It Happened on the Way to War (40 page)

Epilogue

ALL OF MY PEERS who left active duty spoke about the shock of losing leadership responsibility. Few other jobs in the world placed so much onto the shoulders of young men and women as the Marine Corps in combat. In addition to the loss of leadership, it was jarring to be cut out of the flow of information about the war and our former units, many of which felt like extended families.

Although I struggled with adjustment, I was lucky to be in a good place at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where I began the first of my three years of graduate school. The school had an impressive convening power. Any given day featured multiple guest lectures by decision-makers, from generals to cabinet members, senators, ambassadors, and foreign dignitaries. Some of these lectures were large, though many were held in small rooms with off-the-record discussions. It was heady stuff.

The topics that we discussed were strategic and geopolitical. Few of our speakers had any exposure to what was happening on the ground in places such as Fallujah or Kibera. Through these interactions in my first month in Cambridge, I realized that I could make contributions based on my experiences. My mentor from UNC, Professor Kohn, encouraged me to write. In his opinion, knowledge rarely came from experience without periods of intense, prolonged study, and writing was one of the best ways to force serious reflection. His comment made sense. The past six years felt like a prolonged blizzard. I had thousands of observations, powerful emotions, and few conclusions.

Professor Kohn connected me to his colleague Ernest May. A member of Harvard's faculty for a monumental fifty-three years, Professor May graciously took me under his wing. He was a man of few spoken words, and his advice was simple: “Just write. Write while it is still fresh and relevant, and while you have the time.” Over the next year, my writing ballooned into a 150-page manuscript, an article for a military professional journal, and written testimony about the debacle of our detention process and prisons to the Iraq Study Group, a bi-partisan commission that Congress appointed when public opinion about the war was particularly low.

It was a monkish period of my life. I needed space and silence to sort things out. During the weekends, I drove to New Haven, where Tracy was finishing her postdoctoral fellowship at the Yale Child Study Center. On Saturdays, we turned to wedding planning.

That previous summer, shortly after I had returned from Iraq, Tracy and I had taken a two-week vacation to Morocco. Mike called me on a satellite phone from Baghdad a day before we flew to Casablanca. Unfortunately, his flight out of Iraq was canceled due to a military operation. Without Mike, we couldn't hold a traditional Moroccan engagement ceremony at his mother's home. It was a Marine Corps “improvise, adapt, and overcome” moment. Two days later, on a balcony overlooking a sunset over the ocean in a town called Essaouira, of which neither of us had ever heard but instantly loved, I proposed.

Tracy and I had been a couple for five years before we were engaged. We had buried grandparents together and helped each other fulfill parts of our childhood dreams. She supported me through three long deployments and put up with my camper, Caravan, and cleaning habits, which included washing dishes without soap. I was ready for her two cats, even though they didn't like me. Tracy promised to let me keep what she called my “wall of man”—a collection of fighting knives from around the world—even though she loathed it. We understood each other better than anyone else, and I couldn't imagine living without her.

Nevertheless, our marriage couldn't have happened if I hadn't changed. The closer I aged toward thirty, the less I believed my childhood premonition by the pond would come true, and it wasn't simply because of time passing. Something deep within me had shifted. I had gone to Kibera and sought combat for many reasons, from a desire to serve and make a difference to a quest to prove myself and something else that I had never admitted to others or come to terms with myself. That something was a curiosity about evil and a fixation with death, particularly my own death. I wanted to die doing something intense and memorable, a blaze of glory in a righteous battle, and I wanted it badly enough that I took risks that many would view as extreme. Along the way, I fell in love, and over many years, and having survived combat, I changed—not completely, but enough to realize an essential selfishness within what I had long viewed as sacrificial and, at times, close to divine. It was love, and Tracy was a part of it, the largest part, and that's why I needed to marry her. But there were others too, other giants: Tabitha and Salim, my parents, my mentors, and Kibera. These were the forces that showed me the way.

