by Joe Klein
Natasha’s cancer wasn’t so serious, allegedly; she would get a hysterectomy, and that would be it. She absolutely believed that, or tried to, most of the time. But here was this guy, an officer no less, who was on the clock—he didn’t know how many days he had left—and there he was, with them.
There was no pretense, no woe-is-me, no fake machismo, absolutely no bullshit when Mark Weber got up to speak. “They keep telling me to have positive thoughts,” he said, and laughed. “That’s nice, but there are days that are just knee-buckling. I have four children; it’s not hard to have positive thoughts about them. Positive thoughts are good, but they’re not as important as this: seeking perspective. I love it when people say, ‘Today was the worst day of my life. My boss yelled at me.’ ” He waited for the laughter to fill the room, then continued, “But the truth is, somebody always has it worse than you. The way to stop feeling sorry for yourself is to focus on your achievements, the things you accomplish every day. For me, sometimes it’s as simple as ‘Hey, I got out of bed today.’ ” In fact, Weber was still working for the Minnesota National Guard; indeed, he was thinking about becoming a Mission Continues fellow himself—he wanted to serve with Outward Bound.
Everything the guy said was real, Natasha thought. There was not a false note:
“It’s okay to take a knee every once in a while. There’s nothing wrong with being mad, frustrated, crying . . . Have your pity party, then get up and move on.
“Denial gets a bad rap . . . But it’s essential for me. I’m dying. According to the doctors, I should be dead. But I’m not going to stop living. People ask me all the time, ‘Why are you still doing this? Why are you going to St. Louis to talk to a bunch of veterans? Why don’t you spend more time with your family?’ And I say, ‘Because I can.’
“Every one of you has an excuse. I use mine all the time. Telemarketers call. I say, ‘Sorry, I’ve got terminal cancer.’ Click. But do you want to wake up in 2047 and say, ‘My whole life has been one big excuse’?”
When it was over Natasha hugged Colonel Weber and was shocked by how little there was left of him. But he was still so totally there. He’d given her everything she needed to get on with it.
Jake Wood was probably his therapist’s worst nightmare. He was too smart. He knew the post-traumatic stress drill backward and forward; he readily acknowledged what was happening to him. There were no sudden flashes of insight. There was no moment when the scales fell from his eyes. He’d had his moment of candor in the hotel room in Madison—and there were some things he would absolutely not concede.
He would never tolerate the idea that he wasn’t responsible for Clay’s death. He would not tolerate the idea that he would “get over it” or “put it behind him.” He hated when people said that. He knew he would live with it every day, forever.
But, gradually, as 2011 emptied into 2012, he was able to sand down the sharp edges of his pain, some of it. Clay was always there somewhere, a resident demon in his brain: Jake stopped going out on Team Rubicon deployments, but he and William worked like Marine Sergeants at building the organization from within. The work now wasn’t just about helping people suffering through natural disasters; it was, equally, about helping veterans to find a sense of purpose. A Team Rubicon office was opened finally, right next to LAX for easy egress; he and William were able to give themselves salaries: $30,000 per year.
As Jake gradually transformed Clay from guilt-millstone into his private motivation to make Team Rubicon stronger and better, he came to realize his relationship with Indra could be different, too. He now knew she was tough and she was steady, maybe tougher and steadier than he was. He knew that she had taken responsibility for him in a dark hour; responsibility wasn’t a one-way street. He knew that she was going to be there for him and that he needed her.
Almost exactly a year after his Monday Night Football icon act, Jake bought a ring. He carried it around uncertainly for two weeks. And then there came a night when he was in the office staring into his computer, and he said: “Fuck it. This is on.”
Indra was out at a concert with friends. He expected her home about nine or ten, but she didn’t arrive until midnight, by which time he had drunk an entire nervous bottle of wine. He leaped up and then kneeled down and produced the ring . . . and all of a sudden his mouth could not work. He was there, on one knee, shaky, unable to say the words.
She said yes.
