LTC Mike Erwin (Army, OIF, OEF Veteran)
“A true leader has the confidence to stand alone, the courage to make tough decisions, and the compassion to listen to the needs of others. He does not set out to be a leader, but becomes one by the equality of his actions and the integrity of his intent.”
Transition and rediscovery of one’s purpose are two topics continuously discussed in the veteran community. These aren’t just veteran issues, though. All humans at some point in life will undergo a season in life where transition comes into play and purpose may be lost in this place of rediscovery. As a community that understands these matters better than almost any other it makes sense that there are those in the veteran space that would step up and create a path of purpose for those struggling to find it again. Mike Erwin is still serving… and his life is a consistent template of that service. Names are signed on dotted lines knowing full well the ink from that pen may become the blood spilled on battlefields thousands of miles away. When Erwin signed his name that signature was not just bound in service to our Armed Forces, but our nation as a whole. Patriotism is not just some byproduct of having served in a combat zone. Patriotism is also about those who serve on the home front and Mike embodies both sides of that coin. He served honorably in both Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom; and he serves now through various initiatives on the home front.
Erwin’s non-profit, Team RWB, stands as an example of what is right in the world, offering communal healing to those who are struggling to find their purpose again. Their mission is to be the cure to the isolation and health challenges our nation’s veterans face on a day-to-day basis. By forging America’s leading health and wellness community for veterans, service members, and their families, Team RWB strives to recreate a sense of purpose. Their chapters (212) and the Team RWB App deliver virtual and local, consistent, and all inclusive opportunities for veterans and the community to connect through physical and social activity. Volunteers host regular fitness musters, social gatherings, and community service events, while building strong local connections with members and organizations within the community. Erwin has created a construct where service continues past one’s time in the military, and through that model he offers veterans a chance to continue that service to a nation that needs their example. Awareness is spoken of almost ad nauseam in a culture that needs triage. Mike’s efforts have created real, lasting, actionable processes that are saving lives. Here’s Erwin with an education on service through leadership.
Talk a little bit about what life was like growing up.
MSE: I was born and raised in Syracuse, New York which is upstate New York. I was there my whole life and then went to West Point. I actually wanted to be a doctor. It was at the end of my sophomore year my mom said, "Hey, have you ever heard of West Point?" I told her I had heard of it and knew about it a little bit. This was pre-information age, right? So you had to see like a brochure somewhere, or see an advertisement on TV. It was before the time of just going on the internet and perusing information. I went down there and checked it out and thought this place is incredible. It completely captured me. I played baseball there. I was there when 9/11 took place at the start my senior year. I was down in New York City on September 10th watching a baseball game in which the Yankees were playing. I drove across the George Washington Bridge at 9:30 at night because the game ended up getting rained out. I looked to the left and saw the Twin Towers. It was about nine or ten hours later that 9/11 happened. I was actually taking a nap because I was tired.
My brother, who was a freshman at West Point at the time that I was a senior, called me. I remember we had just gotten phones installed in our rooms. He said to me, "Hey, wake up, you see what's going on?" I told him I hadn’t. I watched 9/11 unfold from 40 miles up the Hudson River that day. I just knew that was going to have a profound impact on my future. I'm sure I didn't have the realization of just how much but I knew for sure that it would change my path somehow. I graduated branch military intelligence and went to Fort Hood, Texas which is where I met my wife. I was down in Fort Hood with 3rd brigade, 1st Cavalry Division. I was there and deployed from there to Iraq on St. Patrick's Day in 2004. I came back early April of 2005 which made it a 12 plus month deployment. We were based out of Taji, which is north of Baghdad. I then went to Najaf in August and Fallujah in November of 2004 in support of some theater wide initiatives. My job was to assist with local militias and Iranian influence over there in Najaf and then of course, Al Qaeda in Iraq. Al Zarqawi’s network was the network that was really wreaking havoc in Fallujah. We went there in November of 2004 and it actually led the way for the Marines who then did a lot of the door to door, direct action stuff. I was on that mission and then came home and met my wife. From there I went to my advanced course in Arizona and then I came here to Fort Bragg. I got there in late June of 2006 and I deployed six weeks later. It was a very different experience because I was now with 3rd Special Forces Group. We flew military aircraft directly in the theater. It was very different because one day you're in garrison and 24 hours later you're in Afghanistan working right in theater.