TRACY AND I weren't planning to have a large wedding. We were saddled with debt and didn't mind doing something low-key with our closest friends and family. Since we had met in Chapel Hill and Tracy's family was all in North Carolina, our alma mater was the obvious choice as the place to hold the special day.

Sometime during the fall we traveled back to Chapel Hill for a CFK meeting. My mentor Jim Peacock and his wife, Florence, let us stay at their elegant Southern home where we had held our first major CFK fund-raiser. During the day, I spent time with our board of directors while Tracy searched for wedding venues. One evening we joined Jim and Florence outside in the garden behind their house. We were talking with them about Morocco when Florence surprised us and offered to host our wedding at her home. Thrilled by their incredibly generous offer, we immediately accepted. Florence loved hosting special events for her friends and family, and the setting felt perfect. As far as guests were concerned, she and Jim encouraged us to “fill the garden.” We changed our plans and invited hundreds of family and friends.

THE YEAR PASSED quickly, and soon enough we were standing on the porch overlooking our family and friends gathered in the Peacocks' garden. It was a hot July evening. Many of the guests were using the hand fans Florence had added to the welcome basket of favors. Although summer storms were crackling across the state, there was a pocket of clear sky above Chapel Hill.

Nate, who was studying to become a physician's assistant, stood by my side. He would later begin his best man's speech with “Ladies and gentlemen, this isn't the first time today that I've stood up from a warm seat with white paper in my hand.” Our parents and surviving grandparents were in the front row as the writer Andy Carroll, one of my groomsmen, read part of a letter I had written to Tracy from Iraq, and Jim Peacock read excerpts from the Bible's Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes 3.

Seeing everyone gathered brought back strong memories from my two worlds. My Marine mentors and brothers showed up in force. Colonel Greenwood was there. The colonel and I had reunited in Fallujah, when he was leading the training of Iraqi security forces for the Marine Corps. After thirty years of service, he was about to retire and teach at Georgetown University. Captain Mike Dubrule had arrived from Virginia Beach with his family and commented that our wedding looked like a United Nations gathering. Soon he would again deploy to Afghanistan, as would my friend and first Marine mentee Lieutenant Peter Dixon, whose adopted dog from Kibera, Rafiki, had since passed away at his family's home in northern California. Sergeant David Thompson, who was working as an instructor in a counterintelligence course for another government agency, drove down from Washington, D.C. After our Bosnia deployment, Sergeant Thompson had served with distinction in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unfortunately, my friend and final company commander, Joe Burke, had a military obligation that prevented him from joining us. His second deployment to Iraq as company commander that year was difficult. Three of our Marines were killed by IEDs.

Salim joined us from Kibera and brought greetings from our team on the ground. He spent most of the evening with his mentor Dr. Mary Ann Burris, the former Ford Foundation program officer who had since started her own organization to promote indigenous culture and health based in Nairobi. Kim Chapman had been recently married and joined us with her husband, a fellow Tar Heel. They were expecting their first child. Soon, Kim would transition to being a regular board member and hand over the chair position to Jennifer Coffman. Jennifer had arrived from James Madison University with her family. She was teaching anthropology and ran a top-notch study abroad program in Kenya. The first donor I had ever asked directly for support, Alston Gardner, was there, as was Ted Lord, who nine years earlier had inspired me in Swahili class with his advice, “reach out to a bunch of people and eventually a few will give a damn.” Ted was finishing his medical degree at Harvard.

Hundreds of other special people were with us that day in person and in spirit as we said our vows. They were all great people, people of integrity and upstanding character, and, in the end, that was what mattered most. It's what matters in life, regardless of one's pursuit. It's what made CFK possible.

AFTER A SHORT honeymoon, Tracy moved to my small apartment in Cambridge and started a psychology fellowship at Children's Hospital Boston, while I began my first year at Harvard Business School. The time we had together during the evenings and weekends was wonderful, though there was far less of it than either of us had expected. Life's pace was once again frenetic, and I struggled to keep up with CFK, friends, family, and the most demanding academic course load I had ever faced. Additionally, I was searching for work in renewable energy, an industry that appealed to me because it was relatively new and had wide-ranging social and economic ramifications. Tracy had always been supportive of CFK, but we both knew that we would need to find a new balance in our life together.

