by Joe Klein
They stayed for an hour or so. There was no great aha moment, just the accretion of emotion and amazement at the strength of the young Sailors and Marines . . . and the realization that if their strength wasn’t harnessed in some way, it might wither into hopelessness and depression. As he went from bed to bed, talking to the men about their futures, Eric found himself saying, “Great. We still need you.”
It was a sledgehammer sentence. He could see it in their eyes. And he knew—he was absolutely convinced—that it was true: the country did need them. Despite their wounds—and because of their wounds—these veterans could come home and be examples in the same way the Police Corps graduates in Baltimore were.
Eric was on fire as he left the hospital. He called Ken Harbaugh, who was up at Yale Law, and Kaj Larsen on his cell phone before he reached the parking lot. “I know what we’re going to do with the Center for Citizen Leadership,” he told Ken. They would help wounded veterans to make the transition into civilian life by doing public service in their communities.
“Do you think anyone is doing that? Is there some program we can support?” he asked. Both Ken and Rachel spent the next few days scouring the internet. They couldn’t find any.
Kaj showed up the next day to visit his sister, who was a medical student at Georgetown University. He and Eric went for one of their traditional soul-search runs—and, Kaj remembered, it was the sort of scene that would be shot from a helicopter in the movies. They ran down the mall from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and back again. Eric told him about Bethesda. “Kaj, you gotta go,” Eric said. “You gotta see them.” He told Kaj about his public service idea. “Do you think I should do it?”
“Bro, you were born to do this,” Kaj replied, which was not a difficult call. Eric was a creature of enthusiasms, a constant whim-machine—becoming an astronaut, climbing Mount Everest, whatever—but this was different. It had ballast as well as inspiration. It fit Eric’s military and humanitarian impulses perfectly.
Over the next few months, Eric and Ken came up with a plan to offer fellowships—which sounded less academic and slightly more prestigious than scholarships—to wounded veterans who were willing to go out among the civilians and do some of the same sort of public service work they had done in the villages of Iraq and Afghanistan. To receive the stipend, they would have to find a local public service organization to sponsor them and supervise their work. The core idea was there from the start: if they were helping other people, they might not spend so much time fretting about themselves. They might make new friends, make the transition to civilian life more easily, and maybe even re-create the same sense of purpose they’d had in the military.
Helping veterans would become the work of the Center for Citizen Leadership—which still didn’t seem a very compelling or comprehensible name for this particular program. A month or so after the visit to Bethesda, the lightning bolt struck Eric as he was driving his truck. He called Ken Harbaugh and said, “Let’s call it The Mission Continues.”
Chapter 2
A CHALLENGE, NOT A CHARITY
MICHELE NORRIS: Commentator Kenneth Harbaugh grew up listening to World War II stories from his grandfather. As a child, Harbaugh says those stories seemed fun and full of dark humor. But as his grandfather got older, his tales became more realistic.
KENNETH HARBAUGH: When I was little, I used to love a good war story. My grandfather flew bombers during World War II. And whenever he talked of his exploits, his tales always seemed to end with a punch line. War, for all I knew, was fun . . . Of course, there were stories my grandfather didn’t tell until I was much older. How he came home, body full of shrapnel and a hole clean through his thigh. How his plane flying solo was ambushed by an entire squadron of enemy fighters and every officer on board was wounded and bleeding with a thousand miles between them and home.
Army Captain Chris Marvin was driving home from physical therapy at the Tripler Army Medical Center on Oahu, Hawaii, listening to All Things Considered in early November 2007.
KENNETH HARBAUGH: When I listen to my buddies talk now about Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m struck by how similar their tone is to my grandfather’s. His war was different. We all know that. But there’s a strange sameness in the telling of it, the way humor is wrung from the most awful things.
