Team Rubicon had actually been preparing for something like Hurricane Sandy in the months before the big storm hit. Local TR volunteers, led by East Coast coordinator Matt Pelak, had been part of the city of New York’s emergency planning operations for months. Team Rubicon had an official disaster relief assignment if anything terrible happened: it would provide the personnel to send “Jump Teams” into homeless shelters all over the city, do an assessment, and call for whatever help was needed.
But no one had planned for a storm as monstrous as Sandy, which hit New York harbor on the evening of October 29, 2012. The TR jump teams headed out to survey the shelters, but the enormity of the destruction beggared the city’s ability to respond. There was so much more to do. Team Rubicon put out a national call for volunteers. Pelak had been working with the city’s Office of Emergency Management, and now he offered to coordinate the relief efforts in Rockaway Beach, the barrier island in Queens that had taken the brunt of the storm. Dozens, then hundreds of TR volunteers started to arrive in New York from all over the country; JetBlue provided the plane tickets. A rock-climbing emporium called Brooklyn Boulders offered its facilities as a barracks for the 350 Team Rubicon volunteers who eventually showed up; the Home Depot stores provided a steady supply of equipment from shovels and gloves to earthmovers. James and Josh Eisenberg, Team Rubicon stalwarts who were local property owners, provided a Forward Operating Base (FOB) in a parking lot at Beach 124th Street in Rockaway Beach, the low-slung homeland of a fair number of New York’s police and, especially, firefighters—many of whom were veterans, usually noncommissioned officers like the Team Rubicon volunteers. It was the oddest of New York neighborhoods: middle-class and working-class, almost suburban, planted on a gorgeous beach. It was an hour from downtown by subway. The A train actually ran all the way out there.
Team Rubicon became the spine of the official response in the Rockaways. Palantir, a tech company, offered the team the use of smartphone-like gizmos that TR volunteers could work to report specific house-to-house damage to FEMA and to request demolitions or repairs. Various relief organizations, including the city itself, sent civilian volunteers to the Team Rubicon Beach 124th Street FOB to be organized and deployed. For the next three weeks, 350 Team Rubicon volunteers led thousands of civilians—the estimate was ten thousand—in the cleanup. Word of the effort spread quickly; there were days when more civilians than were needed showed up at the FOB. It was, without question, the largest and most efficient Team Rubicon mission yet.
Sandy was Jake Wood’s first deployment in more than a year. His role was different now; he wasn’t needed on the front lines; he, McNulty, Pelak, and others spent their days making executive decisions, smoothing out logistical snafus, coordinating with the city and the federal governments. It wasn’t the hands-on excitement of Haiti, but there was a certain satisfaction to watching the giant operation unfold. On the local evening news most nights, there were scenes of people wearing Team Rubicon T-shirts (usually over long-sleeved sweatshirts—it was cold and damp on the beach in November) cleaning out flooded basements and hauling trash, and testimonials from the residents to the order and good cheer that the Team Rubicon veterans had brought to their neighborhood.
There was a general exultation among the volunteers; work teams became units; units became friends for life. Vietnam veterans were joining the effort in numbers now, welcomed by the Iraq and Afghanistan vets. The widows of veterans were joining up: Clay Hunt’s ex-wife, Robin Becker, flew in from California and was working in the Team Rubicon office. The parents of those who’d been killed and wounded in Fallujah and Helmand were out working in the teams.
Michael Washington, Sr.—whose son, Mike Washington, Jr., was the squad leader who had taken Jake’s place and been killed by an IED in Afghanistan—was part of a Team Rubicon unit operating in Union Beach, New Jersey. Mike Sr. was an imposing, authoritative presence, a classic Master Sergeant whose rank became his name: everyone called him “Top.” He took command of the toughest jobs with effortless authority and did his work while chewing on a rather complicated pipe. He was a Marine veteran of the first Gulf War and a Seattle firefighter. He’d been a bit lost, suffering since the death of his son—but in Union Beach, Top was working with people Mike Jr.’s age, young men and women who were looking to him for leadership. One day, resting on the back fender of an ambulance in the cool sea breeze, he found himself talking to a Marine named Ryan Ribinskas who had served with Mike Jr. “You’re Sergeant Washington’s dad?”
“Yes,” Top said, misting up a little.
“He was a great Marine.”
They hugged, and later Top realized that a portion of the weight he’d been carrying had lifted; he felt closer to his son than at any time in the past few years. If he’d lived, Top was sure, Mike Jr. would have been out there with his buddies. Mike Jr. would have been one of Jake’s first calls. There was a deep satisfaction—deeper even than the satisfactions of saving lives and helping people as a firefighter—to this work. A few days later, Top went to Brooklyn to find Jake. He needed to tell him personally. “Jake, thank you for this,” he said. “I’m in, all the way. You need me to go anywhere, do anything, I’m there.”
