Charlie Mike

by Joe Klein

  “Why don’t we see if we can help each other here?” Barbara Van Dahlen asked Jake.

  “Absolutely,” Jake said. “That’s a terrific idea.”

  In the spring of 2013, Team Rubicon was growing rapidly, adding staff, including Eric Greitens’s old friend Ken Harbaugh, who had helped to found The Mission Continues. Success piled upon success, but Jake—having been through the ordeal himself—was nagged by the problem that wasn’t being addressed. The conversation with Van Dahlen had been one of those great, let’s do it and then nothing happens sort of things. He and William squabbled about a lot, but not this: they were both terrified that someone—one of the anonymous ones, one of those they’d smiled at and hugged and slapped on the back in Rockaway Beach—would be their next Clay Hunt.

  It turned out to be Neil Landsberg, a brilliant guy, a special operator who was close to Matt Pelak. Landsberg had wrapped himself in a carpet in his parents’ basement, in order to prevent a mess, and shot himself. A few weeks later, on Team Rubicon’s deployment to Moore, Oklahoma, after the fierce tornadoes there in late May 2013, McNulty noticed that the evening debriefs were pretty emotional—a Sergeant named Chris Dominski talked for the first time about the twelve men he had lost in Baghdad, he named them, he named their wives, he named their children. He had tried suicide twice before. “But I guess I wasn’t very good at it. Thank you—Team Rubicon—for saving my life,” he said.

  Which was a frightening responsibility. What would happen when Sergeant Dominski went home to upstate New York and was back, all alone, on Camp Couch?

  On the morning of Memorial Day, beneath a scuddy mix of sun and clouds in Moore, Oklahoma, they raised the flag to half-mast above their Forward Operating Base in the Home Depot parking lot. Top Washington read aloud the Gettysburg Address: “That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

  And then he read a list of those lost, embedded among which were . . .

  Blake Howey

  Nathan Windsor

  Clay Hunt

  Neil Landsberg

  Michael Washington, Jr.

  McNulty came home from Moore worried. He and Jake talked to Barbara Van Dahlen about it and agreed to cement their alliance. In August 2013, Van Dahlen asked a fifty-two-year-old psychiatric social worker named Dane Frost if he’d be willing to join Team Rubicon as a full-time staff therapist. Frost had an easy manner and familiarity with the military: his wife was an Army Major, a Behavioral Health Officer who had deployed to Afghanistan twice with the 101st Airborne. They had lived on Fort Campbell and other Army bases back home; Frost had done some work for the Army. He was part of the culture—and so he knew that grunts saw the shrinks as POGy dweebs. His challenge would be to overcome that.

  He loved Team Rubicon from the start. The dress code at the El Segundo office was T-shirts, board shorts, flip-flops, and baseball caps turned backward; Frost could do that. He was also good for a beer and a bourbon most nights with Jake and Will. And, sure enough, about once a week there would be a crisis—someone desperate on the phone or pitched up in the offices, and Frost would take charge, talking them down, eventually referring them to a Give an Hour therapist in their hometown. He made no structural suggestions at first; he just watched and listened and did what he was told. He defused the crises without drawing attention to himself; he was humble about his work.

  On November 8, 2013—a year and a week after Hurricane Sandy—the strongest typhoon in Asian history, with sustained winds of up to 195 miles an hour, swamped the central Philippine Islands, killing more than 6,200 people and devastating countless others. Team Rubicon immediately sent a fifteen-person Alpha Team to scout the area and prepared two twenty-five-member medical teams to follow. Jake led an executive group that would organize the relief effort from Manila; a factory building there had been donated for Team Rubicon’s headquarters. “You want to come?” Jake asked Dane Frost. “We may need you out there.”

