Two years after he was sure his life had ended, Mike Pereira decided to google Eric Greitens. Mike was beginning to entertain the possibility that his life wasn’t over after all, that he might actually have a second act, and Greitens was the first person in authority he’d ever met—certainly not his parents or teachers or his other superior officers—who took an interest in his future and told him he had real potential.
He had met Eric in Balad, Iraq, in the autumn of 2006. It was weird, too, because Greitens was a Navy officer. In Mike’s experience, Navy officers tended to be—well, there was no other way to put it—assholes. In the Army and Marines, junior officers were out downrange with their troops, eating and fighting and crapping with them; the camaraderie began to dissipate as the officers climbed the ranks, but some hint of it always remained. The Navy, however, had this profound, antique class segregation; they acted as if enlisted men were servants. They took out the dry cleaning, served tea. The Navy was hoity-toity, and Mike was a guy who had a large WORKING CLASS tattoo on his back, with the “C” portrayed as a hammer and sickle, the symbol of communism, which later proved embarrassing: he’d gotten the tattoo when he was fifteen and a jerk and had no idea what the hammer and sickle meant.
From the beginning, Greitens was different from any other officer he’d served under—and it was a difficult start, because Mike’s opening move was a screaming, crying, tearing-his-hair-out fit. Eric was the headquarters intelligence liaison for SEAL Team Six at the time; Mike was a private contractor, an intelligence analyst who assessed the information coming from the interrogations of high-value Al Qaeda prisoners held at Balad. The Army had asked him to retire in order to join this special contract unit—it was a complicated business and too secret to be described—but he was still a Sergeant in his soul, still living the military life, and still eating from the Kellogg Brown & Root dining facility (D-Fac), even though he no longer had to wear a uniform.
The work was fascinating, but frustrating. Mike was there in perpetuity, but the officers on the SEAL side of the intel chain came and went on seven-month tours. Just as the SEAL guys were beginning to distinguish Abu-Azzaz from Abu-Ayyud, they were sent home. Mike, meanwhile, had created a four-foot-high, fourteen-foot-wide Wonder Wall—it looked like a circuit board—that mapped out the connections between almost every conceivable Abu of value. There were a thousand names linked on the wall. Greitens was blown away when he saw it.
The problem was, the new military intelligence guys—the ones perpetually rotating in—always felt the need to establish their own bona fides. They had a stream of info, too, coming in from the SEALs downrange, and very often it was excellent information. Sometimes, though, it was not so good. In this particular case, the SEALs were going with a new source who turned out to be a drug addict with a gripe against a particular family. Mike had tried to stop it. “No, not that family, this family. These are the guys you want to hit.” But the SEALs had been adamant and hit the wrong family. They had blown open the door and there had been people—innocent women and children—sleeping near the door, and now they were dead, and Mike was unloading on this spiffy Lieutenant Commander Greitens, yelling and pounding the plywood table and pulling his hair. Unnecessary deaths could set Mike off this way. Eric just sat there, calmly eating a bowl of rice—and Mike was getting pissed at him, too, because why didn’t he tell Mike to put a cork in it?
Finally, after Mike had drained his fuel tank, Eric asked, “What can we do to make it better?”
Whoa. Now that was novel. But Greitens actually was interested; he wanted to know what Mike knew. He sensed Mike knew a lot. They began to work closely together on a new target set that would integrate ground intelligence, signals intelligence, previous missions, and intel gleaned from detainees. The leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had recently been killed. He’d been succeeded by Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who was now the number-one target. Mike put together the intelligence, Eric edited it, and they brought it to the Colonel of a Unit-That-Cannot-Be-Named, who simply loved it. Eric didn’t take the credit the way most officers would; he told the Colonel they had a gold mine in Mike Pereira. Mike received a commander’s coin—a currency of respect in the military—and felt that he had reached his pinnacle of effectiveness.
He and Eric became friends. They ate together. They talked about the future. Eric talked about how he wanted to combine the wisdom of older people with the ambition of younger people back at home. “What are you going to do?” he asked Mike. “What about college? What are your goals?”
Goals? College? He had always wanted to go to college. But no one in his life had ever expected him to do it or told him he should go to college. “You should go to college,” Eric said. “Let’s figure out how to get you to the right place.”
