“Mike,” Eric Greitens said. “They’re honoring Gold Star families at the Soldiers Memorial downtown. I want you to represent us.”
“Really?” Mike Pereira asked warily, sensing a setup.
“Yes,” Eric said. And yes, it was a setup. Challenging Mike’s post-traumatic stress was part of Eric’s training program in the months after Pereira arrived in St. Louis in August 2009. He knew Mike was uncomfortable in public with people he didn’t know; he would be especially frazzled in public with people he didn’t know who had lost their children in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Why not?” Eric could see the gears spinning, the tension rising.
“Because I don’t know that I can keep it together. I don’t know what I can do for them. I’m going to be thinking about . . .”
“Yeah, but this isn’t about you,” Eric said gently. “This is about those families. They need our support; they need to know we’re here. We have to get the word out. Look, Mike, if you’re going to work here, you’re going to have to handle a lot of uncomfortable situations—and if you’re going to work with people who have PTSD, you’ve got to understand that we don’t accept any excuses, not even from you. You know that. You’re serving others here. You’re going to that ceremony.”
Mike knew that Eric was right, of course. He knew this was a test he was going to have to pass, part of the relentless tutorial that he was getting from Eric. There had been reading assignments, starting with the Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey. “It’s the first book ever written about a soldier coming home from a war,” Eric said. “It’s a journey.”
Mike latched on to that—the idea that he was on a journey upward toward enlightenment. Eric asked him to read other books about the mythic quest: The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford, Iron John by Robert Bly. They all pointed in one direction: the hero went on an adventure; along the way he faced challenges, suffered, and died a spiritual death, and only then, on the way home, he began to rebuild strength and character while suffering through even more perilous adventures. Eric introduced Mike to his favorite poem by Aeschylus, famously recited by Robert Kennedy in the Indianapolis ghetto after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.:
He who learns must suffer,
And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget,
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despite, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
So Mike went to the Soldiers Memorial, and soon he was spending hours with the Gold Star families who showed up at the office, which became a gathering place for veterans and their spouses and families as word of The Mission Continues spread through St. Louis. Eric would invite them—and students, and people he’d met in the business community—to clean playgrounds and refurbish schools and community centers. The projects would draw media attention, and media attention drew more candidates for fellowships—and others, veterans and civilians, who just wanted to be part of something good.
Mike had bureaucratic responsibilities, which he performed with no relish; his main concern was helping veterans who were having problems, especially those he sensed were heading down the suicide slide. He would stalk them, working the hardest with those who were least prepared for a Mission Continues fellowship; he would work with them for months, trying to get them to write an acceptable application essay.
One of Mike’s first projects was Ian Smith, who had been a close intel analysis buddy of his in Germany. Ian was now in Nashville, working three jobs—mowing lawns, delivering pizzas, serving as the janitor at a local church, while carrying a 4.0 average at Volunteer State Community College. But he wasn’t sleeping very well; he needed booze to get himself down. And he wasn’t treating his girlfriend, Christy, very well; he was never violent, but his temper was horrific. He was sleeping with a gun every night. He had gained sixty pounds. He was disconsolate.
“Sounds to me like you’ve got what I have,” Mike said.
“No way,” Ian said. “Nothing bad happened to me over there. I wasn’t hurt . . .”
“I wasn’t either,” Mike replied. “But just sitting there, helpless, watching my friends get blown up . . .”
Ian had certainly experienced that. His first deployment with the 101st Airborne to Mahmudiyah, in Iraq’s Triangle of Death, had been infamous: one of the soldiers in the unit had raped an Iraqi girl in front of her family, then killed the family and set them on fire. A book, Black Hearts, had been written about it. Every day, Ian sat in the TOC in Mahmudiyah, surrounded by big screens showing sky views from drones and helicopters, watching IED explosions. He lost friends on patrol almost every week. Four soldiers he knew were kidnapped by the Iraqis and later found dead. The FOB was mortared or hit by rocket-propelled grenades most days.
But still, he hadn’t been in combat. He hadn’t been hurt.
His second tour, as part of a MiTT team in Baghdad in 2007 and 2008, had been a triumph. The war had turned around by then. His team worked with an Iraqi Army unit trying to rid a mostly Sunni neighborhood of Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) forces—the Shiite militia run by Muqtada al-Sadr—and they ultimately succeeded. “I won my war,” Ian told Mike. “Why should I have PTSD?”
