Charlie Mike

by Joe Klein

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  Contents

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  PART I: We Have a Model

  PART II: War

  Chapter 1: Frick and Frack on an Elephant

  Chapter 2: The Uphills

  Chapter 3: At the Corner of Angels and Pirates

  Chapter 4: The Complete Warrior

  Chapter 5: Can You Get Me a Beer?

  PART III: Finding Home

  Chapter 1: The Diamond Standard

  Chapter 2: A Challenge, Not a Charity

  Chapter 3: One Sky Soldier Falls, We All Fall

  Chapter 4: Living the Herbalife

  Chapter 5: The Hero’s Journey

  Chapter 6: My Life Is a Train Wreck

  PART IV: Their Mission Continued

  Chapter 1: Legacy

  Chapter 2: Transformation

  Chapter 3: The Biggest Storms

  Chapter 4: Post-Traumatic Growth

  Afterword

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  How You Can Help

  About the Author

  Index

  FOR

  ADAM WALINSKY

  LESLIE H. GELB

  AND IN MEMORY OF

  RICHARD C. HOLBROOKE

  Beloved Mentors All

  Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

  —JOHN F. KENNEDY

  It’s hard to live a life of high moral purpose if everyone around you thinks you’re acting like a chump.

  —ADAM WALINSKY

  Author’s Note

  The events that follow really happened. In most cases, I have used multiple sources to get as close as possible to the truth. I did make one concession: the names of a few of the characters in the story have been changed, in some instances because they continue to work downrange as special operators.

  In the U.S. Military, “Charlie Mike” is shorthand for “Continue the Mission.”

  PART I

  We Have a Model

  “Hey? Jake Wood? It’s McNulty.”

  “Nick Nolte?” Jake knew full well that the voice on the other end of the line was neither old nor gravelly enough to be the actor, but goofing on people was Jake’s method of interpersonal exploration.

  “McNulty.”

  “Stop fucking with me,” Jake said. “You’re not Nick Nolte.”

  “No, asshole. Mc-Nul-ty. William McNulty. Remember we talked six months ago about doing that Somali pirate thing?”

  Vaguely. Barely. “Yeah,” Jake said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I saw your Facebook post about Haiti,” McNulty said. “I’m in.”

  It was January 13, 2010. A day earlier, Jake Wood had been sitting in his apartment in Burbank, glued to the news about the devastation in Haiti—the collapsed buildings, wounded civilians, the chaos in the streets. There were reports of looting and banditry. It looked a lot like a war zone. He had been there before, in Iraq and Afghanistan. He realized that he missed it.

  Jake had been honorably discharged from the Marines in October 2009. His plan was to make the transition to full-fledged adulthood. He was applying to business schools for an MBA. It had felt premature immediately after graduating from the University of Wisconsin—Jake in a suit? Jake in an office? And it didn’t feel particularly wonderful now, especially after a way-too-quick rejection from Stanford Business School had detonated in his mailbox.

  “Maybe I can do something in Haiti. I want to help,” Jake said to his girlfriend, Indra Petersons, a meteorologist for KABC-TV in Los Angeles. They had just started living together, after dating for a year.

  He knew that Indra was, at that moment, watching him think. It was amazing how clearly she saw through him, through everybody. They had met at a pickup football game, Thanksgiving of 2008. She was beautiful, Latvian—but the unexpected part was the complete absence of coy. “Oh, sure,” she had said when he’d told her that one of the schools he was applying to was Northwestern. “You can go get your MBA at Northwestern. That’s a great place to go. But I’m not following you to Chicago. And I’m not counting on you coming back.”

  Jake figured Indra would go along with his Haiti excursion—she was a storm-chaser herself, after all. But he was very much on probation. The bottom line was that he was going to have to prove to her that he was serious, that he was ready to begin the rest of his life after a four-year adrenaline fiesta in the Marines. He felt a visceral pull toward Haiti. It would be for only a week or so. It was a onetime deal.