They scheduled a career-counseling meeting. It took place in the Charlie Beckwith Conference Room—Mike would never forget that because it was one of the most important meetings of his life—and Eric became his academic adviser. Eric had taken the time to write out notes about how to find the right school, how to get through the admissions process, and how to establish himself as a force to be reckoned with in the world. “When you get out of the military,” Greitens told him, “you have as strong a possibility of becoming a leader as you do here.”
But you couldn’t just say remarkable things like that to Mike Pereira. You had to understand where Mike was coming from, why all of this seemed so implausible; Mike insisted on it. And so he told Eric about his life, and Eric patiently listened.
Mike had come up very hard; indeed, he’d come from several generations of hard. He was Portuguese, from the Azores, on his father’s side, and Mexican on his mother’s. His father, Ron Pereira, better known as “Doc” because of his otherworldly ability to fix engines of all sorts, had emerged from the human equivalent of primordial slime: Doc’s father had walked out on his mother, who became a prostitute and a drug addict, and then the mistress of a mob guy who dumped her, and then a prostitute once more. At times, she was strung out for days on end. One time Doc had found her covered in blood on the floor: she had tried to cut her hair and cut her ears instead. Another time she was carrying a bottle of drugs in her vagina and it broke; Doc had to clean that up, too.
Doc Pereira started stealing cars when he was ten, just to get by. He was in juvenile prison by the age of twelve and out by the age of fourteen. His mother was murdered when he was fifteen; Doc figured it was his fault for not protecting her. He ran away from the funeral, unwilling to submit himself to foster care. He overdosed on heroin at the age of sixteen and went into rehab. He came out of rehab and began driving long-haul trucks from Canada to Phoenix and selling drugs on the side. He spent four years in jail, when Mike was a boy, after he was caught hauling a shipment of marijuana.
Mike’s mother, Cynthia Lopez, was a Mexican Cinderella. Her parents had crossed the river to get to America. She found solace in religion, deep in religion—and so Mike got deep into religion, too. The family moved around in the San Francisco area, from Watsonville to the East Bay—a house several miles from the epicenter of the 1989 earthquake. Doc had been working on an engine in the basement when the shaking started; Mike and his sister, Amanda, were upstairs, terrified, as the house was falling apart all around them—and then Doc rushed in, swooped them up like Superman, and deposited them in the storm cellar. They moved to Bellingham, Washington, after that. Mike was eight years old. The house was just outside the city line in a rural area; it had a barn out back that Doc used to store and fix cars; in effect, Doc had transformed the property into an auto wreck-yard. The upside was that he had stopped drinking and drugging, and he finally settled into work on a regular basis.
Doc was a big guy, six foot three, 250 pounds, and unpredictable, Superman one minute and the Hulk the next. He was a terrific musician who played guitar with some of the better groups in the San Francisco Bay area and built his own guitars. There was often music and laughter in the house—but he also had a temper. One of Mike’s earliest memories was a pushing match with Amanda, who went to their dad and said that Mike had hit her. Doc grabbed Mike and whipped him with an extension cord. Cynthia took him into the shower to clean him up afterward, and—this was one of his first, indelible memories—he saw his blood running down the drain as she washed him off.
As Mike grew older, the situation with his dad grew worse. He was a rebellious, mouthy teenager. Doc insisted on respect. A lot of the fighting was about standard teenage stuff. Mike had to do chores, lots of them. He’d refuse, he’d taunt Doc, Doc would flash—Cynthia’s first instinct was to protect her boy, which would make Doc even angrier. Even when they weren’t yelling at one another, life pretty much sucked—even the potentially good moments. Cynthia decided Mike needed new carpet for his room, and his dad told him to come along: they were going to the carpet store. But they didn’t go to the carpet store. They went to the Dumpster around the back of the store, and his dad pulled out a hideous piece of orange carpet. “That’s a really nice carpet,” Doc said, and then he threatened, “You better not eat or drink on it. You better keep it clean.”
Mike’s brains were spotted quickly by the powers that be: he was placed in the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) track in elementary school. His father did acknowledge it from time to time: “For a smart kid,” he said, “you’re pretty fucking stupid.”