Marvin had been in physical therapy for three years since his Black Hawk helicopter had crashed near Khost, in southeastern Afghanistan. His recovery had been a weird, dispiriting, otherworldly experience. He had had nine major surgeries, and he wasn’t done yet. He was desperate to do something useful. The Army’s idea of useful was having him work two days a week as the assistant to the assistant to the Assistant Supply Officer at the 25th Infantry Division. He didn’t have a desk or computer; his duties were to show up—his presence meant that a box could be checked by the Division’s Warrior Transition Unit: he had a “job.” He mostly sat around doing crossword puzzles. He also learned how to speak Hawaiian, a near-useless skill—but there he was, in paradise, and the act of learning and, better still, mastering something esoteric was satisfying. He spent the other three days a week in physical and occupational therapy. He had lost count of the hours he’d spent doing physical therapy, but it had to be in the thousands. It was his real job.
KENNETH HARBAUGH: Bullets today aren’t any friendlier than they were back then. I’ve seen what they do. And now there are IEDs and suicide truck bombs and all manner of horrors my grandfather never faced. War stories will never sound the same to me as they did when I was little. I see past the punch lines now. Yeah, I still laugh along with the double amputee who jokes about losing three hundred dollars’ worth of tattoos. But I know how real the pain is when he tells me his only regret is that he didn’t stop enough shrapnel with his own body to save his squad mate from getting hit.
Chris stopped the car in his driveway and just sat there, listening.
KENNETH HARBAUGH: They call my grandfather’s generation the greatest. But I’ve seen what the best of my generation has endured in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there is greatness among them. And, you know, they tell a damn good war story, too. Even if they do, sometimes, break my heart.
And now Chris was weeping. Damn, this guy had nailed it, hadn’t he?
MICHELE NORRIS: Commentator Ken Harbaugh is a former Navy pilot who currently attends Yale Law School. He’s also the executive director of The Mission Continues, a nonprofit that helps wounded and disabled veterans volunteer in their communities.
Now that seemed an excellent idea: “volunteering” in his community. It certainly would be more rewarding than hanging around the supply office, eye-begging the Assistant Supply Officer for some useful chore. He went on his computer, googled “The Mission Continues,” found nothing. He called National Public Radio, got Ken Harbaugh’s email, and sent him a note. Harbaugh called back the next day.
“Hey, I heard your commentary on the radio,” Chris said. “I want to work for The Mission Continues. I want to volunteer in my community.”
“Wow,” Harbaugh said, nonplussed. “That’s great.” The Mission Continues was maybe a month old—in fact, it could be argued that it didn’t really exist yet. There had been phone calls and emails bouncing through the ether. There had been an organizational meeting in Eric’s apartment. The conversations meandered, sometimes to the point of hilarity. At one point, Ken had proposed that TMC’s logo be an eagle with a bandaged wing.
Eric collapsed, laughing. “That’s a terrible idea.”
They did have a general idea of what they wanted to do. But suddenly, here was an actual veteran, Chris Marvin, forcing their hand.
“Tell me about yourself,” Ken asked.
“Well, the reason why your commentary struck me is that both my grandfathers were in World War Two, and my dad was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam,” Marvin began. “He’s career military, a Colonel in the Army National Guard. It’s what people do in my family.”
Chris had grown up in Bloomington, Illinois. He was stra
ight-ahead, no frills all-American: a fine student, a four-sport varsity athlete, an Eagle Scout. He attended Notre Dame University on an ROTC scholarship and entered the Army when he graduated in 2003. He deployed to Afghanistan in April 2004 and worked out of a base near Khost, in the mountainous Paktia province on the Pakistani border. This was an ugly nexus in the war against one of the main Taliban factions, the Haqqani Network, which was supported by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). It was the most noxious entanglement of a frustrating war: The U.S. troops were fighting guerrillas armed, indirectly, by the United States, via Pakistan. The CIA had a major facility in the area, and Chris was doing some very dangerous flying, close air support for special operators on secret missions in the Af/Pak borderlands. He loved the work. He was, he would later say, 25 years old, in charge of a 25-man platoon, flying a $25 million aircraft. Where else but the U.S. military could a person his age have so much responsibility?
