by Joe Klein
Dolhun had a family practice in San Francisco and an idealistic streak—like Jake, he’d simply bought a plane ticket and decided to see if he could help in Haiti. He knew his way around disaster areas and was especially obsessed with cholera, a disease that was essentially a vicious form of diarrhea. It was the second greatest killer of children in the world; an estimated 1.9 million died each year (pneumonia was first and malaria third). The worst part was that there was a simple treatment for cholera, used and distributed by the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO)—a magic mix of glucose and salts that immediately rehydrated the body—but the WHO formula had a severe limitation: it tasted horrible. It worked wonders when transmitted intravenously, but no one seemed to want to swallow it. There were commercial versions of the product—the most popular was Gatorade—but those messed with the essential WHO formula, adding in more sugar and reducing the salt. That was fine for sweaty athletes in the heat of a game, but too much sugar dehydrated the body and would only speed the death of a cholera patient.
Dolhun decided to experiment with the WHO formula, reducing the salt slightly, adding flavoring to the mixture. He worked on it for years, through research fellowships at the University of California Medical School and Johns Hopkins University. He had talked nonstop about Oral Rehydration Solutions (ORS) in Haiti, about the lives they were losing that could be saved. He was still experimenting with his formula. By August 2010, though, he had something he thought would work. He had a batch produced and packaged in eighty-eight-pound bags, which he would ship to Pakistan. He called his product Drip-Drop.
And Drip-Drop was the star of the show when Team Rubicon deployed to western Punjab. The conditions were worse than Haiti because such a vast area was affected, the government response was feeble, and the problem was compounded every day as more and more people drank the filthy floodwaters to survive and then fell ill. The TR team flew into Islamabad, and then traveled in vans down into Punjab, where a doctor, Yasmina Rashid, sent them with translators to one of the more remote areas, the town of Muzaffargarh. They had to walk the last miles in flooded muck, toting the Drip-Drop sacks.
Kaj Larsen recorded all of this for CNN, eventually editing it down to two five-minute reports. The highlight was an infant named Ali, who was near death, comatose, limbs floppy. Kaj’s camera crew shot Will McNulty picking up the baby and taking him to Dolhun, who fed him Drip-Drop orally through a syringe. Within minutes the baby was alive, crying, hungry, thirsty, revived. The stuff actually worked.
Word of the magic potion spread through Muzaffargarh, and crowds began to gather. At night, the Team Rubicon crew would sit at a table—like drug dealers harvesting a haul—separating the Drip-Drop into plastic baggies, which they’d distribute with clean water in the mornings. This was Dolhun’s ultimate test: whether the parents themselves could administer it to their children. They could. For two weeks, Team Rubicon moved from village to village distributing and administering Drip-Drop until their supply ran out.
There was excitement back in California. Team Rubicon now had two strategic advantages when it came to disaster relief—their military skills and Drip-Drop. First Lady Michelle Obama had seen Kaj’s reports on CNN, and in late September she mentioned TR as a group that was doing really important things in a speech to a packed crowd of potential funders at the Clinton Global Initiative. She even mentioned Jake by name—but he had mixed feelings about that. The publicity was nice but sort of phony. He hadn’t been able to go to Pakistan; McNulty had led the mission. Jake was just another MBA student at UCLA . . . and, he had to admit, school just wasn’t very interesting compared to saving lives in West Punjab.
And then Dolhun made Jake an offer: come work for Drip-Drop, be our COO. “We can build this business together,” Dolhun said. “We can build it through TR missions and start marketing it throughout the world. We can take it to the WHO and have a comparison test with their product.” The doctor loved the idea of Jake as a front man—handsome, articulate, an obsessed military humanitarian. Jake was tempted, but careful. He had promised Indra that he would get his MBA and settle down. He was excited, though; there were all sorts of possibilities now.
