by Joe Klein
“Really?” Doc asked. “How long is spring break?”
“Ten days.” Mike gulped. Ten days without a blowup would be a new world record.
“That would be great,” Doc said. “That would be huge.”
So they worked. Mike looked at his father, still an imposing man at the age of sixty-two, fit and trim, with a long gray ponytail. They didn’t talk about anything but work when they were working. They did talk some about the past when they were done working. It wasn’t easy. Doc was not willing to give an inch: he had always been right. Mike had been an angry kid. He was glad Mike had grown up and calmed down and started to respect his father. Mike bit his tongue a lot that week.
As the days passed, Doc loosened up and began to treat Mike as he would any construction worker. He’d yell at him angrily, when Mike wasn’t doing the job to Doc’s specifications. Mike tried to roll with it, but one day he couldn’t take it anymore. “Could you just stop yelling at me?” Mike screamed. “I’m trying to help.”
Doc returned the scream: “You’re doing it wrong!”
Mike dropped his tools and walked away, sat down on the back steps of the old house, and began to cry. This is impossible, he thought. This will never work. He had tried so hard, conceded so much—he had stopped caring, for the first time in his life, whether or not he won the argument. He just wanted peace. He was absolutely convinced that if he didn’t settle things with Doc, he wouldn’t fully experience the burst of creativity and purpose that came from fighting his way past post-traumatic stress to post-traumatic growth. His whole theory was on the line.
He saw Doc ambling over. Uh-oh. But the body language wasn’t aggressive. His father sat down next to him on the steps and threw an arm around his son’s shoulder. “Sometimes I just lose track of the sound of my voice,” Doc said. “I wasn’t meaning to be harsh. From now on, if it’s getting hot between us, maybe we just say, ‘Reset. Let’s take it down a notch,’ okay?”
“Okay,” Mike said.
“You know I love you, son,” Doc said. “And I’m grateful you came out here to help with this work.”
It would never be easy with Doc, but for the third time in his life, Mike Pereira felt that he had been recruited into heaven.
On the afternoon of May 9, 2013, at Ground Zero, where the story of their generation’s service began, Natasha Young and Tiffany Garcia stood arm in arm as Bravo Class took its oath of service:
We are fellows of The Mission Continues. As fellows, our personal service did not end with our military service, but has only just begun . . .
Scanning the faces of the young men and women they had recruited, Natasha was overwhelmed. She had done this; she had helped to build this class. She had spent hundreds of hours on the phone, stalking recruits as Tiffany had stalked her. She had learned their stories. She and Tiffany had a stake in them now; they were rooting hard for these kids, their brothers and sisters. Tears formed. Soon, she and Tiffany were bawling joyously.
Ground Zero was busy that day, as it is most Saturdays. The sun was setting, and new leaves were silvering in the just-planted trees. The massive, descending fountains, carved from the footprint of the towers, descending so far that the bottom was hard to see, splashed and sent a fine mist flying. Only a few of the tourists, boggled by the size and sanctity of the place, noticed the phalanx of seventy-three young people in their blue T-shirts with the compass and the slogan, “A Challenge, Not a Charity,” standing in front of the North Tower abyss, reciting an oath. Some turned their heads when the oath ended with a roar and tears and hugging. A few asked, “What is this all about? Who are those people?”
And when asked, the fellows stopped and politely, respectfully—as if addressing a superior officer—explained their new mission to the civilians. They did so articulately, proudly. You could see the civilians squaring themselves up, standing taller to shake the hands of these young men and women. Slowly the crowd dispersed, and the blue shirts went off in groups of two and three, often with arms draped over one another, away from a scene of unimaginable horror and into the lifeblood of the nation.
Mark Weber kept his spirit to the end, but he didn’t live to graduate from The Mission Continues with his class. He passed away and was powerfully mourned on June 13, 2013.
Soon after his death, Natasha and Tiffany got tattoos on their wrists. Tiffany’s right wrist said WEBER’S and Natasha’s right wrist said PERSPECTIVES. Both Tash and Tiffany eventually left The Mission Continues to work for other veterans’ organizations—but they would often look at their wrists, often when they were feeling down, and remember Weber’s spirit in the face of the worst hand that God could deal. From time to time, strangers would ask Natasha what the tattoo was all about.
It was a story she loved to tell.
Afterword
If I had one thing to say to my fellow veterans, it would be this: continue to serve, even though we have taken off our uniforms. No matter how great or small your service is, it is desired and needed by the world we live in today. Volunteer to mow your elderly neighbor’s lawn for them. Spend a day at a soup kitchen helping feed the homeless, many of whom are veterans themselves. Work on a trail maintenance project. Start a service organization. It doesn’t matter what it is; it only matters that you are continuing to put others before yourself, just like you did when you were in the military. Actions like that are the only sure ways to bring about the positive social change that our country and our world need so badly these days.
