by Joe Klein
In the spring of 2009, Eric was invited to speak on a panel about the post-9/11 generation of veterans at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He gave his usual Mission Continues pitch, looking prohibitively spiffy in a dark suit, white shirt, and canary yellow tie. Out in the audience, a young doctoral student named Sheena Chestnut took the message to heart. Her father, a doctor, had recently crushed his leg while working on a home construction project. The leg had been amputated below the knee—and she realized that a service program like The Mission Continues might have done her father some good as he rejoined the world, physically diminished after surgery.
Sheena had come to the event with a friend who knew Eric through her own national service work. Afterward, they went to Grendel’s Den, a famed campus bar down the street from the Kennedy School. The conversation was easy, fun; no one, not even Eric, dominated. Sheena was an East Asia expert, about to spend the summer in China. Eric regaled her with stories of his own China trip; he talked about singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” after his first Chinese banquet and had everyone laughing. Sheena told Eric about her dad, about her reaction to the panel. She was petite, very attractive, with bright hazel eyes, a small voice, and dark hair. She was a Highland dancer who’d competed in national and international tournaments, so she knew all about the pain and discipline that boxing and SEAL training had required. She was right there with him, on the same wavelength, from the moment they started talking. And when he stood up from the table, Eric heard a voice say, “This is the girl you’re going to marry.”
This was well beyond weird. Eric was not one to hear voices. He had been burned badly once. He had fallen in love with a fabulous, willful young woman from Wales when he’d been at Oxford; it was all youth and passion, two qualities Eric had rarely indulged. They went to refugee camps together. They were married at a castle in Wales. She came to California for his SEAL training but couldn’t seem to settle herself there. Eric tried, too hard, to help her figure out her future, but he had trouble reading her. He was away sixteen hours a day in training and exhausted when he came home—and then she left abruptly, just after he’d completed SEAL training. Eric was crushed. He blamed himself for the divorce: it was the first time that he had failed at anything so totally, with only pain as a lesson. He’d had a series of girlfriends after that. They were of a type: smart, attractive, unchallenging. He was, in fact, boggled by women—was it possible to find someone who was thrilling but also a source of stability? He doubted it. “You don’t settle for anything less than the best in any other aspect of your life,” Adam Walinsky said to him. “Why should you do that with women?”
He and Sheena exchanged business cards as they left Grendel’s. He promised to keep in touch but, daunted, he didn’t. Six months passed.
He was back in Boston that October for a Mission Continues fund-raiser downtown. He called and asked if Sheena would like to go out for a drink after it was over. He figured that it would end about nine p.m., but several of the potential funders seemed real possibilities and wanted to get to know him better. He had to stay on. Finally, at about ten thirty, Sheena texted him, “Are we still going to do this?”
He called her. “Do you still want to? It’s pretty late.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
She took a cab from Cambridge to downtown Boston, where he was staying. He realized that he was starving. He hadn’t eaten dinner. “Do you mind if I get something to eat?” he asked. She didn’t mind at all—but it was late, and nothing was open except a pizza shop that sold slices. Then he realized he had credit cards but no cash—and they took only cash. “Can you help me?” he asked her. “Can I owe you?”
“Of course,” she said. There was something endearing about such a handsome, dynamic guy being so clumsy. He was embarrassed but didn’t try to bluff his way through it. There was no pretense to him, she thought: charisma without pretense was something new under the sun.
They sat on a cold stone wall at the edge of the Boston Common. It was a chilly autumn night, but all the periphera—the pizza, the temperature—soon fell away, and they talked as easily as they had the first time. She told him about her summer in China; he told her that a publisher had asked him to write an autobiography. He was talking it to an assistant, Tim Ly, who would transcribe the sessions; then Eric would write off the notes, but he wasn’t sure it was any good. They talked about their families. Hers was pretty conservative; both her parents were doctors.
