by Joe Klein
Jake scoffed, but he knew McNulty, as usual, had grabbed onto a piece of the truth: Clay was closest to whole when he was on deployments. But there just weren’t that many deployments. International missions were expensive; it cost an average of $3,000 to insert a TR volunteer into an overseas disaster relief role. It was hard to raise enough money to make a significant impact.
At the funeral, Matt Pelak—who had just been with Clay in Haiti—suggested that maybe they could respond to domestic disasters, too. There were lots of those. But what would be their role? Unlike in Haiti, there was plenty of infrastructure in the States. The local authorities were well trained to run things; even the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had gotten its act together after Hurricane Katrina had wrecked New Orleans.
Jake and William went to Miami almost immediately after Clay’s funeral. They were going to tell their story at one of the social entrepreneurship conferences that seemed to be happening every third week; it was a good way to make contacts and troll for funders. They were in their hotel room the first night, when Jake received a call from Dolhun. He put it on speaker, so McNulty could hear.
“Jake, I’m really sorry. I’m really embarrassed. I did a bad thing,” Dolhun began. The deal with the military contractor hadn’t worked out. “I couldn’t sign the papers,” he went on. “I couldn’t just sign away Drip-Drop to someone I wasn’t sure about.”
He wanted Jake back. “We’ll really make it work this time,” he said.
“I don’t know,” Jake said, as McNulty shook his head no-no-no. “You really fucked me, Eduardo. How can I trust you now?”
Jake agreed to think about it. McNulty wanted none of it. “Dude, how can you even think about trusting that asshole?”
“Yeah, but how am I going to make a living?”
Jake looked at William and knew what his answer would be. “I don’t know, Will,” he said.
“Let’s do it for Clay,” William replied.
A few days after they returned home to Los Angeles, Joanne retrieved the mail from their post office box. There were bags of it, thousands of letters filled with money—in memory of Clay Hunt. There was $60,000 in small contributions.
“We can pay Joanne,” William said. “Jake, let’s give this thing a shot. These mailbags are telling us something.”
Jake wasn’t sure. Team Rubicon would live on because of Clay’s death? It seemed ghoulish. On the other hand, there were all these people—thousands of people—who wanted the work to continue.
Eric Greitens reassured the stunned Mission Continues staff on the morning after Clay’s death, but he saved his most important words for his core executives privately, after the meeting. “Our attitude toward suicide has to be this: warriors do not commit suicide,” he said. “A true warrior helps people. Suicide does the exact opposite. It devastates the people who are closest to the warrior. We should be thoughtful and sympathetic in these cases, but we can’t glorify them. We have to send the message that suicide is simply unacceptable.”
It was a hard message; some on the staff, especially those who dealt with prospective fellows, found it a little too hard. Mike Pereira believed that Eric was right about the bottom line and—in theory—about the strategy, too. In practice, though, dealing with suicide was more desperate and wrenching than that; it was the toughest thing in the world. Mike loved Eric and thought he was leading The Mission Continues in the right direction, with rigor, but he was growing further away from the lives he hoped to save.
Indeed, Eric was getting ready to move on, and most people at TMC sensed it. His autobiography, The Heart and the Fist, had made the New York Times best seller list. He was appearing on national television. He had also been wildly successful raising money in 2010; the first segment of a five-year $6.7 million grant from Goldman Sachs had just arrived. Home Depot was about to kick in $1 million to supply Mission Continues service projects; Target, Southwest Airlines, and several private foundations were on board as well. TMC needed a professional executive who could actually manage the transition from tiny to . . . relatively small.
Eric was scheduled to meet with his first choice for the job, a former Army Black Hawk pilot named Spencer Kympton, the morning after he received the news of Clay Hunt’s death. He asked Mary Yonkman to call Kympton and postpone the meeting. “Spence, I’ve got bad news. We’ve had our first suicide,” Mary told him. “The scene in the office might be tense and emotional tomorrow. It certainly won’t be the usual Mission Continues experience. You might want to come another day.”