“Well, that’s great, Top,” Jake said. “We need you.”
There was general acclaim for Team Rubicon after Sandy. Awards were won. Major funders came on board; a continuing partnership with Palantir was established. President Barack Obama invited Jake, William, Matt Pelak, and several of the other team leaders to the Oval Office to thank them for their work. And yet . . .
A few months after Sandy, Jake was on a panel with Barbara Van Dahlen, a psychologist who had started Give an Hour, an organization of six thousand mental health professionals, each of whom agreed to give an hour of counseling to an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran each week.
Afterward, Jake and Van Dahlen spent some time talking, and he could tell that she was not one of those dorky, shrinky sorts—she spoke English, she laughed easily, and she talked sense. She said she didn’t like using the “disorder” part of post-traumatic stress disorder. She called it “post-traumatic stress.” “It’s a rational reaction to what you saw and did over there,” she told him. “If you treat it correctly, it can be a temporary effect. But you can’t just macho your way through it.” She was excited about what Team Rubicon was doing, but she was wary. “In some ways, the greatest adjustment you guys have to make when you come home is being alone,” she told Jake, who knew it all too well. “It’s tough psychologically to leave a tight, close-knit society with intense shared values and traditions.” Team Rubicon addressed that, she said, “but what happens to these kids when they come down from the high of Hurricane Sandy and they’re back home, all alone again?”
Jake knew the answer to that: some of them crashed. In fact, they—actually, it was mostly McNulty—had been dealing with the psychological aftermath of Sandy for months. There were those, the natural leaders like Top Washington, who had been made stronger by the experience; but there were others, the quieter ones, the kids who had happily become grunts again, who had become re-addicted to being part of something with a military swagger. They were beginning to contact the Team Rubicon offices in El Segundo, lost and terrified. McNulty kept his cell phone on the pillow next to him every night, and about once a week, it rang. There were times Will would stay up all night, talking to someone with a gun to his head; it was frazzling McNulty, freaking him out. He realized he needed to go for help himself.
“Why don’t we see if we can help each other here?” Barbara Van Dahlen asked Jake.
“Absolutely,” Jake said. “That’s a terrific idea.”
In the spring of 2013, Team Rubicon was growing rapidly, adding staff, including Eric Greitens’s old friend Ken Harbaugh, who had helped to found The Mission Continues. Success piled upon success, but Jake—having been through the ordeal himself—was nagged by the problem that wasn’t being addressed. The conversation with Van Dahlen had been one of those great, let’s do it and then nothing happens sort of things. He and William squabbled about a lot, but not this: they were both terrified that someone—one of the anonymous ones, one of those they’d smiled at and hugged and slapped on the back in Rockaway Beach—would be their next Clay Hunt.
It turned out to be Neil Landsberg, a brilliant guy, a special operator who was close to Matt Pelak. Landsberg had wrapped himself in a carpet in his parents’ basement, in order to prevent a mess, and shot himself. A few weeks later, on Team Rubicon’s deployment to Moore, Oklahoma, after the fierce tornadoes there in late May 2013, McNulty noticed that the evening debriefs were pretty emotional—a Sergeant named Chris Dominski talked for the first time about the twelve men he had lost in Baghdad, he named them, he named their wives, he named their children. He had tried suicide twice before. “But I guess I wasn’t very good at it. Thank you—Team Rubicon—for saving my life,” he said.
Which was a frightening responsibility. What would happen when Sergeant Dominski went home to upstate New York and was back, all alone, on Camp Couch?
On the morning of Memorial Day, beneath a scuddy mix of sun and clouds in Moore, Oklahoma, they raised the flag to half-mast above their Forward Operating Base in the Home Depot parking lot. Top Washington read aloud the Gettysburg Address: “That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
And then he read a list of those lost, embedded among which were . . .
Blake Howey
Nathan Windsor
Neil Landsberg
Michael Washington, Jr.
McNulty came home from Moore worried. He and Jake talked to Barbara Van Dahlen about it and agreed to cement their alliance. In August 2013, Van Dahlen asked a fifty-two-year-old psychiatric social worker named Dane Frost if he’d be willing to join Team Rubicon as a full-time staff therapist. Frost had an easy manner and familiarity with the military: his wife was an Army Major, a Behavioral Health Officer who had deployed to Afghanistan twice with the 101st Airborne. They had lived on Fort Campbell and other Army bases back home; Frost had done some work for the Army. He was part of the culture—and so he knew that grunts saw the shrinks as POGy dweebs. His challenge would be to overcome that.
He loved Team Rubicon from the start. The dress code at the El Segundo office was T-shirts, board shorts, flip-flops, and baseball caps turned backward; Frost could do that. He was also good for a beer and a bourbon most nights with Jake and Will. And, sure enough, about once a week there would be a crisis—someone desperate on the phone or pitched up in the offices, and Frost would take charge, talking them down, eventually referring them to a Give an Hour therapist in their hometown. He made no structural suggestions at first; he just watched and listened and did what he was told. He defused the crises without drawing attention to himself; he was humble about his work.
