by Joe Klein
One night Matt and Clay stayed up and talked—they were the only two military veterans on the team; the rest were medical personnel—and Clay told Matt all the old stories about Iraq and Afghanistan and guilt. The tremor in his voice, the repetition of the stories, told Matt a lot more than anything Clay said.
They were staying in a rudimentary guest house, and Matt had been given a very large room with an entirely unexpected king-size bed. In the middle of the night, Clay came in without a word, lay down on the far side of the bed, and fell asleep. He didn’t mention it the next morning, so Matt didn’t either. It was all, “What do we need to do today?” And he was back at it, radiating happiness and optimism. The Haitians gravitated toward him; he was a rock star in the field.
Matt left that night. Clay stayed on for two weeks, then went home to Houston and found that the VA hadn’t been able to move his records from California. They were lost somewhere. They had disappeared in Muskogee, Oklahoma—at least, that was what one of the desultory geeks in the VA office told him. He came back a week later and found that there might be another possibility: the computer in Houston was having trouble communicating with the computer in Santa Monica. Or something. But still no medical records.
He started the construction job, which was okay some of the time. It kept him busy, but it didn’t have the satisfactions of Haiti. He thought about taking the exam to become a firefighter. Matt Pelak loved the job and had talked to Clay about it in Haiti. It was sort of like the military, Matt said. It was organized and an opportunity to help people. “It’s not as good as TR because we don’t run it,” Matt told him the night of their long conversation. “You’ve got a bureaucracy, you have to get approvals for some things or wait while the higher-ups decide which way to go. But it’s good work.”
Clay kept at the construction job. The physical part was good, and the pay was great; the crew was mostly Mexican, hard workers, fine people. He would go out with them after work; he began dating.
“Dad, I’ve got to find a place of my own,” he said to Stacy in early February.
“Why?”
“Well, if I meet a lady,” Clay said, smiling, “it’s kind of hard to say, ‘Hey, wanna go to my dad’s house for a drink?’ ”
Stacy laughed. “Well, we’ve got plenty of apartments.” He gave Clay a list of some of the vacant units in complexes that his company managed. Clay chose one in Sugarland, on the southwest side of town, an area chockablock with recent immigrants, especially Arabs. Some of the women in the complex wore hijab. There was a halal grocery store on the corner. Clay wasn’t aware of the demographics until he moved in and then he told his mother that the place freaked him a bit; it reminded him of Iraq—but he was working, had started dating a very nice young woman; he seemed better than he’d been in California.
Except for the VA, which was driving him nuts. His papers still hadn’t arrived from California, and now he had to replace them. They asked him to fill out a long, maddening form, listing his entire medical history, which Clay found impossible. He tried to remember his various maladies and hospital visits in chronological order: When had he first gone to the VA for PTSD? Which drugs had he taken? The very process of filling out the form sent him into a slide. He needed to get his Lexapro prescription filled. An appointment was set for early February, but it was with a psychologist, who couldn’t prescribe medications. He had to go to a psychiatrist. The soonest possible appointment with a VA psychiatrist was early March.
The psychiatrist prescribed the Lexapro and sent Clay to the VA pharmacy, where he waited for more than two hours before a clerk told him they were out of the drug. “We can mail you some as soon as we get it in,” the clerk said.
“How long will that take?” Clay asked.
“Ten days to two weeks.”
Clay stormed out. He had missed an entire day’s work—for nothing. He called his mother and said, “I won’t go back to that damn place. I don’t know what to do. I don’t think I can wait two weeks, Mom.”
Susan asked a friend for some Lexapro, and she was able to get enough pills to tide Clay over until the prescription arrived in the mail.
Jake called Clay in March. He said that he was going to India on vacation with Indra and his sister for a couple of weeks. Things were going well with Drip-Drop. There was the possibility of another TR mission, this time to a real war zone—Libya—in partnership, once again, with the International Medical Corps. Clay was ready to roll.
“So how’s work?” Jake asked.
