Natasha Young came flying out of Alpha Class orientation in January 2012, but it was a false high. She was still facing a hysterectomy. The temptation was to retreat to Camp Couch and lowball her Mission Continues fellowship—nobody would knock her if, in this mess, she put in twelve rather than twenty hours a week at the Veterans Northeast Outreach Center. She spoke on the phone to Mark Weber almost every day, especially the bad days—somehow he was hanging on, month after month, dying without diminishing. She wasn’t dying; the surgery in March was a “success”—if the loss of a womb could ever be considered successful. How could she be any less vital than Weber was? He refused to give her advice or tell her what to do. “Let me just give you my perspective,” he’d say. As her fellowship was drawing to a close, she heard that The Mission Continues was hiring recruiters.
She called Tiffany Garcia. “Bitch,” she said. “Why don’t you hire me?”
She was put in charge of recruiting in the northeast region for The Mission Continues.
Natasha was asked to tell her story at the Bravo Class 2012 orientation in San Diego, not long after her hysterectomy. She wasn’t at her strongest, but there she was—and since when had anything ever stopped her from talking? She introduced the term “Camp Couch” into TMC’s lexicon. She had them laughing and cheering, especially the Marines, whom she played to shamelessly.
After the speech, she realized that she was bleeding—not badly, but leaking a little—from her wound. Tiffany Garcia found some gauze and butterfly bandages and helped put Natasha back together.
Both Tash and Tiffany—inseparable now, even if the bond most days was only electronic—kept talking to Mark Weber, almost every day. He said that he really wanted to become a full-fledged Mission Continues fellow before he died. He wanted to do his fellowship with Outward Bound, but there was a problem: he wasn’t a veteran yet. He was still on active duty—desk duty—with the Minnesota National Guard. It was important for him to stay “active” as long as he could. He intended to die active. TMC fellowships were available only to veterans, which was ridiculous in this case. When Natasha raised this point with Tiffany and the others, there was no dispute. Weber became a fellow, part of Alpha Class 2013, but he struggled to complete his mission with Outward Bound. He was now, obviously, getting weaker. The fellowship, he said, was keeping him alive. He was desperate to finish it before he died.
In May 2013, Eric Greitens asked to be relieved of his day-to-day duties once again at The Mission Continues board meeting. Again he asked for a three-month leave of absence, starting in January 2014; he would return as a symbolic CEO, while he decided what he was going to do next—which everyone assumed would be a career in politics.
This time, the board said yes.
The board meeting had been timed to coincide with Bravo Class orientation, which would be held that weekend at a hotel in Brooklyn. Natasha Young would be the master of ceremonies. She was a controversial choice. “I don’t want you dropping any f-bombs,” her boss, Meredith Knopp, warned her. And so it was an expurgated Tash who opened the proceedings. “Well,” she began, staring out at the seventy-three new fellows, spiffy in their royal blue T-shirts, “don’t you all just look beautiful!”
She told them about her escape from Camp Couch. She did Spencer’s bit: “Look to the left of you, look to the right of you: this is your new unit!” Eventually she introduced Eric, not knowing that he had just arranged his departure from The Mission Continues. “He saw us, our generation, he saw us for our possibilities, and he challenged us.”
Eric talked about the thousands of veterans who woke up this morning and would spend all day without speaking to another human being. “They’re going to go to bed tonight, after having spent the day watching TV, playing video games, doubting whether or not they were still needed. What they all need is to wake up one day and see what their fellow veterans are capable of. What this country needs is to look at this generation of veterans and to see what we are capable of.”
The Mission Continues would never have a triumph equivalent to Team Rubicon’s Haiti mission or Hurricane Sandy cleanup. Its victories would be more subtle and enduring. In the end, Eric realized, the best, most realistic model was Tim Smith, his first St. Louis recruit, who just never stopped growing.