Eric Greitens had wrestled with political ambition for most of his life. He sensed it was radioactive, to be handled very carefully. In his Duke senior thesis, On Courage, he relegated the subject to an “important” footnote; indeed, it was a very long and curious footnote. In it, he attempted to tease out an ethical path between ambition and honor. It wasn’t easy. He made a distinction between the need for popularity—the cheesiness at the heart of politics—and esteem. “To desire esteem,” he wrote, “is not always an expression of pride . . . Rather, it often reflects a hope both that one will act correctly and a faith that others will eventually come to recognize right action.”
Twenty years had passed since Greitens had written that. His “right actions” were manifest. The Mission Continues was acclaimed as something new and entirely admirable. But could you run a campaign for Governor of Missouri—as always, Eric’s ambitions were not modest—based on biography and values, rather than platitudes and reflexive attacks? He wanted to run a campaign that would look and sound different. His campaign events would be service projects, to the extent that was possible. He would show people how he would behave in office, not just tell them.
Was that even vaguely possible? He needed time and space to think it through.
At The Mission Continues board meeting in the summer of 2012, Eric tried to float the idea of a three-month leave at the end of the year, after which he would become a volunteer, unpaid CEO, turning over the day-to-day leadership to Spencer Kympton.
No way, said the board. It was their first year of pushing large numbers of fellows through the system. The big funders had signed on with the assumption that they were buying Eric. Practically no one—except Eric—was confident that the organization could survive without him.
The model did need some fine-tuning. He and the staff were finding that a great many of the fellows didn’t want to go back to Civilian World. They simply wanted to work, and hang around, with other veterans. That feeling actually seemed to intensify as The Mission Continues fellowship was transformed into a group experience. Nearly 30 percent of the 2012 and 2013 fellows chose to work for veterans’ service organizations—and that number would have been much higher if TMC’s recruiting staff hadn’t pushed hard to nudge the prospective fellows into less parochial forms of community service.
It was easy to understand the tribal pull. There were 115 members of Bravo Class in 2012, and the emotion—the relief—when they gathered together in San Diego for their orientation in May was breathtaking. How could you say no to a blind Army officer who wanted to work with blind veterans? And what about those who wanted to train service dogs to provide comfort for their fellow veterans? And those who wanted to do equine therapy for veterans . . . and those who wanted to work with Student Veterans of America? Eric was prepared to make concessions: some of the Bravo Class fellows were victims of severe traumatic brain injuries who simply needed to be around others who understood the twitch and jitter of their scrambled sensibilities. Even some of the non-wounded veterans, whom The Mission Continues started to accept in 2012, just wanted to hang with their brothers and sisters.
There was no way to question the sheer human relief that the members of Bravo Class provided for one another. But Eric wanted more. He still wanted his fellows to be leaders; he wanted his generation of veterans to be remembered for what they brought to civilian life—leadership skills, moral rigor, community feeling that had atrophied in the sixty-year blaze of American affluence. It was an old-fashioned vision, and yet, he believed that people—civilians, too—were looking for a larger sense
of purpose. His fellows needed to be the exemplar. He wanted civilians to look at his fellows and say, “We need to be more like them.”
The fellows had been transformed into a community with the addition of orientation classes in 2012. But there was still something missing. Each individual fellow needed to be stronger when he or she rejoined civilian society. Eric decided that his last major contribution to the substance of the fellowship program would be a personal development curriculum that would directly address their feelings of fear and isolation, the lack of confidence that so many of them suffered when they wandered out their front door and tried to deal with the vast, careless fog of the nonmilitary world. He had done this individually with Mike Pereira and others; now he needed to figure out how to teach it on a larger scale.
For the next six months, Eric led a small team of colleagues and worked out the details of the program. There would be six discrete monthly challenges. Each would come with required reading and a personal essay. The lessons would start in the simplest possible way, by establishing three “smart”—that is, plausible—goals for their fellowship. And from the outset, they would deal with their fears. The first month’s reading was Eric’s “Hell Week” chapter from The Heart and the Fist. The lesson was that he had overcome his fear of washing out by focusing on his men, rather than himself. The fellows would be asked to be specific, in writing, about their own fears. In the second month, the fellows would be taught how to spot allies and build friendships and business relationships—their first halting steps away from Camp Couch.
