Eric Greitens Navy SEAL - Resilience : hard-won wisdom for living a better life

Copyright 2015 by Eric Greitens

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Greitens, Eric, date.

Resilience : hard-won wisdom for living a better life / Eric Greitens.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-544-32398-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-544-32399-5 (ebook)

1. Resilience (Personality trait) 2. Life skills. 3. Self-help techniques. I. Title.

BF 698.35. R 47 G 743 2015

155.2'4dc23

2014035279

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

: Dempsey and Firpo, 1924, by George Wesley Bellows. Photo by Universal Images Group/ Getty Images. Used with permission of the Bellows Trust.

v1.0315

To Sheena

When I saw Zach Walkers number come up on my phone, my heart sank a little. It was late and dark and I was flying down the highway in the middle of Missouri, and I assumed that he was calling to tell me that another of our friendsa classmate from our Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training class, BUD/S 237had been killed.

Walker and I were in the same training class in 2001 and 2002 in Southern California. Wed shared a lot together, served together, and suffered together.

After graduation, he went to the East Coast and I stayed on the West Coast. I saw him for a few minutes in 2004. Walker was back from Afghanistan, working in the training cadre, and I ran into him when he came to San Diego for a few days of maritime operations training. It was a busy daywe were both running in different directionsand except for those few minutes, I hadnt seen Walker in eleven years.

It wasnt bad news about one of our friends, and for that I was grateful. But Walker was calling me for help. And that wasnt what I was expecting.

In a class of tough guys, Walker was one of the toughest. A kid from a Northern California logging family, he was the kind of guy whoeven standing in formation, clean-shaven, in a pressed uniform and spit-shined bootsstill seemed as if he was wearing a beard and had just run out of the woods covered in mud and blood after wrestling a mountain lion. Its not that he was dirty in any wayjust that you couldnt shine the tough out of him.

Walker was also the kind of guy who would do anything for someone he loved. People like to say that a lot: Hed give you the shirt off his back or Hed run through a brick wall for you. Walker wasnt quite like that. If you really needed a shirt, hed climb over a brick wall, rip a shirt off of some pompous ass, climb back over the wall, and give you the shirt you deserved and, he had decided, the other poor bastard didnt. He was motivated by a deep sense of justice. He wanted to know what was fair, what was right. And he was willing to fight for it.

What was also true of Walkerand was true of most of the guys in my classwas that he could have lived quite happily two hundred or even two thousand years ago. He had a truck, but didnt need it. He had boots, but could have gotten on fine in bare feet. And its not just that he was capable of living without modern luxuries, it was also that, even for a guy in his twenties, he had a moral sensibility with an air of the ancient. He believed in courage. He believed in action. He believed in loyalty.

If youve ever thought, If I was ever in a really tight spot, I could call... , I hope you have someone in your life like Zach Walker.

He told me how bad things had gotten for him.

After six years in the SEAL teams, he went home to Northern California. By then he had a wife and a son. He bought a concrete pumper and started a business. He helped people out around town. He raised his boy. He looked, to all outward appearances, to be fine.

One day he pulled into his driveway. He stepped out of his truck and dropped to the ground. A sniper had an eye on his position, or so he thought, and Walker lay prone next to his truck, breathing slowly in, slowly out. He moved not at all, but for the blink of his eyelids. Hours later, as the sun began to set, he sprang to his feet and bolted into the house.

Walker is a guy who shouldnt drink. He almost never could stop at one beer, and even after one, you might find him on the pub patio, standing on a chair and making a speech. Later youd hear a thrown bottle crash on the concrete as he emphasized a point. He was a guy who almost always listened intentlymaybe too intentlyto what was going on around him. But you put one beer in him and he went deaf.

A few weeks after he landed back home a hero, his brother Ed drove his truck into a tree. Ed was drunk when he killed himself. Walker, a guy who always made connections, began to wonder: Did Ed die as punishment for what I did in Afghanistan?

Home now, and his brother dead, he started to drink more. True to form, Walker did little in moderation. Sitting in his backyard on the weekend, hed go through not a case but a cooler full of beer.

Then he told me about the night he got arrested. You know how when a good friend starts a story and, five words in, you can tell where its going? This wouldnt be good. He was downtown. Hed been drinking in a restaurant. He sees his wife pull up and he walks out to get some money from her. A police officer asks him to hold on a second. Walker says hes just going to get some money from his wife to pay his bill. He points at her in the car. The officer grabs Walker by the shoulder. And here it gets messy.

They get the cuffs on Walker. Blood is trickling down his face, and he asks in drunken clarity, Can we talk for a minute about whats going on here? No. They put him in the patrol car. They charge him with a felony: resisting arrest. Walker is confused. Hes been drinking, sure. But what has he done wrong?

His docs at the VA diagnose him with post-traumatic stress disorder. But they dont prescribe exercise or community service. They do prescribe a raft of pills.

Whats going to happen in court? Walker was in the wrong. Hes apologetic. But thats not worth a lot. And the truth is, if it wasnt this incident with the cops, it would have been something else. Maybe drinking and driving. Maybe he would have killed himself behind the wheel like his brother. Or worse, maybe he would have killed someone else. All things considered, theres only one man at fault here, and its Walker. Now the war-hero dad is an unemployed alcoholic on disability who looks as if hes on his way to jail.

We talk.

For a few years Id had a bunch of thoughtsbased on my humanitarian work overseas, my time in the military, and my work with veteransabout how people move through hardship to happiness, through pain to wisdom, through suffering to strength. Our phone call brought them to the surface.

It was late when I got home, but when I did, I put some of those thoughts in a letter to Walker. He wrote back. One letter followed another. We talked a lot. We kept writing.

This book is an edited set of those letters. They are letters to my friend. But while his story is unique, what hes up againstloss, fear, a search for purposeis not. In fact, what hes up against is universal. So, with my friends blessingbut with his name changed to protect his privacyIve collected these letters on resilience in the hope that they might benefit you too.

LETTER

Walker,

You told me you cleared your house last week. You got up around 0300, grabbed a pistol, and went from room to room, closet to closet, crevice to crevice, checking... for what, you werent sure.

Nobody was in the house, of course.

Youve been doing that a couple of times a month. Youve been waking up in puddles of sweat. It would be temptingvery temptingto imagine that youre just having bad dreams. It would be even more tempting to slap a medical diagnosis on whats going on and to let some doctor pump you full of pills.