It was different because when I went to Iraq with a line unit we flew into LaGuardia, from LaGuardia to Germany, Germany to Kuwait, Kuwait to Camp Udari, then Camp Udari up to Baghdad, and finally Baghdad by vehicle convoy to Taji. I think it was a 21-day process versus 24 hours. It was a very different experience. We were in southern Afghanistan in Kandahar. I was the intelligence officer again for a battalion of Green Berets. It was right when we got there, not only do we get there, and it was okay here we go. It was Operation Medusa and the plans for underway which became the largest ever NATO-led combat operation. It was our task force that was essentially the lead. The Recon units were the ones that went through the Registan desert and kind of came up on Zari Panjwai, which is just outside Kandahar city.
The Canadians and the Brits and, you know, other American general-purpose forces were there also. It was pretty wild. It was literally within two and a half weeks of me getting boots on the ground in Afghanistan that things started happening. The flash to bang was relatively quick compared to what I was used to and frankly what I was probably prepared for. I think in order to deal with situations that push you and they push you really hard it often reveals within you the capacity to find a work ethic and a capacity to to go beyond what you thought was possible. You have the ability to perform better than what you thought you were capable of. It was really what happened with me in August and September of 2006 in Afghanistan. I did that and when that rotation ended I came home did some TUI's and was preparing for the next one. I got married, and then went back over in January of 2009 until July of 2009. All through my deployments I had these major battles or major efforts that I was a part of. President Obama had been elected and there was a surge going on. They were beginning the process of the surge by bringing a whole lot more Marines and more Army troops over to southern Afghanistan. We had congressional delegations, senators and Secretary of Defense, all of the big, influential folks were coming over to get boots on the ground. They wanted to take feedback from people like me who had spent the past three years of their life obsessed in and studying what was going on in that part of the country. I was pretty crazy as I look back at that time in my career.
So what would you say, growing up led to your path to the Army? How were you raised?
MSE: My dad did not attend college. My mom actually became the first woman police officer in the Syracuse Police Department in 1974. The first eight months of my life were spent walking the streets of Syracuse in my mom's belly (laughs). My dad didn't go to college but he joined the police force at age 19 and this is before you needed a Bachelor's to join. There was definitely a service mindset that ran through the DNA of my family. My grandfather was a firefighter and my other grandfather was a police officer. It was prior to that he was in the European Theater in World War Two. I had a significant amount of influence, consciously and unconsciously, which led to my desire to go into the military.
It was one of those things where again the world was so different than it is today. It's such an important thing to realize just how much things have changed. You just had a lot less knowledge about the world around you back then. I made a decision and off I went and I was just kind of in that bubble of West Point where I was growing and developing. I was being stressed and being challenged without much knowledge of the world around me. I played baseball and that was a bit of a fun thing in playing college ball but for the most part, it was hard work. I was getting 5 1/2 hours of sleep every single night which is never quite enough. I was taking 18 credits academically and that was a full semester load. I was also doing all the military stuff on top of being an athlete. I was cleaning my room, making sure I was getting a haircut every week or two, checking my belt, my shoes, my gun room, staying hygienic, and all of that kind of stuff. I was also doing all of the physical stuff. It wasn't just baseball but I had the obligations of preparing for a two-mile run, two minutes of push-ups, two minutes of sit-ups that I was graded on, and all of those things.