In the third month, they would be asked to identify and write about a personal role model. What made that person admirable? What qualities did they want to emulate? In the fourth month, they would assess their own strengths and weaknesses and locate their “driving force,” the thing they were most passionate about. In the fifth month, they would decide what their mission in life would be. And then, at the end of the program, they would evaluate the impact their fellowship had had on them.
None of this was new, of course. It was the sort of material that had populated self-help books since Dale Carnegie. But Eric had calibrated it, synthesized it from a bunch of different sources, made it meal-sized and military for his fellows—challenging but not impossible. He unveiled it to the staff in December 2012 and told each of them to complete the curriculum themselves in time for Alpha Class. He wanted Natasha Young—Natasha, specifically, because of her utter working-class skepticism about everything tutorial—to be able to stand up in front of Alpha Class and say, “I did this thing—yeah, even the essays—and if I can do it, you can.”
Chapter 3
THE BIGGEST STORMS
Team Rubicon had actually been preparing for something like Hurricane Sandy in the months before the big storm hit. Local TR volunteers, led by East Coast coordinator Matt Pelak, had been part of the city of New York’s emergency planning operations for months. Team Rubicon had an official disaster relief assignment if anything terrible happened: it would provide the personnel to send “Jump Teams” into homeless shelters all over the city, do an assessment, and call for whatever help was needed.
But no one had planned for a storm as monstrous as Sandy, which hit New York harbor on the evening of October 29, 2012. The TR jump teams headed out to survey the shelters, but the enormity of the destruction beggared the city’s ability to respond. There was so much more to do. Team Rubicon put out a national call for volunteers. Pelak had been working with the city’s Office of Emergency Management, and now he offered to coordinate the relief efforts in Rockaway Beach, the barrier island in Queens that had taken the brunt of the storm. Dozens, then hundreds of TR volunteers started to arrive in New York from all over the country; JetBlue provided the plane tickets. A rock-climbing emporium called Brooklyn Boulders offered its facilities as a barracks for the 350 Team Rubicon volunteers who eventually showed up; the Home Depot stores provided a steady supply of equipment from shovels and gloves to earthmovers. James and Josh Eisenberg, Team Rubicon stalwarts who were local property owners, provided a Forward Operating Base (FOB) in a parking lot at Beach 124th Street in Rockaway Beach, the low-slung homeland of a fair number of New York’s police and, especially, firefighters—many of whom were veterans, usually noncommissioned officers like the Team Rubicon volunteers. It was the oddest of New York neighborhoods: middle-class and working-class, almost suburban, planted on a gorgeous beach. It was an hour from downtown by subway. The A train actually ran all the way out there.
Team Rubicon became the spine of the official response in the Rockaways. Palantir, a tech company, offered the team the use of smartphone-like gizmos that TR volunteers could work to report specific house-to-house damage to FEMA and to request demolitions or repairs. Various relief organizations, including the city itself, sent civilian volunteers to the Team Rubicon Beach 124th Street FOB to be organized and deployed. For the next three weeks, 350 Team Rubicon volunteers led thousands of civilians—the estimate was ten thousand—in the cleanup. Word of the effort spread quickly; there were days when more civilians than were needed showed up at the FOB. It was, without question, the largest and most efficient Team Rubicon mission yet.
Sandy was Jake Wood’s first deployment in more than a year. His role was different now; he wasn’t needed on the front lines; he, McNulty, Pelak, and others spent their days making executive decisions, smoothing out logistical snafus, coordinating with the city and the federal governments. It wasn’t the hands-on excitement of Haiti, but there was a certain satisfaction to watching the giant operation unfold. On the local evening news most nights, there were scenes of people wearing Team Rubicon T-shirts (usually over long-sleeved sweatshirts—it was cold and damp on the beach in November) cleaning out flooded basements and hauling trash, and testimonials from the residents to the order and good cheer that the Team Rubicon veterans had brought to their neighborhood.