He could do extremely well in school when he was interested in something, but he wasn’t interested in much, and if the teacher was even remotely reminiscent of his dad, he just wouldn’t go to class. His high school algebra teacher was, for example, a primo jerk, and Mike decided to boycott. He skipped everything but the tests, which he aced, just to show the guy how little his actual teaching mattered. He was in constant trouble with the principal, suspended, reinstated; he dropped out, came back, got suspended and reinstated again. When he was fourteen, his mother walked out. She took Amanda with her, but not Mike. He remained in the wreck-yard with his father, who took out his frustrations by beating up cars. One time Doc was trying to get the brakes off a car, and he was sweating and cussing, and he slipped and cut his hand open and began slamming his fist into the car, blood flying everywhere. “She’s going to kick, she’s going to buck, she’s going to fight, she’s going to make you sweat, she’s going to make you bleed, but you can’t let that motherfucker win,” he told Mike, who found it hilarious and terrifying—and ultimately, years later, inspirational: his dad had taught him to do a tough job, how not to quit, how to fight for what he wanted. But he’d only realize that later.
After six impossible months with Doc, Mike left. He moved around from friend to friend—the hospitality usually wore out after a couple days—until one friend’s parents invited him to stay forever. They said they wanted to care for him as a foster child. What they really wanted, he soon realized, was the money that came from the state for doing that. They were in debt, and Mike could liberate them. When the foster care deal fell through, they kicked him out.
He took to living in his car, spending nights in the First Baptist Church parking lot. The minister knew him and took pity on him and allowed him to shower inside every so often. His diet consisted of hot dogs and soda, a combo he could buy at Home Depot for $1.60—he found the money by stealing small change from unlocked cars. His one actual meal each week came on Sunday, when his mother took him to Denny’s.
Mike’s parking-lot life ended when he turned sixteen and got a part-time job in a Les Schwab tire store. He saw an ad for a room with extremely cheap rent; it turned out to be a house populated by seven ex-cons who had just come out of halfway houses. It was old and ramshackle, and the ex-cons ranged from sad to creepy, but it was better than living in his car, so he took it. He was needed at the shop, and at times he had to skip class to work there. “Look, I’m on my own. I’ve got to work to live,” he told the principal, who decided to cut him some slack. But some slack wasn’t nearly enough. His boss at the tire shop wanted him full-time, so he dropped out of school—which put him a rung above most of his friends, who had dropped out of high school and were either in juvie hall or dead into drugs. A few weeks later, he came back to the house one night and looked at his hands. They were filthy. They looked like his father’s hands. “I guess everyone in my family is fated to live with grease under their fingernails,” he said to himself. He thought about the tire shop. He was the youngest person working there; there were men in their sixties who had worked there all their lives. He couldn’t imagine living that way, raising a family and having kids that way. “I’ve got to throw myself out into the world,” he thought, “and see what happens.”
He went to an Army recruiter. They took him on a tour of Fort Lewis, which was nearby. They showed him the firing range. They were all hoo-ah about shooting guns and blowing stuff up. But that didn’t impress Mike very much; he’d experienced far too many explosions at home. Then they took him to the D-Fac. He had never seen so much food. It was like a dream. There were hamburgers cooking on a grill, hot dishes, a pasta bar, a long row of fruit and desserts, vegetables, a pile of grilled cheese sandwiches, and ice cream. “Sign me up,” he said. He felt as if he had been recruited into heaven.
He needed a high school diploma in order to sign on the dotted line, and he threw himself on the mercy of a guidance counselor named Sue Jamtsa, who approached his various teachers and promised that Mike would be in attendance and socialized for his last semester of school. He graduated from Squalicum High School that spring.
Mike loved the Army from day one. He loved boot camp. He loved having a secure place to sleep every night. He was amazed that he had access to the D-Fac any time he wanted to go there. And his aptitude test results were off the charts. The Army decided to train him as an intelligence analyst and sent him to Germany.
Germany was like a theme park. American soldiers were rock stars—even if they’d been wreck-yard scum back home. Maybe not all the girls, but a lot of them, wanted to be with G.I. Joe. And for those who couldn’t find a girl, there was a brigade of prostitutes, some of whom were not bad at all. But for Mike, the real thrill was the knowledge that he was no longer alone in the world. The other intelligence trainees were very much like him—high school fuckups with big IQs from tough families. Everyone had a story. One guy had been abused by an uncle. Another guy had a sister who was into drugs and prostitution. Camaraderie—real brotherhood—for most troops was forged downrange; camaraderie for the intel trainees was forged in the back alleys of Sachsenhausen, helping a fallen comrade who had just been punched in the nose by a prostitute and was bleeding profusely. Camaraderie was learning that, rare as they were and antisocial as they had been, they could talk about the most terrible stuff freely, without being betrayed.