  We’ll see, Indra thought. Jake was, as she was, a frightening combination of brains and looks. He was six foot six, ripped—he had lost all his extraneous football weight—with soft brown eyes. But mostly he was very perceptive, in a no-nonsense way. He could think along with her; they could see the world the same.

  Jake was taking some brush-up economics courses at the local community college, which weren’t exactly setting his brain on fire. The MBA was something he would definitely do . . . eventually. But right now, he couldn’t take his eyes off the tube. They were saying that no relief was getting into Haiti because of the general chaos and the fear of armed street gangs—but how dangerous could Port-au-Prince be? Would the gangs be an organized threat, real soldiers, like the Taliban? He doubted it. And if they were terrorizing the populace, all the more reason for a Marine to go in and protect the civilians. The airport was closed on account of anarchy, apparently. That was a problem. If you wanted to help, how did you get in there?

  He called the Red Cross and talked to a nice lady. He told her that he was a Marine Sergeant with two combat deployments, a college graduate, and that he had experience in disaster relief after Hurricane Katrina.

  “Are you a Red Cross volunteer?” she asked.

  “That’s why I’m calling. To volunteer.”

  “We’re not taking spontaneous volunteers,” she said. “You have to be trained. It’s dangerous down there.”

  “I’m a . . . Marine,” he said, carefully editing the f-bomb. “I can do danger. Don’t you need people who can, like, protect the medical personnel?”

  She was sure they did. But that would require training, too.

  “How long does the training take?”

  “Anywhere from a day to a week, depending on what you’re going to do . . . but I’m not sure we’re taking inexperienced people, in any case.”

  Inexperienced? He hung up. “Fuck it,” he told Indra. “I’m going anyway.” He posted his intentions on Facebook and started calling his friends. His best friend from the Marines, Clay Hunt, had to go to a wedding in Houston that weekend. “But I’m in,” Clay said. “I’ll meet you there.” Yeah, sure. In the midst of all the shit and anarchy, Clay would just find him. He worried that Clay would only find trouble—that had happened before—but there was no time to think too much about that. He tried five other Marines; they were willing but didn’t have passports. He had a better result with a Wisconsin roommate and football teammate, Jeff Lang, who was now a firefighter in Milwaukee. “Sure, dude, I’m in,” Jeff said, and he’d check whether any of his fellow firefighters wanted in (one did). Later that day, McNulty called.

  McNulty was also a Marine Sergeant, an intelligence specialist, but he’d spent most of his time—at the Marines’ behest—as a private intelligence contractor. He had been an interrogator in Iraq and also worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA
). He was trying to start an intelligence consulting firm and a film company, which he would call Title X Productions, after the section of the U.S. code that governs military conduct. “I’ve got to be in Istanbul at the end of the month,” he said, “but I’m ready to roll right now.”

  Jake liked that: “Let’s roll” was his generation’s call to arms, made famous on September 11, 2001, when the passengers on Flight 93 decided to battle the Al Qaeda terrorists who had seized the plane. They crashed in central Pennsylvania, the first victory in the war against Al Qaeda.

  McNulty had become aware of Jake a few years earlier, when a friend had turned him on to a blog called Jake’s Life, which Jake used to tell war stories to the folks and former football teammates back home. He liked to write and was good at it; it was a way to wring out the war and to chill. He didn’t dwell on the horrible stuff, although he didn’t hide it either. McNulty was an obsessive consumer of war news—he read everything he could find on the net—and Jake seemed like one of those guys who had his head screwed on straight, who hadn’t been addled by bloodlust or anomie.

  When Jake blogged that he was leaving the military, William had called to see if he was interested in working for Title X. He was trying to get a strategic consulting contract from the U.S. government to do intelligence analysis on the Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. He and Jake had several phone conversations before Jake finally said thanks, but no thanks. He had a bad foot, an old football injury exacerbated by all the running he’d had to do as a Marine. He was about to have surgery on it for the sixth time. Anyway, it was time to get real, to apply for that MBA, to settle in with Indra.

