A monster tornado touched down in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, less than a month after Clay’s death. Hundreds of people were dead; the wreckage was biblical. Team Rubicon put a siren alert on its website, calling for volunteers. McNulty stayed home to run the logistics; Jake went out to run the deployment. He was joined there by old friends like Shawn Beidler, his sniper-team leader, and Matt Pelak, who drove down from Poughkeepsie in his truck, with several chain saws. There were others, several dozen in all, who came and became part of Team Rubicon’s national core. A local doctor contributed his hunting camp as an operating base—it was out in the piney woods, down a mile-long dirt road. The living room’s rude wood walls were festooned with deer heads; there was a bedroom crammed with bunk beds and a no-frills kitchen.
Team Rubicon was on the ground the day after the tornado, doing general cleanup work. Matt Pelak’s previous TR missions in Pakistan and Haiti had been staffed mostly by medical personnel, but now he was surrounded by fellow veterans. They were doing mucky, heavy, muscular chores. They’d drive up to a house with a tree crashed on the roof and start to work the chain saws and wheelbarrow rubble from the yard. They worked steadily all day, and it was as perfect a mission as you could get. The residents were extremely grateful—and astonished: recent military veterans volunteering to do cleanup work? It was satisfying on the most personal level for Matt; it was making him feel good; his endorphins were running. He was very conscious of the people working around him; there were a lot of smiles and backslaps. That night, Jake introduced the team to another Haiti tradition: the nightly debrief, with a couple cases of beer. They set a fire in a pit amidst the loblolly pines, cooked dinner, and sat around the campfire. It was the first time Pelak had experienced anything like it; people were talking emotionally about how much it meant to be together, deployed in this way.
The next day’s work was more of the same. But that night, Matt received a text message from his girlfriend: Osama bin Laden was dead. The volunteers raced to their pickup trucks to see if the news was on the radio—but they were so deep in the woods that regular reception was impossible. Eventually a straggler drove up, and he had satellite radio in his truck. They gathered around, and there it was: bin Laden had been killed, shot dead by Navy SEALs. They were screaming and hugging. Eventually, they sat around the campfire and talked about it. The son of a bitch who had started the whole thing, who’d blown up the Twin Towers, whose minions had killed and maimed their brothers and sisters—that sick bastard was finally wasted. Around the campfire, some were weeping as they remembered their losses. “I don’t know about you,” Jake said, “but right now, I wouldn’t want to be anyplace else on earth than with you guys.”
Two weeks after Tuscaloosa, there was an even bigger tornado in Joplin, Missouri. Jake was out in Oklahoma, storm-chasing with Indra and some of her meteorologist friends, and he quickly moved to take charge of the Joplin deployment. It was another success.
And then things began to calm down; the spring storms abated. Jake found himself alone—Team Rubicon still didn’t have an office—with too much time to think. He was having nightmares. He grew distant, testy, near-mute. Indra wondered: Where did he go?
She also began to wonder about Team Rubicon. The deployments were fabulous. Great work was being done. But they were sort of narcotic, too, weren’t they? The Band of Brothers would gather together, wear their uniform—gray Team Rubicon T-shirts and red baseball caps—organize themselves into teams, tease one another, knock things down, build things up, impress the civilians with their discipline and efficiency, sit around the campfire drinking beer . . . and then they would come home, alone again, and crash.
Indra believed that Jake had been suffering few of the effects of post-traumatic stress before Clay died. He’d never been a great talker in private; when he wasn’t on in public, he was the guy in the corner glued to his laptop. But he hadn’t been suffering either. The war hadn’t put him where he was now. There had been some bad memories, but Jake seemed able to handle those. This was different, though; this had been precipitated by Clay’s death. Jake’s war-related post-traumatic stress hadn’t happened in Iraq or Afghanistan. It had happened in Los Angeles. And it wasn’t just the shock of Clay’s death: it was the corrosive emotional bends, the too-fast decompression that came from leaving the Marines, a tight-knit organization with a sense of higher purpose, and being dumped, alone, in a society with no organized purpose at all except for making money and having fun. Jake had moved, reflexively, toward restoring his military family almost immediately after he left the Marines in October 2009. Within three months, he had organized the Haiti mission, and he’d been on a dead sprint until Clay died. It was subconsciously brilliant: he had lost a community and then he and McNulty had created a community to replace it.
