by Joe Klein
William explained that they were a group of “self-deployers” who had joined together in the past week.
“That means you’re an NGO and you come under my jurisdiction,” she said. “And I need the medical supplies.”
“No fucking way,” William said. “These are dedicated supplies, sent to us by the Jesuits in Chicago.”
“And what are you doing in uniform?” she asked, eyeing Will’s camouflage pants. “You’re not a Marine anymore. It’s illegal for you to wear the uniform.”
Will tried to get her name, but she refused to tell him, and her name tape was covered by her load-bearing vest. “You know what you’re doing by wearing that uniform,” she was shouting now. “You know what you’re doing . . .”
He wanted to scream at her: “What I’m doing is helping people.” He decided to ignore her and see if he could find a way to spirit the supplies out of the airport. He walked a quarter mile to where the medical team and supplies were waiting on the tarmac. He wanted to seem confident and in control for the doctors—he was their first impression of Team Rubicon—but he was worried. “How the fuck am I going to do this?” he asked himself aloud.
By just doing it, it turned out. He went outside the terminal, flagged down three more tap-taps, and had them back up into a secure area that was being guarded by only two U.S. soldiers. “Holy shit, this could get hairy,” he thought, as the Haitian crowd, seeing the movement, surged toward the gate.
McNulty set up a human chain to move the supplies, carton by carton, from the tarmac through the cargo terminal and outside to where the tap-taps were waiting. They stacked the boxes by the gate and—once again—the Haitians surprised him: they didn’t rush the supplies. “Mediseen . . . mediseen,” he said, and they respected that. In fact, about ten of the Haitians joined the human chain and helped load the supplies into the tap-taps. They asked for food or water in return for their work.
“Mediseen . . . mediseen,” he said, and they backed away. The local police, watching all this, offered to escort them wherever they were going. They reached the novitiate late that night.
Meanwhile, there was some good news at the hospital. A U.S. military medical team was coming to take over the emergency room. And somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, Jake heard a familiar voice. “Hey, dude. I made it.”
Clay Hunt.
“Moth-er-fuck-er,” Jake said, separating the term of endearment into as many syllables as possible. “How did you find us?”
“Well, you guys posted the coordinates on the blog,” he said. “I got a ride on a private plane from Santo Domingo, took a taxi to the Jesuit HQ, and they told me that you were down here.”
That night, around the campfire, there was a sense that a corner had been turned. Jake laid out the assignments for the next day: there would be four FAST (Forward Area Surgical Team) units. Each would take a tap-tap loaded with supplies to separate refugee camps. Sadly, they would also be losing members of the original eight—the firefighters were heading home to Milwaukee, and Dr. Dolhun was going back to San Francisco. But Team Rubicon was moving into Bravo Element phase with a lot more knowledge, confidence, and personnel than they’d had just three days earlier.
The four FAST teams deployed successfully to remote refugee camps the next day. Doc Army noted that, finally, there were other medical teams out and about. Indeed, to his disgust, he found out that several teams of medical personnel had been locked down at the U.S. embassy, prevented from working in the field for fear of the nonexistent danger in the streets.
The FAST units were far more robust than the original team, with multiple doctors and nurses and plenty of supplies per unit. Mark Hayward—Doc Army—had gone out on a FAST unit with Brother Jim, and in late afternoon, after a satisfying day’s work, he looked up and saw Jim playing his fiddle with antic merriment, entertaining the children with Irish jigs. The rest of the medical team joined in, playing monster tag with the kids—Seth, a mammoth male nurse with a shaved head, was a hilarious monster. Everyone was laughing, laughing uncontrollably, laughing with relief, till the tears streamed down their cheeks. “This was a good day,” Hayward told Brother Jim as they headed back to the novitiate. “I’m almost happy.”
Jake was feeling pretty good that night, too. He had been out in the field with Clay Hunt—and, for the first time since the war, Clay had seemed really good. He was loading and unloading equipment, helping out where he could, playing with kids—the guy was a genius with kids—and actually smiling.