“No,” he said softly. “I’d still like to come, if that’s all right. Tomorrow is exactly the sort of day I’d like to see The Mission Continues.”
Kympton was a West Point graduate from an Army family. He had left the service just after 9/11 and taken a familiar career path for the military’s brightest officers: a Harvard MBA (with honors, of course) and then a stint at McKinsey, the Green Berets of corporate consulting. He didn’t find the corporate work very satisfying, though. He drifted to the not-for-profit side of McKinsey, fascinated by the burgeoning public school reform movement, and then to full-time work as a Director of Recruiting for Teach For America—a program that Eric considered the gold standard for public service in the civilian sector.
Spencer loved working at Teach For America, but he was an outsider. The rest of the staff had spent two years teaching under duress in desperate schools; they had their own jokes and rituals. He wasn’t part of the tribe. By 2011, the travails of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans—including some of Spencer’s friends from West Point—had become a big, gruesome story, and he thought: There’s a culture where I’m an insider. Maybe I can do something to help there.
Spencer was tall, fit, sandy-haired, and soft-spoken. He felt an immediate bond with Eric. They didn’t tell war stories. They talked process. Spencer understood that The Mission Continues, up till then, had been inspired chaos. Mary Yonkman had been working on bringing it under control, but Mary was pregnant and going back to live with her husband in Virginia. Eric told him about the big grants from Goldman and Home Depot coming in. He also talked about the fellows and how it felt, as a former military officer, to be leading them again in community work. “How do you feel about getting dirty?” he asked Kympton.
Spencer was thrilled by the prospect.
Mike Pereira knew that his time at The Mission Continues was coming to a close. He had been in a constant roil with the bureaucratizing forces at TMC. There had been some bad scenes. Changes obviously were afoot. Spencer was soon hired and so was a former Army officer named Meredith Knopp, who would be Mike’s immediate superior and organize the fellowship program. The Mission Continues was becoming more like the Army: officers and grunts and civilian POGs (Persons Other than Grunts). As always, the grunts felt that the officers were too far from the front lines.
Mike knew that there had to be an officer class if TMC was going to grow. But after Clay’s death, he also thought—and Mike was vehement about this—that the fellows had to become a team. They had to get to know and care about one another, even though they were spread across the nation. No TMC fellow should ever again feel as alone as Clay had. He pestered Eric about this, and his pestering meshed perfectly with the thoughts of the officer class: Spencer and Meredith had the same gut feelings, but they talked about them in business school terms, about the program’s “identity” and “branding.” The Mission Continues didn’t have a strong enough “profile” in the nonprofit world; it didn’t even have a particularly strong profile among its own fellows—most had a deeper connection with the local charities that sponsored them than they did with St. Louis. “We’ve done a lousy job organizing our alumni,” Spencer told Eric, top down. “And we haven’t done much of anything to bond the fellows to the organization.”
“These people need to feel more of what we had in the military,” Mike Pereira told Eric, bottom up. “People like Clay Hunt need TMC battle buddies they can depend on when things get tough.”
The event was an explosion of unexpected emotion from the start. The fellows, nearly one hundred strong, grabbed hold of one another at the “lessons learned” conference and couldn’t seem to let go. There were sessions during which three and four at a time told their stories, sometimes hilariously, sometimes in tears. All sorts of suggestions were made to improve the program; Spencer, Meredith, and the rest of the officer class took furious notes. The similarity of their experiences was ratified by the academic study of fifty-two early fellows Monica Matthieu had done with her Washington University colleagues—and also with Mike Pereira and Ian Smith of The Mission Continues, whose names appeared on the final paper. The results were extremely promising: 86 percent of the fellows reported a positive life-changing experience, 71 percent had gone on to further their education, and 86 percent said the program helped them transfer their military skills to civilian employment. This was especially impressive, given that 52 percent of those studied had suffered traumatic brain injuries, and 64 percent had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress. Matthieu urged caution. The sample size was tiny. There weren’t many of the usual academic regulators, like a control group that hadn’t experienced TMC. But there was the smidgen of an inkling of a possibility: it seemed, as she had expected, that community service might be a viable treatment for post-traumatic stress. (A 2013 update of the survey confirmed the 2011 findings.)
