It Happened on the Way to War (13 page)

“Two billion dollars.” A donor announced the goal of the Carolina First capital campaign.

My jaw dropped. No one before had mentioned the amount of money the university aspired to raise. The audacious amount followed with a dazzling performance where donors stood up and made multimillion-dollar pledges. The room exploded in applause. It felt like a high-stakes auction. Resentment began brewing inside me. How could it be so hard to raise a few thousand dollars for Kibera when such mind-boggling sums of money could be raised for buildings with rich people's names on them? Little did I know that most of the money raised went toward scholarships to support students like me, and endowments to recruit and retain professors such as James Peacock and Richard Kohn.

Confidence replaced my anxiety as a professor of physics delivered a persuasive PowerPoint presentation on nanotechnology. Before I knew it, the chancellor was introducing me and describing CFK's work as a great example of UNC undergraduate initiative. I delivered my presentation on a slide projector and concluded with an appeal. “So if you are inclined, please send us some support. A little bit goes a long way in Kibera.”

Upon returning to Chapel Hill, I learned that one of the donors had publicly pledged $2,500 and encouraged the rest of the room to follow suit. His self-initiated action meant a lot to me, and it helped generate about $7,000 from the Georgia trip. However, we were still $11,000 short of the $20,000, and I needed to reach Major Boothby's $10,000 target within the next week or I would miss the deadline to submit my summer-leave request.

Until that point, I had still not asked an individual directly for money. With Dr. Cross's advice in mind, I mustered the courage to call Lucius Burch. I assumed the prospects of getting some additional support from him were high.

Mr. Burch, a venture capitalist from Tennessee, had a gruff voice. I tried to lighten him up with some small talk, but he was clearly preoccupied. I told him about my fund-raising for CFK and asked him for “some support.” I didn't have the guts to name an amount, though I had planned on asking for $5,000.

“I won't give anything else,” he said, “Out of principle I only give once.”

Stunned, I thanked him for the fellowship in his name that first took me to Kibera, then I went for a cinder-block run through the rolling, kudzu-draped trails around campus. I had learned the workout at the Marine Corps' Mountain Warfare School. As I pounded the sandy trails with my cinder block in my hands, I realized that I was more upset with myself than Mr. Burch. I should have made a more persuasive case.

There was only one more donor on my list whom I thought I could call and who had the means to make a sizable donation. I finished my run, stashed my cinder block under a bush, and prepared for fifteen minutes. Alston Gardner, an affable middle-age entrepreneur from Atlanta who had made a small fortune when he sold his consulting company, had been at the Reynolds Plantation. We had met through Professor Peacock. Alston congratulated me on my performance at the plantation.

“Thank you, sir. Sir, we really need your help for Kibera,” I said with confidence.

“First of all, call me Alston. Second, how much do you need?”

“Five thousand.”

“I'll send you twenty-five hundred.”

For the first time I directly asked someone for money for CFK, and it worked. It put us over the halfway mark.

“Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, sir. I mean, Alston.” I hung up and jogged to Major Boothby's office, leave request in hand and ready to return to Kibera with our team of doers.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Sword

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

MAY 2001

MENTORSHIP WAS A WORD THAT I RARELY used when I first entered college. It had a heavy sound and a formality that made it inaccessible. I wasn't sure what it meant or how it related to my life. Four years later, as I prepared to graduate, be commissioned, and return to Kibera, I viewed mentorship as the single most important factor in my journey. I was fortunate to have an extraordinary group of mentors. These older, more experienced men and women were life advisers who formed a support network, a council of elders that remained invested in my development as long as I did my part to keep in touch.

My good fortune with mentors started when I was a boy. At the time, I didn't know what to call the attention my father's Marine friends gave to me when they asked me questions about life and coached me on how to be a man. Years later, I asked one of my first mentors why he had taken so much time to guide me when he had a large family of his own and a busy career. Lieutenant Colonel R. J. O'Leary, a combat veteran of three wars, replied, “Because that's what Marines do, and I know you'll pay it forward.”

There was an important difference between my childhood mentors such as Colonel O'Leary and those I found during college. My father's friends had taken the initiative to reach out to me. In college, I had to seek mentors out and earn their trust and respect. It took me a while to figure this out. Fortunately, I had met Professors Peacock and Kohn during my freshman year.

Professor Kohn served as my thesis committee chair, and Professor Peacock was a reader. Their approaches were as different as their personalities. Although Professor Kohn acknowledged a connection between ethnic conflict and economic development, he encouraged me to sharpen the focus of my thesis on young men and ethnic violence instead of poverty alleviation. On the other hand, Professor Peacock helped me flesh out the more abstract framework of participatory development to explain why so many nonprofits were ineffective at engaging youth and preventing violence. He encouraged me to think of CFK as a test of participatory development and a way to take research to action.