Mike did well in training. He was sent to Italy to be part of an intel analysis operation focused on the Middle East, which was located on the same base as the 173rd Airborne Brigade, the “Sky Soldiers.” He did well enough there, too, and was sent to PLDC—Primary Leadership Development Course, a training program for Sergeants. “It’s like a ritual,” he would later say. “You go to the woods for a few days, they beat the hell out of you, and you come back a Sergeant.” The first time he was singled out and told to drop and do push-ups, he realized that someone next to him had also dropped, unbidden, and was doing push-ups—and the trainer was yelling at the guy, “What are you doing down? I didn’t tell you to drop.”
“One Sky Soldier falls, we all fall,” Dante Cannelli responded. After that, every time one of the seven guys from the 173rd was told to drop, they all dropped. Cannelli was a medic, a gentle soul, and he quickly became the best friend Mike Pereira had ever had. They had barbecues together, got drunk together, started dating two Italian girls who happened to be friends.
Mike met Georgia Rostirolla at a bar called the Crazy Bull, which was—it was clear from the name—a place for Italian women to meet G.I. Joes. His friend Curry, a charismatic counterintelligence expert, had dragged him there. “Pereira, we gotta get you out on the town,” Curry said. “And here’s how we’re going to do it. You’re going to walk up to the ten most beautiful women in the bar, and the odds are that one of them is going to want to talk to you.” Georgia was number four. She was small, but an absolute stunner. She spoke impeccable English. Mike was not the most confident Casanova; he was good-looking in a nerdy, ectomorphic way, with an intense, academic air about him. He was right there, Georgia thought. There was nothing duplicitous about him. Nothing dangerous either. He was a good guy. They started dating in September 2003 and were living together by February 2004. Soon after that, both Mike and Dante were sent to Afghanistan. Mike went to the detainee interrogation unit at Bagram Air Base, just north of Kabul; Dante went downrange to Paktia province with the 173rd Airborne.
Mike was able to do some serious work at Bagram. He interrogated prisoners—but quickly realized that no one was cross-referencing the intel coming from the interviews, and he set out to do that. Before long, he was interrogating both the regular detainees and the high-value prisoners held by the special operators in a separate shed. In July 2005, four high-value Al Qaeda prisoners broke out of Bagram, probably with the help of Afghan guards. Mike did a quick analysis of all the information that had been gathered on them and found that all four came from the same small town in Pakistan. He requested SIGINT (signals intelligence—drones, phone monitoring, that sort of thing), and the four were found in their hometown and apprehended. Mike became something of an intel celebrity after that; he received accolades all the way up the chain of command to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Mike would receive the daily U.S. casualty reports—two killed in action in Kandahar, three wounded in action in Helmand—but they were abstractions, and he didn’t think about them. He was far more obsessed with the bad guys. He had pictures of them, in most cases; he had compiled thick dossiers on them, their movements, their families, their residences. He felt he knew the Al Qaeda networks cold; he was so caught up in Mondo Mike and special ops that he lost track of which conventional U.S. units were where, with one exception. He knew that the 173rd Airborne was operating in Paktika, and one day there was a report of two killed in action, members of the 173rd Airborne . . . and he wondered. Mike had interrogated prisoners who were members of an IED cell operating in Paktika; they turned out to be part of the group that had laid the IED that killed the soldiers from the 173rd. Mike had known that the rest of the group was still out there. He had felt almost confident enough to put together a contingency operation for special ops troops to hit the members of the cell who were still at large. He had their homes, their schematics . . . but not quite enough.
Then Georgia called. “You heard, right?” she asked.
“Heard what?”
“About Dante.”
Fuck. No.
“He was killed in an explosion”—an IED explosion, the IED explosion in Paktika. Mike had killed Dante. It was the only way he could think about it. He had absolutely been responsible for his best friend’s death.
After that, every KIA had Dante’s face. Mike felt responsible for all of them. Each time someone was killed or wounded, Mike would go through the “if only I had” stations of the cross. He rarely left his work area, rarely ate, rarely slept—finding the bad guys was now a 24/7 operation. Later, he would realize that he had gone off the deep end and probably should have checked himself into sick bay and sought counseling. Instead, the excellent, if insane, quality of his work put him in line for the offer to go to Iraq with the private contractor who dare-not-be-named. He would have access to a lot more assets, and he could be a lot more effective than he’d been in Afghanistan and prevent a lot more American deaths, and he leaped for it.
