Even more fulfilling, I became a useful part of a team that I liked. My manager, a young Englishwoman named Hannah Brooks with a varsity-level cricket career at Oxford under her belt, took good care of our team—checking on how we were doing and trying to protect our weekends from unnecessary encroachments of work—and I wanted to do a good job for her. Jeff came in every week or so to check on progress, and I felt motivated by the task of presenting him and Hannah with interesting results that he could share with the senior leadership of the client.
The problem grew ever more complex as we were asked to analyze the data more and more deeply. As the deadline for implementing the price cuts loomed, pressure grew—and so did the hours. Soon we were working sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week. At one point, a glitch in a computer pricing tool threatened to give every item the wrong UPC code by one digit, meaning the system could give dog food the price for olive oil, or price a snow shovel as a box of cereal. Everyone involved in the project had to do nothing else for days as we raced to manually correct the problem before the deadline for a round of price changes. One night I stopped work at four in the morning, only to toss and turn in my hotel bed, dreaming in spreadsheets. Friends became Excel formulas, fears were expressed as charts in PowerPoint.
Occasionally, I had worked that hard on a campaign or on my studies, but it felt strange to put in those kinds of hours not for a cause but for a client. I wanted to do a good job for my team, my firm, and my client—but this wasn’t life-or-death stuff. And so it may have been inevitable that one afternoon, as I set Bertha to sleep mode to go out to the hallway for a cup of coffee, I realized with overwhelming clarity the reason this could not be a career for very long: I didn’t care.
For purpose-driven people, this is the conundrum of client-service work: to perform at your best, you must learn how to care about something because you are hired to do so. For some, this is not a problem at all. A great lawyer or consultant can identify so closely with the client, or so strongly desire to be good at the job, or be so well compensated, that her purposes and interests and those of the client become one. But for others, work can only be meaningful if its fundamental purpose is in things that would matter even if no one would pay you to care about them. No matter how much I liked my clients and my colleagues, delivering for them could not furnish that deep level of purpose that I craved.
Once I understood this, I knew it was a matter of time before I had to find another career. I did find ways within the Firm to work more on issues that I considered intrinsically important, like energy efficiency research to help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and war-zone economic development work to help grow private sector employment in Iraq and Afghanistan. But every few months the project and client changed, through the natural rhythm of the consulting business, and then it was time to study and care about something and someone new. The churn, which at first had been stimulating, now made me feel unmoored.
Not that I had ever truly expected management consulting to become my life’s calling. I was in it for the education, and McKinsey had delivered on its promise as a place to learn—about industry, about project management, and about myself. Now it was time to seek work that linked whatever skills I had gained to the things that mattered most. Meanwhile, even before resolving what would come after life at the Firm, I began looking for ways to use personal time for causes I cared about, such as volunteering on campaigns. I also began researching military service, especially the possibility of being a reserve officer, which meant I could serve without necessarily making it a career. Unexpectedly, it was a campaign trip to Iowa that shifted my attitude on military service from curiosity to reality.
4
The Volunteers
“You boys are not dressed to be out in this cold,” was how Farmer Daughton introduced himself as he stepped out of his truck and looked the three of us over.1
It was nearing midnight, and he did not appear to be in a very good mood, but we were as glad to see him as if he had been a long-lost friend. We had tried everything to get our little rental car out of the snow—pushing, pulling, rocking, revving. A clipboard from the back seat was used as a shovel, pick, and ramp, to no effect, until we finally gave up and decided to trudge toward the only light we could see, a farmhouse maybe a half mile away. So much for the shortcut.
The homeowner, an elderly lady in a nightgown, did not meet us with a smile and did not invite us in. Not that we were complaining—we felt pretty lucky that she hadn’t greeted us with a shotgun, three twenty-something men ringing her doorbell in the middle of the freezing January night. After we explained ourselves, she went to fetch a cordless phone and returned to the door, eyeing us as she reported to her son, “There’s three fellas here say their car got stuck in the snow.”
She listened for a minute, then looked at us and said, “He wants to know who you are.”
I explained that we were campaign volunteers, not from around here, just trying to take a shortcut, and couldn’t get our car unstuck. She studied us silently and then spoke back into the phone with her revised assessment: “It’s three campaign fellas say they’re stuck in the snow.” She listened for a moment and hung up. He was on his way; we could wait outside.
So we were apprehensive but happy to see Farmer Daughton rumble up in his pickup truck and drive us back to the car. He didn’t say much, other than that the temperature on the thermometer at his house read exactly zero and that we really should have had better gear for the cold weather. The Carhartt-type coveralls he was wearing seemed to do the trick for him; we did have winter coats on, but it wasn’t much against the deep freeze. It was the kind of cold where you feel the hairs in your nostrils start to stand on end, the kind of cold where after ten minutes or so you don’t feel cold at all, but just kind of woozy and weak-headed.