I realized that no matter who I thought I was, no matter how much talent, no matter how hard I worked, no matter how tight all that was wound together, I was going to be challenged and constantly pushed. It can really kind of jack with your confidence a little bit. A good basic training is very similar. The big difference, I think at West Point is it happens over 47 months. It's this four-year process and it's more intellectual because you're taking classes on top of all the physical demands. They require you to take classes that you don't want to necessarily take. They make you take math, calculus one, calculus two, probability in stats. They also have you take two semesters of chemistry, two semesters of physics, a bunch of engineering courses, international relations, and language. It's a very expansive curriculum. You might be a math person or science person, but you get into memorizing poems and getting up in front of a class to deliver those poems. You're constantly being pushed into uncomfortable territory.
What do you remember about your time there? Do you remember one person that maybe had a really profound impact on your career?
MSE: There are so many people that come into my ecosystem in those formative years. There are so many different mentors, teachers, coaches, sponsor parents, and people that you go through life with. I mean, for me, the one who is the most influential was Major Steve Manal. He's now retired and he was a Green Beret. He finished near the very top of his class in class in 1989. He went to Vicenza, Italy, jumped into Persian Gulf One, went back to Harvard, got his Master's, and came back to teach. I had him as a teacher for Macroeconomics, Money, and Banking. He was my Senior Thesis Advisor. He was with me for three of my final four semesters. Steve was very influential and had a big impact on my thinking, not just about economics but how to think analytically. People ask all the time if I use economics in anything I do? I have to say, “No.” I've never technically studied a supply and demand slope or any of that kind of stuff. I will tell you, what has stuck with me over the years is “cost-benefit analysis.” It is one of the fundamental underpinnings in economics in thinking about the cost of something and what's the benefit of that item or idea. I spent a lot of time doing that with him throughout my senior thesis and that really shaped me in a big way. To this day, I think about the cost every time I take on something and what the return on investment brings. What's the benefit? It doesn't mean you always have to do things for the benefit but there is a lot to pay attention to there.
What was that first deployment like?
MSE: It was crazy because I had a bunch of my friends that I played baseball with and went to school with that were over there in OIF 1. 1st Cav Division was supposed to be the first division to cross over into Iraq. Turkey closed the northern border and said that no American forces could come through Turkey. The 4th ID’s plan of coming in from the north wouldn’t work. They ended up just pushing from the south. They followed 3rd ID and set the tone in Baghdad pretty quickly. I thought when I arrived at Fort Hood in November of 2002 that we were leaving in February of 2003. I thought to myself, “This is awesome.” I was hungry. I was very ready to go. When that all changed and they'd said, "Hey, 1st CAV stand down, you're going to train and blah, blah, blah, and be prepared in the future." We certainly didn't think and obviously didn't hope it was going to continue to go on for as long as it did. There was that contingency plan of it being a multi-year thing and if it is 1st CAV, then we were going to backfill 4th ID.They had said some of us had that whole year of training hard. We had been traveling and partying being you know, 23 - 24 years old. We were seeing Texas and I didn't have very much of what I call the traditional college experience. So, you know, going around and partying at A&M, in College Station, Austin, UT, and up near Dallas County.
We would spend time going to those places and then training really hard because that was our life. I was training and preparing for Iraq but then traveling and partying. I remember thinking that we were going to be gone for a year. I was the oldest of four kids and I knew my brother was back at West Point. I also knew my parents were stressed. My sister at the time was dating somebody who was just getting ready to deploy. There was one point where my parents had two sons, and then both their daughters were married to West Point grads. All four of us had deployed at once. It was a lot of stress on the family. I think my parents are still recovering from the stress we put them through. I kind of blame them for being the ones who developed this service mindset in all of us (laughs). Yeah. But yeah. They get it but at the end of the day, it was stressful for sure.