Tim had gone on to graduate from Washington University with a Master’s of Social Work degree. One of his first classes had been Urban Economic Development, and during a lecture about employment possibilities in downtown areas, Tim wrote down the word “cleaning.” He had met more than a few veterans at the VA who went to school during the day but were looking for work at night—like his old job at the post office. He went to his father and asked, “What if we started a company where we had veterans doing cleaning work in offices at night?”
His dad not only thought it was a good idea, he also had a potential customer—a Vietnam veteran who had a real estate brokerage that needed cleaning. Tim and his dad did the job themselves, and Patriot Commercial Cleaning was born. Over time, Tim recruited veterans as nighttime janitors and gradually accumulated enough customers that he could leave his job at the VA and become the full-time president of the company.
He even came up with a slogan: “We Do Corners.”
And then there was Mike Pereira, who continued his fierce, bare-knuckle fight to complete his intellectual journey. He was obsessed by his insufficiencies. He was wrestling with a joint anthropology and psychology major at Washington University. He knew exactly what he wanted now: a PhD in psychology. He had come up with an idea for his thesis: post-traumatic growth. It was the opposite of what everyone seemed to think about his fellow veterans. The experience of combat was the perfect launching pad for the hero’s journey toward wisdom. That was what The Mission Continues was all about. Knowledge through suffering, right?
He was certainly suffering. He knew that he had to settle things with his father to have any pretense of being a plausible adult. He was beginning to realize that the teenage altercations with Doc were partly his fault—he was trying to piss his dad off, trying to get him to blow up, knowing that his mom would jump in on his side, which would cause Doc to go truly berserk. (He also began to understand that he had come by his own volcanic tendencies genetically.)
A childhood memory tormented Mike. He was twelve. His dad packed the family into the truck and took them to southern California, where Mike’s grandfather—the monstrous grandfather who had abandoned Doc and his mother, who had beaten Doc mercilessly—was dying of cancer. And it was astonishing, embarrassing: Doc threw himself on his father’s expiring body, wailing and sobbing, snot flying. Mike didn’t want his final scene with Doc to look anything like that.
He had tried to reconcile with Doc several times in the past—as recently as 2012. The story was always the same. He’d go out to Bellingham, to the house in the country that his parents had been living in for the past five years. He’d work some chores with his dad—that was how they got on. No small talk, no shooting hoops or tossing a football. They might work on a car together—as always, Doc had a garage full of wrecks—or mow the property or repair a fence.
It had been a fence that last time. But within a half hour, they were screaming at each other. Mike wanted to tell his dad about the difficult patch he was going through; he and his wife, Georgia, had grown past each other. They were splitting. It didn’t seem as if Doc was listening to Mike’s story at all. He was working on the fence. And Mike blew up. Doc started to walk away, and Mike followed him into the house, the two of them really getting at it now, Mike’s mother trying to stop Doc—a perfect re-creation of Mike’s youth, as if nothing had changed, as if he hadn’t been to war, as if he wasn’t the first person in the family to go to college. He slammed the door, spun his rental car out of the drive, and was gone without saying good-bye.
A year passed.
Mike still couldn’t get the image of Doc wailing over his near-dead father out of his mind. One day in therapy, Mike was talking about the chopper crash in Iraq—and all of a sudden he was back, terrified, in the San Francisco earthquake, his dad swooping him up, saving his life like Superman.
He called Doc again, and a funny thing happened: they just talked. Doc actually asked a few questions about Mike’s life. They talked about the old house—the wreck-yard—which Doc still owned and was renting out. He was thinking about selling it, but there was work to be done to get it ready for sale.
Mike began calling Doc more regularly; Doc even called him a few times. But it wasn’t enough. A grand gesture was needed. “Hey, Dad, I was thinking,” he said to Doc, “maybe I should come home on spring break and help you fix up the old place so you can sell it.”
“Really?” Doc asked. “How long is spring break?”
“Ten days.” Mike gulped. Ten days without a blowup would be a new world record.
“That would be great,” Doc said. “That would be huge.”