Now he was in full retreat. Indra sensed he was pushing her away, and she was right. Jake was locked in his own prison, under arrest for the death of his friend. He didn’t deserve Indra. He had let Clay down; he would let Indra down, too. How could he take responsibility for Indra after what he’d allowed to happen to Clay? Maybe it was better to be dumped; he worked at it almost every day. But Indra was not going to play that game. She was Nordic tough in that way: she had made her commitment to him, even if he seemed to be trying to sneak away. She loved the guy he had been before he checked out—and she was going to force him to check back in again. She was right there, in his face, all the time; she wanted to know what the hell was going on. But he didn’t know what was going on. He hoped, on some level, that she would kick him out of the apartment; he didn’t have the courage or the strength just to move out. He dreaded that she might kick him out. Where would he go?
Will McNulty had no idea this was happening—in fact, he thought the exact opposite was happening: Jake was becoming a public big shot, and sometimes he was taking too much of the credit for Team Rubicon. There were times Jake didn’t even mention his partner, McNulty, when he gave his oo-rah Team Rubicon talks.
Jake was invited to the Clinton Global Initiative, where Bill Clinton himself announced that the CGI would be funding Team Rubicon to train five hundred combat medics. The Big Ten cable sports channel was buzzing around, filming Jake for a big feature on its newsmagazine—the Badger football player who had become a humanitarian all-star. GQ magazine was scouting Jake as a possible humanitarian of the year; he was a finalist, competing against Eric Greitens. The winner would be announced at a celebrity-clotted New York gala in October. (Jake won.)
In September, Jake was invited to preside over the ultimate temple of American masculinity: Monday Night Football. He would introduce, on film, the game between his beloved Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings. The 57-second spot was filled with all the usual testosterone tricks: trumpets, drums, football players crashing into one another intercut with a Marine drill team doing its thing. And Jake, the coolest guy on the planet, introduced as a Decorated Marine and Veteran Advocate, walking through the players’ tunnel into a stadium . . .
I was part of a team . . .
Then a full-on shot of Jake, raising his head.
The Marines . . .
Enter the Drill Team.
So I know what it takes to succeed . . . to work for a common goal.
Enter football players crashing and celebrating.
It takes precision, discipline, leadership, and pride . . .
Drill team chanting and tossing their rifles around.
My Packers have all that . . . with just one goal in mind:
Jets scorching across the sky, fireworks exploding over a football stadium, orgasmic mayhem.
To win.
Marines folding a giant flag, Packers celebrating.
At legendary Lambeau Field, on our turf . . .
Jake, full-on:
In our country, for the undefeated Packers . . .
Shots of Packers triumphant.
And the Armed Forces . . .
Marine rifle squad firing. American flag, with Packers flag beneath it, being raised at dawn.
I’m proud to welcome you . . .
Clarion trumpets and martial drums, scenes of ecstatic touchdown celebrations.
To Monday Night Football.
A dramatic profile shot of Jake, saying softly:
Oo-rah.
A few weeks later, Jake and Indra were in Madison for the Wisconsin homecoming game. He was to give a speech on the Thursday before the game. There was a dinner. He was testy throughout; he and Indra rattled through the evening on a low bicker. Later, he wouldn’t remember what the bickering was all about—it was just the way things were between them, typical.
Back in the hotel room, Indra asked him what was going on—what was really going on? And Jake exploded in sobs. It was shocking, like watching a building collapse in slow motion. He let it all out—his guilt about Clay, his pain, his loneliness, his attempts to push her away.
“Oh, baby,” she said, comforting him. “We need to get you some help.”
Mike Pereira left The Mission Continues a few weeks before the St. Louis gala and matriculated at Washington University. He left behind a legacy of mad compassion for the fellows that would continue to inspire the noncoms at TMC; indeed, his legacy had a name—Tiffany Garcia.
