The Time of Our Lives (17 page)

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.

When I think about the support the Briests get back home, I am reminded of other young couples in working- and middle-class communities for whom the price of their service will go on forever. They’re part of our common heritage, and yet in the leafy, moneyed suburbs of Louisville, on Park Avenue in New York or the Gold Coast of Chicago, in pricey neighborhoods in Silicon Valley or the country club districts of Kansas City or Miami, they remain an invisible part of our population, these fellow citizens who have paid such a high price.

In a nation of democratic ideals, including justice for all, this is manifestly unjust.

It is time to renew the ideal of public service for all on a national scale—and answer the call John F. Kennedy made so memorably a half century ago.

CHAPTER 10
 

The United States Academy of
Public Service

FACT:
In 2005, Teach for America had 2,181 volunteers teaching in some of the nation’s most distressed school districts. By 2010 that number had more than doubled to 4,458.

According to VolunteeringinAmerica.gov, a website of the Corporation for National and Community Service, in 2010 almost seventy million Americans volunteered in a variety of public service programs. Among the states, Utah, with its strong Mormon tradition of community service, led the way: 43.5 percent of the Utah population volunteered in some fashion.

QUESTION:
If the political and military establishment has no interest in a renewal of military conscription, preferring instead the current all-volunteer concept, should we have as a national priority another form of universal public service?

THE PAST

F
or those who choose not to go into uniform, the menu of other public service options is uneven. The Peace Corps is still a viable government agency; more than seventeen thousand applied during the economic downturn. More than eight thousand are on duty or in training for duty in seventy-seven countries, the highest totals since 2009. Since the Peace Corps was established in 1961, more than two hundred thousand have served. Even so, the Corps seems ready for a hit on the refresh button.

For my generation of males, the draft card issued when you were eighteen was a silent reminder that you owed your country military service. Every young man calculated his future by allowing for the strong possibility he would be in uniform at some point. That all came undone with Vietnam and the deeply divisive debate over just and unjust wars, college deferments, and other escape hatches. The draft went away in a storm of political and military rancor, and it is highly unlikely ever to return.

It was, at best, an uneven distribution of national obligations. Women were not eligible for the draft, and the educated and elite had more advantageous options. It is remembered now more for its liabilities than for its call to public service.

THE PRESENT

At the State Department, Secretary Hillary Clinton initiated a number of programs to expand the presence of civilian agencies in parts of the world where too much of the burden falls to the military services. In her first two years in office, working with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, she doubled the development staff of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and made several internal changes to the agency to make it more efficient and more effective.

Writing in
Foreign Affairs
magazine, she made a strong case for so-called soft power—civilian efforts in finance, construction, health services, and agriculture—describing how the United States must draw on the pool of talent that already exists within the government to build a global civilian presence with the same capability and flexibility as the military.

Clinton described the presence of civilian agencies and their highly trained employees on the ground in Iraq as “force multipliers,” as they work with local groups to take responsibility for the civilian services that were decimated first by Saddam Hussein and then by war.

To those who question the expenditures on soft power and foreign economic development, especially during difficult economic times at home, Secretary Clinton argued that the investments in fact help the United States, because they strengthen fragile, failing states and create capable partners. She acknowledges not all efforts are successful in states such as Yemen and Somalia, but the alternatives are wars without end.

One of her strongest allies in this effort was the late Richard Holbrooke, a supremely gifted public servant who died too young, at the age of sixty-nine, of traumatic heart disease in late 2010. Holbrooke had been involved in American foreign policy in one form or another since his days as a junior foreign service officer in Vietnam in the sixties.

He was brilliant, brash, tireless, and unrelenting in his physical and intellectual quest to make this a better, more peaceful world. Holbrooke’s appetite for difficult problems on the world stage was legendary. As a private citizen he was among the first to recognize the moral and political imperative of dealing with Africa’s AIDS crisis. He was a forceful advocate for nongovernmental organizations—NGOs—that fostered greater understanding of Asia or worked on refugee problems.