After skipping the spring semester of 2010 at Loyola Marymount, Clay tried again in the fall. He was really motivated this time. He wanted to be like Mark Hayward, the super-medic who had been so brilliant in Haiti and Chile. But his brain was fried, he couldn’t retain anything, he had trouble retrieving words, and he had trouble sitting still in class. He tried different combinations of drugs at the VA, but nothing seemed to work—he would be woozy or antsy or nauseated or scattered. He was worried about money, too. He hadn’t received his G.I. Bill education benefits because of the wasted spring semester, so he had paid for the fall semester with his credit card. He was still waiting to hear from the VA about an enhanced disability rating because he was now suffering from both post-traumatic stress and a traumatic brain injury. He couldn’t afford the apartment anymore and moved out. He spent some nights at Audrey Nitschka’s house and others with John Wordin at his home in the San Fernando Valley.
On September 15, Susan Selke received a call from her son. “Mom, you may have to come get me,” he said. “I can’t function very well.”
“I can’t get there tonight, Clay,” she replied. He sounded terrible, scared and shaky. She was terrified. “I can get there tomorrow. Can you get to the VA? Can you drive yourself there?”
“Yeah, I can do that.”
“You do that, and then call me when you get there.”
But Susan wasn’t convinced that Clay could or would do that, so she called Wordin. “John, I don’t know what to do. I’m in Texas. I’m coming tomorrow . . . but he cannot be by himself tonight.”
“I’ll call him right now,” Wordin replied. “I’ll get him to come here.” Even if Clay managed to deliver himself into the impersonal bureaucratic maw of the VA, Wordin feared that he might be left sitting alone in a bleak, fluorescent waiting room for hours, which would be the very worst thing for him. “I’m calling him on the other phone right now,” he told Susan. Wordin reached Clay, who actually was on the way to the VA, and told him to turn around and drive to his house.
A day later, it was as if nothing had happened. “I’m not sure what was going on,” Clay said to his mother.
“You were a mess,” Susan said.
“I know.”
“I can still come out there and get you.”
“No, I’m okay here with John. I’m going to live here with him for a while. He’s got an extra room. I’m going to help him build some bikes for the next challenge ride.” He sounded strong, firm, almost normal.
As the weeks passed, Wordin began to get a better picture of Clay’s illness. If John let him, Clay could go on, obsessively, about how he’d let down his fellow Marines in Iraq. The exact same words, the same stories every time, the same guilt. That was one of his fixations. The other was Afghanistan: how useless and stupid a war it was, how backward the people were. “It was surreal, John,” he’d say. “They had no idea that we were trying to help them. And they were probably right. I don’t know that we were helping at all. I think we probably weren’t. We watched Echo, Fox, and Golf do company-sized sweeps through Taliban lands—they were always ‘successful’ and then the Taliban would come back. We didn’t accomplish a fucking thing.”
Sometimes Wordin found Clay up by himself at two or three in the morning and suggested, “Don’t you think you should try to sleep?” But the only way for Clay to sleep was Ambien, and John wasn’t convinced that, or the fusillade of other pills that Clay had been prescribed, was doing much good.
What worked was work. If Wordin could keep him busy in the bicycle shop, Clay was fine—in fact, he was excellent in the shop, helping to build hand-crank bikes for paraplegics and customized models for double, triple, and, in one case, a quadruple amputee. They built a pull-along bike for a quadriplegic named Chuck, which they called the Chuck Wagon. Clay worked quietly, with a purp
ose—and then, after they cleaned up for the day, he would play catch or shoot hoops, or he’d play Xbox with Wordin’s son, Josh. He was terrific with Josh; they were like two kids playing together.
Clay’s parents would call each day, sometimes both Stacy and Susan, asking for a report. When Clay spent the night at Audrey Nitschka’s house, his mom would find him there, too. Susan didn’t mind that Clay called Audrey his “second mom.” Sometimes a kid just needed someone like that in his life, and she wanted all the eyes-on supervision she could get for Clay. Audrey had all the time of the day and night for him. They would watch television, and then they would stay up and talk.
“I think Jake and William are getting sick of me calling,” Clay said one night. “I bum them out. All I can talk about is this shit.”