On August 12, 2004, he and his copilot were flying a mission near Khost when the controls jammed. Chris got down low, beneath the instrument displays, to see if he could fix the problem as the Black Hawk seriously began to lose altitude—which was a good thing, because if he had been sitting upright, he probably would have died when the helicopter crashed, very hard, on a flat stretch of hardpan desert and flipped over. He was crushed inside, stuck there for more than an hour. Fourteen were wounded in the crash; one killed.
“Is this aircraft on fire?” Chris shouted out to his men.
“No, sir,” someone answered.
“Am I the worst?”
“Yes, sir.” And Chris was relieved, because if he was the most severely injured, then his men were okay, then everything would be okay.
But Chris was far from good: he had broken his right foot, both of his legs, his right arm, and he had shattered all the bones on the right side of his face and broken both his knees, both of his hips, and both of his shoulders. He had broken so many things that he couldn’t be put together all at once. He spent much of the next two years in a wheelchair, with an arm and a leg still needing to be fixed—there was debate among the doctors as to whether the leg should be operated on or amputated.
He was the very first casualty of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to arrive back at Tripler Army Medical Center on Oahu. His parents were there to greet him, which was another good thing, because his mother was a nurse, and she noticed that the doctors had him on far too many medications. “My son isn’t there!” she told the doctor and ordered him to take Chris off three of the five different narcotics they had him on.
His girlfriend, Amy Miller, was there, too, appalled by his physical condition. Chris had been too broken to be properly cleaned in the field or even as he was rushed through Landstuhl Hospital in Germany, where the first surgeries were done. He was convinced that the steady diet of morphine added to the stench. But Amy—a dolphin trainer with degrees in psychology and biology from Harvard—was in for the duration. She would come home from work to make him a sandwich for lunch every day for the next three years, until he was able to use his arms again. Eventually, they would get married and have two children.
And it was Amy who pushed the wheelchair as he emerged from Tripler a few days later. Chris was swaddled by the soft tropical air, the magnificent views of Diamond Head and Waikiki Beach below. “Okay, wow,” he said. “This is the perfect place to do rehab!”
A few months later, just before Christmas 2004, Chris wheeled himself out to the mailbox and found a $500 check from some charitable organization he’d never heard of—the letter talked about supporting America’s heroes. And he began to get angry: this charity didn’t know him. All they had was an address. So what was this $500 for? He was still on full pay, and he would retire with 100 percent disability. He owned his house and car, and he was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars of free medical care from the military. The Army had paid for college, so he had no student loans. He had no debt at all! And here were these mushy-minded do-gooders sending him money, treating him like a charity case. They pitied him. They assumed he couldn’t take care of himself, that his productive life was over. And yes, he was still in a wheelchair; and yes, his girlfriend still had to make him a sandwich for lunch. But he refused to be seen as an object of pity—he was a wounded soldier, looking to restart his life, and convinced that he had a lot more to offer. And yes, he had a very serious job: rehab.
He sent the $500 to a local food bank, to people who really needed it.
Listening to all this, Ken Harbaugh was blown away. The guy was so strong, so composed: Chris Marvin seemed the fantasy version of the sort of veteran they wanted to help. He and Chris had several more phone conversations, in which Ken admitted that The Mission Continues didn’t quite exist yet and asked Chris what he thought the program should be. “It should be a challenge, not a charity,” Chris said. “We’re warriors, not victims.” And that was pretty much that.
Chris Marvin became the first official Mission Continues fellow, a status that was extremely temporary, because he was soon hired as TMC’s second employee, after Rachel Wald, who was still Eric’s assistant. He was named National Director of TMC’s Fellowship Program in December 2007. He would do this work from Hawaii, while continuing with his operations and physical therapy. Chris accepted the stipend during his first weeks as a fellow—this wasn’t like getting $500 for nothing; he was working for it—but then he found out that Eric, Ken, and Kaj were paying it out of their own pockets and refused to take any more money from them.
