To the Last Breath

by Francis Slakey

  And through all this welter of change and development your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purpose, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishments; but you are the ones who are trained to fight.

  When I finished reading, I turned around and faced the major. “I hope you understand now, sir,” he said. In silence, we headed back to the science building at West Point, he with a confident soldier’s march, and me with the stride of a determined academic.

  Not everyone shared that major’s view. A month later, a dozen cadets and a brigadier general would come down from West Point to Georgetown to attend my class.

  “I’ll call it the Program on Science in the Public Interest, SPI,” I explained to a group of administrators at Georgetown University.

  Students would break into groups, identify a critical global issue, evaluate what’s being done by directly engaging with the government, industries, and nonprofit organizations, and then they would develop their own solution. The primary enrollment would be science students, but we would include students with other skill sets that could complement the work of a group; each would be a cross-disciplinary analysis team.

  The defining characteristic of SPI would be direct engagement with experts to address contemporary global problems. There would be no textbook. There would be no tests. All grading would be based on class presentations and what was accomplished by semester’s end: they would have to turn their ideas into legislation or some other actionable step.

  All my lectures would be interactive. Students would bring their laptops to class and we would explore challenges and potential solutions in real time. I would teach seminar style, facing the students, all of us sitting around a conference table, all with the purpose of taking the science that they had learned and using it to address global issues.

  The plan was well suited to Georgetown University. Founded on a small plot of land overlooking the Potomac River, it was the nation’s first Catholic university. My program would be perfectly in line with its more than two-centuries-long commitment to public engagement and social justice.

  The university has a tall iron gate that marks the eastern side of the campus at the corner of 37th and O streets in Washington, D.C. Students walk through that gate and take a step back in time, the striking old stone buildings of the quad their first sight of the historic institution. A spectacular amount of learning goes on inside this gate. My concept was to make sure that it didn’t just stay inside the gate.

  “Students will get outside the gate and think outside the textbook,” I told the administration. I didn’t have to wait long for their response: do it.

  I wouldn’t have other programs in the country to mimic or build on. No university I knew of was teaching science through direct engagement on global issues. No science department in the country was assessing grades based on whether their students had legislation introduced in Congress. I would have to riff. It wouldn’t be the first time I did that; I just hoped it would have a better result than it did with Dangerman.

  “Creating this program will be like climbing Mount Everest,” a colleague had told me. For the first time since summiting that mountain, I appreciated the metaphor.

  While I would be navigating new territory, I knew of a success story that gave me confidence in the approach. I knew that if someone is passionate about their cause, driven to see a just end, willing to push with every breath, then they could impact the decisions of major institutions even if all odds were against them. I was confident about this because I knew a person who had done just that: Patsy Spier.

  Gina and I are sitting about twenty rows back in the auditorium for the awards ceremony, far enough that we can barely see Patsy sitting in the front row. We thought we had come early enough to get a good seat, but the event was already packed.

  When they call out her name and read the citation, my throat grips tight, tears form in Gina’s eyes. Patsy walks up on the stage and is handed the Department of Justice’s Special Courage Award. This comes just a week before she would receive the FBI’s Strength of the Human Spirit award, established with her in mind, its first recipient.

  “I can think of no more worthy honoree,” the presenter, President Bush’s own FBI director, Robert Mueller, had said.

  Patsy had successfully persuaded members of Congress to suspend funding a military training program in Indonesia until the gunmen were hunted down. After the suspension of funding, the investigation proceeded quickly. Within a few months, the ringleader of the ambush was identified, Antonius Wamang. Soon after, he was apprehended.

  Patsy had flown to Indonesia for the trial and was there when the verdict was read: Wamang was sentenced to life in prison and six other co-conspirators were given jail sentences. She had found her justice.

  Her approach had served up a lesson: don’t work against an institution, work with it. There will be obstacles, but push on, push through.

  Justice is a thing worth fighting for in this world, and it is steeper, more challenging, more valuable, and requires more perseverance and strength of character than any mountain I had ever scaled. My mantra had changed.

  Justice, to the last breath.

  With the investigation complete, the gunmen behind bars, Patsy would now begin a new life. She would be moving to Washington, D.C., and the job she was taking was not unexpected: she was the new outreach specialist in the Justice Department Office of Justice for Victims of Overseas Terrorism. And she would be working just a few hundred yards away from my downtown office.

  “Not interested.” I dismiss Gina’s suggestion.