The tension came to a head in late December 2007. We had been living together for five months, and I was planning on returning to Kibera for two weeks during winter break with Dr. Melanie Walker, a senior program officer from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Jennifer Coffman. Tracy didn't like that I would be away for such an extended time, but she accepted it because she knew how important the visit would be for CFK. It was our first serious opportunity for funding from the Gates Foundation since Melinda Gates had visited Kibera nearly a year and a half earlier. We had invested a lot of time and effort cultivating the relationship.

On December 27 Kenya held a presidential election. The incumbent Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, appeared to be trailing the lead opposition candidate, Kibera's very own member of Parliament, Raila Odinga, when the election was abruptly declared to be over and Kibaki was sworn back into office in a private ceremony. Five years earlier, at the end of 2002, Salim and I had been at Kibaki's swearing in ceremony in Uhuru Park. Fueled by Kibaki's strong anticorruption rhetoric, expectations had soared across the country. In the five years that had passed, however, little had changed. Kenya consistently ranked among the world's most corrupt nations.

Kenyans were fed up heading into the 2007 election, and the apparent rigging of the results by Kibaki and his henchmen sparked violence. Kibera, an ethnic faultline with a history of clashes, was among the first places to erupt.

Our clinic remained open to assist hundreds of victims needing emergency care. I held on to my plane ticket as the initial news unfolded. Each time I spoke to Salim the situation sounded worse. Dozens of Kikuyus had been killed by roving bands of Luo men called “youthwingers.” There was talk of retaliation by an underground Kikuyu gang called Mungiki. Dr. Walker at the Gates Foundation called the day before we were scheduled to leave and canceled her visit. It was the right thing to do, but I wasn't sure whether we would ever have another opportunity to showcase our work. Of course, that was only part of the reason I held on to my ticket. It all came out at dinner that night with Tracy.

“So you've canceled your flight, right?” she asked matter-of-factly.

“Not yet, babe.”

“Well, what are you waiting for?”

“I don't know.” I wanted to be with Salim and our team, helping people, defending CFK, moving to the sound of guns.

“What's going on?” she asked.

I tried to explain it honestly. I apologized.

“So you're not going?”

“I don't know.”

“Babe.” She raised her voice, “No.”

“But—”

“No, don't do this.” Silent tears streamed down her face.

I was no longer a roving soldier gambling my life with high-risk missions in hopes of big-impact paydays. This change was excruciating. The only reason it happened was that I eventually felt a greater pull toward a future with Tracy's love and support of peaceful work than to a past holding my father's grenade. My responsibilities in life were changing. They weren't greater or more important; they weren't smaller or less significant either. They were just different, and I was still figuring out and coming to terms with what that all meant.

THREE MONTHS LATER, after the violence had subsided and with Tracy's blessing, I returned to Kibera for spring break. A charcoal odor overpowered the typical pit-latrine stench as I reentered the slum. Stands that had once bustled with hawkers at the
matatu
minibus stage had been reduced to ashes on the sidewalk. The stained-glass windows on the church above Kibera were shattered. Its steeple was charred.

More than fifteen hundred Kenyans had died in the clashes by the time the former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan and a team of mediators managed to cobble together a fragile power-sharing agreement. That agreement created the position of prime minister for Raila Odinga and left Mwai Kibaki with the crown jewel, the highly centralized and powerful office of the Kenyan presidency. No one viewed it as a lasting solution.

The specific circumstances that had led to the 2008 postelection violence were superficially different from the events behind the clashes of 1995 and 2001 in Kibera that Kassim and other sources-turned-friends had dissected for me when I was a college student. The root causes, however, were the same, and they had little to do with ethnicity. They were political and economic. Real and imagined differences were manipulated to control resources from land-tenure rights in Kibera to the Kenyan national-security budget, an area that was particularly rotten with self-enrichment. As time passed, ethnic polarization seeped into the root causes and fed them like rainwater.