When we got there and had landed there I remember the first time I was going to take a quick shower. It was at Baghdad International Airport, and there came a massive volley of mortars and rockets because BIAP is such a huge target. They were able to set up indirect fire from so many different places there without being detected because BIAP was in a very built-up area. I remember thinking, “This is for real.” I remember hearing those sirens and knowing things were serious. I moved out of Sadar because they were hitting convoys so hard in Baghdad. They told us we weren't going up the route is off the Haji that we were going to go down and around. We would then cross the river on the Euphrates or Tigris, and you're going to go in. It was a long trip. Baghdad is on the west side of the river and traditionally you should have been able to just go straight up and in. The river wraps around right and starts to bend to the east. You wouldn't even have to cross over the river. They were just getting hit so hard in that area. They pushed us out down Route Irish and then out across over the river, and then up. The city of Sadr City was further off to the west. We were on the outskirts of Sadr City and then they go up to cross over. It has now made it a much longer trip, but it was deemed by the Intel folks to be a much safer route that way up to Taji.
What was it like being in that position on your first deployment?
MSE: I was a 1st Lieutenant and an intelligence officer. I didn't have any knowledge about anything going on until we got up to Taji. I was like everybody else out there. I couldn’t do any intel forecasting or planning when I was there. That first incoming volley of mortar rounds, immediately made me realize I knew nothing about the area. I knew I wasn’t in Texas anymore and that was about it (laughs). We got there to the camp we were staying at called Camp Taji. It used to be the home of two of Saddam's divisions from the Fedayeen (Saddam’s Army) and it was also an ammo supply point. They had tons of rockets and mortars. Those ammo stores had been raided continuously when Saddam was ousted. We got indirect fire all the time and I think they killed seven people on camp Taji within like my first month. It was a big deal.
This was our first mission with 2/7 CAV and it was basically to get at this indirect fire cell because enemy artillery was so prevalent in the area. They had people who were very well trained. I'll never forget one day right around between, like 1245 for a 25 minute period, we came under a barrage from four different points of origin. It was a combination of rockets, mortars, and the whole nine yards. I mean we were dealing with a sophisticated cell. I wasn't a source person but I was doing a lot of informants meets with people. They were able to paint the picture of the town that was three miles away or where the cell was at. We disrupted it. I don't know if we got everybody, but we certainly saw a massive decline in the amount of indirect fire coming our way in late May of 2004 because of our operations.
Was that probably the most frightening part of that deployment for you? Just the constant threat?
MSE: It was like that every day. The people were living with sandbags built up everywhere, and all that kind of stuff around their hooches. The place where we were sleeping there's a big road called Red Leg Road which went up to the oil and petroleum factory. It was always littered with IEDs and especially big ones that were in the culvert. Driving down that road was kind of awful just waiting on the possibility of an attack. The battles in Fallujah required me as the Intel officer just to be right there in proximity to that area. The Intel officer generally has it pretty safe but at that point in the war, there were a lot of threats. There was a good amount of danger in those days.
I was around for the battle Najaf and I did some work with a Captain who was in 5th Special Forces Group. He was the S-2 for 1st Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group. He shared with me this holistic picture of what was going on in Iraq because I was focused on my sector. I was only a Lieutenant at the time. He painted his whole picture for me of what was going on with Iranian influence and what was happening with Al Qaeda. I thought to myself, “How do you know all this?” (laughs) I wanted to have that kind of knowledge and know what was happening across the entire battlespace. When I came back stateside I was thinking about going Special Forces and becoming a Green Beret. I realized that it was a two-year pipeline to get there. I decided instead of doing that I’d see if I could go be an Intel officer for them. I requested a spot in 5th SFG. They said there was no spot in 5th Group but there was one in 3rd Group. It was right there at Fort Bragg. I told them I was in. That’s what drew me into being an Intel Officer for a Special Forces unit. I wanted to be able to see the bigger, clearer picture of what was really going on overseas. I realized I had to know the bigger picture and not just my own sector in order to accomplish as much as I could.
