The Time of Our Lives

by Tom Brokaw

  But then Doug, a world-class kayaker, rock climber, and deeply committed environmentalist, hit a philosophical conundrum: How could he be true to his environmental values and still push more clothing on consumers—more clothing than anyone could need?

  Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face and Esprit, a world-class outdoorsman and dedicated environmental philanthropist (Photo Credit 8.2)

  “I asked my mom,” he said, “how many shirts Dad had during the forties, and how many dresses she had. She said, ‘Oh, I don’t know—just a few.’ That got me to thinking. ‘Why do we need more now?’ ”

  So Doug sold his interest in Esprit, sold much of his art, and moved to South America where he began buying up hundreds of thousands of acres in Chile and Argentina, converting them to wilderness parks or running them as sustainable ranches. As rich as he was at Esprit, he’s even richer now, personally and financially.

  Kevin and Joan Salwen of Atlanta have gotten a good deal of attention for a do-over of their lives prompted by a question from their daughter, Hannah. They were at a stoplight when Hannah noticed a homeless man with a sign saying he was hungry. There was a Mercedes at the same light, and Hannah said, “If that man had a less nice car, that [other] man could have a meal.”

  When the Salwens got to their two-million-dollar home in an upscale Atlanta neighborhood, the conversation continued about “How much is too much?” Hannah and her brother, Joseph, made it clear they didn’t need all the things their parents’ financial success could afford.

  Kevin had been a Wall Street Journal reporter before becoming a successful entrepreneur and Joan was an executive at Accenture, the financial services firm, before returning to teaching, something she loved more.

  The family dialogue didn’t let up, and the Salwens came to a consensus: Let’s sell this big house and give half to charity. The half amounted to $885,000 net.

  They performed a diligent search of where they wanted the money to go and decided to spread it throughout twenty villages in Ghana. That, in turn, led to a widely praised book, The Power of Half: One Family’s Decision to Stop Taking and Start Giving Back, addressing what well-off families can do with half their home values or, carried to the extreme, their net worth.

  As Kevin puts it, “Now we always look at our lives and the other halves we can do. We’re always going to be involved.”

  Obviously, Tompkins and the Salwens are exceptions, even at the high end of the personal wealth scale.

  The rest of us can be be inspired by their model, however, and pause to reflect on the large posters now adorning the lobbies of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s most successful large bank. They feature self-confident young men and women with the banner headline SAVE IS THE NEW SPEND.

  Save for a smaller, more affordable home, perhaps. Obviously, the long-running trends have come to a halt. The average size of an American house expanded by 140 percent between 1950 and 2007, from just under 1,000 square feet to more than 2,400 square feet. That’s twice the average size of homes in France and Germany.

  Already, there are signs of a reversal. The Wall Street Journal profiled an Atlanta company, John Wieland Homes and Neighborhoods, that was known for building trophy homes throughout the Southeast selling for an average of $650,000 apiece. Just a few years ago, they had Jacuzzis, butlers’ pantries, vaulted ceilings over breakfast nooks, and laundry rooms as large as bedrooms. Now Wieland is building homes without fireplaces and substituting fiberglass tubs for the pricier tiled models.

  One of Wieland’s new homeowners spoke for many when he said, “There’s a lot more that comes with those McMansions. There’s a lot more cleaning, a lot more heating, a lot more cooling.” There’s also a lot more debt.

  Opportunities could grow out of this dislocation between finances and fundamentals. For example, smaller, more energy-efficient homes in communities or developments with more green space could take the place of that third stall in a three-car garage. Urban dwellers seem to get along fine by sharing a common wall with a neighbor in an apartment. Why can’t a new generation of suburbanites look to more townhouse construction with the saved energy costs of common walls and wider common green spaces in the neighborhood?

  Many of the new homes in the New Orleans flood zones are getting high praise for their stylish design, energy efficiency, and a scale that adds up to a sense of cozy community.

  If you Google “house size in America” you’ll find not only statistics on square footage but also testimonies on the benefits of smaller homes from their owners in the comments section: “We may have the smallest home on our street but we’re also the only ones who can afford to take nice vacations.”

  Call them what you will—McMansions, Hummer Homes, Garage Mahals—they are on their way out. Someday there may be an exhibit in the Smithsonian of how a popular trend in home building gave way to smarter ideas, such as energy efficiency and coziness.

  In Marin County, California, Aspen, Colorado, and other communities where big money was put on display on ever larger homes, local officials are now putting a cap on construction size. A popular builder in Westchester County, New York, the affluent suburban area north of Manhattan, is getting work from investors who are swooping in to buy foreclosed McMansions and hiring him to downsize the homes by knocking off a wing or reducing the garage area.

  A Make It Right Foundation home in the New Orleans flood zone—part of a Brad Pitt project (Photo Credit 8.3)

  Other communities are requiring remodeled homes or new construction to include a certification of green standards, indicating energy efficiency and the use of recycled materials. That is a harbinger of new construction codes that will become routine before too long, just as earlier regulations were updated to improve fire safety and earthquake resistance.