On November 8, 2013—a year and a week after Hurricane Sandy—the strongest typhoon in Asian history, with sustained winds of up to 195 miles an hour, swamped the central Philippine Islands, killing more than 6,200 people and devastating countless others. Team Rubicon immediately sent a fifteen-person Alpha Team to scout the area and prepared two twenty-five-member medical teams to follow. Jake led an executive group that would organize the relief effort from Manila; a factory building there had been donated for Team Rubicon’s headquarters. “You want to come?” Jake asked Dane Frost. “We may need you out there.”
Frost, by now, had a theory of the case: The best way to be Team Rubicon’s official shrink was to not act like a shrink. And so, on his first real deployment, he acted like a grunt. He helped lift and sort supplies. He did errands. He would go to the airfield to pick up or drop off this or that; he would go to downtown Manila; he would go to Starbucks and bring back coffee for the team. And still, about once a week, he’d have a crisis back in the States, which he’d manage from Manila with the help of a Give an Hour therapist who had located herself temporarily in the Team Rubicon Los Angeles office.
Manila was quiet. The devastation was far to the south, in Tacloban, and most of the headquarters work was, as always, logistics. Jake—and William, from Los Angeles—tried to get USAID, which was managing the flights into the disaster area, to allow the Team Rubicon medical personnel on the planes. There were constant trips to the airfield, endless frustration dealing with the USAID bureaucrats. There was a half-empty plane ready to fly to Tacloban, and USAID wasn’t allowing Team Rubicon aboard.
“When do you stop banging your head against the wall?” Frost asked Jake. “When do we go to Plan B?”
Jake just smiled. There was a Marine Sergeant in charge of the flight manifest. At the last minute, the medical team was surreptitiously ushered on board.
Frost saw the disaster area only briefly, in the last days of his two weeks on the ground in the Philippines. His real challenge came in Manila, when the Alpha Team returned from Tacloban after an emotionally intense ten days in the field. They had seen hundreds of dead bodies; they had treated hundreds of survivors; they had buried Americans who had died in the storm in shallow graves marked for retrieval. They would find children, six and seven at a time, dead in houses that had been crushed by the winds. The experience had been overwhelming, and Frost sensed a real tension in Alpha Team as it gathered for a debrief with Jake and other TR leaders in a weirdly pleasant spot under a gazebo on the grounds of the airport hotel.
These were people Frost didn’t know. They were Team Rubicon’s elite. The team leaders were Matt Pelak and JC McGreehan—both of whom had been close to Neil Landsberg—and they seemed just barely able to control their anger as they described the myriad of problems they’d had on the deployment; Frost watched their men, who seemed pretty angry, too. And then Ken Harbaugh did exactly what Frost did not want anyone to do. He said, “Hey, guys, this is Dane Frost. He’s our new mental health guy. Dane, why don’t you say a few words . . .”
Frost tried to make it as brief and as far away from tell-me-how-you-feel as possible. “Look,” he began, “I’m the newbie here, but if you want to . . .”
“We don’t have time for that,” Matt Pelak interrupted. His team needed time to decompress, clean up, and have a couple beers before they started to hash out a very difficult mission.
“ . . . talk about anything, either here or back home, I can . . .”
“We need to pack up—and go,” Pelak said. And they went to their hotel rooms, leaving Frost standing there, mouth agape, with Jake, Ken Harbaugh, and Vince Moffitt, the operations specialist. “I think,” Frost said, “there’s a fair amount of anger there that we’re going to have to deal with.”
“It’s always like that after a tough deployment,” Moffitt said.
“No, I think Dane’s right,” Jake jumped in. Matt Pelak, normally a total rock, seemed to be seething. Jake needed to get up with Matt and McGreehan about it; it probably wasn’t a coincidence, he realized, that they were having problems six months after Neil Landsberg had died.
In the next few months, quietly, and for the first time, Jake sat down with Pelak and McGreehan and told them how much of a mess he’d been after Clay’s suicide and how the shit had really hit the fan after six months. He was absolutely candid—a straight Jake infusion—without being gooey. He’d been there. He’d been desperate. He’d felt useless. He understood how overwhelming the Philippine experience, on top of Landsberg’s suicide, must have been. But he knew them. They’d get through it. Oh, and by the way, Dane Frost was a good guy. “You might want to get to know him better.”
In the spring of 2014, Give an Hour held its annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The audience was mostly composed of mental health professionals, frustrated by the difficulties they had dealing with veterans. One of the first speakers was Jake Wood, who began simply, “My name is Jake Wood. I’m the cofounder of Team Rubicon . . . and I’ve been helped by counseling.”