  I had married and I owned a house now—two pillars that I had identified so many years ago had fallen. I also had established a science education program at Georgetown University based on civic engagement. I was not the person I was a decade earlier, but I wasn’t about to become a marshmallow. “I’m not interested in going to a yoga class,” I told Gina.

  We were in Encinitas, California, visiting a friend. I had spent most of the time surfing, Gina had spent the time doing everything but surf. Typical of her, in just a week she knew the town like she was a native. “The class will be on the beach tonight at seven; I’m going.”

  I shrugged. I could think of better things to do with my time.

  Gina interpreted my shrug. “Look, I’m not suggesting you do this for me; it’s for you. You could use it; your body is beaten up.”

  That was true. I had three decades’ worth of accumulated injuries. An anti-inflammatory, ibuprofen, was now an almost daily supplement, my vitamin I. So Gina had a point. If yoga could displace some of the painkiller, it just might be worth doing. I decided to try it, once.

  I was the only man on the sand that evening. But just because the class was dominated by women, that doesn’t mean it was a soft activity. A metaphor helps make the point.

  If you see a collection of ants, whether thick and dense or in a narrow line transporting bits of leaves back to the hill, you can be sure of one thing: they are all female. Every one of them.

  And if you see a collection that’s swarming around a hapless cat-erpillar, tearing at its puffy casing—the kind of ants that when enlarged under a microscope appear armored, as if plates of steel have been grafted onto their body in a foundry—then those are marauder ants. Each of those marauder ants in the swarm, mandibles ripping at the caterpillar’s soft belly, is a female. Every one of them.

  Where are the male ants? They are dead.

  On the rare occasion when you actually see a male ant, winged and flying about, he can only be doing one of two things. He is either flying around looking for the queen ant so he can mate; or he has just finished mating with the queen ant, has served his lone function in the colony, and is now making the most of his last two weeks of life. Even with wings, two weeks is not enough time to cover much groun
d and establish a legacy. He will be forgotten.

  I am neither the caterpillar nor the male ant in this metaphor. In fact, I’m not part of the metaphor at all. Focus instead on the behavior of the female ants.

  The female ants are concentrated on the task, operating with purpose and precision, a large group behaving as one. On the beach in Encinitas that evening, with the sun setting over the ocean, the instructor swept through a vinyasa, smoothly connecting one yoga position after another, and the whole group arched and flowed in unison. Individuals, working together with shared purpose, were achieving their goal.

  This, in essence, was precisely what I hoped to accomplish in my classroom. On the beach that evening, individuals were achieving their goals, enabled by the entire group. The entire group, less one, that is. It would take a couple months of this before I would learn the positions. Eventually, with practice, I would get limber enough to do them. And as it turned out, Gina was right. I’m taking less ibuprofen now.

  “Find the honest people—there are plenty of them out there—and work with them,” I tell the students.

  I then explain, briefly, leaving out the details of the bullets and the tears, the story of Patsy Spier. The students have now learned the difference that one person can make. That story can give them confidence that they can influence an institution, despite what may seem like overwhelming odds against it.

  Within a week, the students have broken into groups. A week after that, they are identifying the issues they want to address over the semester.

  “Bags. Plastic, paper, whatever,” a student explains in my office. His group is concerned about the global waste associated with single-use bags. We are all sitting around a table, and the students are excited, eager to take their idea outside the gate and engage others on the topic.

  “Congress can provide incentives for people to stop throwing away shopping bags and instead have them carry around reusable bags,” another student in the group explains.

  They take turns telling me what they have learned in researching what has been tried in various states and cities around the country and in other parts of the world. “In Rwanda,” one of the students enthuses, “plastic bags are banned. They can arrest people with a bag!”

  I reel him back. “Drop that idea of jail time.”

  There is plenty of potential here. With only some modest tweaking, their project can actually develop into something reasonable, actionable. “Let’s consider a carrot instead of a stick,” I tell them, and we begin to sharpen their idea.

  Over the next month they discuss their idea with environmental organizations and contact representatives from industry including Walmart and the National Grocers Association. Eventually, they establish their core idea, their solution to achieve a 40 percent reduction in single-use bags. It starts with a voluntary program that businesses can participate in. With the plan solidly developed, they organize students from other campuses, publish an opinion piece in a local newspaper, and meet with members of Congress and their staff.