  As we emerge from the great downturn we’ll get a better picture of the lasting effects of the mortgage meltdown on succeeding generations beyond pricing and borrowing capacity. If Americans once again rush out to buy more than they can afford or pay too little attention to home proportions and energy efficiency, it could be an ominous sign of lessons missed and a forerunner of other disappointments to come.

  Owning your own home has always been central to the American Dream, but until the era of subprime loans and speculation frenzy as lenders, promoters, and developers baited the landscape with condominiums and freestanding homes at inflated prices, it was a deliberative process. Qualifying for a loan was not easy, and the decision whether to buy was carefully thought out. If we return to those fundamental values, the dream can be renewed. In the meantime, for many in the marketplace there is only one viable choice: rent.

  That does not mean the idea or the reality of home ownership should disappear. When it began to be realized on a wide scale following World War II, starter homes were small and affordable, sized to match the expanding economy and the financial aid package available for veterans. It was the beginning of suburban America, new houses, neat lawns, and white picket fences. Visit any American suburb today and measure the changes—they are testimony to the changing definition of that part of the American Dream. For those who can financially manage it, “home sweet home” is central to the idea of a successful life.

  For those who cannot—those who become hostage to the pressures of their mortgage—the dream becomes a nightmare and their homes become a measure of a stressful life, not a successful one.

  CHAPTER 9

  Uncle Sam Needs Us

  FACT: One percent of Americans wear a military uniform. They carry the battle for the other 99 percent of us, and nothing is asked of us in return.

  QUESTION: Do you know anyone in the armed forces? Have you been in touch with a returning veteran or a veteran’s family? Have you supported a military aid organization?

  THE PAST

  “Ask not what your country can do for you …”

  On January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy famously appealed to the nation he was about to lead to continue the ethos of his generation: “Ask
what you can do for your country.”

  The young president ignited a fresh fervor for public service as the Peace Corps became the hot new destination for the young. It was followed by the stirring oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr., calling on all Americans to confront the deeply unjust and immoral reality of codified and de facto racial discrimination.

  The U.S. armed forces were the primary form of public service in America until the war in Vietnam, which deeply divided the country. The United States discontinued the draft in 1973. The resulting all-volunteer military is today drawn largely from the working and middle class of the country.

  We became two societies with too little connective tissue.

  THE PRESENT

  It is time to find a framework for national service that goes beyond a military uniform and provides a long-term benefit for the country. It is fundamentally unfair to expect a small percentage of our population, drawn largely from the middle and working class or poor, to carry the burden and pay the price of fighting wars that are always initiated in “the national interest,” however credible or contrived the threat.

  It took a while, but a number of civilian organizations eventually emerged to support the troops in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, many of them providing crucial support to wounded vets and their families. Nonetheless, it remains a random exercise, and all the “Welcome Home” committees at airports are not a substitute for what should be, in a democratic republic, an organic relationship between a civil society and its military.

  Not too far from wherever we are gathered, there are military families sitting by the phone hoping it doesn’t ring with unbearable news. Annette Kuyper, one of the featured speakers at the 2010 dinner of the Minnesota Military Appreciation Foundation in St. Paul and the mother of a National Guardsman who served a year in Iraq, took the audience inside a mother’s fear. While her son was away, Annette said, she closed the blinds on the windows that overlooked her driveway because she didn’t want to see the arrival of a military vehicle carrying a National Guard chaplain with a dreadful message.

  When her son did come home after an extended deployment, Annette said, his two-year-old daughter didn’t recognize him and was tearful in his presence for several months. He had not been married long when he left for Iraq, so he and his wife had to restart their relationship, a task made more difficult by his conditioning from living an all-male environment in a combat zone.

  The least the rest of us can do as fellow citizens and the beneficiaries of their sacrifices is to find a way to connect to those families and ask, “How can I help?”

  Corey Briest is a heartening example of what can go right when everything goes wrong in combat and the personification of just how much help these wounded veterans require. Corey went to Iraq at the age of twenty-four in 2005 as part of Charlie Battery, First Battalion, of the 147th Field Artillery, the National Guard in my hometown of Yankton, South Dakota. He had been working days in a small manufacturing plant and spending many of his nights as an emergency medical technician in Yankton, responding to tornado damage, car wrecks, and fires in that small city tucked along the Missouri River.

  His wife, Jennifer, says, “Corey loved being an EMT and being in the National Guard,” which he joined when he was seventeen. He also loved Jennifer, a special education teacher, and their two children, Kylie and Connor. By coincidence, they lived in a small, neat home my mother and father built when the Brokaw boys left home.

  Jennifer and Corey’s mother, Diane, were anxious when the Yankton Guard was deployed to Baghdad to help train Iraqi troops as security forces, but they kept in touch with Corey by email. All seemed to be going well until December 4, 2006. Corey was riding in the gun turret of a Humvee in a caravan through Baghdad when first one and then two improvised explosive devices—IEDs—tore through the column.