  Frost, by now, had a theory of the case: The best way to be Team Rubicon’s official shrink was to not act like a shrink. And so, on his first real deployment, he acted like a grunt. He helped lift and sort supplies. He did errands. He would go to the airfield to pick up or drop off this or that; he would go to downtown Manila; he would go to Starbucks and bring back coffee for the team. And still, about once a week, he’d have a crisis back in the States, which he’d manage from Manila with the help of a Give an Hour therapist who had located herself temporarily in the Team Rubicon Los Angeles office.

  Manila was quiet. The devastation was far to the south, in Tacloban, and most of the headquarters work was, as always, logistics. Jake—and William, from Los Angeles—tried to get USAID, which was managing the flights into the disaster area, to allow the Team Rubicon medical personnel on the planes. There were constant trips to the airfield, endless frustration dealing with the USAID bureaucrats. There was a half-empty plane ready to fly to Tacloban, and USAID wasn’t allowing Team Rubicon aboard.

  “When do you stop banging your head against the wall?” Frost asked Jake. “When do we go to Plan B?”

  Jake just smiled. There was a Marine Sergeant in charge of the flight manifest. At the last minute, the medical team was surreptitiously ushered on board.

  Frost saw the disaster area only briefly, in the last days of his two weeks on the ground in the Philippines. His real challenge came in Manila, when the Alpha Team returned from Tacloban after an emotionally intense ten days in the field. They had seen hundreds of dead bodies; they had treated hundreds of survivors; they had buried Americans who had died in the storm in shallow graves marked for retrieval. They would find children, six and seven at a time, dead in houses that had been crushed by the winds. The experience had been overwhelming, and Frost sensed a real tension in Alpha Team as it gathered for a debrief with Jake and other TR leaders in a weirdly pleasant spot under a gazebo on the grounds of the airport hotel.

  These were people Frost didn’t know. They were Team Rubicon’s elite. The team leaders were Matt Pelak and JC McGreehan—both of whom had been close to Neil Landsberg—and they seemed just barely able to control their anger as they described the myriad of problems they’d had on the deployment; Frost watched their men, who seemed pretty angry, too. And then Ken Harbaugh did exactly what Frost did not want anyone to do. He said, “Hey, guys, this is Dane Frost. He’s our new mental health guy. Dane, why don’t you say a few words . . .”

  Frost tried to make it as brief and as far away from tell-me-how-you-feel as possible. “Look,” he began, “I’m the newbie here, but if you want to . . .”

  “We don’t have time for that,” Matt Pelak interrupted. His team needed time to decompress, clean up, and have a couple beers before they started to hash out a very difficult mission.

  “ . . . talk about anything, either here or back home, I can . . .”

  “We need to pack up—and go,” Pelak said. And they went to their hotel rooms, leaving Frost standing there, mouth agape, with Jake, Ken Harbaugh, and Vince Moffitt, the operations specialist. “I think,” Frost said, “there’s a fair amount of anger there that we’re going to have to deal with.”

  “It’s always like that after a tough deployment,” Moffitt said.

  “No, I think Dane’s right,” Jake jumped in. Matt Pelak, normally a total rock, seemed to be seething. Jake needed to get up with Matt and McGreehan about it; it probably wasn’t a coincidence, he realized, that they were having problems six months after Neil Landsberg had died.

  In the next few months, quietly, and for the first time, Jake sat down with Pelak and McGreehan and told them how much of a mess he’d been after Clay’s suicide and how the shit had really hit the fan after six months. He was absolutely candid—a straight Jake infusion—without being gooey. He’d been there. He’d been desperate. He’d felt useless. He understood how overwhelmin
g the Philippine experience, on top of Landsberg’s suicide, must have been. But he knew them. They’d get through it. Oh, and by the way, Dane Frost was a good guy. “You might want to get to know him better.”

  In the spring of 2014, Give an Hour held its annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The audience was mostly composed of mental health professionals, frustrated by the difficulties they had dealing with veterans. One of the first speakers was Jake Wood, who began simply, “My name is Jake Wood. I’m the cofounder of Team Rubicon . . . and I’ve been helped by counseling.”