Clay was from Houston, a little guy—he and Jake would have been called Mutt and Jeff in an earlier era, but this generation of troops knew nothing about the ancient comic strip. Clay was wicked smart, but scattered. He could quote Yeats and Tennyson, but he couldn’t seem to handle community college. He was a handsome guy, Jake thought, with soft, long-lashed eyes and a sweet disposition. Clay hated the war, and he let people know it when they had deployed to Afghanistan, which was not cool. Back home, he was being treated for post-traumatic stress at the VA, but not very successfully. He was married, but that didn’t seem to be working out very well either. And so it was—well, it was thrilling—to see Clay so happy and . . . whole, working downrange in Haiti.
“I think we may have a model here,” William said that night after the meeting. His time in Haiti was coming to a close. He had those Title X business meetings scheduled in Istanbul. But he knew that this couldn’t be the end of Team Rubicon.
“What do you mean a model?” Jake asked, impatient and a bit hotter than he’d intended. “For what?”
“We could do this in other places, asshole,” McNulty said. “We’ve got skills that other relief teams don’t. We go in first, right?”
There certainly was a need, Jake conceded. There were natural disasters everywhere, all the time. He’d flashed angry because he was torn. He didn’t want to chuck everything and become the boss of Team Rubicon. How would he live? How would he get paid? Then again, his dad had emailed that about $150,000 in cash donations, in addition to the medical supplies and volunteers, had come in while they’d been in Haiti. Team Rubicon was all over the news, too—their blog had been linked to by military bloggers and other relief organizations. Newspaper articles had been written. There were stories on TV, featuring a rather unique angle: Iraq and Afghanistan veterans doing something good and inspiring, rather than being portrayed as basket cases, for a change. In 2010, the idea that veterans might actually be a positive force was still very much a novelty.
So, okay—McNulty had a point. If Team Rubicon could make just a small difference in the way that civilians saw veterans, and the way veterans saw themselves, in addition to helping out the Haitians of this world, well, that would be pizza with extra toppings and free drinks at the bar.
Jake was not willing to concede that to McNulty quite yet. He figured that his own fate was business school and a quiet life making lots of money. But he was willing to contemplate more missions for Team Rubicon while he pursued his MBA, keeping it small and occasional. “My dad said we had to form a 501(c)(3)—whatever that is—or pay taxes on it,” he told McNulty that night, knowing that a 501(c)(3) was the preferred corporate entity for nonprofit organizations, but hating to sound like he knew what that was.
“I can check that out when I get back to D.C.,” Will said.
“Okay, brother,” Jake said, hugging him. “This has been good.”
McNulty left the next morning in a blur of bear hugs and with a lump in his throat. Within days, seven of the original eight Team Rubicon volunteers were gone—only Brother Jim remained with Bravo Element. They now had dozens of people on the ground, with a full complement of medical gear, maps, internet, and solar panels to provide energy. They had learned so much in two weeks—about medical care in chaotic conditions, about one another. Years later, Jim would think about their experiences in Port-au-Prince and feel an emotional hollow, a desire to re-create the military experience of brotherhood—the banter, the spiritual bond, the thrill of pur
e service.
Wood, McNulty, and Clay Hunt left Haiti exultant, firing off celebratory blog posts from Santo Domingo. Clay wrote that he and Jake were going to eat “huge chunks of cow.” McNulty wrote that a Spanish relief worker had asked him out for dinner and dancing. “Problem. I can’t dance, I smell like the ass of a dead rhinoceros, and all I have are dirty cammies and boots.”
On the flight from Santo Domingo to Miami, Clay showed Jake a copy of Outside magazine, featuring a former Navy SEAL named Eric Greitens who had an organization named The Mission Continues that gave fellowships to wounded veterans who were willing to do public service. “I think people end up benefiting from serving as much as those they aim to serve,” Greitens was quoted.
“That was certainly true in Haiti—for all of us, right?” Clay said. “I think I might apply for one of those fellowships.”