That afternoon, Spencer was working out in the hotel gym when he overheard two fellows who’d just finished their PT. “I’ve got to go upstairs and iron my Mission Continues shirt for the dinner tonight,” one said. He said it with great pride and responsibility, and Spencer was moved: Eric really had created a new branch of the service, a new unit, for these young men and women. And this meeting was the missing piece: they had restored camaraderie and unit pride to the tribe.
The next morning, the day of the gala, Ian Smith organized a service project for all the returning fellows and some high-profile members of the St. Louis Rams football team: they would put together eight hundred “reverse” care packages for kids in the community. There were TV cameras; everyone seemed thrilled and happy to be part of the event. Eric walked into the room and saw his father, among others, hard at work. Rob Greitens looked up, beaming. “The energy in this room is amazing,” Eric told Ian Smith, grabbing him by the shoulders. “Thank you.”
Afterward, Rob approached his son. He was a man who worked to keep his feelings under control. But he was having trouble with that now. “Eric,” he said, “this is really good.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Eric said, unable to say more.
That night, Tom Brokaw was followed to the stage by Army Major Anthony Smith, a huge black man wearing a blazing ivory suit and scarf, with a black collarless shirt that featured an embroidered zircon crucifix in a shield. He began to tell his story: he’d been blown up by a rocket-propelled grenade and left for dead in a body bag. He’d survived only because one of the medics unzipped the bag to get Smith’s dog tags and found that he was still breathing. Smith lost an arm and a leg and suffered traumatic brain injury. He spent sixty-four days in a coma and had endless surgeries. And then he started to recover, and then he began to work out. He competed in triathlons, running on a prosthetic leg; he became a karate champion using his hand and his stump, and then he mastered tae kwon do. “But I felt a void,” he continued. “I’d spent all my life helping others.”
He did his Mission Continues fellowship at the Boys and Girls Club in his hometown of Blytheville, Arkansas, “down by the river, where we black folks live.” He started his own martial arts dojo, teaching boys and girls how to defend themselves—and more: “We have six maxims. Be polite. Be patient. Be alert. Be brave. Do your best. And respect yourself and those around you . . . And so that’s my story.
“Today, I am known in the military as Major Anthony Smith. I am known in the martial arts community as ‘A-Train’ . . . but that ‘A’ doesn’t stand for ‘Anthony’; it stands for”—and here he leaped into a brilliant falsetto—“aww-some!”
The place went wild, and Smith—who seemed perfectly conscious of where everyone was: the fellows on the left-hand side of the audience, the funders and supporters on the right-hand side—turned to the funders and said, “I am a living testament to Never Give Up. I am a Mission Continues fellow. Are you ready to help out? Are you ready? Because if you didn’t know before, now you know.”
There was a mob scene afterward. Everyone wanted pictures taken with Smith and Tom Brokaw. But that wasn’t the most memorable thing for The Mission Continues staff: a stream of fellows surrounded them and thanked them and asked, “Why didn’t we ever do this before? Can we do this more often?”
Spencer Kympton and Meredith Knopp looked at each other with the same thought: Can we do this more often? Within days, they approached Eric with a plan: they would divide the 2012 fellows into four classes—Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta—and they would begin each class with an orientation and a big community service project. There would be a real induction ceremony. They would take an oath together. They would identify themselves as Mission Continues fellows from day one, as Spencer and Meredith wanted; they would bond as brothers and sisters, as Mike Pereira had hoped.
Chapter 2
TRANSFORMATION
A monster tornado touched down in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, less than a month after Clay’s death. Hundreds of people were dead; the wreckage was biblical. Team Rubicon put a siren alert on its website, calling for volunteers. McNulty stayed home to run the logistics; Jake went out to run the deployment. He was joined there by old friends like Shawn Beidler, his sniper-team leader, and Matt Pelak, who drove down from Poughkeepsie in his truck, with several chain saws. There were others, several dozen in all, who came and became part of Team Rubicon’s national core. A local doctor contributed his hunting camp as an operating base—it was out in the piney woods, down a mile-long dirt road. The living room’s rude wood walls were festooned with deer heads; there was a bedroom crammed with bunk beds and a no-frills kitchen.