The fact that Mike met Eric Greitens in Balad helped a lot. Eric was an anchor; his sanity and friendship kept Mike from flying off too far. But Mike figured that he wasn’t going to have access to the LT for very long. Eric was like a lion in a shoebox, Mike thought, desperate to get downrange, see real action, test himself. Eric pushed himself physically far beyond anything Mike had seen before; he pushed so hard running a treadmill one day that he broke it. (Eric would win the Fallujah marathon that year—an event that took place within FOB Fallujah, in which the runners were given maps that included bomb shelters in case there was a rocket attack.)
And so Mike wasn’t surprised when Eric went downrange to lead an Al Qaeda targeting cell in Fallujah. He was pretty much alone then. He had become a necessary piece of the machine, and he was respected, sort of. But he hadn’t trained with any of the guys in his secret intel unit—Mike believed you couldn’t really know a guy unless you’d trained with him—and they were pleasant and smart enough, but they weren’t brothers.
He did have one friend, a prisoner. We’ll call him Hamid. He knew Mike as “Stanley,” which was Pereira’s nom d’intel. He was a lot like Mike, same age, a nerdy, introverted ectomorph. He was a jacked-up Al Qaeda communications expert. He’d built the laptop for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that was traced by American intel and led to Zarqawi’s death. Hamid was from Kuwait, the younger brother of a major Al Qaeda leader. He was working in an electronics store in Syria while doing his secret work, and his parents were on his case: Why couldn’t he be a fighter, a martyr for God, like his brother? The family had connections to Zarqawi, and Hamid eventually agreed to go to Iraq to be part of Zarqawi’s team. He was caught up almost immediately in the battle of Fallujah—which terrified him. “All I could do was cry,” he told Mike. “They wanted me to drive a suicide car. I drove it a little ways and then jumped out and ran to another village, where I knew some of my brother’s friends were.”
Having demonstrated a distinct inability to be a martyr for God, Hamid was put in charge of the Al Qaeda websites and chat rooms, which were sometimes used to send instructions for terrorist missions. He was captured on the “Night of a Thousand Daggers,” when forty-eight different high-value targets were taken by American special forces, one of the most effective operations of the Iraq War. Mike was not the first person to interrogate Hamid, and he didn’t want to be the last: when a prisoner was deemed no longer useful, he was turned over to the Iraqi judicial system, which was usually a death sentence.
Hamid had two wives and a kid. He spoke excellent English and had a sense of humor. Mike loved the guy but didn’t trust him entirely. He was, after all, Al Qaeda.
Mike’s world began to crater in late March 2007, when he heard that Eric had been blown up in the chlorine bomb in Fallujah. It was a huge bomb, and Mike assumed the worst. He was shattered—everyone he’d really cared about seemed to die. When the casualty reports came in, Mike exhaled—Eric wasn’t seriously wounded—but the anxiety lingered, even after he actually saw Greitens one last time, on the flight line at Balad. Eric was on his way home, and he was humble about the bomb; he just said that it had been tough and that a close friend had been badly hurt, but he was fine. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “And keep in touch. Let me know when you get back home.”
When you get back home . . .
Okay, it was time to think about that. Georgia certainly thought it was well past time. But . . . home—nothing good had ever happened for him back home. And yet: He was a private contractor. He had about $100,000 in savings. All he had to do was walk into the office, sign a few papers, and he’d be out of there.
Three days after he said good-bye to Eric, the special operators asked him to come on a field operation with Hamid. They were going to Ramadi, where Hamid was supposed to identify a target. When they got there, Hamid couldn’t, or wouldn’t, identify the guy—and the special ops guys took him away and beat the crap out of him, breaking his nose and jaw. They put him in the back of a flatbed truck with a bag over his head. He was sobbing quietly. “Stanley,” he whispered. “Stanley, are you here?”
“Yes, right here.”
“Will you hold my hand?” Fuck it, Mike thought. He held Hamid’s hand.
They were piled onto a dual-rotor Chinook, the primary troop- and load-carrying military helicopter. They were dragging a sling-load of supplies to the town of al-Assad. But the load was too heavy for the chopper, which strained to get off the ground and then began to falter and groan when it was aloft. Mike could hear the Chinook’s crazy wheezing, and then he could see the engine on the other side of the bird was on fire. And they were going down.