Eric decided he would base The Mission Continues back home in St. Louis. Washington was overstuffed with organizations with names like the Center for Citizen Leadership (of which The Mission Continues was still thought to be the first of several programs). There was the Center for Public Leadership and the Center for Civic Education—countless claustrophobic centers and projects stewing in the same federal juice and trying to raise money from the same pool of donors.
It would be distinctive to run it from St. Louis. And he had other moneymaking opportunities back home: a teaching fellowship at the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri, and a contract to offer Walinsky-style training to the Missouri firefighters. Washington University in St. Louis had agreed to have him teach a course on citizenship in its political science department. He was even given free office space in a downtown library building by the Gateway Center for Giving, which was an incubator for nonprofit projects.
Going home wasn’t easy at first. Eric slept on an air mattress in a rented room adorned by only a clock radio and his books, organized on shelves he’d gotten from craigslist. He didn’t mind the austerity so much; his Washington apartment had been thingless, too, but it had been filled with people and intellectual excitement and nonstop activity. Now, not so much. He didn’t know many people beyond his family in St. Louis yet—certainly not many people with whom he could brainstorm new ideas or from whom he could learn. His old mentor Bruce Carl had died—incredibly—of AIDS. His wife told Eric that Bruce had been leading a secret life; neither she nor their children knew about it until Bruce got sick. There had never been a hint of this at B’Nai El; Bruce clearly understood that if he slipped once and even hinted at his truth, he’d be gone—and teaching the kids was too important for that. Bruce’s quiet suffering seemed incomprehensible and unnecessary; the tragedy added to Eric’s emptiness.
Eric’s professional life in St. Louis wasn’t off to a flying start either. His citizenship class at Washington University fell through when no students signed up for it. He worked out, and ran, and then worked out some more. He started learning tae kwon do; his goal was to compete nationally, and the act of learning something new, something physical, was its own reward. But the truth was, he was crawling up the walls of his apartment, frustrated and a bit worried about what came next.
He had doubts about The Mission Continues, too. It wasn’t building fast enough. Ken Harbaugh also provided the first real fellow a few days after Ch
ris Marvin signed on, the first who really needed a Mission Continues stipend. Harbaugh’s parents ran an equine therapy center—Horses Helping the Handicapped (Triple H Equitherapy)—just outside San Antonio, Texas. They’d found a wounded Navy veteran, Mathew Trotter, who had some experience around horses and wanted to help both children and his fellow veterans heal themselves by learning how to control a horse. “Can you guys help out?” they asked Ken.
Ken and Kaj Larsen kicked in $1,000 apiece, and Eric donated $3,500 from his combat pay—and Mathew Trotter, who had endured eight surgeries on his ankles after a shipboard accident, proved to be a wise and patient teacher. A few months later, Ken’s parents asked if Mathew could get a second fellowship from The Mission Continues—and he received the first Travis Manion fellowship award, funded by the Travis Manion Foundation.
The next two fellows were worthy, but not exactly what Eric had had in mind. One, Mike Paul, wasn’t even an Iraq or Afghanistan veteran. And his injuries had occurred after he had served in the Gulf War, in a skydiving accident. He was in a wheelchair now, but he wanted to become an adaptive skiing instructor—and The Mission Continues did help him succeed in that, enabling him to go back to school to get his master’s degree in teaching people with special needs. Helping Mike become a productive member of society seemed a good thing, but it was a long way from the mission Eric had imagined for himself at Bethesda. He had envisioned thousands of Mission Continues fellows, storming out to change the world.
Chris Marvin found another fellow in Hawaii. His name was Readen Clavier, an Army veteran from Palau who had suffered a severe traumatic brain injury when his Humvee had been blown up by an IED. Chris landed Clavier an internship at a tech company, where he could work on his fine-motor skills. This was another good thing to do, but it was vocational rehab, not public service.