When he died he was commanding a vastly expanded force of economic, agricultural, and civilian political advisers in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the most difficult assignment of his long and distinguished career. We talked often about the need to reorder the “hearts and minds” equation of America’s foreign policy investments.

Personally, I think it is time to take the concept of civilian power one step further to complement the work Secretary Clinton has initiated with a major commitment to a new form of public service. Mandatory public service may be a hard political sell, but I think that bold new initiatives are in order. At the U.S. Naval Academy I outlined some thoughts for the brigade of midshipmen and an audience of academy graduates and friends.

I reminded that audience that military units in Iraq and Afghanistan have the dual and, I think, incompatible assignments of fighting the bad guys in dangerous neighborhoods and then trying to win the hearts and minds of those not shooting back. Iraqi and Afghan locals are understandably wary of heavily armed American forces who come into their villages, establish checkpoints to search for weapons, don’t speak the language, and then, through an interpreter, say, “We’re here to help.”

During reporting trips to the region, I was embedded with military units on the front lines. An hour’s helicopter ride north of Kandahar I accompanied American special forces troops into a poor village in the middle of a broad, barren valley where the Taliban had been very active. The Americans were accompanied by Afghan officers trying to raise and train a local force, and they were attempting to sell the concept to the skeptical merchants and village elders while the women looked on at a distance from behind their veils.

I asked one storekeeper whether he would welcome an Afghan force in his community. He looked around at the heavily armed Americans in their helmets, Kevlar vests, and sunglasses and said, “We don’t need more people with guns telling us what to do.”

I was reminded of what a former CIA terrorism expert once told me. “The problem with the Afghans,” he said, “is that they have reversible turbans; their loyalty depends on who is in town.” Two thousand years of foreign invaders have left them with an understandable wariness of the “we’re here to help” gesture.

As for getting assistance from the locals, one encounter in an east central Afghan village at once defined the limits of their hospitality and offered a welcome laugh in the dusty intersection where members of the Tenth Mountain Division were walking that fine line between vigilance and cordiality. A gregarious Afghan man came running up to me, reached down into his raggedy robes, and produced a piece of paper worn from many folds.

He handed it to me with great pride. I opened and it read, “This is Mahmoud. He worked for me for a couple of weeks. He was just okay in his job but whatever you do, don’t trust him around your personal belongings.” It was signed by a U.S. Army captain. Members of the Tenth Mountain squad and I suppressed our laughs and I returned the note, saying, “You should be very proud.”

Who’s to blame the Afghans for taking whatever advantage they can, after all they have been through in their long history of one occupational force after another—all men with guns telling them what to do?

It’s not the fault of the highly trained and well-meaning American forces. They just have incompatible missions and not enough of the right kind of help for the hearts and minds equation. For example, when the U.S. military units set up medical offices in rural areas, they were generally staffed by male combatants, which meant Muslim fathers wouldn’t send their daughters there for examinations or treatments.

THE PROMISE

I returned from two Afghan trips wondering, Couldn’t we establish a Peace Corps Plus or a Diplomatic Special Forces? Highly trained adventurous young Americans who take up the hearts and minds mission? These would be noncombatants stationed in forward operating bases as physicians, educators, technicians, agriculture experts, and engineers.

USAID has committed and capable staff members doing this kind of work in the world, but as effective and passionate as they are, USAID workers have almost no public profile at home to draw in this country’s best and brightest.

In this age of portable technology, why couldn’t instructional programs in midwifery, fundamental health practices, basic hygiene, water projects, nutrition, or agriculture be downloaded and fed through portable satellite dishes powered by portable, gas-fueled generators in modular structures placed in the village center? A small team of Peace Corps Plus technicians could set up such an arrangement in a short time and the U.S. government could launch a satellite dedicated to making just these kinds of programs available around the world, in an electronic glossary of languages.

The twenty-first century should be a time for new, big, and bold ideas for a renewed America. It is time to establish public service institutions that are as prestigious and successful as the military academies so that people who are dedicated to their country but unable or unwilling to serve in the armed forces have a complementary opportunity.