Book review: Former SEAL Eric Greitens leads with his heart - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Book review: Former SEAL Eric Greitens leads with his heart

Eric Greitens is aboard the USS Midway Museum in San Diego, participating in a discussion about veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. He tells an audience of American Society of News Editors that he’s happy to be back near Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, where 10 years ago, at age 26, he completed Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, which, he writes, is “the best time I never want to have again.”

Why the relatively late start in the military? Because he had “spent more time outside the U.S. than I’d spent in it,” working as a volunteer in China, Croatia, India, Mexico, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bolivia and the Gaza strip. Between airports, he picked up a doctorate and a British university boxing title while he was a Rhodes scholar.

Greitens covers a lot of ground and sea, and as a result the book is episodic, a TV series set in a new location each week.

Greitens gets his traveler’s feet wet while an undergraduate in China, where he learns kung fu and studies the economy. In 1994, he learns Bosnian and works in refugee camps in Croatia.

There he realizes that “there was a great dividing line between all of the speeches, protests, feelings, empathy, good wishes and words in the world, and the one thing that mattered most: Protecting people through the use of force or threat of force.”

Seeing adversity compels Greitens to try fighting adversity.

By summer 2003, he is in Afghanistan, where he tries “to put on a friendly face yet be ready for violence at a moment’s notice.”

In Iraq, Greitens is injured during a truck-bomb explosion. As he evacuates, he turns to Marine Lt. Travis Manion for help. A month later, Manion dies and is posthumously awarded the Silver Star.

After Greitens and fellow wounded warrior Paul Poudrier meet Manion’s family, he connects “the hot, brutal warfare in distant lands and the kind of community spirit we had seen both at the Manions’ home and among many Iraqis in Fallujah.”

“I had seen it before in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia and other places where courageous people found ways to live with compassion in the midst of tremendous hardship.”

Using his combat pay and contributions, he starts The Mission Continues, a charity that offers disabled veterans a chance “to rebuild a meaningful life.” Greitens, CEO of Mission, also is a Navy Reserve officer and fellow at two Missouri universities. He knows what “meaningful” means.