It really pushed me and challenged me intellectually in my own growth. This all happened in 2006 and into 2007 and that next deployment was an eight-month deployment. It was tough and different in so many different ways. When I was in Iraq I was briefing and debriefing platoon leaders and platoon sergeants who were going out on a patrol. I saw guys eye to eye before they went out into dangerous areas. When they came back all dusty, dirty, and smoked from their mission, I then debriefed them. I would ask them what they saw out there. “What do you know? Is there anything important that I should be knowing?” But, in Special Forces, they're scattered throughout the entire country. I might have seen them like, once or twice in eight months, when they fly back to base to gather funds or whatever it might be. It's totally different. I was interacting with them on email a lot but not seeing them face to face. If they were attacked and if there were troops in contact you heard them over the radio. It was just a very different emotional experience in terms of that and when I was a Lieutenant I saw these guys every day. When I was in the conventional Army it was much more hands-on, face to face. Being attached to the Special Forces mission put me in a position of more of a bird’s eye view.
What was the dynamic in Afghanistan? Where and how was how did that work out with that?
MSE: In 2006 - 2007 the overwhelming majority of the focus of the Department of Defense in the U.S., along with the media, was in Iraq. The people hardly knew what was going on in Afghanistan. All eyes were on Iraq and that was basically from 2004 all the way through 2008. You had that component of it and then there's the fact in that first deployment there was very little concern about what was going on in Afghanistan. We were under-resourced and it was really about fighting for as many resources as possible to do what we know needed to happen.Iran had their primary focus on Iraq. It was just different. The second time back was different because now people thought Iraq seemed to be relatively under control. President Obama had run under the idea of honing in on Afghanistan and figuring out what the strategy was there. He made the decision to surge for at least a year and we knew it would be limited but we were basically there at a really critical point. The strategic focus coming in all the time by the politicians, decision makers and other people was, “What is priority? Where is our priority and what effort needed to be the main effort in Afghanistan? Is it in Kandahar? Is it up in the East? Where's the biggest threat?”
As a young 27, 28 year old Captain it was my job to brief these policy makers and politicians. I had to translate what I saw happening on the ground, from all the reporting from our Green Berets into recommendations essentially on policy. I had to be able to speak to priorities on the ground and where resources needed to be allocated. I stressed the importance of addressing the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) threat. Those obviously became a huge issue that was tantamount to the way the Taliban was engaging us in Afghanistan. It was a very different enemy with different techniques that knew exactly how to be effective in their battle space. To me, it was just a matter of getting as many people as possible up to speed because so much of the focus politically, strategically, militarily was on Iraq for such a long period of time.
Do you think Special Operations can maintain its kinetic energy in a war that’s now over two decades old?
MSE: The situation on the ground for Special Operations is obviously very tricky. When you’re looking back into the past you also have to look where you are right now to understand where you're at in context. Special Operations looked at where they came from and where they need to go. The big question right now is really, “Do you have the pipeline to bring in enough soldiers who are qualified to do the job?” When I was working with Special Operations they had an 18X program bringing people out of college, off the streets, and pushing them straight into the selection pipeline. They have to maintain that really high standard for a Special Forces soldier because they operate in such an autonomous way. They have such a massive strategic responsibility and not just in Iraq, or Afghanistan. The same applies even when they are in Uzbekistan, Africa, Central, or South America. The idea under the Obama administration was that we can basically do more or the same with a lot less boots on the ground. You started to see an increase in appreciation for what you can get with Special Ops. I think that's when you started to see the deployment rates that have been studied since 2002. It depended on what group you were in but the pace was frenetic across the board. The big question became and still is, “Is this sustainable?”
I don't know. I think that there are real questions that people are having right now about the sustainability of it all. It becomes a question of how much can you ask guys to be gone on and off on and off again for decades. I'm not sure how you balance that with your family life, your personal life, and your mental well being. When you deploy you're not eating as well, you're not sleeping as well, you're far from family and friends. There's a lot more stressors in your life. I know there's a lot of really smart people thinking about that right now and most of them are right there at Fort Bragg and down in Tampa Bay. They're very much acutely aware of the challenges and the stresses on the force. I think the question once again goes back to who you bring into it. This is just a bigger picture of the challenge facing America. There's a lower propensity to serve. There's an increased obesity rate and things like that make it so that fewer people even qualify for the military to begin with. Forget about Special Operations. Even finding people who qualify to serve in conventional forces is tough. Then, take that a level up to uniquely talented Tier 1, 2, and 3 units. That adds on a whole other layer. You're going to go and do what is asked of you for that long, long period of time. It’s a tough thing to ask of this country.