After a short drive we pulled up alongside our ditched car, its hazard lights still blinking, making me think of a half-sunken ship. He produced a towing chain and stood holding it for a moment; we weren’t sure what was supposed to happen next. To clarify things, he asked a rhetorical question. “One of you boys gonna hook this up to your car, or am I going to get down on my hands and knees and do it for you?” Message received, we quickly got on all fours, racing to try to figure out how to attach it to our vehicle before he changed his mind about helping us at all.
I’d like to think that we won Farmer Daughton over, or at least that we parted on fairly good terms once the car was safely back on the main road, which is to say one that was actually paved, somewhere in the general vicinity of the town of Murray, Iowa. We thanked him profusely, even tried to pay him, but he would have none of that, and before leaving he had warmed up to the point that his grudging curiosity moved him to ask a question: Who we were campaigning for, anyway?
I think we were all dreading that question. This was as rural and white as any county in the Midwest: not Democratic territory in general, and if it was going to favor any Democrat at all, it would be John Edwards of North Carolina. Still, he had asked, and we weren’t about to lie. After a moment studying our shoes, one of us finally coughed up that we were knocking on doors for Senator Obama. “Well . . .” He paused. “He’s my second choice.”
Turns out Farmer Daughton was a Bill Richardson man.
IN A WAY, MY MILITARY CAREER started that week, with my friends Ryan and Nathaniel, knocking on doors and canvassing local Dairy Queens in three of the lowest-income counties in the state of Iowa: Ringgold, Decatur, and Union.
Immersed in my business career at McKinsey but feeling like I couldn’t just sit out the 2008 presidential campaign without being involved in some way, I had decided to take a little time off in January to do something to help the campaign of Barack Obama, who was still considered unlikely to overtake the juggernaut of Hillary Clinton but was showing increasing strength. I’d become aware of Obama when I was a senior in college and he was running for Senate in 2004; someone sent around a video clip of him speaking in a church, and
it sounded different from any political rhetoric I’d heard before:
If there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago that can’t read, that makes a difference in my life even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen on the West Side of Chicago who can’t afford her prescription medicine . . . that makes my life poorer even if it’s not my grandparent.
Inspired yet analytical, he seemed a welcome alternative to the bravado of President Bush, and yet, unlike most running for Congress or Senate that year, he was able to campaign with very little reference to the Republican side at all. Importantly, he had also opposed the Iraq War at a time when most Democrats were afraid to say what they truly believed.
I started following his campaign, and as a graduating senior briefly entertained a job offer from his race for Senate, before deciding to go to Arizona instead for the Kerry campaign. My reasoning, idealistic if not the most career-savvy, was that Obama was highly likely to win his race in Illinois anyway, and so I could make more of a difference in a battleground state on the presidential effort. It was there, on a thirteen-inch tube TV in my office cubicle in Phoenix, that I watched the convention keynote speech that made Obama famous. By 2008, it was clear to me that this candidate was not like the others, and worth supporting for the presidency.
Many of my friends felt the same way, and three of us decided to reach out to the campaign to see if we could be helpful by taking a few days off to knock on doors. As a result, our trio spent the days around New Year’s 2008 in south-central Iowa, working in towns not very different from the small communities I knew in rural areas around South Bend.
One thing I hadn’t expected was how big a role the Iraq War was playing in these one-stoplight towns with grain elevators for a skyline—not as a political football but as a kind of local issue. The Iraq troop surge was winding down but not yet over. Afghanistan, mostly out of view, was simmering. Yellow ribbons were everywhere, and more than once I would knock on a door and get into a conversation with a young man who told me he would love to go to the caucus on Thursday and vote, but couldn’t because he was packing up for Basic Training.
In fact, it seemed like every other teenager I met was signing up for the Army or the Guard. I was only twenty-five years old, but these freckled young Iowan recruits looked like children to me. And I began asking myself how it could be that whole communities in this part of the country, just like those in rural Indiana, seemed to be emptying out their youth into the armed services, while so few people I knew had served at all. Warming up in a diner after a day’s canvassing, Ryan and Nat and I tried to construct a list of people we’d known at Harvard who had gone into the military. You could count them on one hand.
It wasn’t just us, and it wasn’t just Harvard. In their book AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from Military Service—and How It Hurts Our Country, Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer examined the record and found that the Ivy League college with the most 2004 graduates going to the military was Princeton, with all of nine students going into service. Much had changed since the days when the names of over a hundred Harvard men made their way onto the wall in the transept of Memorial Hall. Some combination of social stratification, Cold War campus politics, and changing norms around elite universities meant that service had gone from standard to rare.
For my grandfather’s generation, military service was a great equalizer—something that Americans (at least, American men) had in common across race, class, and geography. Indeed, for some prior generations the rate of loss in war may have been higher for the wealthy than for the working class, because service was so close to the heart of elite culture. There was nothing unusual about Lieutenant Junior Grade John F. Kennedy, scion of one of the most prominent and well-connected wealthy families in America, risking death aboard PT-109 in the South Pacific. The wealth and fame of JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy Sr., made it more, not less, natural that his sons would enter the service. Indeed, John F. Kennedy’s path to the presidency was cleared only by the death of his older brother, Joe Jr., the one thought destined for high office until that naval airplane explosion in 1944.