—Clay Hunt
Eric Greitens (right) at his BUD/S graduation. (Courtesy of Eric Greitens)
Eric in Iraq in 2007. (Courtesy of Eric Greitens)
Jake Wood in Afghanistan in 2008 after an overnight operation searching for IED emplacers. (Courtesy of Jake Wood)
Jake’s sniper team (left to right): Jake, CJ Wheeler, Stephan Thenn, Jon Davis, Josh Kernan, and Shawn Beidler. (Courtesy of Jake Wood)
Jake with Mike Washington, Jr. and Sr. (Courtesy of Jake Wood)
Jake (far left) leading Team Rubicon’s first mission in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010. (Courtesy of William McNulty)
William McNulty (center) and other members of the first Team Rubicon mission in Haiti. (Courtesy of William McNulty)
Left to right: Brother Jim Boynton, Jake Wood, and Clay Hunt in Haiti in 2010. (Courtesy of William McNulty)
Clay Hunt with a Haitian mother and child. (Courtesy of William McNulty)
Clay and Jake during Team Rubicon’s second relief mission, in Chile after the earthquake in February 2010. (Courtesy of Jake Wood)
Jake, Clay, and McNulty with a Chilean soldier. (Courtesy of Jake Wood)
Eric Greitens leading orientation for The Mission Continues at the Dream Center in Los Angeles in January 2013. (Courtesy of Eric Greitens)
Left to right: Mike Pereira with Jake Wood and Clay Hunt on the day they met in California. (Courtesy of Jake Wood)
Natasha Young at The League School in Brooklyn during a Mission Continues orientation in May 2013. (Courtesy of Natasha Young)
Natasha Young and Tiffany Garcia, both former fellows and staff members for The Mission Continues. (Courtesy of Natasha Young)
The wrist tattoos that Tiffany (left) and Natasha (right) got together in memory of another Mission Continues fellow, Mark Weber. (Courtesy of Natasha Young)
McNulty on his cell phone, coordinating Team Rubicon’s Sandy relief efforts. (Photo by Kyle Murphy)
McNulty in New York City after Hurricane Sandy hit the area in 2012. (Photo by Kyle Murphy)
Team Rubicon at their Annual Leadership Conference in October 2014 in Dallas, Texas. (Photo by Kirk Jackson)
The Mission Continues. (Courtesy of Eric Greitens)
Acknowledgments
This book could never have happened if I hadn’t seen the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan firsthand, embedded with U.S. troops who performed magnificent service under impossible circumstances. I’d especially like to thank Major Jeremiah Ellis and First Sergeant Jack Robison
of Dog Company, 1st battalion/12th regiment of the Army’s 4th Infantry Division, who first demonstrated the leadership skills in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province that led me to the theory of the case: that the post-9/11 military would produce civilian leaders with a genius for public service.
My greatest thanks, obviously, go to Eric Greitens, whose vision and honor provided the backbone and spirit of this book. But Jake Wood and William McNulty were absolutely essential as well, generous with their time, insights, and mockery. Also, of course, Mike Pereira, Natasha Young, Kaj Larsen, Spencer Kympton, and all the others who let me into their lives, trusted me, spent patient hours with me, and became my friends. Thanks to the Greitens and Wood and Pereira families—and of course, to Clay’s parents, Stacy Hunt and Susan Selke, who opened their hearts to me; to Sheena Greitens and Indra Petersons, who supported their guys and tried to protect them from my prying, and gave me great perspective in the process; to all the staff and fellows at The Mission Continues and Team Rubicon, who spent hours, days, weeks sharing their lives with me.
Thanks to the dozens of veterans who spent time with me, but whose remarkable stories didn’t find their way into this book. I’d also thank those Team Rubicon and Mission Continues members I served with on service deployments; your devotion and cheer should be a lesson to this country. And to Barbara Van Dahlen, whose big, smart heart and her organization—Give an Hour—has provided great service to the veterans’ community. I hope I’ve honored all of your work with this book.
Thanks, too, to General David Petraeus and his brilliant COINistas, who schooled me in counterinsurgency warfare, both at Fort Leavenworth and downrange. I’d especially like to thank Lt. Col. John Nagl (Ret) and Col. Derek Harvey (Ret) for their affectionate impatience with my blockheaded civilian cast of mind. (“Klein, you’re too lazy to tie your shoes in the morning,” Nagl once said, eyeing my loafers.) I’d like to thank Paul Reickhoff of Iraq Afghanistan Veterans of America, David Gergen (who told me about Eric Greitens), Rachel Kleinfeld and Michael Breen of the Truman Project, and Paula Broadwell, all of whom introduced me to dozens of returning soldiers and Marines, spectacular young people whose stories were told in my August 2011 Time magazine cover story, “The New Greatest Generation.” These include people who will surely help lead our democracy in the years to come—Congressman Seth Moulton, former VA Assistant Secretary Tommy Sowers, Elizabeth McNally, John Gallina and Dale Beatty of Purple Heart Homes, Nate Fick, Wes Moore, Rye Barcott, and Dr. David Callaway. Special thanks also to Admiral Mike Mullen, who has been a voice of sanity and intelligence throughout this process. And also to my Time magazine war buddies, Franco Pagetti and Bobby Ghosh.