Team Rubicon was on the ground the day after the tornado, doing general cleanup work. Matt Pelak’s previous TR missions in Pakistan and Haiti had been staffed mostly by medical personnel, but now he was surrounded by fellow veterans. They were doing mucky, heavy, muscular chores. They’d drive up to a house with a tree crashed on the roof and start to work the chain saws and wheelbarrow rubble from the yard. They worked steadily all day, and it was as perfect a mission as you could get. The residents were extremely grateful—and astonished: recent military veterans volunteering to do cleanup work? It was satisfying on the most personal level for Matt; it was making him feel good; his endorphins were running. He was very conscious of the people working around him; there were a lot of smiles and backslaps. That night, Jake introduced the team to another Haiti tradition: the nightly debrief, with a couple cases of beer. They set a fire in a pit amidst the loblolly pines, cooked dinner, and sat around the campfire. It was the first time Pelak had experienced anything like it; people were talking emotionally about how much it meant to be together, deployed in this way.
The next day’s work was more of the same. But that night, Matt received a text message from his girlfriend: Osama bin Laden was dead. The volunteers raced to their pickup trucks to see if the news was on the radio—but they were so deep in the woods that regular recept
ion was impossible. Eventually a straggler drove up, and he had satellite radio in his truck. They gathered around, and there it was: bin Laden had been killed, shot dead by Navy SEALs. They were screaming and hugging. Eventually, they sat around the campfire and talked about it. The son of a bitch who had started the whole thing, who’d blown up the Twin Towers, whose minions had killed and maimed their brothers and sisters—that sick bastard was finally wasted. Around the campfire, some were weeping as they remembered their losses. “I don’t know about you,” Jake said, “but right now, I wouldn’t want to be anyplace else on earth than with you guys.”
Two weeks after Tuscaloosa, there was an even bigger tornado in Joplin, Missouri. Jake was out in Oklahoma, storm-chasing with Indra and some of her meteorologist friends, and he quickly moved to take charge of the Joplin deployment. It was another success.
And then things began to calm down; the spring storms abated. Jake found himself alone—Team Rubicon still didn’t have an office—with too much time to think. He was having nightmares. He grew distant, testy, near-mute. Indra wondered: Where did he go?
She also began to wonder about Team Rubicon. The deployments were fabulous. Great work was being done. But they were sort of narcotic, too, weren’t they? The Band of Brothers would gather together, wear their uniform—gray Team Rubicon T-shirts and red baseball caps—organize themselves into teams, tease one another, knock things down, build things up, impress the civilians with their discipline and efficiency, sit around the campfire drinking beer . . . and then they would come home, alone again, and crash.
Indra believed that Jake had been suffering few of the effects of post-traumatic stress before Clay died. He’d never been a great talker in private; when he wasn’t on in public, he was the guy in the corner glued to his laptop. But he hadn’t been suffering either. The war hadn’t put him where he was now. There had been some bad memories, but Jake seemed able to handle those. This was different, though; this had been precipitated by Clay’s death. Jake’s war-related post-traumatic stress hadn’t happened in Iraq or Afghanistan. It had happened in Los Angeles. And it wasn’t just the shock of Clay’s death: it was the corrosive emotional bends, the too-fast decompression that came from leaving the Marines, a tight-knit organization with a sense of higher purpose, and being dumped, alone, in a society with no organized purpose at all except for making money and having fun. Jake had moved, reflexively, toward restoring his military family almost immediately after he left the Marines in October 2009. Within three months, he had organized the Haiti mission, and he’d been on a dead sprint until Clay died. It was subconsciously brilliant: he had lost a community and then he and McNulty had created a community to replace it.