  Two of Corey’s buddies were killed immediately, and a third died later. Corey, who had been responding to the first IED attack in his role as a medic, was grievously wounded by shrapnel piercing his brain. He became the latest victim of TBI, traumatic brain injury.

  Back in Yankton, Jenny was preparing dinner for their two children when, she said, “The phone rang and someone from the Pentagon—I guess they were reading from a computer screen—said, ‘Your husband has been bombed.’ That’s what they said! I thought it was some kind of cruel joke. They didn’t have any more information.”

  Corey’s mother was not home at the time so the Pentagon left a message on Diane’s phone that her son had been badly wounded. It was the beginning of a long, often confusing, and always painful ordeal.

  Corey was medevaced to Germany and then on to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where Jenny and Diane flew to his side. The prognosis was so grim they began planning his funeral as he lay swaddled in bandages the length of his swollen body, breathing through a ventilator. But then doctors noticed some encouraging signs in his brain activity, and they recommended a transfer to a Veterans Administration rehabilitation center in Minneapolis.

  Corey continued to make some progress, but his Minneapolis physicians thought his recovery would be limited. They advised Jennifer to prepare to have him assigned to a nursing home for the rest of his days. “No way!” Jenny thought.

  She concluded that the Minneapolis facility was simply overwhelmed by the continuing carnage of the two wars. Traumatic brain injuries are, in the clinical verbiage of Pentagon medical officials, “the signature wound of these conflicts.”

  So Jenny scoured the Internet. Through the website of another TBI veteran she learned of a private facility in Southern California called Casa Colina. The government was willing to transfer Corey there and pay the $21,000-a-month costs.

  Jenny and Diane accompanied Corey to California and stayed with him for a year of intensive therapy and rehabilitation. It paid off. He learned to walk again, in a limited fashion, and to speak in a guttural tone that Jenny could understand. He was still blind and he’d never fully recover, but he was ready for what Jenny and Corey both wanted: to return to Yankton and his family.

  Yankton was eager to have him back, but there were so many questions: Where could he live? How would he get around? Could he ever work again? The publisher of the local newspaper called me looking for help, and I immediately suggested creating a 501(c)(3) fund so contributions would be tax deductible. When I offered financial assistance from the Brokaw family, the publisher called back to say the community was grateful but it needed to step up to help Corey as well, and so we agreed on a shared fund for housing and a wheelchair-accessible van.

  South Dakota building contractors came through with Operation Opening Doors, a program organized by the Associated General Contractors of America to provide renovated or entirely new homes for severely wounded veterans. Operation Opening Doors raised $230,000 from local sources for the new Briest home, which would include an elevator and handrails everywhere to help with Corey’s mobility.

  When Jenny brought Corey home from California, a local organization called Bringing Sergeant Corey Briest Home turned out a large flag-waving crowd at the small municipal airport and escorted him to an even larger reception at the civic center, where he was awarded the Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.

  Corey has been back in Yankton for almost five years now and Jenny says they couldn’t “be in a better place. Everywhere we go people stop to ask how we’re doing, and Corey’s buddies pick him up and take him to EMT meetings.” Still, some of his old friends no longer come by, and when Jenny presses them for an explanation, they say, “It’s too hard to see him that way and to try to communicate with him.”

  Too hard for them?

  THE PROMISE

  Jenny has become an advocate for other wounded veterans, writing regularly on a website called CaringBridge, an information center for families with members who are struggling with war wounds, cancer, or other debilitating conditions. In a cheerful tone she describes shopping trips to Walmart, or Corey helping the children with a bubble
bath, all of which underscores her strong belief that the Pentagon and the VA have to place more emphasis on the whole family of wounded veterans.

  “Remember,” she told me, “I have to be in charge of the constant changes in his care from year to year to year. They worry primarily about his immediate care or just his hospital stay.”

  Then she brightens when she describes their now twice annual trips to Colorado, where Corey has become a regular in a program called Challenge Aspen, which offers a recreational opportunity for wounded vets. “It’s awesome,” Jenny said. “Corey has been white-water rafting and skiing two years now and he loves it.” In a photograph on the Challenge Aspen website there are Jenny and Corey with two other couples, the guys with baseball caps, broken bodies in wheelchairs, giving the thumbs-up sign, as their young wives tenderly embrace them.

  When Corey came to a lecture I gave on the University of South Dakota campus in the fall of 2010 I was encouraged by the progress he was making with his speech clarity, and so I asked a family friend, “How’s his vision?” She answered with a laugh, “Oh, it’s improving, too. He likes to say he can see hot girls and cool cars.”

  When I visited the Briests at their home Jenny was quick to point out that Corey seldom uses the elevator anymore. “He works his way down that wide staircase to the family room,” hanging on to the handrails on either side, she told me.

  They enjoy watching movies together, Jenny explaining to Corey what he’s missing visually as he listens to the dialogue. His daughter, Kylie, reads stories to him—a reversal of the father-daughter role he hopes someday to change. Since Kylie is nine, he figures he has time to work on his walking so he can accompany her down the aisle on her wedding day.