“Yeah, well,” Audrey said, “that makes two of us. All I can talk about is this shit, too.” She’d never really recovered from her son’s death; it was as if she had PTSD, too. She went to a shrink who said she was suffering from agoraphobia, anxiety, and depression. Her marriage had fallen apart, but she had found a boyfriend who was extremely understanding—even when Clay, who seemed to have no boundaries, would come into their bedroom in the middle of the night and want to talk. There were times, too, when Clay would call in from some bar, bruised and shit-faced, and her boyfriend would go retrieve him.
Audrey and Clay compared medications. He was on Lexapro, Ambien, Valium, and several other drugs. She was on Xanax.
“I just feel like I’m so fucking damaged,” he said.
“Clay, we’re all damaged,” she said, but she worried about him. There were times when Clay was just crazy amped—she wondered if he was bipolar—and he’d talk about going to live in Haiti or becoming a ski bum in Colorado or reenlisting in the Marines.
“Clay, you don’t want to do that,” she said. “Please don’t go back in.”
“I was good at it.”
But look where it landed you, she thought. She didn’t say it, because she didn’t want to compound his agony. His best times, in a way, were with her daughter, Taylor, Blake’s half sister. He would shoot hoops with her, attend her basketball games, go to her dance recitals. Taylor called Clay her “pretend” brother. Audrey had mixed feelings about that, too.
Jake lasted a semester at UCLA business school. He could handle the MBA material, but it lacked the rush and import of a Team Rubicon deployment. In late autumn of 2010, Dr. Dolhun finally convinced him to become COO of Drip-Drop. “It’s entrepreneurial and humanitarian,” Jake told Indra. “It just makes sense for me.”
“Just be sure you sign a contract,” she told him, assuming that he wouldn’t. And he didn’t: there was too much else to do; the legal stuff was a diversion. There was a marketing plan to concoct, and there were obvious potential customers to contact—the U.S. military, the UN relief agencies, the Red Cross—there was the overwhelming question of how to bring the product to scale. Jake was commuting up to San Francisco for organizational meetings with Dolhun.
There were still plenty of Team Rubicon things that needed to be done in preparation for the next mission—fund-raising, publicity, stocking equipment on both coasts. McNulty tried to get Clay to do some of the bureaucratic chores, like getting permits from the city of Los Angeles to store the array of medicines they used on disaster operations, but Clay whiffed on them. He was too scattered and scared, and sometimes he couldn’t leave the house, whichever house he happened to be living in at that moment. Worse, he was calling Will all the time now—and it was always the same Ancient Mariner routine: everything was awful, he was depressed, he was having problems with the VA. By late fall, William dreaded seeing Clay’s number come up on his phone. Sometimes, to his own horror, he wouldn’t pick up.
Jake was burdened by Clay’s calls as well. He just didn’t have time for all the bitching and moaning, even from a brother, and he felt heartsick about that . . . because it was so easy to be an asshole. You would say to yourself: I’ll call him back later. And then you’d get involved in something else, and later would slip by and never happen.
In early December, Jake got a phone call from Audrey Nitschka. “Have you seen Clay?” she asked. “He spent last night with us and he was supposed to go to Taylor’s recital, but he told me this morning he wasn’t coming because he just couldn’t handle it. And now I can’t find him anywhere. Jake, I’m really worried.”
Clay answered Jake’s call on the first ring. “Hey, dude, you’re freaking out Audrey,” Jake said.
“I know,” Clay said. “I wasn’t answering because I felt guilty about not going to Taylor’s thing.”
“So why didn’t you go?”
“Because I keep thinking about Blake,” Clay said. “I’m in a bad place right now.”
Jake told Clay to meet him at the Pasadena apartment. He bought a case of beer and asked Indra to go upstairs. “Clay’s not good,” he said. “I’ve got to deal with this.”
Clay was shaking visibly when he arrived. Jake could tell that he’d been crying. “Hey . . . hey, dude, what’s going on?” Jake asked.
“I feel guilty about Blake,” he said.
“Why should you feel guilty?” After all, Jake figured he was the one who should have died on the bridge that night, if Rosenberger had only let him lead the convoy. “You weren’t even there.”
“I suck at everything. My life’s a fucking train wreck.” And he began to recite his personal stations of the cross.
