama’s Joining Forces initiative for veterans.
The success Mike had with Ian was narcotic; repeating that success was pretty much all he cared about. The fellowship program needed to be tightened. There were still too many failures. There were fellows who didn’t show up for work at their local sponsoring organizations or used their stipends to buy drugs or couldn’t control their anger. Eric wanted a foolproof system. He wanted every fellow to succeed. At the same time—and this was the hard part—he didn’t want to reject anyone. It was okay if recruits said, “No, this isn’t for me.” But Eric couldn’t bear the thought of turning away anyone who really wanted to serve, no matter how debilitated. He wanted Mike to stick with them, prepare them for the moment when they’d really be ready and purposeful enough for a fellowship. But what did “ready” mean? What were the parameters for selecting a Mission Continues fellow?
“Why don’t you make a list of the qualities we need to see when a fellow applies?” Eric asked Mike.
Mike huffed and sweated and came up with a list of ten. He handed the list to Eric, who said, “Can you recite all ten from memory?”
Mike couldn’t. “Why don’t you work on this?” Eric said. “Pare it down. Come back to me with a list of two or three absolutely essential qualities.”
That was how it was in 2009: systems and processes and metrics. It seemed to Mike that The Mission Continues staff was plodding down a slow, sludgy river on a raft, while Eric was zooming about in a Jet Ski, stopping in occasionally to fire off a set of instructions or bring news of another $10,000 or $50,000 raised—and pushing them always, always, to develop ways to measure the efficacy of the program. They were having individual successes like Ian Smith and Tim Smith, but those two had served in St. Louis, under close supervision. What about the fellows in the rest of the country? It was time for Monica Matthieu to step in and do a proper study; she recruited both Mike and Ian—former intel analysts were natural sociologists—to help with an exit questionnaire for the fellows. The problem was, there still weren’t very many of them, maybe twenty or so, past and present. They were choosing their fellows carefully, adding them one at a time.
