Charlie Mike

by Joe Klein

  Eric’s grandfather Harold Jacobs had grown up at the gyms on the south side of Chicago and regaled him with stories about the characters he’d met and the fights he’d fought. There was an elaborate mythology to the sport, created by intellectual devotees like A. J. Liebling, who called it the “sweet science,” as well as Norman Mailer, David Remnick, and Joyce Carol Oates, whose reflections on the spectacle was one of Eric’s favorite books. It seemed a noble challenge, mano a mano, a far more primal affair than the usual run of sporting possibilities. Eric’s journey to the E. D. Mickle gym at the beginning of sophomore year was almost as exotic as his trip to China. He was the only white person in the place.

  His first action came the very first day when a bantamweight asked him if he wanted to spar. “No, thanks,” Eric said. He didn’t know how to throw a punch yet.

  “How you gonna learn to box if you don’t spar?” The bantamweight asked. Eric got into the ring and exited a few minutes later with a black eye and a split lip. The other boxers assumed that was it for the white boy—they’d seen the phenomenon before—but Eric was back the next night, doing push-ups and sit-ups, working the heavy bag. He came back every night for the next three weeks.

  Eventually the gym manager, a former welterweight named Bob Pugh, took pity on Eric as he worked the heavy bag one night. “You’re telegraphing your right,” he said.

  “How do I fix that?”

  Pugh gave him the phone number of a fighter named Derrick Humphrey, who trained with a man named Earl Blair—in fact, Derrick was one of the few fighters around who was willing to put up with Earl’s physical and moral rigor, a matter of personal loyalty after Earl had saved him from the streets. Humphrey told Eric to come to his apartment complex and there, in the parking lot, they met Earl, who told Eric to start running in place with Derrick, fast and then faster, which they did until Eric’s legs were burning. After more exercises, Earl asked Eric to lie flat on his back, his legs six inches in the air, and he punched Eric hard in the stomach. Eric reached for his gut—what on earth?—but Earl said, “You can do this,” and he proceeded to demonstrate with Derrick, who took Earl’s left and right and left without a wince.

  Earl was short, dark, sixty-six years old. He had the barrel-chested build and the commanding style of Eric’s high school teacher Bill Jenkins, and he shared the same philosophy: the only way to save poor teenagers from the streets—the only way to turn boys into men—was to work them as hard as possible and build a granite determination and toughness that was impermeable.

  He was an Army veteran whose nickname was Bebop because he walked with a bounce and had a big smile. He had his sayings, mostly about the Lord, and he had his ways, which were entirely stubborn. He had gotten kicked out of the Mickle gym after an argument with the owners and was training Derrick Humphrey out on the track at North Carolina Central University, a historically black college. “If you really want to do this,” Earl told Eric when he finished the parking lot workout, “you pay twenty-five dollars a week whether you show up or not. Everyone wants to box, but nobody lasts. They hang out for a week or two, and then Derrick cracks them in the face and they leave. Or they start to feel sore and they don’t show up again. Lots of ’em come and go,” he said. “I’m always here.”

  A few weeks later, Derrick cracked Eric in the face for the first time, and Eric showed up the next day. Earl worked Eric like a beast, and he showed up every day. The trainer began to suspect that this white boy was different—diligent, respectful, able to withstand pain, stubborn as a rock. The real test came on a monsoon November day, the cold rain pelting so hard that Eric could barely see the road as he drove from Duke to North Carolina Central, even though his wipers were on high. Eric figured that there was no way Earl could be out at the track in this weather, but the man had said every day and I’m always here. Eric had to show up and find out for sure. He certainly didn’t want to disappoint Earl. He pulled up to the North Carolina Central track but couldn’t see the dirt patch where they trained from the road, so he began walking down the hill—and there was Earl, sitting in his lonely, dark blue plastic classroom chair without an umbrella or rain gear, wearing a baseball cap that read, REAL MEN PRAY and a zip-up Windbreaker. As he saw Eric walking down the hill in his workout gear, Earl stood, smiled, and started walking—bebopping—toward his fighter and gave him a huge hug in the lashing rain. Nobody else had shown up that day, not even Derrick. There was a quiet appreciation in Earl’s eyes, as if to say: the Lord has sent me a solid white boy. “The Lord don’t always give you what you want,” Earl would often say, embellishing the Rolling Stones a little bit, “but he’ll give you what you need.”