  All the other students in the class are developing unique strategies best suited to their project. But there are a couple things they all have in common. First, no one works alone; they have to work in groups. I’ve learned that brings the greatest possibility for success. Most importantly, a group provides the support needed after a failure. And there is always at least one failure: a bad meeting, a rejection, an expert’s dismissal of their original idea that requires them to reformulate their plans.

  Another requirement is that the students choose their own projects. I don’t tell them what to work on. By allowing them to develop their own ideas, they are passionate about achieving their goal. This is in contrast to their typical science class. Up to this point in their science training, they have worked on problems that are carefully laid out in a textbook, solvable—problems that I had solved so many times on the chalkboard a decade ago.

  When I give talks on my teaching method at campuses around the country, I usually get this question from a detractor in the audience: “Fine, but what do they accomplish?”

  I welcome that question, because I also demand results. In fact, I grade students based on what they accomplish. So I respond to that question by reading from a speech that was presented on the floor of the U.S. Congress:

  Our environment is literally choking on plastic bags. Whole swaths of our oceans, in some places up to 580 square miles have turned into floating landfills. Every day thousands of birds, turtles, marine mammals, fish, and squid die because they’ve ingested plastic bags or other plastic debris.

  The representative then goes on to describe his resolution, which aims to reduce plastic bag use by 40 percent nationwide.

  I could conclude here, but that would be only half the story. This resolution was brought to my attention by two enterprising Georgetown University students. Together with their fellow classmates they drafted the resolution.

  The public and many elected officials are not always in sync with what we need to do…. While the science of today has led us to a better understanding of our relationship with nature, we must also appreciate that a democracy requires time for the public to accept and support the necessary changes.

  I applaud the efforts of the Georgetown students and their class for providing us a valuable political lesson.

  The students had persuaded an influential member of Congress to pursue the legislation they had written. And, to his credit, he acknowledged their role.

  Not every student group in my class achieves their goal as completely as those students did. Still, my files at Georgetown are now starting to fill with students’ success stories. They have not only had their ideas included in legislation, but some of those ideas have been passed by Congress and signed into law by the president of the United States.

  The students have promoted development of green buildings, proposed new methods for combating tuberculosis and malaria, pushed for cleaner transportation. Their enthusiasm is infectious—one team persuaded a foundation to support them to fly to Bamako, Mali, to do a feasibility study of a bus rapid transit system. They discuss their ideas with Congress, write opinion pieces for newspapers, publish articles in major research journals, and give presentations at government agencies.

  They stand at the helm, steering our journey to a better place.

  Ten years ago, I had lectured with my back to the class. Now my students were part of the world. The map had come to life.

  My more-than-a-decade-long journey was nearing its end.

  I had only one last ocean to surf to complete the record; all I had left to do was pick a beach and get there. Also, reluctantly, I had finally accepted that I would never know the meaning of the amulet. For the last couple of years I had been writing about the amulet in the hope that I could find someone who could translate it. I would get letters from readers, but no one knew what it meant. I spoke to linguists, but they couldn’t interpret it. It was at one talk in particular that I finally had to face facts. I was invited to speak at the Library of Congress. This, I thought, was my final opportunity to decipher the amulet.

  I told the assembled scholars at the library the story of the Most Holy Rinpoche of the Khumbu and how I had acquired the amulet. I also told some of the tales that followed. I closed the talk holding up a board with the amulet’s letters inscribed on it, asking the experts if anyone could provide a translation. I left the board behind and a few days later got a response from a Tibetan scholar at the library: “I can’t translate the amulet.” I had consulted a final authority, and even then, I couldn’t crack its code.

  So many things had changed in me over the last decade, but one thing had not. Ten years earlier Jim Williams and I were looking down at Ang Nima, encouraging him to stand, and Nima had remained in the snow, at peace with his own death, comforted by his belief that he would be reincarnated. Despite all the time I had spent in Lama Kinle’s prayer room and all the miles spent crisscrossing Asia talking with monks, I would act no differen
tly today than I did during that blizzard on Everest. I would do what it took to get Nima on his feet.

  To this day, I don’t look to Buddhism for answers about life and death. Instead, I take my guidance from Joe Louis.

  Joe Louis was born in a shack in rural Alabama, his parents the descendants of slaves. His family worked farmland until they were harassed by the Ku Klux Klan and moved to Michigan, where Louis intended on becoming a cabinetmaker. Instead of hammering wood, he took to hammering people and, by Ring Magazine’s standard, became the greatest heavyweight boxing champion in history.

  So what was Louis’s observation on life and death?