  Chapter 4

  POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH

  Natasha Young came flying out of Alpha Class orientation in January 2012, but it was a false high. She was still facing a hysterectomy. The temptation was to retreat to Camp Couch and lowball her Mission Continues fellowship—nobody would knock her if, in this mess, she put in twelve rather than twenty hours a week at the Veterans Northeast Outreach Center. She spoke on the phone to Mark Weber almost every day, especially the bad days—somehow he was hanging on, month after month, dying without diminishing. She wasn’t dying; the surgery in March was a “success”—if the loss of a womb could ever be considered successful. How could she be any less vital than Weber was? He refused to give her advice or tell her what to do. “Let me just give you my perspective,” he’d say. As her fellowship was drawing to a close, she heard that The Mission Continues was hiring recruiters.

  She called Tiffany Garcia. “Bitch,” she said. “Why don’t you hire me?”

  She was put in charge of recruiting in the northeast region for The Mission Continues.

  Natasha was asked to tell her story at the Bravo Class 2012 orientation in San Diego, not long after her hysterectomy. She wasn’t at her strongest, but there she was—and since when had anything ever stopped her from talking? She introduced the term “Camp Couch” into TMC’s lexicon. She had them laughing and cheering, especially the Marines, whom she played to shamelessly.

  After the speech, she realized that she was bleeding—not badly, but leaking a little—from her wound. Tiffany Garcia found some gauze and butterfly bandages and helped put Natasha back together.

  Both Tash and Tiffany—inseparable now, even if the bond most days was only electronic—kept talking to Mark Weber, almost every day. He said that he really wanted to become a full-fledged Mission Continues fellow before he died. He wanted to do his fellowship with Outward Bound, but there was a problem: he wasn’t a veteran yet. He was still on active duty—desk duty—with the Minnesota National Guard. It was important for him to stay “active” as long as he could. He intended to die active. TMC fellowships were available only to veterans, which was ridiculous in this case. When Natasha raised this point with Tiffany and the others, there was no dispute. Weber became a fellow, part of Alpha Class 2013, but he struggled to complete his mission with Outward Bound. He was now, obviously, getting weaker. The fellowship, he said, was keeping him alive. He was desperate to finish it before he died.

  In May 2013, Eric Greitens asked to be relieved of his day-to-day duties once again at The Mission Continues board meeting. Again he asked for a three-month leave of absence, starting in January 2014; he would return as a symbolic CEO, while he decided what he was going to do next—which everyone assumed would be a career in politics.

  This time, the board said yes.

  The board meeting had been timed to coincide with Bravo Class orientation, which would be held that weekend at a hotel in Brooklyn. Natasha Young would be the master of ceremonies. She was a controversial choice. “I don’t want you dropping any f-bombs,” her boss, Meredith Knopp, warned her. And so it was an expurgated Tash who opened the proceedings. “Well,” she began, staring out at the seventy-three new fellows, spiffy in their royal blue T-shirts, “don’t you all just look beautiful!”

  She told them about her escape from Camp Couch. She did Spencer’s bit: “Look to the left of you, look to the right of you: this is your new unit!” Eventually she introduced Eric, not knowing that he had just arranged his departure from The Mission Continues. “He saw us, our generation, he saw us for our possibilities, and he challenged us.”

  Eric talked about the thousands of veterans who woke up this morning and would spend all day without speaking to another human being. “They’re going to go to bed tonight, after having spent the day watching TV, playing video games, doubting whether or not they were still needed. What they all need is to wake up one day and see what their fellow veterans are capable of. What this country needs is to look at this generation of veterans and to see what we are capable of.”

  The Mission Continues would never have a triumph equivalent to Team Rubicon’s Haiti mission or Hurricane Sandy cleanup. Its victories would be more subtle and enduring. In the end, Eric realized, the best, most realistic model was Tim Smith, his first St. Louis recruit, who just never stopped growing.

