By Robert Britt, Contributing
Columnist
It’s been five
years since I left Iraq. Five years since I stepped off that flight carrying me
and hundreds of others from the Middle East to rural Kansas, an unloaded rifle
slung across my back and an empty pistol on my hip. Five years since I stepped
off the plane and had a general greet me with a salute at the bottom of the
gangway.
Five years and I
still don’t feel like I’m home.
I returned to
Portland just a few days after I returned that salute, but the years that
followed brought me no closer to home.
Friends greeted me
with the same trite comments about the war and its politics.
The new manager at
the restaurant I worked at before my deployment told me there was no room on
the payroll to hire me back. Classmates accused me of having blood on my hands
in the middle of a college course.
All the while, I
couldn’t understand what was wrong with me. My frustrations led to destroyed
relationships, slumping grades and financial problems.
I felt lost. I felt
alone. I felt farther from home than I did in Iraq.
It wasn’t until I
connected with a nonprofit called The Mission Continues that I truly began my
journey home.
Started in 2007 by
Eric Greitens, a scholar, humanitarian and Navy SEAL, The Mission Continues
challenges post-9/11 veterans to engage with and improve their communities
through nonprofit service work. Feeding off the same desire to serve a greater
purpose that drove most veterans to the military in the first place, it
harnesses that selfless service and applies it to the community level through
six-month fellowships.
For me, it was the
perfect fit.
Greitens founded
The Mission Continues by donating his combat pay from his last deployment to
Iraq, where he served as the commander of an al Qaeda targeting cell in
Fallujah. During the deployment, a truck bomb laced with chlorine gas exploded
outside his barracks, completely shearing off one of the building’s walls and
injuring him and others.
After returning to
the states, Greitens went to Bethesda Naval Hospital outside Washington, D.C.,
to visit some of those wounded in the attack and Marines wounded elsewhere in
the war.
“When I asked
Marines in the hospital what they wanted to do, they all said ‘I want to go
back to my unit,’” he says. “That wasn’t going to be possible for all of them,
but they all wanted to find a way to continue to serve. I knew how much they
still had to offer to their communities and our country.”
Greitens also
recognized that in addition to saying thank you, what the veterans needed to
hear was, “we still need you.” The best way to welcome them home, he thought,
was to treat them as assets and to challenge them.
“When we challenge
them to find a way to continue to serve,” he says, “it lets all of them know
both that we have tremendous respect for them, and that we’re going to be with
them every step of they way as they become successful citizen-leaders here at
home.”
Since early 2008,
when The Mission Continues awarded its first fellowship, more than 500 veterans
have served as Mission Continues fellows at a variety of nonprofits around the
country.
Already having
earned a doctorate from Oxford, served as a Rhodes scholar and White House
fellow, done humanitarian work in China, Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere, Greitens
— once the commander of a Mark V Special Operations Craft detachment — was now
heading what would become a leading veterans nonprofit. In 2008, he was awarded
the President’s Volunteer Service Award.
“For me, part of
the motivation has been to try to find a way to mature myself and also help
others unlock their own potential to be of service,” Greitens says. “I think
that when we engage in outer service it also leads to inner growth.”
Greitens says there
are three major concerns regarding the reintegration of veterans.
The first is that
the country has yet to get to know this generation of veterans. Less than one
percent of the population serves in our military, and when many get out of the
service they flock to areas of high concentration of veterans.
“There are many
people who might have great respect for this generation of veterans, but simply
don’t know them,” Greitens says. “When you get to know this generation of
veterans and you see what they are capable of, then people really get to
understand what the whole generation has to offer.”
The second concern
is to ensure that as the veterans come home, they successfully reintegrate and
build purposeful lives again.
“A lot of times
people focus on issues such as post traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury,
unemployment, even suicide, and they worry about those problems,” Greitens
says. “We found at The Mission Continues that when veterans come home, when
they successfully reintegrate — when they’re waking up every day doing
meaningful and purposeful work in their community — that’s the foundation upon
which they build a successful life here at home. Many of those other challenges
can be addressed once we’ve built that foundation.”
And finally,
Greitens says that we need to establish the legacy for post-9/11 veterans.
“We don’t yet know
what the future is going to hold for this generation of veterans,” he says.
“When you think of the World War II generation, that was a generation that when
they came home, they really helped to build the country. When you think about the
Vietnam generation, that was a generation that came home and struggled to
transition successfully here at home.
“Ten years from
now, I want people to look back and when they think about this generation, they
are thinking about men and women who went overseas, who served in the U.S.
military, and then came home and found ways to use the skills they had to
actually build purposeful lives again and contribute to our communities and our
country here at home.”
As he writes in
“The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy
SEAL,” his 2011 New York Times bestseller, “A good life, a meaningful life, a
life in which we can enjoy the world and live with purpose, can only be built
if we do more than live for ourselves.”
Nearly finished with
my Mission Continues fellowship here at Street Roots, I feel closer to home
than I have since leaving Iraq. I’m not quite there, but I once again feel like
a part of the community and I’m once again living with purpose.
This article appears in 2013-04-12.