The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL

by Eric Greitens

Before those two men left Thailand, I sat down with them. “You guys have made a serious mistake, and you’re going to suffer serious consequences for your decision. That’s the bad news. This is going to stay with you for the rest of your lives. The good news is that you can both decide how this is going to affect the rest of your lives. You have two options. One choice is to pretend that this isn’t your fault, to act like you’re a victim, to pretend that you were misunderstood, to pretend that you didn’t make the choices that you did make. If you do that, this decision is going to haunt you for the rest of your life. The other choice, the better choice, is to be honest about what happened here. Be honest with yourself and be honest with everyone else.

As Americans we often have a tendency to want to build things in an effort to promote goodwill. We’d often be far better off investing in people. Trying to build a school in Kenya is a difficult venture, hampered by corruption and local politics. In any building project there is a strong tendency for local officials to fight over petty advantages. Building projects are capital intensive, and because Americans usually aren’t closely involved in the actual building process, once a school is built, the U.S. often receives little credit. The United States will, however, be blamed for every failing roof, broken desk, and cracked sink. More importantly, a building cannot speak, cannot act as an ambassador of goodwill.

Later, when I went to Iraq, I’d find that the entire campaign turned on simple actions like these; where we built friends and allies, we won. George C. Marshall, commander of American forces during World War II, and later secretary of state, secretary of defense, the architect of the Marshall Plan, and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, had three simple rules for going to war: “Never fight unless you have to, never fight alone, never fight for long.” What he believed then is still true now: the longer we fight alone, the longer we’ll have to fight.

Most of the special operations personnel I had worked with were engaged in nighttime capture or kill operations, focused on specifical Qaeda—associated targets. As a group of highly trained operators, those men would step into their Humvees, helos, and Strykers at night alongside other highly trained men. Provided with the best possible intelligence and the best possible equipment, special operations forces snuck up on and attacked their targets. The night gave them the cover of darkness, and generators whirring in the cities often masked the sound of their approach.

The world, I believe, is not constructed so that it presents us with perfect choices. I’d joined the military, in part, because I saw that to protect the innocent, we have to be willing to fight. It is also true, however, that for all the warrior’s discipline, when we pick up the sword, innocents will suffer.

My own experiences in Rwanda, in Iraq, and elsewhere had not made me a militarist or a pacifist, or any kind of “ist.” I knew that the world would continue to require us to make hard decisions about when we draw the sword and I’d seen that the use of force was both necessary and imperfect.

There is no school of thought that can save us from the simple fact that hard decisions are best made by good people, and that the best people can only be shaped by hard experience.

” In Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school we were taught the “Stockdale paradox,” named after Admiral James Stockdale, a POW in Vietnam for seven and a half years who received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his leadership while in captivity. Stockdale taught that as a leader, you must embrace reality and be brutally honest about the harsh facts of your situation. At the same time, you must maintain hope.

I also realized that these men and women had to hear something else. In addition to “Thank you,” they also had to hear, “We still need you.” They had to know that we viewed them not as problems, but as assets; that we saw them not as weak, but as strong. They had to know that we were glad they were home, that we needed their strength here at home, that we needed them to continue to serve here at home. I knew from my experience working with Bosnian refugees and Rwandan survivors that those who found a way to serve others were able to rebuild their own sense of purpose, despite all they had lost. I knew from my time in refugee camps and my time working with children of the street that to build a new life in the face of great challenge, what mattered was not what we gave them, but what they did. Our wounded and disabled veterans had lost a lot. Some had lost their eyesight. Some their hearing. Some had lost limbs. All of that they could recover from. If they lost their sense of purpose, however, that would be deadly. I also knew that no one was going to be able to give them hope; they were going to have to create hope through action.

So I donated my combat pay to begin a different kind of veterans’ organization, and two friends contributed money from their disability checks. My plan with The Mission Continues was to offer fellowships for wounded and disabled veterans to serve at nonprofit, charitable, and public benefit organizations. We would provide wounded and disabled veterans with a stipend to offset cost-of-living expenses and with mentors to help them build plans for their post-fellowship life. Most importantly, we would provide them with the challenge and the opportunity to rebuild a meaningful life by serving again in communities here at home.

When he returned home to Texas, he moved into a trailer and lived off his disability pay. No one would hire him. “It was the hardest time of my life. I used to be in charge of 160 people. Now here I was, absolute bottom of the barrel. My wife left me then and I sunk even further.” In late 2007 Mathew heard about The Mission Continues. When we talked with Mathew we asked him the same question we’ve asked every wounded and disabled veteran since then: we need you; how are you going to continue to serve?

I write these lines sitting at peace in a cabin in mid-Missouri, where a single quotation hangs on the wall: “I shall pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

Life is short. Life is uncertain. But we know that we have today. And we have each other. I believe that for each of us, there is a place on the frontlines.

This book is not the story of my life. If it were, my family and others close to me would feature more prominently. I have worked with some incredible people—Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, who wake every day to work among the poorest of the poor, and members of America’s most elite commando units, who have given their lives defending their friends and our country. They are real heroes, and I hope that this account has shone some light on their amazing lives.