by Joe Klein
The X-rays showed a podiatric disaster. “I’ve got to tell you, Jake, this is a very serious Lisfranc injury and very rare for football—it’s more like a rodeo injury, like someone getting their foot twisted in the stirrup. A lot of people don’t recover from this.”
Jake had five surgeries his senior year. He suffered two staph infections in the foot, which forced two of the operations, and another when one of the screws holding his arch together broke. Still, he continued to work out—no running, but plenty of lifting—to get ready for college football. Many of the schools that had been chasing him pulled their offers after Jake was hurt, but Stanford, Wisconsin, and Iowa State were still interested. (Jake would remain infuriated in perpetuity that the University of Iowa, his local Big Ten school, pulled its offer.) His father wanted him to go to Stanford; his mother wanted him to stay as close to home as possible. Christy Wood called Jake the “President of the Mama’s Boy Gang”—a family joke, but it was true: he adored her.
Christy and Jeff were worried about their son. He had never faced any real adversity before. He had always been sunny, unflappable. Jeff was an expert in the scientific management of manufacturing processes. When Jake was six, the family had moved to a small town in Austria, near Graz, for several years. There were no international schools nearby; Jake had to go to the local public elementary and take all his classes in German. Jeff and Christy hired a tutor for their three kids, but Jake was the one who really excelled—he just dived into it, became Jakob Wood, not only fluent in German but also earning the highest grades in his class.
When they moved back to the States—to Danville, Illinois, for a few years—they put Jake and his sisters into a Lutheran school, and once again, Jake dived into it. He had always been interested in Jesus—at the age of four, he had “creeped out” his father by sitting at the dining room table for hours with a scroll of computer paper, drawing pictures of Jesus on the cross, and now, at the age of ten, he dived into the Bible, really studied it, and had serious conversations with Christy’s brother, a Lutheran minister, about faith and service. The family assumption was that he was going to be a minister—although that wasn’t a certainty: he was serious, but not in a righteous way. When he received an errant B in high school and Jeff bawled him out, Jake said, “Forget it, Dad. I’m going to enjoy myself in high school.”
Even when he was obnoxious, he was fun. When he scored his 32 on the ACT, he danced into the family room with his arms over his head, singing, “32 . . . Ba-bee, 32 . . . Ba-bee.”
“Jake, that’s just not fair,” moaned his older sister Sarah, who had managed a pretty impressive 30 herself. “I’m supposed to be the smart one. You’re supposed to be the charming one. Megan is supposed to be the athlete.”
The truth was, he had it all. And he was easy with it—even after the injury, when nothing was as easy as it had been. He was in a wheelchair with his leg extended for two months. He was on crutches for months after that.
He decided to go to the University of Wisconsin. “It’s just so beautiful,” he told his mom. And it was even more beautiful when Wisconsin stayed with him after his injury. It also didn’t hurt that the Badgers’ offensive line coach, Jim Hueber, had a remarkable track record of getting his starters drafted into the National Football League. When Jake arrived in 2001, the Badgers were a Big Ten powerhouse, winners of the previous two Rose Bowls.
Jake was back on the field, and running, the summer after he graduated from high school. He excelled in freshman camp, at first. Then the rest of the team arrived. In his second serious practice, playing with the freshmen against the starters, he was tossed aside by Wendell Bryant, an all-American defensive tackle who went on to play in the National Football League with the Arizona Cardinals. He landed hard on his shoulder. Jake knew it was dislocated, which was not the end of the world. The trainers simply snapped it back into place. What Jake didn’t know, but soon found out, was that he had torn his labrum, the tendon that holds the shoulder in place. He tried to play on—dislocating his shoulder several more times—before the coaches decided that he had to have season-ending surgery.
He still dreamed of playing in the NFL, but he knew he was falling behind. His natural position was left tackle, but Wisconsin successfully recruited Joe Thomas—a major stud who would go on to become an All-Pro tackle with the Cleveland Browns. The coaches moved Jake inside to left guard, and he had just about won the starting job in his junior year when he dislocated his other shoulder. “I am fucking made of glass,” he lamented to his friends. He continued to work hard to stay in shape, but it wasn’t easy. Varsity football was a forty-hour workweek, beginning at five a.m. every day. He worked out relentlessly and then watched film in the mornings; he practiced every afternoon. All that muscle required feeding, or it would begin to wither. He had to stuff himself at mealtimes and scarf down ten thousand calories of protein shakes every day to stay at 295 pounds—and the coaches wanted him at 310. The prodigious effort to turn an ectomorph into an endomorph played havoc with his body. His growing assortment of injuries limited the amount of time he could stay on the field; he lived in the land of whirlpools, liniment, ice packs, and bandages. By senior year, he knew that the NFL wasn’t going to happen. Which raised the question: What was?