Eric put her in a cab back to Cambridge, and she said, “Are you going to let another six months go by?”
No. No way. They began a nomadic courtship. Their first six dates were in five different cities. Eric soon sent her the manuscript of his autobiography, The Heart and the Fist, and asked for her opinions. It seemed a perverse act of intimacy, incredibly forward in its way. There was a fair amount of ego involved but also an open sort of earnestness: he was saying that he really respected her, that he really valued her judgment—even though he barely knew her. She decided to return the intimacy; her comments would introduce him, in the most precise way, to the way her mind worked. She wasn’t going to be easy on him. She would give the book a stern but appreciative read, marking up the pages with questions—“Can you find a better way to say this?”—and corrections: “Yugoslavia was not a Soviet satellite state.”
Eric fell in love with her corrections. He could not have hoped for a better reaction from her. She came to St. Louis—he gave her an extensive tour, quietly trying to make the case that this was as good a place as any for a China scholar to live—and she passed the Rob and Becky test easily. He went for runs with Kaj Larsen in California and St. Louis, wondering whether this was the real thing, whether he should take the plunge. Kaj—who was having too good a time to take any sort of plunge himself—told Eric he wouldn’t know unless he tried.
“I don’t want to be a two-time loser,” Eric said, but he knew that was not an answer.
On Veterans Day, 2009, a major study of returning veterans called “All Volunteer Force: From Military to Civilian Service” was published with much aplomb, including the support of Michelle Obama.
The results were stunning:
— Only 13 percent of post-9/11 veterans strongly agreed that their transition home was going well.
— 92 percent agreed that service to their community was important to them, and 90 percent agreed that service was a basic responsibility of every American.
— 95 percent wanted to serve wounded veterans; 90 percent wanted to serve military families; 88 percent wanted to do disaster relief; 86 percent wanted to serve at-risk youth; 82 percent wanted to help older Americans; 69 percent wanted to help clean up the environment.
The survey was the work of a young woman named Mary Yonkman, a blonde, somewhere-way-beyond-intense Hoosier who was married to a Navy helicopter pilot. Yonkman worked for a small Washington think tank called Civic Enterprises, which had been founded by John Bridgeland, a former director of George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. She had studied the various organizations serving returning veterans—there were more than 200,000, but few seemed to reflect the spirit of this new generation, and more than a few were outright scams, raising money, allegedly, for veterans but distributing only a tiny fraction of what they raised. One exception that Yonkman found was The Mission Continues, and it was tiny.
She latched on to Greitens and picked his brain about ways to make service a more accessible option to help returning veterans make the transition to private life. She and Bridgeland spent the next five months planning an all-star Veterans Day release for the study, a conference that would feature speeches by the First Lady and Dr. Jill Biden announcing their joint effort to help veterans, Joining Forces. Eric, and a handful of veterans who had actually volunteered in their communities, would also speak.
“Mike! I need you in my office,” Eric said a few weeks before the event.
Uh-oh. Every time the summons came, Mike k
new, the probability was pain. And now Eric told him about the ceremony in Washington, featuring the First Lady, and said, “I want you to speak for us.”
Mike was terrified but also excited. He really wanted to tell the world about The Mission Continues. He had given speeches about veterans back home in Washington, but this was a very different Washington. Michelle Obama would be there. It would be televised. He worked late into the night at the office and presented Eric with a draft a few days before the ceremony.
“Well, you’ve made a start,” Eric said. “You’re here,” he added, raising his left hand, palm down, just over his desk. “I need you to be here.” Eric raised his right hand, palm down, several feet over his head. “I need you to inspire them.”
The speech, about two and a half minutes long, is recorded for posterity on YouTube. Mike seems somber, disciplined. He talks briefly, in a restrained way, about how he quit school, lost his wife, and had his best friend commit suicide when he came home from the war. He talks about how service gave him a sense of purpose, saved his life. The presentation is crisp, fairly confident—not a barn burner, not Mike at his passionate best (which was probably a necessary precaution, given Mike’s Vesuvian tendencies)—but good enough to win an ovation from the audience and a thumbs-up from Greitens.