People were screaming. He could smell them pissing and shitting their pants. He was pushed up against the bulkhead. He was going to be crushed to death. “Please, God,” he prayed. “Please, God, let me live to see another morning.”
Somehow, everyone lived. The pilots crash-landed the Chinook, and people were wounded, but everybody lived. Mike rolled out onto flat land and just stared at the stars. He had prayed to God, and he’d been allowed to see another morning—but how weird was that? How weird was praying? Was it really God who had spared him or the brilliant helicopter pilots? He had lived with God for a long time and never questioned Him. But now—and Mike realized that this was so him, so perverse—a prayer had been answered, and Mike had lost faith.
And then there was Hamid. He’d been fooling himself about that, too. Sooner or later, Hamid was going to have to be remanded into the Iraqi judicial system. He would undoubtedly be hanged. There was no way around that. And there was no way around the fact that Hamid’s fate was Mike’s responsibility. He was the interrogator who knew him best—but, when it came right down to it, how well did he really know Hamid? And could he put his affection for the computer geek ahead of the safety of American troops like Dante Cannelli?
He signed Hamid over to the Iraqis, and then he went to the contractors’ office and signed himself out. “I’m done,” he told them.
He was very much done. Everything had died in the chopper. God was dead. His friends kept dying. He had signed Hamid’s death warrant. His life was over.
He tried school at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham. It was said to be a good school, a feeder for the University of Washington, but Mike lasted only a few weeks. He took a political science class, and they were discussing Iraq. A girl said, “I don’t know what we’re doing there, aside from raping women and killing babies.” Mike held his fire, but then they showed a film about the war that had a scene of burning bodies and . . . Mike was back in the Intensive Care Unit at Bagram, interrogating severely burned detainees. The greasy smell of cooked flesh was in his nose, and he simply got up and walked out of the class.
He had rented—this was really weird, when he thought about it—his old house from his parents, who had gotten back together and moved to a newer place. It was a small three-bedroom set on three acres, with a red barn that his dad had used as a mechanic’s shed and a yard that was still filled with wrecked cars. He settled in very deeply with his memories. He played Rainbow Six nonstop on Xbox with a couple of Albanians in New York. He pushed Georgia away. She didn’t want to leave, but he told her that she had to—and she went back to Italy. That was August 2007.
Trash and pizza boxes and empty bottles piled up around the house. He felt a near physical craving for the order of military life, for his guys, for the way things had been in Germany. He would haunt the local Army recruiting station, not to re-up, just to talk; the soldiers there began to think he was nuts. He put an ad on craigslist, seeking other veterans to talk to. No one responded.
One night, alone in his mess, Mike pulled out his 9mm Smith & Wesson pistol. He put a bullet in the chamber and put the barrel in his mouth. He figured his life had more value as a statistic. The pain of living every day like this was excruciating. He put his finger on the trigger—and . . . he began to think: Dad had a really fucked-up life, but he made it through somehow—was he really that much more fucked up than Doc Pereira? And if he took the gun out of his mouth right now, he might be of service to others—you didn’t have to commit suicide, no matter how fierce the pain. And then he thought about Eric Greitens: he had believed in Mike. And what if Eric was right, that Mike could be not just a person of value, but a leader? Leadership seemed implausible—he couldn’t even lead himself at that point—but becoming a person of value was within range, even if he wasn’t quite sure how to get there. He took the gun out of his mouth. He kept the bullet.
Before she left for Italy, Georgia had sent out an all-points bulletin that Mike was really in a lot of trouble. She went to the authorities at Whatcom Community College and told them; she went to the Student Veterans Club. And about a month after Mike took the gun out of his mouth, there was a knock on the door—Tim Nelson, the president of the Veterans Club at Whatcom. Tim was a Marine, a force of nature, the perfect opposite of lugubrious, and lugubrious was where Mike still was. They started to talk. Tim had done three tours in Iraq. They talked about the military; they were both proud to have served, but their pride didn’t match with the mortal suck of the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, the friends they’d lost—and for what? Tim didn’t mention the utter squalor of Mike’s place until near the end. “So, Mike, you’re so proud of being an NCO [a noncommissioned officer, a Sergeant],” he said. “How come you’re living like a Private?”
