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street roots
April 12, 2013
13
*4
J
In search of ‘the
meaningful life’
Mission Continues helps
returning veterans reconnect with
their community through service
BY ROBERT BRITT
C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T
t’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
h o m e t h a n I did i n I r a q .
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
I
Robert Britt
Robert B ritt is a
writer, photographer
and U.S. Army
veteran with two
deployments to the
war in Iraq. He is
currently serving a
six-month fellowship
with Street Roots and
The Mission
Continues, a
nonprofit that
connects post-9/11
veterans with service
work in their
communities.
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
b e c o m e 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
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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.
PH O TO S C O UR TESY OF
ERIC G R E IT E N S
Above, Eric
Greitens on a tour
o f duty in Iraq.
Inset, Greitens
today, now the chief
executive officer of
The Mission
Continues.
D E T O U R
3035 S.E . D ivision . P o rtlan d , O R 97202
5 0 3 .2 34.7499