  Tim had gone on to graduate from Washington University with a Master’s of Social Work degree. One of his first classes had been Urban Economic Development, and during a lecture about employment possibilities in downtown areas, Tim wrote down the word “cleaning.” He had met more than a few veterans at the VA who went to school during the day but were looking for work at night—like his old job at the post office. He went to his father and asked, “What if we started a company where we had veterans doing cleaning work in offices at night?”

  His dad not only thought it was a good idea, he also had a potential customer—a Vietnam veteran who had a real estate brokerage that needed cleaning. Tim and his dad did the job themselves, and Patriot Commercial Cleaning was born. Over time, Tim recruited veterans as nighttime janitors and gradually accumulated enough customers that he could leave his job at the VA and become the full-time president of the company.

  He even came up with a slogan: “We Do Corners.”

  And then there was Mike Pereira, who continued his fierce, bare-knuckle fight to complete his intellectual journey. He was obsessed by his insufficiencies. He was wrestling with a joint anthropology and psychology major at Washington University. He knew exactly what he wanted now: a PhD in psychology. He had come up with an idea for his thesis: post-traumatic growth. It was the opposite of what everyone seemed to think about his fellow veterans. The experience of combat was the perfect launching pad for the hero’s journey toward wisdom. That was what The Mission Continues was all about. Knowledge through suffering, right?

  He was certainly suffering. He knew that he had to settle things with his father to have any pretense of being a plausible adult. He was beginning to realize that the teenage altercations with Doc were partly his fault—he was trying to piss his dad off, trying to get him to blow up, knowing that his mom would jump in on his side, which would cause Doc to go truly berserk. (He also began to understand that he had come by his own volcanic tendencies genetically.)

  A childhood memory tormented Mike. He was twelve. His dad packed the family into the truck and took them to southern California, where Mike’s grandfather—the monstrous grandfather who had abandoned Doc and his mother, who had beaten Doc mercilessly—was dying of cancer. And it was astonishing, embarrassing: Doc threw himself on his father’s expiring body, wailing and sobbing, snot flying. Mike didn’t want his final scene with Doc to look anything like that.

  He had tried to reconcile with Doc several times in the past—as recently as 2012. The story was always the same. He’d go out to Bellingham, to the house in the country that his parents had been living in for the past five years. He’d work some chores with his dad—that was how they got on. No small talk, no shooting hoops or tossing a football. They might work on a car together—as always, Doc had a garage full of wrecks—or mow the property or repair a fence.

  It had been a fence that last time. But within a half hour, they were screaming at each other. Mike wanted to tell his dad about the difficult patch he was going through; he and his wife, Georgia, had grown past each other. They were splitting. It didn’t seem as if Doc was listening to Mi
ke’s story at all. He was working on the fence. And Mike blew up. Doc started to walk away, and Mike followed him into the house, the two of them really getting at it now, Mike’s mother trying to stop Doc—a perfect re-creation of Mike’s youth, as if nothing had changed, as if he hadn’t been to war, as if he wasn’t the first person in the family to go to college. He slammed the door, spun his rental car out of the drive, and was gone without saying good-bye.

  A year passed.

  Mike still couldn’t get the image of Doc wailing over his near-dead father out of his mind. One day in therapy, Mike was talking about the chopper crash in Iraq—and all of a sudden he was back, terrified, in the San Francisco earthquake, his dad swooping him up, saving his life like Superman.

  He called Doc again, and a funny thing happened: they just talked. Doc actually asked a few questions about Mike’s life. They talked about the old house—the wreck-yard—which Doc still owned and was renting out. He was thinking about selling it, but there was work to be done to get it ready for sale.

  Mike began calling Doc more regularly; Doc even called him a few times. But it wasn’t enough. A grand gesture was needed. “Hey, Dad, I was thinking,” he said to Doc, “maybe I should come home on spring break and help you fix up the old place so you can sell it.”