My father, much like Professor Kohn, thought that the most interesting issue to research in Kibera was the cause of ethnic violence. He seemed to see CFK as a diversion that could detract from my preparations to lead Marines. Distractions could have lethal consequences in combat, he warned. My father wasn't opposed to international aid. But he saw the intervention we were aspiring to achieve through CFK as just that—aid, a little good in a place that needed a lot. Although my father's ambivalence frustrated me, it also deepened my resolve to make CFK successful.

My mother, on the other hand, was one of CFK's greatest ambassadors from the very beginning. Her support meant a tremendous amount to me. Just like Professor Peacock, Mom was often theoretical. She saw participatory development as an idea worth spreading, a framework that could lead to systemic change and make the world a better place. Mom's enthusiasm connected to her experiences as a young nurse in Peru, where she worked in a small hospital with impoverished nursing assistants. After a year in a remote desert town, she had left behind relevant skills that could be used to help address some of the community's needs.

Up until college, I had taken my parents' active involvement in my schoolwork for granted. From primary school through high school they had read and critiqued nearly every paper I had produced. What they had done was remarkable, and I wanted to honor them. “Dedicated to Drs. T. P. and Donna Schwartz-Barcott,” I wrote after the cover page of my thesis. “For twenty-two wonderful years of constant support, encouragement, and intellectual partnership.”

Nate laughed when he read the dedication. “Sounds like a light read?” he said. Tracy giggled when she saw it. “I wonder what kind of ‘intellectual partnership' you were having as a toddler,” she joked.

Professors Kohn and Peacock forwarded the thesis to an external review committee of three other professors with a recommendation for highest honors. I had poured my heart and mind into that thesis, and I was eager to hear the committee's decision. Never before had I worked so hard for so long on a single project. Days later, the committee awarded the thesis highest honors. The recognition bolstered the credibility of what we were about to do in Kibera, and that credibility ended up being more important than I had initially imagined.

Although UNC had provided us with considerable support and let me present my proposal to some of its top donors at Reynolds Plantation, the university legal counsel raised liability concerns about UNC affiliating in any way with a grassroots organization in a “dangerous Third World slum.” Professor Peacock had managed to marshal $6,000 of grant money to support CFK. However, the funding had to be routed through the university, and the pushback from the legal counsel threatened to prevent us from accessing it. We needed that grant to reach our $20,000 goal, and the thesis enabled me to build a mini-coalition of senior professors who were willing to lobby the legal counsel on our behalf. With less than a week to spare before graduation, the counsel relented. We were fully funded and ready to go.

NATE AND I sat together in Kenan Stadium at graduation. Looking out into the bleachers of thousands of fellow students in shiny Carolina blue caps and gowns, Nate joked that we looked like an “army of Smurfs on cell phones.” Four years earlier I never saw a cell phone on campus. Now it seemed as if every student had one.

The ceremony began and most students continued to chat on their phones, toss beach balls, and wave to their parents as if nothing were happening. The dual culture shock that my mom had warned me about had never quite worn off. My classmates on their phones were being disrespectful. If a beach ball bounced my way, I planned to pop it with my Spyderco. We were adults and all of this pomp and circumstance, which came with a price tag, was for us. The chatter and ball bouncing continued as the main speaker stepped to the podium. Even if we couldn't hear him, we should have shut up. I was waiting for one of those beach balls to bounce my way when Nate tapped my shoulder.

“Interesting speech, huh,” he said with mock sincerity. “Really inspiring stuff here.”

He cracked me up.

“She's hot,” Nate said, looking down the bleachers.

“Who?” All I could see were caps and gowns.

“That one,
safi sana
[very nice].” He pointed to a blow-up doll bouncing with the beach balls. “Wanna ask Tracy to a double-date?”

Nate always knew how to bring it back to earth. He had shaken my sour mood. At the end of the ceremony, James Taylor's “Carolina In My Mind” was playing, and I began to feel nostalgic.

In my mind I'm goin' to Carolina

Can't you see the sunshine

Can't you just feel the moonshine

As excited as we were about CFK, I didn't want to leave Chapel Hill. So many of the clichés about college I had found to be true. It was a place of seemingly unlimited possibilities with communities of thinkers and doers tackling some of the world's largest problems. I loved being a part of it, and I loved being a Tar Heel. Steeped in Southern traditions, UNC inspired a sense of identity that at times felt as intense as what I had experienced in Kibera and in the Marines. Not until my final month, however, did I begin a true immersion in the South by dating Tracy, whose family had been in North Carolina for centuries.