I’d like to thank my editors at Time magazine—Jim Kelly, Rick Stengel, Nancy Gibbs, and Michael Duffy—who allowed this old political reporter to become a war correspondent; especially Gibbs and Duffy, who gave me the time to write this book. I’d like to thank my wonderfully sharp and persistent editor at Simon & Schuster, Priscilla Painton, who simply would not let this book be any less than all it could be. And Jonathan Karp, Sophia Jimenez, and the rest of the team at S&S as well. Captain Nate Rawlings (Ret), Trish Stirling, and Alexandra Raphel were a trio of exemplary researchers, all of whom came to love the characters and premise of this work.
Thanks and cheers to my friend, Baroness and Bomb-Thrower Helena Kennedy, the principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, who made me a visiting fellow and gave me the time and space and alcohol necessary to write this book. (And her husband, Ian Hutchinson, for the medical care and laughs, when needed.) Ditto for Alex Jones of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, an old friend, who allowed me to work on this book rather than write a research paper during my semester as a visiting fellow there.
My longtime friend and agent, and doppelgänger, Kathy Robbins deserves a paragraph all her own for her lifetime of . . . well, just about everything. I could not have written the books I’ve written without her advice and support, brilliant editing, birthday parties, and all-around cheer.
Okay, finally: my family. Apologies. I know I get sort of obsessive when writing a book, especially one that sends me off to exotic places like Kandahar and St. Louis. These things take years to exorcise and you’ve lived through them more than once. Now I have not only children—Christopher, Terry, Sophie, and Teddy—to thank for their patience, but grandchildren—Zoe, Bibi, and Lucy—as well. And Lindsay Sobel, Ann Mah, and Silvia Santos, too.
Which leaves only Victoria, my love, and there is just not enough to say: You taught me how to live with joy, not just purpose. You are hilarious and beautiful, insanely creative and wicked smart. Boy, am I a lucky guy!
New Rochelle, February 2015
How You Can Help
The Mission Continues
1141 South 7th Street
St. Louis, MO 63104
Team Rubicon
300 N. Continental Blvd., Suite 100
El Segundo, CA 90245
Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America
292 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Give an Hour
P.O. Box 5918
Bethesda, MD 20824-5918
Ride2Recovery
23679 Calabasas Rd. #420
Calabasas, CA 91302
Team Red White and Blue
1110 W. Platt St.
Tampa, FL 33606
About the Author
© KEIKO IKEUCHI
Joe Klein is an award-winning journalist and the author of seven books, including the #1 bestseller Primary Colors and most recently, Politics Lost. His weekly Time column, In the Arena, covers U.S. politics, elections, and foreign policy and has won two National Headliner Awards for best magazine column. Previously, he served as Washington correspondent for The New Yorker and as a political columnist for Newsweek. Klein is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former Guggenheim fellow.
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ALSO BY JOE KLEIN
Nonfiction
Woody Guthrie: A Life
Payback: Five Marines After Vietnam
The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton
Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re Stupid
Fiction
Primary Colors
The Running Mate
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Index
A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.
Aeschylus, 196
Afghanistan, 34, 175
Hunt’s service in, 24, 99–101, 112–16, 180–81, 186, 223
Marvin’s service in, 142–43
Pereira’s service in, 168–73
veterans of. See veterans
Woods’s service in, 15–16, 18
Ali, Colonel, 92, 123
“All Volunteer Force: From Military to Civilian Service” (report), 205–6, 208
American Legion, 132
AmeriCorps, 127, 133, 134, 149, 157
Auburn University College of Architecture, 125
Baltimore, 127, 128, 129, 130–31, 136
Bealefeld, Fred, 129, 131
Becker, Robin, 234, 269
divorce of, 193–94, 212
Herbalife selling by, 183–84, 185
relationship and marriage to Clay, 24, 110, 179–80,
182–83, 184–85, 188, 189, 190–91
Beidler, Shawn, 15–16, 111–17, 247
Bethesda Naval Hospital, Maryland, 134–36, 137
Biden, Jill, 206
Black Hearts (Frederick), 198, 199
Blackwater Security contractors, 74, 89
Blair, Earl, 57–61
Bly, Robert, 196
Boothby, Neil, 61
Bosnia, refugee camps in, 61–64
Boynton, Jim (“Brother Jim”), 7, 9, 13, 14–17, 26, 222–23
Boys and Girls Club, Blytheville, Arkansas, 244
Boys Nation, 132–33
Bradley, Lawrence, 38, 42
Bridgeland, John, 205, 206, 207
Brokaw, Tom, 242, 244, 245
Bryant, Wendell, 71
Bullard (soldier), 79, 83, 85
Bush, George W., 72, 125, 126, 128, 205
Campanili, Doc, 79, 80
Campbell, Joseph, 196
Cannelli, Dante, 167–68, 169–70, 173
Carl, Bruce, 49–50, 56, 146
Cartwright (soldier), 81, 83, 84
Center for Citizen Leadership, 131, 136–37, 145, 158
charity
Marvin’s reaction to, 144–56
Mission Continues work as challenge rather than, 145, 148, 159