“It’s work.” It wasn’t Team Rubicon; he wasn’t helping anybody. He wasn’t helping himself. “I need the team,” he said. “I’m thinking about reenlisting with the Marines.”
Jake had heard it all before. But he’d do what he could to keep feeding Clay new missions.
“Hey, Mom, you doing anything on Friday?” Clay asked Susan near the end of March.
“No. Why?”
“I’m getting myself a new truck.” He was moving up to a Toyota Tacoma. “It’s bigger. I need it to haul my tools and stuff around for work. Plus it’s a really cool truck. I’d like you to take a look before I buy it.”
This was good news, Susan thought. Buying the truck seemed a statement: Clay was settling in. He had the cash to buy himself something expensive. It was spring in Houston; flowers were blooming before the heat and humidity got crazy. Susan allowed herself a moment of hope.
Clay showed the truck to Stacy on Saturday and they went out to lunch to celebrate. Clay wasn’t talking much about his plans, but he wasn’t talking about his problems either. In fact, Stacy was the one who raised PTSD that day. He and some real estate friends had agreed to help a local group of recent veterans build a retreat called Camp Hope, where they could do a lot of the outdoorsy things that Clay liked to do. “They’re having a meeting on Wednesday. Maybe you could go, tell them your story, tell them about Team Rubicon. These are all guys with PTSD and maybe you could help them.”
“Sure,” Clay said, but Stacy sensed he wasn’t very interested, which was odd: Clay usually got all het up over veterans’ programs.
Clay went to dinner and a movie with his mom and stepdad that night. He wanted to see The Lincoln Lawyer, but Susan and Richard had already seen it. Instead, they went to see Limitless, a tense, mind-bending movie in which Bradley Cooper plays a blocked writer who becomes omnipotent after he takes a secret drug.
Clay seemed okay going in, although he did insist on sitting down in the handicapped row—his lone seat was the closest to the door. Susan and Richard sat farther along the row, past the spaces for wheelchairs, but Susan had a clear view of her son, who seemed completely immersed in the movie. And as she watched, she began to worry that this was probably not the best thing for Clay to see—there were harrowing scenes in which the main character became addicted to the drug. But he learned how to control the addiction. Eventually, he was stronger and smarter than ever. She watched her son, transfixed by the movie, alone at the end of the row.
Stacy called Susan the next day. He told her about Camp Hope, and how he thought it might be a good thing for Clay to go to the meeting on Wednesday. Maybe she could nudge him. “Maybe you could go with him,” Stacy said. “I’m going to be in Austin. He could tell them about Team Rubicon and that might help them.”
“Clay’s the one who needs help,” Susan replied, but she thought the meeting might be good for him and told Stacy she would call Clay on Monday. She usually called Clay every day. There was no answer on Monday, so she left a message. He didn’t call back. She called again on Tuesday with the same result. She was beginning to get worried. Clay was usually pretty good about returning her calls. And nothing again, on Wednesday. She called Stacy to see if he knew anything.
On Thursday morning, March 31, Stacy called her from Austin. “Susan, apparently Clay hasn’t shown up for work the past few days. Have you been in contact with him?”
“No, and I’m worried,” she said. “I’m going right over to the apartment.”
She raced over and saw both Clay’s old and new trucks in the parking lot. So he was there. Maybe he’d just gone on a bender. She banged on the door as hard as she could; no answer. The apartment was on the ground floor, and she tried looking through the windows, banging on them and screaming crazily, “Clay, it’s Mom! Mom’s here!” But nothing.
She called her husband, Richard, who said he’d come right over. She called Stacy, who said he’d get the building manager over there right away. The building manager, a woman, came with the keys, but the door to Clay’s apartment was dead-bolted, and she said she’d send some maintenance people with a crowbar. Susan handed the woman her phone and said, “Dial 911. He’s a veteran and he’s had some suicidal thoughts in the past.” She slumped down then and pushed her back hard against the brick wall of Clay’s apartment, trying to be as close to her son as she possibly could.
The Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office arrived about the same time as the maintenance people with the crowbar. The cops came in force, as did the maintenance people—five of them with a crowbar. Suddenly there were police lights spinning; suddenly there was a crowd. It was like a scene from a movie. Just a moment ago, Susan had been alone.
One of the maintenance men started working the crowbar. The police drew their guns. “No!” Susan screamed. “You don’t have to do that. He’s fine,” she added hopefully. “He’s just asleep.”
“Is he armed?” the police asked.
“He does have weapons,” she admitted—but that seemed irrelevant, ridiculous. Everything was so far past that now. “He’s a veteran and he does have firearms.”
“Well,” the lead police officer said, “then we have to do this.”
The maintenance man was the first through the door, and he came out wide-eyed. He couldn’t speak English, but he gestured hopelessly with his hands. Nothing else needed to be said.
Susan made a move for the door, but the lead detective stopped her. “You don’t want to see this,” he said. “He’s been dead about a day and you don’t want to see this . . . This is not the memory you want.”
A few weeks later, Susan Selke received a letter from the Department of Veterans Affairs addressed to Clay. She could barely handle it; it seemed radioactive. She struggled to open it and then read: Clay’s claim had finally been processed, after two years of trying. He had received a 100 percent disability rating for post-traumatic stress disorder.
PART IV
Their Mission Continued
Chapter 1
LEGACY
Jake was in a Mexican restaurant in Huntington Beach with William and several other core Team Rubicon members. His phone rang, a 713 area code number he didn’t know, so he let it go to voice mail. It rang again, then again. What was 713? Houston, he realized. He picked up the phone on the third ring.
“Is this Jake Wood?” a woman said.
“Yes.”
“Could you hold for Stacy Hunt?”
Jake went out to the street, his mind racing—immediately fixing on his responsibility, his letting Clay down those past few months. Clay was hurt, was dead. He was probably dead. “Please don’t let it be suicide,” he said aloud. If it wasn’t suicide, if it was just a car crash, he could live with that.
Stacy came on the phone, shattered. “Well, Jake, we lost him.”
“What do you mean?” Jake responded fiercely.
“Clay. He’s dead. He shot himself.”
They continued talking, mouths flapping, arrangements . . . Jake would call Robin, Audrey, the other Marines . . . the funeral would be . . . Stacy and Susan would . . .
And Jake felt his knees go out from under him. After fifteen minutes, McNulty went outside to see what was going on, and Jake was on the ground, in fetal position, sobbing.
When Jake looked back on it, everything that had happened in March 2011 was of one piece, a calibrated series of events intended to punish him for his complicity in Clay’s death. His car had been broken into, and his wallet was gone—credit cards, license, and everything. He had to have two root canals; his face was pounding. And then his Drip-Drop job was snatched away from him suddenly, and rather violently. He had sensed that something squirrelly was afoot for weeks. Eduardo Dolhun was involved in negotiations with a military contractor who wanted to buy a piece of the company. Jake thought this was a good idea at first. It was the quickest, easiest way to move to scale: the contractor knew how to sell to the U.S. military—Drip-Drop would be a natural product for them to stock—and he had other potential clients throughout the Gulf region. The contractor also promised that he would make a major grant to Team Rubicon.
But the tone of Dolhun’s emails was sliding south, ever more evasive, in the days before Jake was supposed to leave with Indra and his sister for a vacation to India. For some reason, the military contractor didn’t like the idea of Team Rubicon going to Libya with International Medical Corps. Jake tried to find out why. No answer. He made a last-minute check of his email in the LAX departure lounge, and there was one from Dolhun: the contractor didn’t want Jake to be COO of Drip-Drop any longer.
Jake sent an email to Dolhun: “Does that mean I’m fired?”
He received the answer in Mumbai: “Yes.”