Even with all the football, Jake had made the dean’s list several times and was carrying a 3.5 grade-point average. He was double-majoring in business and political science; he loved the politics but figured that business was his fate. There was, however, another option, to his parents’ dismay: he had always been interested in the military.
It started when he was a boy in Austria, on a trip to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial. The camp was situated in a quarry, the inmates worked to death. There were pictures of the haunted survivors, all eyes and bones. It was the U.S. Army, his dad told him, who liberated those people. He and Jeff spent the next few years in Europe collecting World War II memorabilia. He grilled his grandfathers for every detail of their service in the war. Before Jake became a football stud in his junior year of high school, he had given serious thought to applying to West Point. He researched the physical requirements and began to work at them. And then, when the September 11 terrorist attacks happened during his first weeks at Wisconsin, Jeff Wood said to Christy, “I just hope Jake doesn’t do something stupid and sign up.”
He wanted to sign up. He almost signed up. And it nagged at him when the Arizona Cardinals’ safety Pat Tillman quit his team and joined the Army to fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Jake figured that if he had any guts, he would do what Tillman had done. We had been attacked; he had skipped weeks of classes, watching cable news after September 11. But if he quit school and went to war, he would have to kiss the NFL good-bye, and he just couldn’t bring himself to do that.
The military wasn’t very popular in Madison, a notoriously liberal redoubt, and, as George W. Bush began to shove the nation toward war in Iraq, the atmosphere on campus became toxic. Jake hated the anti-American rhetoric; he hadn’t really studied the situation in Iraq—and he was too young to know much about Vietnam—but he figured that Saddam Hussein was certainly part of the problem in that region. There were large antiwar demonstrations on campus now, so Jake tried to organize a pro-America demonstration after the Iraq invasion. About twenty supporters showed up, as did a handful of opponents, one of whom spat on him.
Then, in Jake’s senior year, Pat Tillman was killed in action in Afghanistan. Jake saw the news and began to cry. It was a blub that had been a long time coming after the frustrations of the past four years, a mixture of sadness about Tillman and shame that he hadn’t had the guts to quit school and enlist. It ended with resolve: he was going to join the military.
But that turned out to be ridiculously complicated, too. He figured he would join the Marines or the Army. Those were the two services actually fighting the wars on the ground. He wanted the real deal; he wanted to lead men in combat. The Marines were the mythic way to do that; it didn’t hurt that a few
years earlier he had read an article in Inc. magazine arguing that Marine officer training was better than an MBA: “Preparing for Business Battles? Learn Some Lessons from the Marines.”
Jake played his last football game, a loss to the Georgia Bulldogs in the Outback Bowl in Tampa, Florida, on January 1, 2005. He visited a Marine recruiter a few weeks later, still bulked up, which—the recruiter told him—was not the Marine way. “I don’t know if you can hack it. How many pull-ups can you do?”
Pull-ups were not part of his PT program. They were the opposite of what he had been training to do. “Fourteen, last time I checked,” Jake said.
“A Marine officer needs to be able to do twenty,” the recruiter said. “Have you had any serious injuries?”
Jake cataloged his woes. He felt as if he were trying to sell a used car.
“Whoa!” the recruiter said. “That’s an awful lot of paperwork. Why don’t you call me back in a month?”
Jake did, having shed twenty pounds and reached twenty pull-ups. He left a message; the recruiter never called him back. He shed another twenty pounds without effort—the muscle bulk was just burning off naturally. Meanwhile, the war was intensifying. A year earlier, four American contractors had been incinerated and hung from a bridge in Fallujah; a big battle was under way. Jake tried the Army recruiter, hoping for a special forces or Ranger contract. But once again he was told he would need a medical waiver for his foot. He continued to research his choices: Did he actually have to become an officer? Everything he read, everyone he spoke with, pointed in the same direction: this was a squad-level war. That was where the real action was. Squads were led by Corporals or Sergeants. All he had to do was enlist.