So they worked. Mike looked at his father, still an imposing man at the age of sixty-two, fit and trim, with a long gray ponytail. They didn’t talk about anything but work when they were working. They did talk some about the past when they were done working. It wasn’t easy. Doc was not willing to give an inch: he had always been right. Mike had been an angry kid. He was glad Mike had grown up and calmed down and started to respect his father. Mike bit his tongue a lot that week.
As the days passed, Doc loosened up and began to treat Mike as he would any construction worker. He’d yell at him angrily, when Mike wasn’t doing the job to Doc’s specifications. Mike tried to roll with it, but one day he couldn’t take it anymore. “Could you just stop yelling at me?” Mike screamed. “I’m trying to help.”
Doc returned the scream: “You’re doing it wrong!”
Mike dropped his tools and walked away, sat down on the back steps of the old house, and began to cry. This is impossible, he thought. This will never work. He had tried so hard, conceded so much—he had stopped caring, for the first time in his life, whether or not he won the argument. He just wanted peace. He was absolutely convinced that if he didn’t settle things with Doc, he wouldn’t fully experience the burst of creativity and purpose that came from fighting his way past post-traumatic stress to post-traumatic growth. His whole theory was on the line.
He saw Doc ambling over. Uh-oh. But the body language wasn’t aggressive. His father sat down next to him on the steps and threw an arm around his son’s shoulder. “Sometimes I just lose track of the sound of my voice,” Doc said. “I wasn’t meaning to be harsh. From now on, if it’s getting hot between us, maybe we just say, ‘Reset. Let’s take it down a notch,’ okay?”
“Okay,” Mike said.
“You know I love you, son,” Doc said. “And I’m grateful you came out here to help with this work.”
It would never be easy with Doc, but for the third time in his life, Mike Pereira felt that he had been recruited into heaven.
On the afternoon of May 9, 2013, at Ground Zero, where the story of their generation’s service began, Natasha Young and Tiffany Garcia stood arm in arm as Bravo Class took its oath of service:
We are fellows of The Mission Continues. As fellows, our personal service did not end with our military service, but has only just begun . . .
Scanning the faces of the young men and women they had recruited, Natasha was overwhelmed. She had done this; she had helped to build this class. She had spent hundreds of hours on the phone, stalking recruits as Tiffany had stalked her. She had learned their stories. She and Tiffany had a stake in them now; they were rooting hard for these kids, their brothers and sisters. Tears formed. Soon, she and Tiffany were bawling joyously.
Ground Zero was busy that day, as it is most Saturdays. The sun was setting, and new leaves were silvering in the just-planted trees. The massive, descending fountains, carved from the footprint of the towers, descending so far that the bottom was hard to see, splashed and sent a fine mist flying. Only a few of the tourists, boggled by the size and sanctity of the place, noticed the phalanx of seventy-three young people in their blue T-shirts with the compass and the slogan, “A Challenge, Not a Charity,” standing in front of the North Tower abyss, reciting an oath. Some turned their heads when the oath ended with a roar and tears and hugging. A few asked, “What is this all about? Who are those people?”
And when asked, the fellows stopped and politely, respectfully—as if addressing a superior officer—explained their new mission to the civilians. They did so articulately, proudly. You could see the civilians squaring themselves up, standing taller to shake the hands of these young men and women. Slowly the crowd dispersed, and the blue shirts went off in groups of two and three, often with arms draped over one another, away from a scene of unimaginable horror and into the lifeblood of the nation.
Mark Weber kept his spirit to the end, but he didn’t live to graduate from The Mission Continues with his class. He passed away and was powerfully mourned on June 13, 2013.
Soon after his death, Natasha and Tiffany got tattoos on their wrists. Tiffany’s right wrist said WEBER’S and Natasha’s right wrist said PERSPECTIVES. Both Tash and Tiffany eventually left The Mission Continues to work for other veterans’ organizations—but they would often look at their wrists, often when they were feeling down, and remember Weber’s spirit in the face of the worst hand that God could deal. From time to time, strangers would ask Natasha what the tattoo was all about.