  The Lord had not given Earl a natural boxer, just a very persistent one. Eric had been a baseball and soccer player in high school, but his favorite sport was long-distance running. His father was a runner, and one day when he was in elementary school, Eric rode his bike alongside Rob, who was training for a 5K race. “Do you know where you pass people in the road races?” Rob asked his son.

  “Yeah, it’s on the downhills, because that’s when you can run really fast,” Eric replied.

  “No, it’s on the uphills,” Rob said, “because that’s when it’s hard.”

  Eric came to love the uphills. He loved all the tough, unglamorous things about sports. He loved training; the pain in his legs when he pushed himself past previous points of endurance was entirely satisfying. He won his first race, the junior division of the St. Louis marathon, at the age of sixteen. He was never the fastest runner—although he eventually would run marathons in less than three hours—but he could go on and on. He graduated to running double marathons and triathlons. When the time came, the regular five-mile run in the sand in full uniform at SEAL training was a piece of cake.

  Eric trained with Earl five nights a week for the next three years. He fulfilled every pathetic white-boy stereotype: he had no flow, no rhythm, no smoothness. He even had trouble skipping rope at first. Eric found comfort within the rituals of the sport—he would learn to jump rope, and he would happily train to the point of exhaustion, and he would work the corner when Derrick had a fight, and he would watch carefully as Earl taped Derrick’s hands and laced on his gloves. He kept his own gloves in pristine condition, especially the laces, which had to be spotless if you wanted to train with Earl.

  He also enjoyed the violence. Getting cracked by Derrick was painful, but educational. Derrick could have decked him at any moment he chose, but he used their sparring sessions to keep in shape and to help Earl teach Eric how to move. They worked in tandem, Earl shouting instructions and Derrick making Eric pay if he didn’t follow them. “Keep your hands up,” Earl would say and if Eric dropped them, Derrick would shoot a jab and bloody his mouth or his nose. “Move to your right!” And if Eric didn’t, Derrick would throw a right cross to get him going.

  Early on, after an especially tough sparring and heavy-bag session, Eric unwrapped his hands and saw that his knuckles were bloody. He looked into the mirror above the sink and saw that his lip was cut. He dipped his hands into the soapy water and saw the blood ooze out. He would develop scar tissue there; it would be a painful process. But that wasn’t a bad thing. There was a difference between pain and injury; the pain would make him tougher and enable him to give a little more tomorrow. He wasn’t close to reaching his physical limits yet. He looked in the mirror, and he was hurting, but he felt very good.

  Earl began calling Derrick and Eric “my babies.”

  That fall, Eric learned that one of his professors, Neil Boothby, was organizing a group of students to work in Bosnian refugee camps during the summer of 1994. Their job would be to help out where they could, observe, and write a report about how the orphaned children were being treated in each camp. Eric also decided to document the conditions in the camps with photos, so he took a class at Duke with the accomplished professional Margaret Sartor. He fell in love with the Walker Evans photographs that accompanied James Agee’s magnificent accou
nt of Mississippi sharecropper life, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. He loved the strength and dignity that Evans accorded his subjects.

  The first camp Eric visited that summer confounded his dire expectations. It was called Puntizela—and it was gorgeous, set in a public park overlooking the Adriatic in the ancient city of Pula. The kids were well-clothed and -fed, and they seemed happy. “Welcome to paradise,” the aid worker who ran the program for children said when Eric arrived. Well, not exactly paradise; these children had seen things that no one should ever see. Eric wasn’t in Puntizela long enough to get to know them well, but he found that he really loved being with the kids. He organized soccer teams and then matches, which the adults in the camp would come and watch. He worked in the kindergarten and hung out in the common room, playing chess (badly, compared to teenagers who had grown up with the game) and watching the older adolescents and adults drink beer and dance. This was good and satisfying work, but it didn’t seem the real refugee camp experience—the desperation he’d seen on television.