  And now, out of nowhere, Will McNulty was on the phone, and he had some very good ideas. Will had graduated from the University of Kansas with a dual degree in economics and communications—but his real education had been suffered at the hands of the invaluable Roman Catholic drill sergeants of learning, the Jesuits. Will knew a priest back in Chicago, who knew a Jesuit Brother down in Port-au-Prince, who was asking for help.

  Within a matter of hours, Will arranged for them to meet up the next day with Brother Jim Boynton in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, which shared the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Brother Jim would be carrying medical supplies across the border, and McNulty offered to get letters of passage from both governments. “We’re going to be carrying narcotics,” he told Jake. “We should have everything in order.”

  “I would never have thought of that,” Jake said to Indra.

  So, twenty-four hours after being rejected by the Red Cross, Jake had a partner and a mission. Brother Jim was trying to get some doctors to join them. “What are we going to call this operation?” McNulty asked Jake. “We should have a name, right?”

  William, in a Jesuitical frame of mind, emailed him a bunch of Latin possibilities. Jake liked “Rubicon.” He knew the expression “crossing the Rubicon” but didn’t know what it referred to. He googled it and told Will that it was the river Julius Caesar had crossed when he returned to Rome on his way to overturning the Republic and establishing himself as emperor. It was the point of no return.

  “That’s kind of cool,” Jake said. “We’ve got to cross a river to get into Haiti, right?”

  His first thought was to call it Operation Rubicon, but McNulty was wary: an “operation” suggested a lot more organization and planning than they had done. “It’s just you and me, the firefighters, and Brother Jim, right?” Will said. “Let’s call it Team Rubicon. You don’t want to oversell.”

  There was one more phone call that day. McNulty had checked in with a friend in the intelligence community who told him, “Will, they’ve got armed gangs toting M-16s, and there’s lots of looting. It’s dangerous. Don’t go down there and try to be a hero.”

  Will relayed this to Jake, who blew up: “McNulty, I’ve handled heavier shit than some fucking street gang in Haiti. I’m going. What I need to know from you is, are you with me or not? C’mon, we’re fucking Marines. We do chaos.”

  “I’m going,” Will said, noting that, like most Marines, Jake used the word “fucking” as an adjectival amplifier. “I told you I was fucking in, didn’t I?”

  Also that day, Jake revived his wartime blog. His first post began: “I knew I’d come out of retirement at some point.”

  They now had a name, they had raised enough money off Facebook for $500 plane tickets to Santo Domingo—and, remarkably, they had letters of passage that Will had secured from the Haitian and Dominican embassies in Washington. They would meet up with Brother Jim in Santo Domingo on the evening of Day 2.

  They doubled their numbers the next day. Jeff Lang, the Milwaukee firefighter, asked the pilot to make an announcement on his flight down to Santo Domingo: Were there any doctors or nurses on board who were headed to Haiti and wanted to be part of a medical relief team? Dr. Eduardo Dolhun, an obstetrician from San Francisco with extensive disaster relief experience, raised his hand. Another doctor approached Jake at the baggage claim in Santo Domingo. “You look like you’re headed to Haiti,” Dave Griswell, an emergency room doc from Virginia, asked, “Can I come with you?”

  “Absolutely,” Jake said.

  Just before he boarded his own flight to Santo Domingo, McNulty, who looked semiofficial in his Marine camouflage pants, was approached by an obvious military sort (he could always tell a comrade by his looks, his walk, his body language, his attitude). “You wouldn’t be going to Haiti, by any chance?” asked Mark Hayward, an Army special forces medic. He signed on, too. Team Rubicon now had eight members.

  Jake Wood and William McNulty finally met each other in Santo Domingo on the evening of January 14, 2010.