“Hey, let’s hit the reset button,” Jake said, “and get your mind off this.”
They went out to hear some live music at a local dive, but Clay remained catatonic, shaky. When they returned to the apartment, he collapsed, crying. It was shocking; Jake had never seen him this bad. And again, Clay sobbed and talked about how he’d failed at everything—he had dropped out of Loyola Marymount; he hadn’t made it through recon school; he was a failure at marriage. “I know I’m dragging you down, Jake,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about using the gun. Really thinking about it.”
“C’mon, dude, you don’t want to do that.” Jake tried to comfort him. He didn’t know what to say.
“I don’t have any fucking idea what to do,” Clay said. “Maybe I should drop all this shit, go to Colorado and be a ski bum. That’s the only place I’ve ever been happy.”
The only place he’d ever been happy? Jake had seen Clay happy plenty of times in California, happy for long periods of time. He’d been happy in Haiti. He’d been happy in D.C. Jake knew that Clay expected him to be responsible, to tell him, “You’re an idiot. Stop acting like a baby. Get your shit together. Get back into school.” But Jake was in the midst of his own process of dropping out—and he knew that Loyola Marymount had been torture for Clay. School would only make him worse.
“Look, I think you’ve got two choices,” Jake said. “You can go to Colorado, have some fun, chill out or . . .” Jake hesitated here. “Or you can go back to Haiti. We’re trying to arrange a trip with the International Medical Corps to go down and work on the cholera epidemic there. They need teams to go to the remote towns, up in the hills, and set up clinics there. We may go right after the first of the year, if we have the money for it. But I’ll fucking bankrupt Team Rubicon to send you there, if you think it will help you get your shit together.”
Clay brightened immediately. This sounded like a plan. He would go to Colorado and do some snowboarding. Maybe he’d go to Houston and see his parents for the holidays. And then, he’d go back to Haiti. It would be exactly a year since the earthquake.
He lasted two weeks in Colorado. He moved into a basement apartment with some friends, but felt claustrophobic. A big storm was coming, he told his mother, and he could be trapped there for weeks.
“Then leave right now,” Susan said. “Come home.”
Home was, in a way, more stable than it had ever been before. Both Stacy and Susan had remarried—and, as they struggled through the Clay situation together, they had actually become friends again.
Susan and her husband were just moving into a new house, so Clay stayed with his father and stepmother. Stacy had plenty of friends in the construction business, and he found Clay a job as a site superintendent-in-training. Clay liked the idea—it was outside work; he’d be using his hands—and he began to make plans to settle down in Houston. He went to the VA and asked to have his files transferred from Santa Monica.
But before he could really settle in, the Haiti trip materialized. He left in mid-January and stayed for several weeks. He joined Matt Pelak, an Army National Guard Sergeant and Poughkeepsie, New York, firefighter, as the two Team Rubicon representatives. Matt was a classic hyper-efficient TR type: big and quiet, smart in a humble, no-nonsense way. His first mission had been to Pakistan, where he’d impressed McNulty with his utter reliability. “He’s solid,” McNulty told Jake when they got home.
“Let’s make him our East Coast Coordinator,” Jake said. “He lives in New York. It would be smart to store medicine and equipment on both coasts, right?”
In Haiti, Clay introduced Matt to Brother Jim Boynton before going up into the mountains. Jim was burned out and preparing to leave the country. He said the Haitians had learned nothing from the earthquake. The country was a horror show. Clay was bummed by the visit, but once they arrived in the hill town, he was all business. He was, in fact, exemplary, Matt thought: Clay just dived right in, setting up a tent roof over the clinic, washing down the place, doing some rudimentary first aid work, playing with the kids. When he finished whatever tasks Matt gave him to do, he’d come back for more—with a smile. No wonder Jake and William love the dude so much, Matt thought. Clay was a total pro, a happy camper—he even bolstered the spirits of the rest of the team, some of whom were rookies when it came to disaster relief and were having a tough time handling the devastation, which was stomach-turning. The Haitians didn’t understand that if they washed the victims’ bedsheets in the filthy river and brought them to the clinic, they would get rid of the stains, but not the germs.