Anthony Smith, the star of the gala, would never have become a fellow if Tiffany Garcia hadn’t stalked him. She was famous for that. If Tiffany thought you had the makings of a TMC fellow, you couldn’t get rid of her. She was a former Marine mechanic, ridiculously candid. “I’ve been fired twice and I’m a lousy mother,” she told Eric when she first visited the St. Louis office. But she proved a brilliant recruiter. Mary Yonkman would listen to her on the phone with some poor soul in a dark room and think: This girl is a genius. She knows how to play every chord in the hymnal.
In the months before and weeks after Mike Pereira left, Tiffany faced her greatest recruiting challenge: a Marine named Natasha Young.
Young had skin cancer, Lyme disease, and a child out of wedlock. She had seen a lot of awful in Iraq. She had been the Gunnery Sergeant for an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) company. She had lost five close friends—one especially close—in bomb disposal detonations, and when they died, her job was to gather their effects (and scrub their laptops for embarrassing personal stuff as well as official documents) and accompany the caskets to the airfield. She prayed alone over each casket.
Young—everyone called her “Tash”—had been born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the daughter of two troubled teenagers. Her father was a crack addict who moved furniture; he was murdered when she was eighteen. Her mother loved Tash desperately, but she had drug-related health problems as well. Tash was molested regularly for years by her mother’s second husband. She hid that somewhere deep inside, under a devastating facade of mouth and energy. She was an indifferent student with a foghorn Boston accent and a wild streak of blarney; she took shit from nobody and ran with a crowd so rough that the FBI was watching them for drug dealing. In her junior year, two federal agents stopped her as she was driving her boyfriend’s car and said, “It’s just a matter of time.”
Natasha was no dummy: she figured the feds were right. She was going to wind up dead or in jail; all her friends were. She needed an out. The summer before senior year, her cousin Tommie took refuge with her mom—her family was screwed up out to three or four degrees of separation; Tommie needed protection from an even worse mess than Natasha’s. “I’m getting out of here,” Tommie said. “I’m joining the military.”
“You are out of your mind,” Natasha replied.
Tommie had applied to all the different services, but when the recruiters began to call, she got cold feet. One day the Marine Corps guy called, and Natasha answered the phone. “Tommie’s not here,” she said. “I don’t know where she is.”
“How about you?”
“What about me? I’m too young. I’m still in high school.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“You’re old enough. You can sign up now—pick your specialty—and then join up after you graduate.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Give me five minutes and I’ll change your life,” he said. “I’ll be there at two thirty.”
The guy just wouldn’t take a no. “I’ll give you three minutes,” she said, knowing that she wasn’t even going to give him that. She slipped out of the house fifteen minutes before the recruiter was supposed to arrive the next day . . . but he was already there, waiting outside. That was her first taste of the Marines. And he looked seriously spiffy in his Charlies: a short-sleeved khaki uniform shirt with his Staff Sergeant stripes and dress-blue pants. She thought about the contrast between this guy and her friends: this guy was put together. She gave him more than five minutes. She lost track of time.
He tried to sell her on the benefits—education, health care, the chance to pick a specialty and learn a skill—but that wasn’t what got her. It was the you can be part of something really special. You can be part of something important. You’re going to have to work hard to win it; the Marines were a world-class, kick-ass physical and mental challenge. She was going to have to be tough. But, he said, he sensed something in her. “I believe in you and I know that you can do it.”
And that was it. As with Mike Pereira and countless others, this was the first time anyone had said the magic words. Why would anyone believe in her? She had never really been part of anything, unless you counted her family (and yes, she did love her poor mother and her stepsisters and stepbrothers, even though her mother was so out of it in those days that her youngest stepbrother got on the school bus in his pajamas every morning until the social workers came; Natasha wound up taking custody of him, but that was another exhausting story).
In boot camp, she learned something else. She was a very good Marine, but she was more than that: every night the recruits in her squad got together, sat in a circle, said prayers—I can do all things through Christ—and gave thanks. On occasion, and much to her surprise, her fellow Marines gave thanks, out loud, in public, to Recruit Young for helping get them through the day. She was a natural leader; she’d never known that either. Her peers voted her “Molly Marine,” the most admired recruit in the unit.
