Former Navy SEAL To Speak At Library

When Eric Greitens faced his life's crossroads, he had three options.

A 1992 graduate of Parkway North High School, Greitens attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes and Truman Scholar. With his school work finished he could either stay at Oxford and pursue an academic career, go to work at a consulting firm or join the Navy.

"The deal that the Navy puts on the table is they say: If you join the Navy we'll pay you $1,332 dollars and 60 cents per month. In your first few months, you'll get zero minutes per day of privacy. And the minute you sign up on the dotted line you owe us eight years of service," Greitens said.

"And in return, they said they'd give me one and only one chance at basic underwater demolition school. If I passed, then I'm on my way to becoming a SEAL officer, but if I fail--as over 80 percent of the candidates do--then I still owe them eight years, and they'll tell me where and how to serve." 

The young man looked over his options and made his choice.

"The academic route could give me a lot of freedom. The consulting firm could give me a lot of money. The Navy was gonna give me very little, but I thought it would make me more. I thought that test of going through the SEAL team training would make me more. The leadership opportunities, the opportunities to serve, would push me and make me a stronger and better person," he said.

"Sometimes the strong needs to protect the weak, and I didn't want to be someone who just talked about that as an academic. I really wanted to live my values."

Greitens presents his values and life story in his latest book, The Heart and the Fist: the Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL. Greitens will be the guest speaker at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the St. Charles City-County Library District McClay Branch, 2760 McClay Road in St. Charles.

The United States Navy Sea, Air and Land (SEAL) teams have been all over the news lately since their role in the death of terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden. Many of those reports stress the difficulty of SEAL training. Greitens confirms those reports are not exaggerated.

"It is the hardest military training in the world," Greitens said in a telephone interview from Washington D.C. 

More than 220 trainees were in his class. Only 21 made it through.

"One of the things that keeps you going is your ability to step outside your own pain and your own fear," Greitens said. "You reach points where it's so painful and so difficult that you know that the thing that keeps you going is you've got somebody to your left and somebody to your right, and you know they're counting on you."

Greitens served as a SEAL from 2001-07 and transferred to the reserves after his last deployment. Shortly thereafter, he helped start up The Mission Continues, a nonprofit agency that trains wounded veterans to work in their communities.

"In March of 2007, I and my team were hit by a suicide truck bomb in Iraq. I was very fortunate that my wounds were minor, and I was treated at the Fallujah Surgical Hospital, and I returned to duty 72 hours later. But some of the guys who were with me were hurt a lot worse than I was," Greitens said.

"When I came home to visit them and see some other Marines who had been hurt, I realized that all of these guys, despite their injuries, wanted to find a way to continue to serve. They needed to know that when they came home we saw them not as problems but as assets.

"When I left the hospital that day, I called two friends who were disabled veterans. They put in money from their disability checks, I contributed my combat pay, and we used that to start The Mission Continues."

The agency helps wounded and disabled veterans to continue their public service through training and then connecting them with organizations such as the Red Cross, Mothers Against Drunk Driving and St. Louis Children's Hospital.

"The most serious injury for these men and women when they come home is not if they've lost a limb or their eyesight or their hearing. The most serious injury comes if they lose their sense of purpose," Greitens said.

In addition to his work with The Mission Continues, Greitens continues to study and teach public service at the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri and in the MBA program at the Olin School of Business at Washington University.

His first book, Strength and Compassion, was published in 2008 and focused on Greiten's humanitarian work. In 2009 he began work on his second book, The Heart and the Fist, which was published earlier this year.

"The title captures the idea that we all have to be both good and strong. Everybody needs both courage and compassion," he said. "The heart sets you on a direction, but to walk that path requires courage. Everyone has a front line in their lives--to be successful you need courage and compassion."

Attendance for the library event is free, but registration is required, as space is limited. The library will be closed to the general public that evening for the event. Register online at www.youranswerplace.org or call the library at 636-441-7577. For more information call 636-441-2300.

For more information on Eric Greitens visit www.ericgreitens.com.