  After a few weeks, he was transferred to Gasinci, a much larger camp where conditions were much worse. Gasinci was a dull compound of prefab shelters set in straight lines near the Croatian city of Osijek, patrolled by a not very friendly unit of the Croatian Army. On Eric’s second day there, Croat soldiers shot and killed two puppies, the beloved mascots of the kids in the kindergarten. The camp was in an uproar and the UN workers who supervised the operation had a meeting about how to respond to the outrage. They decided to write a letter of protest. They were powerless to do anything more, Eric realized—just as the Europeans and the UN had been powerless to do anything to prevent the mass rape and slaughter that was forcing the Bosnians into these camps.

  As he walked through Gasinci one morning, Eric was approached by a man in his late thirties. He spoke pretty good English and invited Eric into his prefab trailer, his young children playing in the corner. They sat on folding chairs as the man told Eric his story, about the terror that had caused him to flee his home in Bosnia. He lifted his shirt and showed Eric the shrapnel scars he’d received in a grenade blast. Eric had heard many similar stories, but what set this man apart was a question he asked: “Why aren’t you doing anything?”

  Eric knew the man was talking about the American government, which was dithering over how to respond to the human disaster in Bosnia. But he took the question personally. He knew he was doing valuable work with the kids, and he was learning a lot from the experience. He wasn’t making much of a sacrifice, though. The conditions in the camp were tolerable except for the food, which often featured a tasteless cornmeal mush served along with an apple. He lived simply in a prefab bunkhouse with other volunteers from around the world. He had his backpack, a couple pairs of pants, a pair of shorts, some underwear and T-shirts, plus his camera and his notebooks. It was not a life of privation; he had suffered worse training with Earl. He was serving others, but was this sort of service enough?

  Another insight came through the lens of his camera. He wore it around his neck and snapped casually, refusing to pose the children or make a big deal of what he was doing. His intent was to show them as they were. The photos were beautiful, well-composed, and emotionally resonant, but without the perfect sheen and depth that a professional might have brought to the shot. They were inspired nonprofessionalism, unadorned, humane, and therefore very moving. More important, Eric began to understand that they told a story: there was pain in many of them, but also joy. Happiness was a part of the daily experience for most children in the camps. He photographed them looking up to their elders with love and respect—and, especially, looking directly at his lens, but not really at the camera. They were looking at Eric, their friend, with love and puckish humor and a certain dignity. It was as if his snaps were part of the conversation, a demonstration of affection for these kids. The things he saw through his lens were, Eric realized, very different from the photographs of children in refugee camps he had seen back home. Those showed only one kind of child—pitiful, haunted, desperate, and dirty, holding a crust of bread, perhaps, with a perfectly located tear on her cheek. Eric captured some of that desperation, too, but he knew there was more to life in the camps. There were families who took care of most of these children, even the ones who had lost their parents. There was love and a rude form of security.

  One day, the director of one of the charities working in the camp asked Eric to gather all the children together outside. A major donor was coming to visit and wanted to hand out gum to the children. The director asked Eric to record this beneficence for posterity. “Why doesn’t he sit down and talk with them?” Eric asked. “Why doesn’t he come to the kindergarten and look at the artwork they’ve done?”

  But no, the donor wanted the traditional charity shot—and Eric began to wonder if this fetishizing of refugee children worked against their best interests. There were charities that ran pity ads on television back home, encouraging Westerners to “Adopt a Child.” It bordered on exploitation, Eric thought, enabling Westerners to feel less guilty about their comforts. It raised money for the charities, but what was it doing for the vast majority of kids—or for their families?

  He spent the next summer in Rwanda, and the summer after that in Bolivia, and then his Oxford school breaks in Cambodia and Mexico and Albania and Gaza and India, in one of Mother Teresa’s end-of-life homes. He would spend every school break for the next five years in refugee camps. He figured that he had found his life’s work.