The entire campus of the elite prep school Phillips Andover was in uniform throughout World War I, so it was hardly shocking that the outbreak of World War II would motivate a young George Herbert Walker Bush to enlist on his eighteenth birthday and find his own way to the Pacific. A year after Kennedy and the men of PT-109 were rescued from the island where they had washed up, another Navy operation would rescue young Bush out of the waters of Chichijima where he had been shot down during a daring strafing run.
NO LESS REMARKABLE, for men of such privilege, was the fact that they would have been interacting on more or less equal terms with people from other walks of life, regions, and backgrounds. As an enlistee Bush, whose father would soon be a senator, might have taken orders from the sons of farmers or laborers; Kennedy’s fellow officers aboard PT-109 were from Ohio and Illinois.
In 1956, a majority of the graduating classes of Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton joined the military. But in the decades that followed, the once-diverse makeup of our military shifted dramatically. Especially after Vietnam, America saw a growing share of service members coming from places like Mount Ayr and Creston in Iowa, or Fulton County in Indiana—and far fewer from places like Harvard. The proportion of members of Congress who were veterans had fallen from 70 percent in 1969 to 25 in 2004, and fewer than 2 percent of members of Congress had a child who was serving.
As I reflected on it, I realized that my arrival at Harvard coincided with the near-disappearance of my own childhood interest in serving. At a younger age, when I had hoped to be an astronaut or a pilot, service in uniform was very much on the table. Indeed, on my mother’s side, it was a family tradition.
One of my heroes growing up was a relative I had never met: my great-uncle Russell Montgomery, an Army Air Corps captain who died in a 1941 plane crash. My grandmother’s house had a large painting of him on the wall, in the house where she and my grandfather settled after he retired from the Army at Fort Bliss in El Paso. In the painting Russell is seated, in uniform, his cap on one knee, a bookshelf behind him and a painting of a dog on the wall over one shoulder. Beneath a generous brow, he gazes forward with blue eyes that look commanding and serious, yet self-possessed and approachable.
After my grandmother died, the painting found a new home on the wall of our South Bend living room. Since we weren’t a paintings-of-ancestors-on-the-wall kind of family, I once asked my mother how it came to exist. She explained that during World War II my grandfather, still grieving the loss of his brother, encountered a German officer in a prisoner-of-war camp in New Mexico who knew how to paint. Even in war, there was a gentlemanly understanding between officers of different countries. Using two photographs—one of Russell and one of his favorite dog—the young German officer was able to create the portrait, which my grandfather bought from him. It was the only painting in our house that hadn’t been painted by my grandfather himself, or by my mother.
Besides the painting, the family had another treasure of Russell’s: his logbook. The tiny, leather-bound notebook contained a log of his flight hours, but also little anecdotes about the life of an officer and pilot in those still-freewheeling days of early Army aviation. In it, he writes about hops across the Midwest to build up his flight hours, usually in the company of a fellow officer, and punctuated by football games and visits with girls. The entry for October 24, 1931, is characteristic:
Flew to Pittsburgh, Pa. with Lt. McAllister in BT-2B. Thru rain all the way but last 15 min. Left Dayton at 8:00 A.M. Arrived Pittsburgh at 10:05. Met some wonderful people. Saw Purdue wallop Carnegie Tech 13 to 6. Had lunch at Univ. Club. Went to Dance at Athletic Club with a very good blind date. Saw lots of fraternity brothers. Flying time, 2 hrs 5 mins. Flew back next day Oct 25 to Dayton. An awful head wind and air was terribly rough. Was initiated into air-sickness, an awful feeling.
As far as we kno
w, it was taken from his remains after the crash, and I used to thumb through it with wonder as a child, a family relic even more unique and special than the painting. The paragraph-long adventures were as engaging as a novel, but also may have added to my sense that military service, like war in general, belonged to a different time and place than my own.
These traces from my personal and family history had faded as the adventures of Harvard, then Oxford, commanded my attention. The question “Why aren’t you wearing your country’s uniform?” did sometimes nag at me as I made, with the unique confidence of a college student, some lofty statement about public service or national security. But it always seemed like there was something else for me to focus on, and few of my peers were serving, either. Most of the role models I would have had, military officers actually connected to me, were relatives who had died before I was even born.
Back from Iowa and visiting my parents one day, I squared up to the painting and looked at it closely. I put myself in Russell’s place; I must have been coming up on the age he had been when the original photo was taken. For him and his generation, a college education and a military career went hand in hand; for me, education had somehow made military service seem more remote. Yet all around me, especially in small towns and rural areas, men my age and much younger were making themselves available for the defense of our country. The more I reflected on it, the less it seemed I had any good excuse or reason not to serve.
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