  Jake saw that Will was really intense: he was about six feet tall, fit and wiry—that was good—dark Irish, clean shaven but with a heavy beard, and sharp blue eyes that almost seemed to bug out when he was talking. He’d already sensed that Will would be a perfect XO (executive officer), second in command, and organizational guy, but there was also intelligence and sensitivity, perhaps an emotional vulnerability to him. Both were enlisted men who were college graduates, who could have, and maybe should have, been officers, which infused Team Rubicon with a particular style: there wouldn’t be any of that bullshit officer stiffness and formality. There would be, Jake hoped, an easy noncom pride and defiance. They would be loose and fearless. The hell with the Red Cross.

  Crossing their Rubicon on Day 3—at Jimaní, a tiny town next to a dry stream that divided the Dominican Republic from Haiti—proved to be less dramatic than expected. After hearing about the street gangs, Jake was intent on being armed for the trip. He later managed to acquire a pistol, but he would never need to use it. They piled into two vans, cross-loading the medical supplies so that a full ration of medicine would get through if one of the vans was attacked, detained, or confiscated—but that proved an unnecessary precaution, too. The drive to Haiti was long, eight hours, but uneventful, and crossing the border wasn’t very dramatic either. The letters of passage that Will had obtained were honored on both sides of the border; all the medical supplies got through.

  The next drive, from the border to Port-au-Prince, took about an hour and a half. McNulty thought it was beautiful—the Baie de Port-au-Prince on the right and white chalk cliffs on the left. Jake was struck by the robust police presence, helicopters in the air, military on the ground. They saw none of the free-range criminality and danger that was being reported on television and by McNulty’s intel friend. There were traffic snarls around gas stations as they entered Port-au-Prince from the north, but food and drink were being sold along the side of the road. This wasn’t so bad.

  As they moved south, though, there were more collapsed buildings, hundreds and hundreds of them, and soon, wild and utter devastation. Mark Hayward, the Army medic, told McNulty that the pervasive, gagging, rancid smell in the air came from dead bodies rotting in the tropical heat, something William had never experienced before. There were crowds of people in th
e street as the team moved toward the Jesuit novitiate at dusk, wandering—not rioting—asking them for help. Jake was tempted to stop but decided that they had to keep moving, get to the Jesuits, and plan out their deployment from there.

  The novitiate sat at the end of a winding road. It was a large compound, surrounded by an eight-foot wall topped with razor wire. There was a heavy metal gate guarded by a security team. The Team Rubicon firefighters immediately set to work assessing the structural damage to the novitiate’s buildings. The damage was significant, so the team set up sleeping tents in the yard. That evening the monks fed them pumpkin soup with pasta, plus saltine crackers and pieces of goat meat. There were some refugees at the novitiate, one child with a broken leg, and Doc Griswell set it. Jake and William were daunted by the conditions they’d seen, but they were hopeful about their team. It had taken them all of four days to organize themselves, get to Haiti, and start helping out.

  The next morning, they went to the Manresa refugee camp, which was well across town, on the grounds of a former Jesuit retreat. Before they left, Jake set out the logistics and gave each of the team members an assignment. He had their Jesuit translator, François, hire two tap-taps—the hallucinogenic, crazy-painted, covered pickup trucks that served as taxis—and the team hit the road.

  Manresa was a hot and bare field, clogged with people. There was a single tree toward the back of the camp, and they strung a tarp from it. This would be their triage center. People immediately began to gather, hundreds of them. McNulty saw that they had crushed limbs, compound fractures, bloody and tattered bandages, open wounds. The doctors had François ask the people to line up according to the severity of their injuries, and, much to McNulty’s joy and amazement, they triaged themselves, quietly, without pushing or screaming. There was, in fact, a reverent silence, punctuated by occasional sobs of pain and babies crying. The crowd parted to allow the most severely wounded to be brought in on makeshift litters—doors that had been blown off in the quake. The Team Rubicon doctors, medics, and firefighters went to work, making the most seriously injured comfortable, setting bones, cleaning and debriding wounds. McNulty didn’t feel capable to do that—he had no training—so he began to break down window frames into sticks for splinting. He organized a crew to gather window frames from the Jesuit retreat and other collapsed buildings in the area.