So, going back into the deployments a little bit. Do you remember a significant time any one of those deployments that was really tough for you?
MSE: The stress for me was different than the guys on the ground kicking down doors. There are guys that most of the time who know anything about me that I supported infantry and then Special Forces. I was around soldiers who were on the front lines who are under physical threat to safety and psychological threat daily. I was faced with most of my time back on a bigger FOB. It was Camp Taji and there was Camp Brown down at Kandahar airfield. The stress is different for me in that I had to make recommendations to the forces, or to commanders, or to policymakers. I had to help lead the decisions that would give other people to essentially carry the water on. It's a different kind of stress and it's certainly not physical stress. There was still the occasional mortar or rocket round at Kandahar Airfield. The decision-making and the frequency of choices that could put guys’ lives in danger are what added to my stress. Mentally, I go back to February of 2009 and there was an area in the Oruzgan Province where all the data had shown there wasn’t a lot of enemy activity there. It was wintertime and the enemy was supposedly not as active in the winter months. This area was up in the mountains. It turns out that the enemy became pretty active and we took four US KIA. We then had an interpreter on one attack, and then another attack was when one of our medics out there was shot and killed by a sniper. These events happened on February 13 and February 20 of 2009 and that was the window of time where I questioned my own decision-making capabilities for a brief moment. I knew a couple of these guys because one of them was Master Sergeant Dave Heard was previously in the S3 so I knew him.
I also knew Blaine Smith, a team leader, who went on to become my first executive director at Team RWB. He was a Green Beret Team Leader. His ODA took four KIA (Killed In Action) in February 2009. The enemy always gets a vote and they just did some things that were really smart and I didn’t catch it. The hard part is that was early on in the deployment around five or six weeks into the deployment. We still had a long way to go. We all wondered if we were going to be able to get it together and make smart decisions moving forward. I thought I had a really good understanding of the enemy and the terrain. I thought I knew where they would be active and where they'd be hunkering down for the winter. This really challenged my confidence in my ability to be a good Intelligence Officer for the rest of the deployment. It was also emotionally hard, just because these guys like Jeremy Besa were in the S-2 shop hanging out around me before he went down to his team. I knew these guys. I didn't know him super well, but I knew him well enough to form a connection. There was a combination of psychological stress and it was rocking my confidence, my ability, but then, more importantly, the emotional side of knowing these are great, great Americans. They were killed and I had something to do with that.
How do you find that identity?
MSE: I teach this in psychology and I learned about it a little bit in grad school. This idea of identity you need in life and we have these moments where we have essentially an identity crisis, more or less. There are multiple ways you can respond to it and there isn’t really any one way of doing it right. You either lean into it and say, “Hey, this is a crisis, I need to figure out what my identity really is.” The other side of that is you start to think, “Yeah, well, I guess I will figure it out whenever it comes to me.” It might take years to figure that out and that can be really powerful in the process but also dangerous.
There's also people who decide to return to what they knew in their previous life. “My identity is that I'm going to go work in family business,” and they just kind of adopt the identity of what's been given to them already. It depends on how you approach it psychologically. It has a huge impact on those immediate couple years after transition. It's a fact that veterans struggle the most within those first couple of years. The bottom line is I was out there and I was still on active duty. I was in selective duty and was getting paid. I had health insurance, the whole nine yards. I took my PT test and still had to do paperwork but I was also living outside of service. I had this crazy experience, where I kind of felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. I was in the military but I really wasn't. I was struggling in some way but had security in others. I can't imagine people who get out and don't have any of that. They don't have the security of health care, have a paid job, or a sense of identity. When you get out you lose the security blanket. You also kind of lose a sense of mission and purpose. That’s part of the identity. When you think about it there's a lot that goes on when you get out that can be traumatic. I still had a sense of what my purpose was and what I was doing. It was March 23, of 2010, when I launched and submitted the paperwork for Team Red, White and Blue. My wife was 39 weeks pregnant.