  One day, early on during his stay in Rwanda, Eric stopped at a roadside church with several aid workers. It was a rudimentary building with brown mud walls and a simple cross. He went to the door, opened it—and saw a sea of human skeletons, skulls and rib cages and arms and legs, scattered across the floor. He had heard about places like this. People had gathered in the churches during the genocide. Marauding Hutus had punched holes in the mud walls and tossed grenades into the church, then charged in and raped and murdered the survivors. He had heard about it but couldn’t really imagine it until that moment. He tried to visualize the screams and the panic, the carnage. Then he turned his back on the room, stared out into the dusty sunlight glare, and imagined that he was holding an assault rifle, a brutish, angry-looking instrument, holding off the Hutus. There was a visceral click: he desperately wanted to take on the killers, to protect the people in the church. It was the ultimate test, he realized, the real thing—especially for a humanitarian. Now that was counterintuitive. But it was true: the innocent of the world needed heavily armed moral protection. Maybe the best way to save lives was to go to war.

  Chapter 3

  AT THE CORNER OF ANGELS AND PIRATES

  It was a running play, nothing special. Jake Wood propelled himself forward into the Bettendorf High School lineman, pushing him back and down—and then a devastating force crashed into his left foot. It was friendly fire: one of his Pleasant Valley teammates pushing into the pile. Jake heard his foot crack—not a snap or a twist, not a broken toe—it sounded as if his entire foot had cracked in two. But he didn’t feel anything. He disentangled himself from the pile, stood up, and started to walk back to the huddle, thinking: “It doesn’t hurt yet, but I know it’s going to fucking kill me pretty soon.” The quarterback called the play, and Jake started walking back to the line of scrimmage. With each step, he heard a series of smaller cracks—metatarsals snapping off from his tarsus, the main bone in his arch, all five of his toes. His arch collapsed, and now the pain came on. He managed to get down into his three-point stance, but the agony was overwhelming and he fell over, drifting away from consciousness. The quarterback thought he’d had a heart attack.

  Jake had spent his adolescence growing into serious plausibility as a football player. As he grew, and then grew some more, he’d been moved from fullback to tight end and, finally, to the trenches—he was, in fact, an offensive line coach’s dream, a huge kid, strong not fat, who loved to work and had bulked himself up to nearly 270 pounds, with a minuscu
le amount of body fat and a maximal amount of brains. You had to be clever to be a good offensive lineman; you had to figure out ways to jujitsu the bull-rushing defensive linemen, stand them off, or fake them into an overreaction. Jake sneered at defensive linemen; he considered them a reflexive, Neanderthal life-form. Jake also sneered at his coaches at Pleasant Valley High School, who didn’t take things, especially the rivalry with Bettendorf, seriously enough. Pleasant Valley was too well-named. Jake wanted a major league strength and training program—he had to bulk up if he was going to be a blue-chip college lineman—but the weight room was open only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The coaches had ordered a perfunctory “Bigger, Faster, Stronger” training program off the internet, but Jake didn’t think it was enough. He did his own research, found a more elaborate physical training regime, and convinced his teammates to join him.

  By the middle of his junior year, it was clear that Jake had real talent, and the college recruiters were out in force. The fact that he was riding a 3.8 grade average in advanced placement classes, with a 32 (out of 36) on the ACT college aptitude exam and was class president and very active in community service projects made him an irresistible prospect. He was recruited by Harvard, but they didn’t send many ballplayers to the pros. He received full-ride scholarship offers from prestigious schools like Stanford and many of the Big Ten football factories.

  Those were all at risk now. At home that night, he lay on the couch in the family room. His mom and dad, Jeff and Christy, and his two sisters were bawling. The Iowa State coach called and said, “Don’t worry. We still love you, Jake.” But no other coaches called, even though the word of his injury was flashing around the internet. The high school football prospect network was hot-wired, and Jake’s left foot was a national story. The Woods’ next-door neighbor was an orthopedic surgeon who came over that night and said, “I need you in my office first thing tomorrow.”