Greitens’s program was new and relatively small, but it seemed a confirmation of what Jake had experienced for real on the ground in Port-au-Prince. He had other plans, but The Mission Continues might be perfect for someone like Clay. Jake had watched his best friend do a reverse zombie in the refugee camps: Clay was fully alive again and fizzing with all sorts of ideas. He could try for The Mission Continues fellowship or maybe he could go to Loyola Marymount and take classes to become a physician’s assistant. He wanted to go back to Haiti, and when he went, he wanted to be something approaching a medic like Doc Army. He was talking about this as Jake’s eyes began to close.
“Okay, dude,” Jake said. “I’m going to sleep.” Unable to fold himself into a sleeping position in his seat, and somewhat to the dismay of his fellow passengers, he lay down in the aisle and slept there. The flight attendants, aware of what he’d been doing in Haiti, left him alone.
PART II
War
Be certain that to you too it is owed to suffer this
To make your life glorious after and through these labors.
—SOPHOCLES
Chapter 1
FRICK AND FRACK ON AN ELEPHANT
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Naval Special Warfare has an uncomfortable relationship with the idea of conformity.
—ERIC GREITENS
They called themselves the “One-Two Punch.” Their fellow Navy SEALs, with a measure of irony and bemusement, called them “Frick and Frack.” They were fine junior officers to be sure, smart and solid. They were as physically tough as anyone in the force. One, Eric Greitens, was a runner and a boxer. The other, Kaj Larsen, was a powerful swimmer, a super frogman. But they were . . . different. They didn’t do the SEAL strut. They hadn’t signed up because they wanted to be the coolest, most macho guys on the planet, chesting about in long hair and Oakley shades, launching themselves into the Navy bars in San Diego and on Coronado Island, dead drunk and draped with girls. They kept their hair short. They had no tattoos. Greitens didn’t even drink.
Actually, Greitens’s super-flashy academic record was a matter of curiosity to his peers and especially to his superiors—he was a Rhodes Scholar from Duke University who had earned a doctorate of Philosophy in Politics from Oxford. He had spent almost all of his school breaks working in refugee camps around the world. He had even spent a few weeks working for Mother Teresa in an end-of-life nursing home in Varanasi, India. His doctoral dissertation was about the treatment of unaccompanied children in war zones by nongovernmental organizations.
Larsen’s résumé was less stratospheric; he was a man of the water, not the air. He had spent some time at the Naval Academy—he loved the water polo but hated the petty shine-your-belt-buckle hazing—and then left for UC Santa Cruz in his hometown, where he graduated with a degree in politics and a Nobel Prize in surfing.
The other thing was, they were both Jewish. Both had Jewish mothers and Christian fathers. Neither Greitens nor Larsen was observant in any strict sense, although each had been a bar mitzvah. They had been raised in the Jewish moral and intellectual tradition—and it certainly informed their military service. Each, at an early age, had learned about the Holocaust. Kaj’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors; Eric had listened to the stories of survivors at the Jewish Community Center in St. Louis. And they’d both reacted to the stories the same way: Why the hell hadn’t more Jews fought back? It was part of the reason they’d become SEALs. They would definitely fight back, if it came to that. Both joined the military before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Their religion was largely unknown to their men. It just didn’t come up, although Greitens once was asked by an enlisted SEAL, “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant, Mr. G?”
“I’m Jewish,” Eric replied, and the SEAL just started to laugh, as if to say: well, of course it would be something like that.
And so it was that when Eric and Kaj were dispatched to Thailand as part of a hundred-man squadron for Operation Cobra Gold, an extended exercise with elements of the Thai Navy in May 2004, they kept away from the garish bars along Walking Street in the beach town of Pattaya. They were Lieutenants Junior Grade on their first real deployment. It wasn’t Iraq or Afghanistan, but tours to the war zones would come soon enough, if they didn’t screw this up. Each commanded a small boat detachment, which kept them busy. Eric’s boats were a pair of sleek, fabulous 82-foot Mark Vs, loaded with firepower. They had eight twin 50-caliber machine-gun placements. They could skim the water at a blistering 50 knots; under full steam, they drafted a mere 3 feet. Kaj had a less powerful detachment of rigid-hulled inflatable boats (RHIBs). But if there was dangerous work to be done near the shoreline, the RHIBs would be doing it. Their crews were composed of Special Warfare Combatant-Craft (SWCC, pronounced swick) personnel, who were, in effect, elite roadies for the SEALs: they were smart and super-trained, just as the SEALs were, but they were essentially the techies who managed the equipment that enabled the rock stars to put on their show. Their senior officers believed the SWCCs suffered from something of an inferiority complex as a result. They hoped that having SEALs like Eric and Kaj command SWCC detachments—this was a new thing—would have a positive effect on pride and morale.