So Natasha absolutely loved being a Marine, even when her engineering specialty turned out to be bulk fuel: “Pumping gas and kicking ass.” That was a bummer. Worse, it put her in the bull’s-eye of a maniac in her unit who blasted into her room at the Cherry Point Marine Air Station in North Carolina, wearing a ski mask and orange shorts with white piping, and attacked her sexually with such a testosterone rush that she could not fight him off—she screamed for help and finally bit him in the chest. A week later, they found the guy—but a local girl claimed that she had bitten him, and he got off. Natasha filed that away with her stepfather. She wasn’t going to let one asshole ruin everything.
She rose through the ranks quickly, serving two tours in Iraq—the second one with the EOD unit and the caskets. Then she came home and spent her last three years as a Marine recruiter in Massachusetts and New Hampshire—and she had to admit, she was every bit as good as the guy who had recruited her. She was selling a product that she loved. But she was also careless one night with one of her fellow recruiters; that’s when she became pregnant.
After she gave birth, she was sick and overweight, and she was ragged by her superiors about it. She was subjected to humiliating public weigh-ins at the recruiting office. She worked out constantly, but it was no use. The weight just wasn’t coming off. She later learned that she had trouble processing glucose. She was paralyzed, and sometimes she was worse than that. She had weapons in the small new house she had bought in Lawrence, the one perpetually flying the Marine Corps flag. She knew how to use a gun; she’d think about it, but there was her son, Julian. She was determined to be a good mom. Still, her retirement from the Marines felt like exile; she was at home, but far, far from her real home. There was a constant ache; her energy was gone.
Tiffany Garcia heard about Natasha Young from a Mission Continues fellow named Julian Jaramillo, who said that she was his sister—not really, not genetically, but . . . really, they were emotional twins. They had become close in the Marines, stateside at Camp Lejeune; each needed a safe friend, Natasha especially, after she was raped. And if they really were alike, Tiffany thought, well then, that was something very good: Julian—everyone called him “J”—was a compelling mess at first, living alone in a tiny tent in a Florida campground, but he was strong in all the important ways. His fellowship with Habitat for Humanity had worked; he was a Harley mechanic now. “Tiffany, you gotta get my sister,” he said in the summer of 2011. “She’s not out yet, but she’s all fucked up.”
Tiffany called Tash and said that J had told her to check Tash out. “Not interested,” Tash said.
Tash called Julian, “What is this shit?”
“It saved my life,” he said. “You know where I was . . . Where are you now?”
“You drank the Kool-Aid,” she said. “Service? What do I need that shit for? I just served. I’m done with service.”
Tiffany called again. Natasha shut her down. Tiffany kept calling. She didn’t know why she was doing this; she just sensed something about Natasha—as a recruiter, she knew a potential recruit when she heard one on the other end of the phone . . . and this potential recruit was a recruiter herself; Tash knew all the tricks. It became a contest.
Natasha was on retirement leave, getting paid to do nothing—which she did with aplomb. She told friends that she had deployed to “Camp Couch, where I’m the commanding officer and my MOS is to stay on Camp Couch.” She did her best to take care of her son. During her postpartum illness, she’d gotten a service dog—Josh—who protected her in crowds, could actually turn on the bedroom light when she had nightmares, and reminded her when she had to take her medications; all together, that was more than enough family. She was okay.
She was released from the military on October 24, 2011—the same day her father had been murdered in 2000. She was back to her same old factory town, but she was—she knew this—different now. She had skills. She landed a job as a counselor at the local technical center, but she hated the kids. They weren’t well-off, but they were . . . entitled. How had that happened? Even after she taught them how to write résumés, they’d ask her to do it for them. They’d whine about not being able to get jobs. When she asked them where they’d looked, she got blank stares. She wanted to drill sergeant the lot of them, kick them in the butt, PT them until they puked.
Tiffany called again. “Did you get your DD214?”—her discharge papers.