Mike cleaned up the house. Then he went back to school, and it was sort of like being in the military again. He didn’t go back to school just for himself; he did it for Tim. And for the first time, he took it seriously: he aced every class. Every day, he could feel it—moving away from the squalor and depression, moving toward peace. He went to counseling at the VA. He moved out of his parents’ house into an apartment. Georgia came back in the spring of 2008. She wanted to go to school at Whatcom and become an accountant. “I’ll let you stay here for ten days, and then you’ve got to leave,” he told her. Ten days later, he desperately didn’t want her to leave, and they were back together.
Mike became active in the Veterans Club with Tim Nelson, and over time, it turned out that Tim needed Mike as much as Mike had needed Tim. He would show up at Mike and Georgia’s house in the middle of the night, crying, unable to sleep. Mike would take him to Denny’s for an early breakfast and let him talk it out. There were a thousand signs that Tim was in deep trouble, but Mike couldn’t process that: Tim was his superior officer, his Eric. Tim had been trained in suicide prevention; he had taught Mike how to keep the gun out of his mouth.
Tim took a shotgun and blew his face off in July 2008. Mike had to hold up Tim’s father at the funeral; the old man kept collapsing. Mike was collapsing inside, too—another Sky Soldier down—but this time, Mike was holding it together, in part because the other Whatcom veterans were looking to him for leadership. Tim’s wife had taken their daughter to her home in Spokane, and so it fell to Mike and his fellow veterans to clean up the mess, wash the walls, and pack up all of Tim’s things. Mike wasn’t sure he was ready for leadership; he wasn’t sure he was going to hold it together; he was back to dark as the reality of Tim’s death settled in.
That was when Mike googled Eric Greitens, looking for advice. He was impressed by The Mission Continues website. There were video links to speeches Eric had given. Mike had never thought about the notion of community service as a means to reenter civilian life before. He really wanted to talk to Eric about it—he really wanted to become a Mission Continues fellow—but he couldn’t just cold-call him. He had to do something that would impress Eric first.
Mike looked for a local program that encouraged veterans to serve in their community, but he couldn’t find any. There was one program that was targeted for convicts. “If they take convicts,” he told the guys in the Veterans Club, “maybe they’ll take veterans.”
He met with Allie Hoover, the woman who ran the program for convicts. “We’d love to have you guys,” she said. “What do you want to do?”
“Anything,” Mike said. “Give us the things no one else wants to do.”
“You’ve GOT it,” Allie said.
And they were in business, scrubbing mold in basements, cleaning roofs, helping the elderly and the disabled and those who were dying of cancer. Mike’s group grew from three veterans to thirty during the course of the year. They focused on helping the disabled and those who were ill. By the spring of 2009, they were helping six hundred people—doing chores, cleaning and shopping for them, taking them to doctor’s appointments, keeping them company.
Finally, he was ready to send a letter—a nine-page, single-spaced letter—to Eric Greitens, asking to become a Mission Continues fellow. “Sir, you may not remember me,” he began. Eric laughed when he read that: How could you not remember Mike Pereira? “You’ve really got something here,” Mike wrote. “I’ve seen how service changes lives. It saved my life.”
Eric invited Mike and Georgia to come to St. Louis for dinner. He was impressed, once again, by Mike’s acuity, but even more by his story: he had created his own Mission Continues fellowship and lived it without the stipend. Eric continued to think about Mike after he and Georgia returned to Bellingham. The Mission Continues was now almost two years old, and it was beginning to grow exponentially. There were now thirty-two Mission Continues fellows, past and present. But there was no one to keep up with the fellows, really keep up with them, to help them through the rough spots and challenge them if they weren’t meeting their service obligations. He was interviewing people to become Fellowship Director, and he realized the best interview he’d had was dinner with Mike.
He called Mike and said, “Hey, Mike, I’ve been thinking about something. You’ve already done the equivalent of a Mission Continues fellowship. In fact, you’ve done more than that. You’ve organized veterans, and led them, and helped them through the tough times. I need someone to do that here. Would you be willing to come to St. Louis with Georgia and become my Fellowship Director?”
“Are you kidding?” Mike asked. Eric said he wasn’t, and the job would pay $30,000 a year.
“Of course I’ll come,” Mike said.
“One other condition,” Eric added. “You’ve got to promise me that you’re going to go back to school and graduate from a four-year college. I don’t think the job I’m offering you scratches the surface of your potential.”
For the second time in his life, Mike Pereira felt he’d been recruited into heaven.