In Thailand, Greitens and Larsen worked sixteen-hour days keeping the boats in shape, which was the easy part. The harder part was keeping their men out of trouble. They were billeted at the Botany Beach Resort, a fancy tourist hotel, which added to the sense that this deployment was something close to a holiday. The hotel, which was thirty minutes from downtown Pattaya, offered $5 Thai massages on the beach. But their men spent their evenings adding to their tattoo collections and hanging in the Walking Street bars, which were not off-limits. There was a standard twelve-hour “jigger to trigger” rule. They would have to be on duty at 0800 every morning—and therefore, theoretically, last call was 2000 hours. Eric and Kaj tried to toughen that by having their men up and out at 0600 for a rigorous session of physical training. The men called it the “dick-dragger” PT. Still, the mix of testosterone and temptation raging through the bars was worrisome. Years later, Admiral Joe Maguire, who had just taken charge of the SEALs in 2004, would wonder why on earth they were having extended exercises in the world capital of drugs and prostitution while there were wars going on in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Hey, Kaj,” Greitens said after several weeks on the ground in Pattaya. “We haven’t done anything really Thai yet.” They had a free Saturday morning, and he proposed that they go on an elephant trek—an act of surpassing FrickandFrackitude, certainly not the sort of thing real SEALs would do in their spare time. An off-the-grid tiger hunt with bow and arrow, maybe; freestyle shark-fighting with Spyderco knives, perhaps. But a slow plod along a well-worn trail with a bunch of tourists atop extremely tame pachyderms? That was not remotely the way that real SEALs rolled.
The morning of May 8, 2004, was ridiculously hot and sticky, as most mornings were in Thailand. Kaj and Eric were wearing T-shirts, shorts (for Kaj, surfer-dude board shorts, as always; for Eric, shorts with a more co
nservative camouflage pattern), and sneakers. The elephant trek company sent a minivan to pick them up at the hotel. There were a few tourists up front; Larsen and Greitens took the backseat.
“I got a heavy one for you, bro,” Kaj said as soon as they settled in. He spoke quietly, seemed stricken—certainly not his usual self. He told Eric this story: He had been approached at his 0600 PT session that morning by two of his best men, Seaman Tom Reilly and Petty Officer Sean Galvin. They had been to the Electric Blue nightclub on Friday and had bumped into Lieutenant Hobbs, the ranking SEAL officer in the squadron. Hobbs looked pretty strange to begin with—he had dyed his hair orange and wore brass hoop earrings like a pirate; the SEALs had flown into Pattaya weeks before the SWCC boats arrived, and the theory was that Hobbs had gone native—but Galvin noticed that Hobbs’s eyes were blitzed, his pupils completely dilated. “Sir, your pupils are blown!” Galvin said.
Hobbs exploded. “What the fuck are you, a master-at-arms?” he said, referring to the Navy version of Military Police. “You better stay the fuck away from me!”
Galvin decided this was sage advice. “Let’s get out of here,” he said to Reilly. They needed to hit the bathroom before leaving—and were shocked in midstream when Hobbs showed up with three of his men. “Set security at the door,” he told the youngest, a seaman on his first SEAL deployment. Then Hobbs pulled a baggie from his pocket and went into a toilet stall with the other two.
“Whoa,” Kaj said when Galvin had told him the story. He figured that there were only two things three SEALs could do together in a toilet stall, and both would get you kicked out of the Navy in 2004. “You’re sure about this?”
Reilly and Galvin were sure. Kaj told them that he would discuss it with Mr. G and then make a decision about what to do next. And now Kaj asked Greitens, “What do we do?”