“I don’t know,” Mike replied. “Why do you need that gun? Why can’t you sleep without booze? Why did Christy leave you?”
Ian wasn’t budging, but Mike wasn’t giving up. He told Ian to go out and buy an Xbox and headset, so they could play Call of Duty together and talk. They spent hours on the headsets, wasting hajjis and, occasionally, talking about Ian’s situation. Mike could hear the numb in Ian’s voice. He sounded too much like Tim Nelson, who had blown his head off in Bellingham. That simply could not happen again. He tried to get Ian off the couch, over to St. Louis for a weekend. He told him about The Mission Continues—Ian thought Mike made it sound like a cult, with Eric Greitens as Jesus—but Mike kept talking about it and asking Ian about what he was doing and whether he had friends nearby, service buddies, anybody to keep him in the world.
The truth was, except for Mike, Ian was alone, the pizza boxes—the signature nutritional artifact of post-traumatic stress—piling up in his dark room. He was playing with his gun, cleaning it, loading it, putting it to his temple. He was going through the motions of his life, mowing lawns, cleaning the church. He started doing some emergency ambulance work, which he thought would add some purpose—but almost all of his runs involved moving dialysis patients to a clinic and back. He was pissed off at everyone, all those civilians who had no idea about anything.
Mike sent Ian a copy of Black Hearts, and Ian devoured it and was freaked by it. The book brought everything back in Technicolor and surround sound. His unit had been driven nuts by war. He hadn’t been outside the wire very often, but he’d been playing in the same crazy sandbox. And he simply could not understand why he was acting the way he was. Life in Nashville was cratering. Without Christy, there wasn’t enough income to keep the house; he was going to have to move into a trailer. He was pulling out the gun almost every night, playing with it. “One of these nights, I just may put a bullet in my head,” he told Mike.
“Hey, why don’tcha come this weekend?” Mike offered again, trying to sound calm. “We’re doing a service project at a children’s center, cleaning it up. It’s good. It’s like saddling up again. You get to hang with people like us, shoot the shit. No pressure. You can stay with Georgia and me. Ian, listen man, you need a road trip.”
Much to Mike’s amazement, Ian came. The service project was at the Edgewood Children’s Center in St. Louis. Ian found himself in a room with a paintbrush and a handful of other vets. They were immediately familiar to him—they looked like he did, tough and tatted on the outside, confused and angry on the inside. It was like looking in a mirror. They began to talk as they worked, basic stuff, like where they’d deployed and with which unit and “Hey, did you know so-and-so?” They told war stories and stories about coming home and stories about how retarded civilians were. They were laughing. And suddenly the room was done—it looked great!—and they started painting another. You couldn’t argue with this, Ian thought. There was no downside to painting a school for disabled kids. There was no bad in this. He understood, suddenly, the silly cliché: it’s all good.
That night he slept the sleep of the just on Mike’s couch, ten hours without nightmares. It had been how long—months? years?—since he’d slept like that. He woke up happy, pretty near euphoric. Man, he thought, if I can capture just a little bit of what we did yesterday and hold it close to my heart, I think I could do all right.
Ian moved to St. Louis, got counseling at the VA, made a living driving EMT ambulances. He started working out, lost the sixty pounds; eventually he began to run, swim, and bike in triathlons. He became a Mission Continues fellow and then a TMC staff member. He specialized in organizing service projects all over the country. Eventually, Eric sent him to Washington to serve as a White House intern in Michelle Obama’s Joining Forces initiative for veterans.
The success Mike had with Ian was narcotic; repeating that success was pretty much all he cared about. The fellowship program needed to be tightened. There were still too many failures. There were fellows who didn’t show up for work at their local sponsoring organizations or used their stipends to buy drugs or couldn’t control their anger. Eric wanted a foolproof system. He wanted every fellow to succeed. At the same time—and this was the hard part—he didn’t want to reject anyone. It was okay if recruits said, “No, this isn’t for me.” But Eric couldn’t bear the thought of turning away anyone who really wanted to serve, no matter how debilitated. He wanted Mike to stick with them, prepare them for the moment when they’d really be ready and purposeful enough for a fellowship. But what did “ready” mean? What were the parameters for selecting a Mission Continues fellow?
“Why don’t you make a list of the qualities we need to see when a fellow applies?” Eric asked Mike.
Mike huffed and sweated and came up with a list of ten. He handed the list to Eric, who said, “Can you recite all ten from memory?”