In fact, although I didn't want to admit it, Tracy was the real reason I wasn't ready to leave Chapel Hill. I was falling in love, yet I feared the commitment and the trappings of what I perceived to be an ordinary life. I saw myself as “expeditionary,” just like the Marine Corps, our nation's “expeditionary force-in-readiness.” It was a point of high pride for me that I could fit my life's belongings into the back of the Green Bean, sleep anywhere, live with little, and be always on the move. I didn't want a relationship to hamper my autonomy. I didn't want it to change my identity.

There was something else, too, something deeper. I was still influenced by my near-death experience as a boy at the pond. I didn't have career horizons, and the last thing I thought I wanted was marriage or a family. I knew from my mom and dad what it took to be great parents. I couldn't imagine that I would ever be ready to make such sacrifices, and I certainly didn't want to be responsible for a fatherless child. I thought I could make far greater contributions to society as a roving soldier with things like CFK on the side than as a father or a husband. If my premonition played out and I was dead by age thirty, my time was running out.

Nine months earlier, when I was driving out of OCS, my mom had warned me to slow down. It wasn't until I met Tracy that I did. Tracy's presence alone allowed me to step back, reflect, and enjoy life more completely. No one had ever had such an effect on me. It didn't matter what we were doing. Even when we were doing nothing—taking a nap, driving somewhere, walking across the campus greens, sitting in silence—we were content. We were happy just being together. This attraction transcended the physical and brought with it a new sense of belonging that I didn't know how to interpret, and couldn't resist.

Tracy's strength was reflected in her own life journey. When she was sixteen years old, she decided that she was going to be a clinical psychologist after reading about the profession in magazines. Ever since then she had pursued her goal, graduating as valedictorian of her high school class, earning Phi Beta Kappa at UNC, and enrolling in a Ph.D. program. She had a large, loving family, though her parents were somewhat disengaged from her work. She never complained about money and often offered to split expenses when we went out. Yet she was so saddled with debt that she could have qualified for food stamps.

One night after some hard drinking Nate asked me to describe Tracy in one word. I thought about it for a moment and replied, “Angelic.” Drunk or sober, I had never used that word to describe a person. Nate raised his eyebrows skeptically. Seeing the sincerity in my face, he withheld judgment until meeting her the following weekend. Afterward, he advised me to “do whatever it takes to hold on to that
msichana mrembo
[beautiful girl].”

I was torn. A part of me was saying let it go, and I suspected Tracy had similar feelings. She knew I grew up dreaming of being a Marine, and she didn't want to become attached to a guy whom she would never see. Yet the attraction between us was too powerful to ignore or cast away, and in the end it didn't feel like a choice. We had to try. We agreed to give it a shot, and the more I thought about it, the more I tried to convince myself that it was possible to have it all. If I could be based at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, as an East Coast Marine, then we could still see each other on weekends when I wasn't deployed overseas. And maybe the deployments wouldn't be that difficult. It was peacetime after all.

OUR MARINE CORPS commissioning ceremony contrasted sharply with our large, distracted graduation. It took place on a cloudless, Carolina-blue day. The dome-shaped Old Well, our university's icon, stood to our side flanked by beds of pink and white azaleas. My uniform was so tight I walked with my stomach clenched. My neck pulsed beneath the midnight blue choker-collar. My mother, Tracy, Major Boothby, and the friends and family of the two other soon-to-be second lieutenants formed a half-moon around us as my father read me the Oath of Office.

“I, state your name, do solemnly swear…” Dad stated in his booming bass.

“I, Rye Barcott, do solemnly swear…” I stood at attention in my dress blues, eyes fixed on the jagged scar across my father's cheek. Thirty-five years earlier a bullet from a Vietcong machine gun entered and somehow exited without chipping a tooth.

We continued, my father, then me, stating the verses passed down by legions of Americans who had served in uniform. As I repeated my father's words, I felt a new responsibility to carry on that martial legacy, the legacy that stretched from the Revolutionary War to the Persian Gulf. It was the legacy of men and women of arms who gave up some of their freedoms to safeguard those of their countrymen and -women, born and unborn.

“
… that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.

“So help me God.” My father whacked me on the shoulder, smiled, and pulled Mom and me into his embrace. When the cameras finished clicking, we joined a conversation with other parents. All three fathers in the group were Marines, and each father led his son in the oath. One of them, a lieutenant colonel, shared his swearing-in story with us, when decades earlier he had walked into a captain's office in civilian clothes, raised his hand, and read the Oath of Office. That was the extent of it back then. The colonel said he was pleased that our own swearing-in ceremony was so much more personal by comparison.