But even that wasn’t easy. His foot, again. At the end of June 2005, however, he lucked into a Marine recruiter who desperately needed to make his monthly quota. Somehow he was able to get expedited waivers for Jake’s foot and shoulder—and Jake Wood was a Marine, bound for Camp Pendleton.
He starred in boot camp and the School of Infantry—first in his class in both—and found himself ticketed for the Marine Air Ground Combat Center at 29 Palms in the middle of the Mojave Desert, a notoriously dreadful place. Jake was now at the bottom of the ladder again: a newbie or, more commonly in the Marines, a boot—and also something of a zoo show. Word got around the camp that there was a boot who’d actually played football for Wisconsin. People sidled by just to look at him. Marines are tough, as advertised, but they tend to have a larger cohort of little guys than big guys—historically, the Corps has been the most direct path for a little guy with something to prove to prove it. Among those who were curious about the Jake Zoo Show was Corporal Jeff Muir of the First Platoon of Golf Company, of the second battalion of the 7th Marine regiment (2/7, for short). Muir was the son of a Peoria police officer and an average-sized Marine, just short of six feet tall. He had just returned from a combat deployment in Fallujah, which gave him street cred with the new recruits. He therefore had the credentials to amble over and check out the new guy with some of his friends. “Some boot here play football for Wisconsin?”
“Hey, Wood . . .”
Jake stood. Jaws dropped. “Uh . . . okay,” they said. “Good to meet you.” And slunk away. “Dude’s large,” Muir’s Sergeant said.
“A big target,” Jeff said.
“You want to get close to him downrange. They won’t even see you.”
A few weeks later, Muir was transferred into Third Platoon, and he found that he wanted to get close to Jake, but not because he was a big target. Jake wasn’t your normal, pimply eighteen-year-old boot; he was Jeff’s age, twenty-three, and seemed to have his act together. When they went out on maneuvers, Jake always had his gear in good order—he could produce his knife, his compass, an extra canteen without even looking for it. He listened carefully, followed orders well. He had studied the field manual, and he knew stuff. When Muir would ask, “What’s the proper response to an L-shaped ambush?” Jake would know. A fair number of the guys with whom Muir had deployed couldn’t do that.
Quietly, Jake was dismayed by the quality of his fellow boots—they were slow, incompetent. These were Marines, the toughest fighting force in the world? How could he entrust his life to all these fools? But he kept it to himself. Indeed, in the field, Jeff Muir began to notice other things about Wood. When guys in their squad were lagging on a hike, Jake picked up their gear and carried it. He didn’t advertise it, didn’t say, “Here, let me help you with your gear!” so that everyone would notice. He quietly said, “I got it,” and carried on. So Muir and Wood became friends, and even there, Jake had all the nuances covered. He called Jeff “Lance Corporal,” respectfully when other people were around; he stood at parade rest when Jeff spoke to him in the presence of others. He did neither of those things, however, when he and Jeff drove the three hours to Hermosa Beach on weekends. They got drunk, chased girls, watched insane amounts of college football at an apartment owned by some of Jake’s friends who weren’t in the military.
They were joined by a third amigo—Clay Hunt—who was also older and smarter than most of the other recruits, and a solid guy. Jeff noticed that Clay would never bitch, even when they had to do something crappy, like go on patrol at 0300. “Let’s do it!” Clay said, always cheery, entirely dependable.
Clay wasn’t as easy as Jake, though. He had been kicked out of recon school, the Marines’ equivalent of the Green Berets—kicked out in spectacular fashion during his very last exercise, an ocean swim with full gear. The Sergeant had been ragging him, making fun of him, telling him he was fucking up. It was all bullshit. Clay stopped in the water and gave him the finger. And that was it. He was out.
It was an utter disaster in a mythic Marine fuckup sort of way. Clay, of course, didn’t see the humor in it. He was back to boot, back to the regular infantry, and his superiors would hassle him about it—and Clay would turn red and get angry, which made them rag him all the more. He was a little guy, about five eight, and given his closeness to Jake, his littleness seemed all the smaller. So it was: “Hey, tiny.” “Hey, recon dropout.” And when he responded, they’d say, “Hey, emo.”