After the Joining Forces ceremony, Eric had a sense that the world was about to rush his way. It seemed inevitable that The Mission Continues would be drawing more attention and funding now, and it just wasn’t ready to handle all that. He called Mary Yonkman a few weeks after the Veterans Day ceremony and said, “Mary, you did an excellent job. The report is fantastic. But what are you going to do now? You can continue to work in Washington, D.C., and think great thoughts, or you can come and work for me in St. Louis and make this happen.”
Then Eric lowered his voice, from pitch to plea, and said, “I just want you to keep in mind that this is your husband’s generation of veterans, and you’ll live with this for the rest of your life.”
The next day, Yonkman walked into Bridgeland’s office and said she was going to work for The Mission Continues.
On April 1, 2010, Eric dispatched Mike Pereira to Los Angeles to make the TMC pitch in a contest to win an $8,000 grant, organized by mobilize.org. Ten different veterans’ groups would try to sell their ideas, and one hundred veterans, gathered by the sponsor, would vote on which was best. The event was held in one of those dreary airport hotels near LAX, but the feeling in the place—again, the camaraderie—was warm and easy. Mike met Kaj Larsen for the first time, who was there to cheer on the cause—and Eric was there, too, to give the keynote address in the morning; he left immediately thereafter. The ten-minute grant presentations began in the afternoon.
Mike was looser this time, and more personal. He talked about the program for the elderly that he and his fellow veterans had started in Bellingham, how that experience had turned him around, and how The Mission Continues was unique in its quest to make veterans whole and purposeful through community service. The reaction to his pitch was very good, he thought.
But after he spoke, three Marine noncoms got up and talked about how they had provided disaster relief after the Haiti earthquake two months earlier. Jake Wood led the presentation with slides of the devastation and slides of Team Rubicon members saving lives, saving babies’ lives—uh-oh, Pereira thought, these guys have their shit together—and then Will McNulty talked about how the trip had been organized with help from the Jesuits. Finally, Clay Hunt told his story, about how he had been flailing around since he’d come home from the war, how he’d even contemplated suicide, but in Haiti, for the first time, his problems just didn’t seem so serious anymore.
That night, Mike sought out the Team Rubicon guys at dinner. “Hey, why don’t you guys think about becoming Mission Continues fellows?”
“Why would we want to do that?” Jake asked.
“Because we’ll pay you a stipend to do what you’re already doing for free.”
“What’s the catch?”
Well, when you came right down to it, there was no catch, other than making an application and writing an essay.
Clay reminded Jake that this was the program he’d mentioned on the plane home from Santo Domingo. Eric Greitens was the Navy SEAL dude. “They also have Kaj Larsen,” McNulty said. Kaj had gotten a job as a television journalist, doing real investigative reporting from all over the world for Vanguard on Al Gore’s Current cable channel. McNulty was a fan. He had spotted Kaj during a break that afternoon and said, brilliantly, “You’re Kaj Larsen.”
“And you’re the guy from Team Rubicon,” Kaj replied. “I’d like to come along with you on one of your missions, do a story about it.”
Wow. Was it going to be that easy?
Kaj made the TMC fellowship pitch to McNulty that afternoon, but William was ineligible because he hadn’t been wounded downrange. Clay had been shot in the wrist, though, and had a PTSD rating; and Jake had his foot, which had required yet another surgery after the Afghanistan deployment.
Team Rubicon won the $8,000 grant the next day. The Mission Continues finished a very close second in the voting. But Mike Pereira left LA stoked: Jake and Clay had said they would apply for fellowships. They were exactly the sort of fellows Eric had had in mind. Mike had lost the competition, but he believed he’d come home with a bigger prize.