Wow. Now he had . . . nothing. Indra, as usual, had been right: she could have gone double I-Told-You-So. She had told him to finish the MBA; she had told him to get a signed contract from Dolhun. He had a contract, sort of—but it was a flimsy document, worthless. Dolhun was one of the original eight in Haiti; he was a stepbrother, sort of. Drip-Drop had become an integral part of recent Team Rubicon missions. It saved lives. It had never occurred to Jake not to trust Dolhun.
And then, Clay’s death. Jake had absolutely no doubt that he was responsible. He was clear on that. He thought about all the things he should have done, all the phone calls he should have answered. He knew that he had abandoned his post; he had pushed his brother away. He thought about Clay at his best, in Haiti, surrounded by children. The thoughts swirled and ramified: What kind of an asshole am I to let him die like that?
Jake made it through Clay’s funeral, fueled by beer and his sense of responsibility—he had to hold it together for Clay’s family. Stacy Hunt felt culpable for Clay’s death, too. There was a lifetime of things he could have done; there were all of his impatient reactions to Clay’s ADHD. Jake comforted him, told Stacy there was nothing he could have done, and he did so with real conviction. Because Jake knew the truth: he was the one responsible for Clay’s death.
Mike Pereira went down to Houston for Clay’s funeral as the official representative of The Mission Continues, carrying Eric Greitens’s condolences. Clay was the first TMC fellow to kill himself, but he was not well-known in St. Louis. Jake and Clay had been left to their own devices, starting Team Rubicon; they’d had less contact with the TMC staff than most fellows did. Eric barely knew him. But Mike did: he had spent a lot of time on the phone with Clay, especially toward the end.
Mike had known what was happening. He’d heard the near-death voice twice before, with his mentor Tim Nelson in Bellingham, whom he had failed, and with Ian Smith, whom he had helped to save. Actually, three times: he remembered his own death voice and the cruelly impersonal taste of cold steel in his mouth. He tried everything with Clay. He would talk about what Clay had accomplished in Haiti and how to bottle it. That worked, sometimes. Mike would try to widen the focus, talk about Clay’s life as a hero’s journey, talk about Homeric values. At times, Clay could be lured out of his despair; toward the end, though, he was less responsive. “The world is dead to me,” he told Mike.
But that was part of the process, Mike argued. The hero comes back from the near-death experience . . .
Jake Wood, shattered, gave a beautiful eulogy at the funeral. Afterward, Mike, Jake, Will McNulty, Matt Pelak, and Paul Rieckhoff of IAVA pulled away from the crowd and talked briefly: What were they going to do about this? Clay had been a nexus—integral to IAVA, to The Mission Continues, to Team Rubi
con—and they still couldn’t stop him from killing himself. Suicide was becoming an epidemic among their brothers and sisters. The Veterans Administration was estimating that twenty-two veterans killed themselves each day. (Many were older—Vietnam era—but weren’t they brothers, too?)
“He kept saying, ‘I’m all alone,’ ” Mike said. “Isn’t that always the way it is?” But how could you—how could they—break through that? Jake had no answer. He wavered between catatonia and fury. The night before the funeral, he’d almost gotten into a bar fight with some of the other Marines because he’d kept shouting, “Fuck you, Clay . . . Fuck you . . . You asshole. Fuck you.”
And now what? Actually, Jake didn’t have the wherewithal to think about what came next, but McNulty was lobbying him to drop everything and do Team Rubicon full-time to honor Clay.
“And who pays our salaries?” Jake argued back. “How do we live?” The situation was complicated by the fact that the military contractor who was trying to buy Drip-Drop hadn’t delivered on the $100,000 grant to Team Rubicon. In the interim, Jake and McNulty had hired a woman named Joanne, whom Clay had known and recommended from Loyola Marymount, to do the administrative work that no one else had the patience to do. The plan was to pay her out of the $100,000. “How the fuck are we going to pay Joanne?” Jake asked.
“We’ll figure it out,” William said. “Look, Jake, you know that this idea is a game changer. It can change the world.” Having uttered the words, McNulty knew that was precisely the sort of grandiose argument that would not work with Jake, and then he thought of a better one: “It could have saved Clay.”