“No,” Natasha lied.
Tiffany called Jaramillo, who said that Natasha had indeed gotten her 214. “She’s ducking you,” J said.
Tiffany called Natasha back and played her last card. “You’re fucking lying to me. If you don’t realize that you need my program, you don’t deserve my program. You’re not good enough for my program.” And then she hung up.
“Oh, shit,” Natasha thought. “That bitch just did it.” Tiffany had challenged her—she wasn’t good enough? “Okay,” she thought. “I’m gonna show you who can do what—and then I’m gonna kick your ass.”
She called Tiffany back. “Okay, I’m ready.”
“If you want to be in Alpha Class, you’re going to have to get moving,” Tiffany said, quietly satisfied. There were essays; there was an interview. Tiffany helped her through the essays. And Alpha Class? That implied that there were going to be others in the same boat with her. When Natasha thought about it, that didn’t seem bad at all.
A few weeks before Alpha Class convened, Tash learned that she had uterine cancer. She was told that it was curable, but it was cancer, the civilian equivalent of a million-dollar wound: she had a gold-plated excuse to remain on Camp Couch for the duration. But The Mission Continues paid cash money—a $6,000 stipend over six months—and she needed that. She decided to tough it out; she was going to have to do The Mission Continues and uterine cancer simultaneously.
Alpha Class—thirty-four strong—convened in a St. Louis hotel in late January 2012. Each was given TMC swag: a blue T-shirt with FELLOW written across the back, a blue polo shirt with TMC’s compass insignia and slogan “A Challenge, Not a Charity” embroidered over the heart, a Mission Continues plastic water bottle, power bars, other stuff. They met in one of those anonymous hotel meeting rooms, part of a larger ballroom; it could have been anywhere. But Natasha looked around and saw people who were very much like her: more women than in the standard-issue military, mostly from the enlisted ranks, and guys—Marines, some of them—with tattoos nearly as elaborate as her own. There was a fancy buffet chow line. There were cold drinks and snacks.
Spencer Kympton had been thinking about what he would say to Alpha Class ever since he’d heard the fellow at the St. Louis gala proudly talking about how he had to iron his Mission Continues polo shirt. To start, he showed Alpha a series of PowerPoint slides: who they were demographically, what branches of the military they’d served in, how many were officers and enlisted, how many were men and women. “Every one of you voluntarily signed up for the military,” he said. “That’s one bond you share.” Another bond was that each of them had volunteered for The Mission Continues. That meant they were ready to continue their service, “And we still need you. We believe you still have a lot to give. Look to the left of you, and to the right of you. This is your new unit. This is your new branch of service. So stand up and shake hands with all your new brothers and sisters in Alpha Class of The Mission Continues.”
There was a whoosh in the room, a massive exhale, an almost palpable sense of relief.
There was a guy at Natasha’s table who really stood out—older, scarily emaciated, an officer—Lieutenant Colonel Mark Weber. He wasn’t a fellow; he was there as an inspirational speaker. A year earlier, as he prepared for a staff job with General David Petraeus in Afghanistan, LTC Weber had gone for a physical and was told that a rapacious cancer was rifling through his innards. He was told he had six months to live.
Natasha’s cancer wasn’t so serious, allegedly; she would get a hysterectomy, and that would be it. She absolutely believed that, or tried to, most of the time. But here was this guy, an officer no less, who was on the clock—he didn’t know how many days he had left—and there he was, with them.
There was no pretense, no woe-is-me, no fake machismo, absolutely no bullshit when Mark Weber got up to speak. “They keep telling me to have positive thoughts,” he said, and laughed. “That’s nice, but there are days that are just knee-buckling. I have four children; it’s not hard to have positive thoughts about them. Positive thoughts are good, but they’re not as important as this: seeking perspective. I love it when people say, ‘Today was the worst day of my life. My boss yelled at me.’ ” He waited for the laughter to fill the room, then continued, “But the truth is, somebody always has it worse than you. The way to stop feeling sorry for yourself is to focus on your achievements, the things you accomplish every day. For me, sometimes it’s as simple as ‘Hey, I got out of bed today.’ ” In fact, Weber was still working for the Minnesota National Guard; indeed, he was thinking about becoming a Mission Continues fellow himself—he wanted to serve with Outward Bound.