In December 2010, Eric went to Spokane for the holidays. On the day before Christmas, he asked Sheena to go with him on an errand—he’d always liked the English tradition of Christmas crackers with crepe-paper crowns and tiny gifts in them. He took her to a dollar store and got a bunch of joke gifts—Groucho glasses, a fake hand grenade, candy—and went home to wrap them. After dessert on Christmas night, the family opened their gifts. And then Sheena opened hers, a small box with an engagement ring inside.
“Will . . . will you . . .” Eric was suddenly very nervous. The room was silent, in mid-gasp. “Will you marry me?”
Sheena said yes and began to cry, then her mother and sister and everyone was crying and hugging. Later, Eric fell asleep on the couch, watching a British Premier League soccer match. Sheena was touched by this public display of sheer comfort. “Well,” her mother said. “That’s good to know. He has an off switch.”
Chapter 6
MY LIFE IS A TRAIN WRECK
Chile wasn’t as compelling a mission for Team Rubicon as Haiti had been. It was a developed country; there was a disaster relief infrastructure. The Chilean Army took charge of post-quake operations, which left TR with not that much to do aside from occasional first aid work. But it was good to be back together again—Jake, William, Clay, the super-medic Mark Hayward, and Zack Smith, a firefighter from Sacramento. They landed in Argentina and crossed the Andes in taxis, a rousing ride along switchback roads. The Chilean Army asked them to do reconnaissance in the seaside towns north and south of ground zero, and they did—it was nice to be doing something—but they were seeing only a handful of patients a day. Helicopters were dropping tons of food and medical supplies. The hospitals were fully staffed. They went home after a week.
Jake and McNulty figured there would still be a need for Team Rubicon in the more desperate places on earth, but after Chile, they realized there were limits to its potential—and Jake was more convinced than ever that this was going to be a part-time thing in his life. He had been accepted to UCLA business school on a full ride; he and Indra were set in her apartment near Pasadena.
Clay was alone in Santa Monica now; Robin had left and taken all the furniture. Clay’s mom flew in and tried to make the empty place a home. She bought him sheets and pillows and towels, stuff for the kitchen. He seemed okay to her, but drifting. Spring semester at Loyola Marymount was lost—he received incompletes in all his classes—but he was determined to return in the fall. The VA hadn’t come through with his disability benefits yet. He had the $1,000 a month from The Mission Continues, but no other sources of income. He certainly wouldn’t be able to keep the Santa
Monica apartment if he didn’t find work of some sort, especially if the VA didn’t come through. Indra gave him a key to their place; he would come over, unbidden, when he was feeling down and lay it all on Jake. Taking care of Clay was a heavy burden, and Indra began to wonder if the Band of Brothers thing might not be the untrammeled fabulousness that they made it out to be.
McNulty saw Clay frequently during the summer of 2010 as well. He had decided to move to Los Angeles—it would be a much more convenient locale for his Title X film company—and he bunked with Clay when he came to town, looking for a place to rent. They hung out with Kaj Larsen, running on the beach, working out, chasing girls. Clay was itching for another TR deployment, thinking about going back to Haiti on his own.
Kaj became an easy liaison between The Mission Continues and Team Rubicon, able to bridge the cultural gap between Eric’s rectitude and Jake’s casual charisma. Eventually Kaj would serve on the boards of both organizations. His real-life career was going well: he had moved on from Current TV to CNN’s investigative unit, and he figured that Team Rubicon’s next mission would make for a great story.
It came that August, when the torrential waters from an epic monsoon season in Pakistan cascaded down from the Hindu Kush and flooded the Indus River Valley. Millions of people were displaced; thousands were dying of waterborne diseases like cholera. As Jake and Will began to plan the mission—Will would lead it; Jake and Clay would stay home and go to school for real—McNulty received a phone call from Dr. Eduardo Dolhun, one of the original eight in Haiti, who was desperate to get to Pakistan.