Mike couldn’t. “Why don’t you work on this?” Eric said. “Pare it down. Come back to me with a list of two or three absolutely essential qualities.”
That was how it was in 2009: systems and processes and metrics. It seemed to Mike that The Mission Continues staff was plodding down a slow, sludgy river on a raft, while Eric was zooming about in a Jet Ski, stopping in occasionally to fire off a set of instructions or bring news of another $10,000 or $50,000 raised—and pushing them always, always, to develop ways to measure the efficacy of the program. They were having individual successes like Ian Smith and Tim Smith, but those two had served in St. Louis, under close supervision. What about the fellows in the rest of the country? It was time for Monica Matthieu to step in and do a proper study; she recruited both Mike and Ian—former intel analysts were natural sociologists—to help with an exit questionnaire for the fellows. The problem was, there still weren’t very many of them, maybe twenty or so, past and present. They were choosing their fellows carefully, adding them one at a time.
In the spring of 2009, Eric was invited to speak on a panel about the post-9/11 generation of veterans at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He gave his usual Mission Continues pitch, looking prohibitively spiffy in a dark suit, white shirt, and canary yellow tie. Out in the audience, a young doctoral student named Sheena Chestnut took the message to heart. Her father, a doctor, had recently crushed his leg while working on a home construction project. The leg had been amputated below the knee—and she realized that a service program like The Mission Continues might have done her father some good as he rejoined the world, physically diminished after surgery.
Sheena had come to the event with a friend who knew Eric through her own national service work. Afterward, they went to Grendel’s Den, a famed campus bar down the street from the Kennedy School. The conversation was easy, fun; no one, not even Eric, dominated. Sheena was an East Asia expert, about to spend the summer in China. Eric regaled her with stories of his own China trip; he talked about singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” after his first Chinese banquet and had everyone laughing. Sheena told Eric about her dad, about her reaction to the panel. She was petite, very attractive, with bright hazel eyes, a small voice, and dark hair. She was a Highland dancer who’d competed in national and international tournaments, so she knew all about the pain and discipline that boxing and SEAL training had required. She was right there with him, on the same wavelength, from the moment they started talking. And when he stood up from the table, Eric heard a voice say, “This is the girl you’re going to marry.”
This was well beyond weird. Eric was not one to hear voices. He had been burned badly once. He had fallen in love with a fabulous, willful young woman from Wales when he’d been at Oxford; it was all youth and passion, two qualities Eric had rarely indulged. They went to refugee camps together. They were married at a castle in Wales. She came to California for his SEAL training but couldn’t seem to settle herself there. Eric tried, too hard, to help her figure out her future, but he had trouble reading her. He was away sixteen hours a day in training and exhausted when he came home—and then she left abruptly, just after he’d completed SEAL training. Eric was crushed. He blamed himself for the divorce: it was the first time that he had failed at anything so totally, with only pain as a lesson. He’d had a series of girlfriends after that. They were of a type: smart, attractive, unchallenging. He was, in fact, boggled by women—was it possible to find someone who was thrilling but also a source of stability? He doubted it. “You don’t settle for anything less than the best in any other aspect of your life,” Adam Walinsky said to him. “Why should you do that with women?”
He and Sheena exchanged business cards as they left Grendel’s. He promised to keep in touch but, daunted, he didn’t. Six months passed.
He was back in Boston that October for a Mission Continues fund-raiser downtown. He called and asked if Sheena would like to go out for a drink after it was over. He figured that it would end about nine p.m., but several of the potential funders seemed real possibilities and wanted to get to know him better. He had to stay on. Finally, at about ten thirty, Sheena texted him, “Are we still going to do this?”
He called her. “Do you still want to? It’s pretty late.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
She took a cab from Cambridge to downtown Boston, where he was staying. He realized that he was starving. He hadn’t eaten dinner. “Do you mind if I get something to eat?” he asked. She didn’t mind at all—but it was late, and nothing was open except a pizza shop that sold slices. Then he realized he had credit cards but no cash—and they took only cash. “Can you help me?” he asked her. “Can I owe you?”
“Of course,” she said. There was something endearing about such a handsome, dynamic guy being so clumsy. He was embarrassed but didn’t try to bluff his way through it. There was no pretense to him, she thought: charisma without pretense was something new under the sun.