There was a general exultation among the volunteers; work teams became units; units became friends for life. Vietnam veterans were joining the effort in numbers now, welcomed by the Iraq and Afghanistan vets. The widows of veterans were joining up: Clay Hunt’s ex-wife, Robin Becker, flew in from California and was working in the Team Rubicon office. The parents of those who’d been killed and wounded in Fallujah and Helmand were out working in the teams.
Michael Washington, Sr.—whose son, Mike Washington, Jr., was the squad leader who had taken Jake’s place and been killed by an IED in Afghanistan—was part of a Team Rubicon unit operating in Union Beach, New Jersey. Mike Sr. was an imposing, authoritative presence, a classic Master Sergeant whose rank became his name: everyone called him “Top.” He took command of the toughest jobs with effortless authority and did his work while chewing on a rather complicated pipe. He was a Marine veteran of the first Gulf War and a Seattle firefighter. He’d been a bit lost, suffering since the death of his son—but in Union Beach, Top was working with people Mike Jr.’s age, young men and women who were looking to him for leadership. One day, resting on the back fender of an ambulance in the cool sea breeze, he found himself talking to a Marine named Ryan Ribinskas who had served with Mike Jr. “You’re Sergeant Washington’s dad?”
“Yes,” Top said, misting up a little.
“He was a great Marine.”
They hugged, and later Top realized that a portion of the weight he’d been carrying had lifted; he felt closer to his son than at any time in the past few years. If he’d lived, Top was sure, Mike Jr. would have been out there with his buddies. Mike Jr. would have been one of Jake’s first calls. There was a deep satisfaction—deeper even than the satisfactions of saving lives and helping people as a firefighter—to this work. A few days later, Top went to Brooklyn to find Jake. He needed to tell him personally. “Jake, thank you for this,” he said. “I’m in, all the way. You need me to go anywhere, do anything, I’m there.”
“Well, that’s great, Top,” Jake said. “We need you.”
There was general acclaim for Team Rubicon after S
andy. Awards were won. Major funders came on board; a continuing partnership with Palantir was established. President Barack Obama invited Jake, William, Matt Pelak, and several of the other team leaders to the Oval Office to thank them for their work. And yet . . .
A few months after Sandy, Jake was on a panel with Barbara Van Dahlen, a psychologist who had started Give an Hour, an organization of six thousand mental health professionals, each of whom agreed to give an hour of counseling to an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran each week.
Afterward, Jake and Van Dahlen spent some time talking, and he could tell that she was not one of those dorky, shrinky sorts—she spoke English, she laughed easily, and she talked sense. She said she didn’t like using the “disorder” part of post-traumatic stress disorder. She called it “post-traumatic stress.” “It’s a rational reaction to what you saw and did over there,” she told him. “If you treat it correctly, it can be a temporary effect. But you can’t just macho your way through it.” She was excited about what Team Rubicon was doing, but she was wary. “In some ways, the greatest adjustment you guys have to make when you come home is being alone,” she told Jake, who knew it all too well. “It’s tough psychologically to leave a tight, close-knit society with intense shared values and traditions.” Team Rubicon addressed that, she said, “but what happens to these kids when they come down from the high of Hurricane Sandy and they’re back home, all alone again?”
Jake knew the answer to that: some of them crashed. In fact, they—actually, it was mostly McNulty—had been dealing with the psychological aftermath of Sandy for months. There were those, the natural leaders like Top Washington, who had been made stronger by the experience; but there were others, the quieter ones, the kids who had happily become grunts again, who had become re-addicted to being part of something with a military swagger. They were beginning to contact the Team Rubicon offices in El Segundo, lost and terrified. McNulty kept his cell phone on the pillow next to him every night, and about once a week, it rang. There were times Will would stay up all night, talking to someone with a gun to his head; it was frazzling McNulty, freaking him out. He realized he needed to go for help himself.