Everything the guy said was real, Natasha thought. There was not a false note:
“It’s okay to take a knee every once in a while. There’s nothing wrong with being mad, frustrated, crying . . . Have your pity party, then get up and move on.
“Denial gets a bad rap . . . But it’s essential for me. I’m dying. According to the doctors, I should be dead. But I’m not going to stop living. People ask me all the time, ‘Why are you still doing this? Why are you going to St. Louis to talk to a bunch of veterans? Why don’t you spend more time with your family?’ And I say, ‘Because I can.’
“Every one of you has an excuse. I use mine all the time. Telemarketers call. I say, ‘Sorry, I’ve got terminal cancer.’ Click. But do you want to wake up in 2047 and say, ‘My whole life has been one big excuse’?”
When it was over Natasha hugged Colonel Weber and was shocked by how little there was left of him. But he was still so totally there. He’d given her everything she needed to get on with it.
Jake Wood was probably his therapist’s worst nightmare. He was too smart. He knew the post-traumatic stress drill backward and forward; he readily acknowledged what was happening to him. There were no sudden flashes of insight. There was no moment when the scales fell from his eyes. He’d had his moment of candor in the hotel room in Madison—and there were some things he would absolutely not concede.
He would never tolerate the idea that he wasn’t responsible for Clay’s death. He would not tolerate the idea that he would “get over it” or “put it behind him.” He hated when people said that. He knew he would live with it every day, forever.
But, gradually, as 2011 emptied into 2012, he was able to sand down the sharp edges of his pain, some of it. Clay was always there somewhere, a resident demon in his brain: Jake stopped going out on Team Rubicon deployments, but he and William worked like Marine Sergeants at building the organization from within. The work now wasn’t just about helping people suffering through natural disasters; it was, equally, about helping veterans to find a sense of purpose. A Team Rubicon office was opened finally, right next to LAX for easy egress; he and William were able to give themselves salaries: $30,000 per year.
As Jake gradually transformed Clay from guilt-millstone into his private motivation to make Team Rubicon stronger and better, he came to realize his relationship with Indra could be different, too. He now knew she was tough and she was steady, maybe tougher and steadier than he was. He knew that she had taken responsibility for him in a dark hour; responsibility wasn’t a one-way street. He knew that she was going to be there for him and that he needed her.
Almost exactly a year after his Monday Night Football icon act, Jake bought a ring. He carried it around uncertainly for two weeks. And then there came a night when he was in the office staring into his computer, and he said: “Fuck it. This is on.”
Indra was out at a concert with friends. He expected her home about nine or ten, but she didn’t arrive until midnight, by which time he had drunk an entire nervous bottle of wine. He leaped up and then kneeled down and produced the ring . . . and all of a sudden his mouth could not work. He was there, on one knee, shaky, unable to say the words.
She said yes.
Eric Greitens had wrestled with political ambition for most of his life. He sensed it was radioactive, to be handled very carefully. In his Duke senior thesis, On Courage, he relegated the subject to an “important” footnote; indeed, it was a very long and curious footnote. In it, he attempted to tease out an ethical path between ambition and honor. It wasn’t easy. He made a distinction between the need for popularity—the cheesiness at the heart of politics—and esteem. “To desire esteem,” he wrote, “is not always an expression of pride . . . Rather, it often reflects a hope both that one will act correctly and a faith that others will eventually come to recognize right action.”
Twenty years had passed since Greitens had written that. His “right actions” were manifest. The Mission Continues was acclaimed as something new and entirely admirable. But could you run a campaign for Governor of Missouri—as always, Eric’s ambitions were not modest—based on biography and values, rather than platitudes and reflexive attacks? He wanted to run a campaign that would look and sound different. His campaign events would be service projects, to the extent that was possible. He would show people how he would behave in office, not just tell them.
Was that even vaguely possible? He needed time and space to think it through.