They sat on a cold stone wall at the edge of the Boston Common. It was a chilly autumn night, but all the periphera—the pizza, the temperature—soon fell away, and they talked as easily as they had the first time. She told him about her summer in China; he told her that a publisher had asked him to write an autobiography. He was talking it to an assistant, Tim Ly, who would transcribe the sessions; then Eric would write off the notes, but he wasn’t sure it was any good. They talked about their families. Hers was pretty conservative; both her parents were doctors.
Eric put her in a cab back to Cambridge, and she said, “Are you going to let another six months go by?”
No. No way. They began a nomadic courtship. Their first six dates were in five different cities. Eric soon sent her the manuscript of his autobiography, The Heart and the Fist, and asked for her opinions. It seemed a perverse act of intimacy, incredibly forward in its way. There was a fair amount of ego involved but also an open sort of earnestness: he was saying that he really respected her, that he really valued her judgment—even though he barely knew her. She decided to return the intimacy; her comments would introduce him, in the most precise way, to the way her mind worked. She wasn’t going to be easy on him. She would give the book a stern but appreciative read, marking up the pages with questions—“Can you find a better way to say this?”—and corrections: “Yugoslavia was not a Soviet satellite state.”
Eric fell in love with her corrections. He could not have hoped for a better reaction from her. She came to St. Louis—he gave her an extensive tour, quietly trying to make the case that this was as good a place as any for a China scholar to live—and she passed the Rob and Becky test easily. He went for runs with Kaj Larsen in California and St. Louis, wondering whether this was the real thing, whether he should take the plunge. Kaj—who was having too good a time to take any sort of plunge himself—told Eric he wouldn’t know unless he tried.
“I don’t want to be a two-time loser,” Eric said, but he knew that was not an answer.
On Veterans Day, 2009, a major study of returning veterans called “All Volunteer Force: From Military to Civilian Service” was published with much aplomb, including the support of Michelle Obama.
The results were stunning:
— Only 13 percent of post-9/11 veterans strongly agreed that their transition home was going well.
— 92 percent agreed that service to their community was important to them, and 90 percent agreed that service was a basic responsibility of every American.
— 95 percent wanted to serve wounded veterans; 90 percent wanted to serve military families; 88 percent wanted to do disaster relief; 86 percent wanted to serve at-risk youth; 82 percent wanted to help older Americans; 69 percent wanted to help clean up the environment.
The survey was the work of a young woman named Mary Yonkman, a blonde, somewhere-way-beyond-intense Hoosier who was married to a Navy helicopter pilot. Yonkman worked for a small Washington think tank called Civic Enterprises, which had been founded by John Bridgeland, a former director of George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. She had studied the various organizations serving returning veterans—there were more than 200,000, but few seemed to reflect the spirit of this new generation, and more than a few were outright scams, raising money, allegedly, for veterans but distributing only a tiny fraction of what they raised. One exception that Yonkman found was The Mission Continues, and it was tiny.
She latched on to Greitens and picked his brain about ways to make service a more accessible option to help returning veterans make the transition to private life. She and Bridgeland spent the next five months planning an all-star Veterans Day release for the study, a conference that would feature speeches by the First Lady and Dr. Jill Biden announcing their joint effort to help veterans, Joining Forces. Eric, and a handful of veterans who had actually volunteered in their communities, would also speak.
“Mike! I need you in my office,” Eric said a few weeks before the event.
Uh-oh. Every time the summons came, Mike knew, the probability was pain. And now Eric told him about the ceremony in Washington, featuring the First Lady, and said, “I want you to speak for us.”
Mike was terrified but also excited. He really wanted to tell the world about The Mission Continues. He had given speeches about veterans back home in Washington, but this was a very different Washington. Michelle Obama would be there. It would be televised. He worked late into the night at the office and presented Eric with a draft a few days before the ceremony.
“Well, you’ve made a start,” Eric said. “You’re here,” he added, raising his left hand, palm down, just over his desk. “I need you to be here.” Eric raised his right hand, palm down, several feet over his head. “I need you to inspire them.”
The speech, about two and a half minutes long, is recorded for posterity on YouTube. Mike seems somber, disciplined. He talks briefly, in a restrained way, about how he quit school, lost his wife, and had his best friend commit suicide when he came home from the war. He talks about how service gave him a sense of purpose, saved his life. The presentation is crisp, fairly confident—not a barn burner, not Mike at his passionate best (which was probably a necessary precaution, given Mike’s Vesuvian tendencies)—but good enough to win an ovation from the audience and a thumbs-up from Greitens.