When Clay talked about playing football in high school, they would go, “That’s bullshit dude—you’re too small to play football.” Actually, Clay was a fine athlete—especially when it came to individual sports like hunting, skiing, and biking—and he was tough, a total gym rat, a PT fanatic, which he and Muir had in common. But that counted for nothing. His fellow Marines had found a target of opportunity. They even ragged him when he got a Marine Corps tattoo: a Ka-Bar knife with the words “Death Before Dishonor.”
Jake and Jeff tried to help Clay through the hazing. Ignore those assholes. It’s part of the game. They do it to everyone. But Clay wasn’t buying. One day, Jeff Muir found Clay in a screaming fight with his team leader, Oscar Garza, who was tossing Clay’s stuff—his sleeping bag, his clothes, his helmet—around the barracks. Clay picked up his helmet and tossed it in the general direction of Garza, not quite at him, but close enough. Muir stepped in and stopped it, which was not a good thing to do: he had intervened to help a boot. It hurt Jeff’s standing with the senior noncoms, but he didn’t care—Clay and Jake were his brothers now. Seniority was important, but not that important.
Jake arrived in Iraq a newly minted lance corporal and leader of a four-man fire team. His first impression was filth. There was garbage everywhere, especially those little plastic shopping bags and shreds of bags, swirling in the wind. It also stank to high heaven. There was open sewage. The people were poor in the countryside; most had no running water or electricity. Most of them hated the Americans after four years of occupation. But they also hated the Al Qaeda fanatics who wouldn’t let them smoke or watch TV and forced marriages with their daughters. A change was coming—the Sunni tribes would switch sides that spring—but the members of Third Platoon, Golf Company, couldn’t sense it yet.
Three weeks into their deployment, on February 18, 2007, word
came to headquarters at FOB (Forward Operating Base) Viking, where they were stationed, that a Humvee convoy had gotten stuck in the mud, outside the wire but near them, and needed security while it waited for a tow. Jake’s squad saddled up and headed out at sunset, hoping to get back to Viking in time for dinner. They drove along the main highway, MSR Mobile, looking for Route Reds (all the local roads were named after baseball teams) as it grew dark and cold—as it does in winter in Iraq—with Jake and his fire team in the third Humvee. They made a turn onto a darkened route, which should have been Reds but wasn’t—there was a big bridge over a canal on Reds—and the convoy stopped and tried to figure it out.
Jake unfolded himself from the Humvee and stepped into ankle-deep mud. “I thought this was supposed to be a fucking desert,” he said and squished his way over to Sergeant Rosenberger in the lead vehicle, which was driven by Blake Howey, a friend of Clay’s. They consulted maps. Jake had a pretty good sense of where they had gone wrong and volunteered to turn around and take the lead; Rosenberger told him it wasn’t necessary. He’d stay in the lead, with Howey driving . . . but now Howey’s Humvee was stuck in the mud. Jake and three others got in back and pushed, mud splattering their faces, their jumpsuits, everything. The mud tasted like shit. Iraq was a field of shit. “I don’t see how this night could get any worse,” someone said.
“Don’t. Fucking. Say. That,” Jake said. “Don’t ever say that.”
They traced back to Reds and saw the bridge and then a white puff of smoke. Jake realized he was suddenly near-deaf; he could barely hear a thing. From a very great distance, someone—Bullard, up in the turret—was yelling, “IED . . . Howey hit an IED.”
Jake was out of the Humvee quickly, pulling Doc Campanili with him. The IED had been placed under the bridge—the lead Humvee should have stopped to check it out, but they were already late, and so they had breezed through. Now the bridge was on fire, a gagging reek of gunpowder, gasoline, and burning rubber in the air. Jake saw Sergeant Rosenberger limping toward him; a big piece of shrapnel had gashed through his calf. Jake began to run toward the bridge. He saw Latcher pull himself out of the turret, and then he saw Latcher and Sergeant Payne pulling Howey from the driver’s side. Jake was on the bridge now, skipping through puddles of burning gasoline. He reached the Humvee and started giving orders. He told Latcher to set up security about fifteen meters farther down the road—it was entirely possible that the IED was the beginning of a complex ambush. He told Sergeant Payne to go twenty-five meters down the road that ran along the canal. He didn’t stop to think that he was giving a superior noncom orders, and Payne, a very good guy, didn’t seem to mind. “I’m on it,” he said.