At The Mission Continues board meeting in the summer of 2012, Eric tried to float the idea of a three-month leave at the end of the year, after which he would become a volunteer, unpaid CEO, turning over the day-to-day leadership to Spencer Kympton.
No way, said the board. It was their first year of pushing large numbers of fellows through the system. The big funders had signed on with the assumption that they were buying Eric. Practically no one—except Eric—was confident that the organization could survive without him.
The model did need some fine-tuning. He and the staff were finding that a great many of the fellows didn’t want to go back to Civilian World. They simply wanted to work, and hang around, with other veterans. That feeling actually seemed to intensify as The Mission Continues fellowship was transformed into a group experience. Nearly 30 percent of the 2012 and 2013 fellows chose to work for veterans’ service organizations—and that number would have been much higher if TMC’s recruiting staff hadn’t pushed hard to nudge the prospective fellows into less parochial forms of community service.
It was easy to understand the tribal pull. There were 115 members of Bravo Class in 2012, and the emotion—the relief—when they gathered together in San Diego for their orientation in May was breathtaking. How could you say no to a blind Army officer who wanted to work with blind veterans? And what about those who wanted to train service dogs to provide comfort for their fellow veterans? And those who wanted to do equine therapy for veterans . . . and those who wanted to work with Student Veterans of America? Eric was prepared to make concessions: some of the Bravo Class fellows were victims of severe traumatic brain injuries who simply needed to be around others who understood the twitch and jitter of their scrambled sensibilities. Even some of the non-wounded veterans, whom The Mission Continues started to accept in 2012, just wanted to hang with their brothers and sisters.
There was no way to question the sheer human relief that the members of Bravo Class provided for one another. But Eric wanted more. He still wanted his fellows to be leaders; he wanted his generation of veterans to be remembered for what they brought to civilian life—leadership skills, moral rigor, community feeling that had atrophied in the sixty-year blaze of American affluence. It was an old-fashioned vision, and yet, he believed that people—civilians, too—were looking for a larger sense of purpose. His fellows needed to be the exemplar. He wanted civilians to look at his fellows and say, “We need to be more like them.”
The fellows had been transformed into a community with the addition of orientation classes in 2012. But there was still something missing. Each individual fellow needed to be stronger when he or she rejoined civilian society. Eric decided that his last major contribution to the substance of the fellowship program would be a personal development curriculum that would directly address their feelings of fear and isolation, the lack of confidence that so many of them suffered when they wandered out their front door and tried to deal with the vast, careless fog of the nonmilitary world. He had done this individually with Mike Pereira and others; now he needed to figure out how to teach it on a larger scale.
For the next six months, Eric led a small team of colleagues and worked out the details of the program. There would be six discrete monthly challenges. Each would come with required reading and a personal essay. The lessons would start in the simplest possible way, by establishing three “smart”—that is, plausible—goals for their fellowship. And from the outset, they would deal with their fears. The first month’s reading was Eric’s “Hell Week” chapter from The Heart and the Fist. The lesson was that he had overcome his fear of washing out by focusing on his men, rather than himself. The fellows would be asked to be specific, in writing, about their own fears. In the second month, the fellows would be taught how to spot allies and build friendships and business relationships—their first halting steps away from Camp Couch.
In the third month, they would be asked to identify and write about a personal role model. What made that person admirable? What qualities did they want to emulate? In the fourth month, they would assess their own strengths and weaknesses and locate their “driving force,” the thing they were most passionate about. In the fifth month, they would decide what their mission in life would be. And then, at the end of the program, they would evaluate the impact their fellowship had had on them.
None of this was new, of course. It was the sort of material that had populated self-help books since Dale Carnegie. But Eric had calibrated it, synthesized it from a bunch of different sources, made it meal-sized and military for his fellows—challenging but not impossible. He unveiled it to the staff in December 2012 and told each of them to complete the curriculum themselves in time for Alpha Class. He wanted Natasha Young—Natasha, specifically, because of her utter working-class skepticism about everything tutorial—to be able to stand up in front of Alpha Class and say, “I did this thing—yeah, even the essays—and if I can do it, you can.”