After the Joining Forces ceremony, Eric had a sense that the world was about to rush his way. It seemed inevitable that The Mission Continues would be drawing more attention and funding now, and it just wasn’t ready to handle all that. He called Mary Yonkman a few weeks after the Veterans Day ceremony and said, “Mary, you did an excellent job. The report is fantastic. But what are you going to do now? You can continue to work in Washington, D.C., and think great thoughts, or you can come and work for me in St. Louis and make this happen.”
Then Eric lowered his voice, from pitch to plea, and said, “I just want you to keep in mind that this is your husband’s generation of veterans, and you’ll live with this for the rest of your life.”
The next day, Yonkman walked into Bridgeland’s office and said she was going to work for The Mission Continues.
On April 1, 2010, Eric dispatched Mike Pereira to Los Angeles to make the TMC pitch in a contest to win an $8,000 grant, organized by mobilize.org. Ten different veterans’ groups would try to sell their ideas, and one hundred veterans, gathered by the sponsor, would vote on which was best. The event was held in one of those dreary airport hotels near LAX, but the feeling in the place—again, the camaraderie—was warm and easy. Mike met Kaj Larsen for the first time, who was there to cheer on the cause—and Eric was there, too, to give the keynote address in the morning; he left immediately thereafter. The ten-minute grant presentations began in the afternoon.
Mike was looser this time, and more personal. He talked about the program for the elderly that he and his fellow veterans had started in Bellingham, how that experience had turned him around, and how The Mission Continues was unique in its quest to make veterans whole and purposeful through community service. The reaction to his pitch was very good, he thought.
But after he spoke, three Marine noncoms got up and talked about how they had provided disaster relief after the Haiti earthquake two months earlier. Jake Wood led the presentation with slides of the devastation and slides of Team Rubicon members saving lives, saving babies’ lives—uh-oh, Pereira thought, these guys have their shit together—and then Will McNulty talked about how the trip had been organized with help from the Jesuits. Finally, Clay Hunt told his story, about how he had been flailing around since he’d come home from the war, how he’d even contemplated suicide, but in Haiti, for the first time, his problems just didn’t seem so serious anymore.
That night, Mike sought out the Team Rubicon guys at dinner. “Hey, why don’t you guys think about becoming Mission Continues fellows?”
“Why would we want to do that?” Jake asked.
“Because we’ll pay you a stipend to do what you’re already doing for free.”
“What’s the catch?”
Well, when you came right down to it, there was no catch, other than making an application and writing an essay.
Clay reminded Jake that this was the program he’d mentioned on the plane home from Santo Domingo. Eric Greitens was the Navy SEAL dude. “They also have Kaj Larsen,” McNulty said. Kaj had gotten a job as a television journalist, doing real investigative reporting from all over the world for Vanguard on Al Gore’s Current cable channel. McNulty was a fan. He had spotted Kaj during a break that afternoon and said, brilliantly, “You’re Kaj Larsen.”
“And you’re the guy from Team Rubicon,” Kaj replied. “I’d like to come along with you on one of your missions, do a story about it.”
Wow. Was it going to be that easy?
Kaj made the TMC fellowship pitch to McNulty that afternoon, but William was ineligible because he hadn’t been wounded downrange. Clay had been shot in the wrist, though, and had a PTSD rating; and Jake had his foot, which had required yet another surgery after the Afghanistan deployment.
Team Rubicon won the $8,000 grant the next day. The Mission Continues finished a very close second in the voting. But Mike Pereira left LA stoked: Jake and Clay had said they would apply for fellowships. They were exactly the sort of fellows Eric had had in mind. Mike had lost the competition, but he believed he’d come home with a bigger prize.
In December 2010, Eric went to Spokane for the holidays. On the day before Christmas, he asked Sheena to go with him on an errand—he’d always liked the English tradition of Christmas crackers with crepe-paper crowns and tiny gifts in them. He took her to a dollar store and got a bunch of joke gifts—Groucho glasses, a fake hand grenade, candy—and went home to wrap them. After dessert on Christmas night, the family opened their gifts. And then Sheena opened hers, a small box with an engagement ring inside.
“Will . . . will you . . .” Eric was suddenly very nervous. The room was silent, in mid-gasp. “Will you marry me?”
Sheena said yes and began to cry, then her mother and sister and everyone was crying and hugging. Later, Eric fell asleep on the couch, watching a British Premier League soccer match. Sheena was touched by this public display of sheer comfort. “Well,” her mother said. “That’s good to know. He has an off switch.”