I knew I needed to start a non-profit organization that could bring back purpose to our community. I myself had this pending purpose of becoming a dad and I didn’t know what it would be like but I knew it would be powerful. I think part of it was as I became a dad, I was thinking hard about what the world would be like that my kids would grow into. I thought to myself, “What can I do to make a positive impact here?” I think some of these thoughts were the unconscious or the subconscious thoughts in my brain that had been with me for quite some time. I submitted the paperwork and the initial idea for Team RWB was that we were going to run and do CrossFit. We were going to do triathlons as vehicles to raise money for the organization and like-minded causes. I wanted to bring that culture of marathons raising money for various causes to the veteran space. That was my initial idea. My next thought was directed towards where the money would go. I wanted to sit down and talk with people at the VA. It was clear that the number one need that veterans face from Post 9/11 was connection. They needed to be able to sit down and have a cup of coffee with somebody. They needed to talk about their experiences or talk about their challenges. Some really do need heavy, in-depth therapy but there are a lot of people that essentially need therapy and counseling, disguised in friendship; and that can be just a simple interaction. Let’s bring that idea into our community.
We might go to the ballgame to do something because as you know it's so easy to be isolated. You can watch TV all day long, play video games all day long, and scroll social media all day long. You don't need to leave your house to do almost anything nowadays. It’s easy to fall into this dark cycle of purposelessness. Isolation. You start to feel really frustrated that you can't go out there and make a living because you’re struggling to find a job as many veterans do. Our idea at Team RWB was to help veterans who were struggling to meet other people. We had a multifunction scope of physical activity, community, talk therapy, and then to raise money through those various legs. We then wanted to take the money to a separate team of advocates who would sit there and who wanted to have the one on one conversations with people. We needed people who were willing to lean in. We wanted them to be willing to sit down with veterans and have those conversations. We needed both athletes and advocates.
What's been your what's been one of some of your most powerful experiences within the time that you started it? I mean, I'm sure there have been a lot.
MSE: We worked with Matt Dre from the very beginning. He was the lone survivor of a suicide vehicle born IED attack in Iraq. He still had a pretty severe traumatic brain injury but he was living on his own. He did have some support but he's part of Team RWB. We brought him out to some Michigan games and Redwings games. He still suffers pretty significantly from some of the effects of the TBI. In the very beginning, he was that powerful reminder of this is why it's so important to connect with other vets. There are those who can find it's so easy to become isolated or who can find it so daunting to go out there and to connect with other people. It was also massive from a confidence standpoint and from just a functionality standpoint. There are countless stories of veterans who are dealing with these issues.
Ira Brownridge, another guy who's with us, and was shot in the head. Even though the Kevlar slowed it down, the bullet still grazed his head. He has some long-term challenges with that. When you see him out running half marathons carrying the American flag in Michigan for Team RWB, you can’t help but get chills. It was so incredible to see him stepping up and being a volunteer leader within the Ann Arbor chapter. Dan Cower down in Houston is a Silver Star Recipient who just recently got upgraded to a DSC (Distinguished Service Cross), and he was the chapter captain for Team RWB in Houston. There are so many examples of veterans seizing this opportunity of leadership and connection and just really taking responsibility within the role. There's literally thousands of examples of people from the very early days to where we're at right now, who are inspiring people through their actions and through their leadership.
What are the big picture goals of the work?
MSE: It's a challenge to figure out the vision or try to figure out the strategy and where we are going exactly. In the beginning it was primarily about fundraising and helping veterans who are really struggling. It then morphed into this chapter based model and we saw that a lot of veterans need help and they weren’t going to say it. We needed to build networks or chapters of veterans that could come together in various cities. We can help them do that and provide that support to each other even for those who don't ask for it. it was sort of the evolution where we realized we really needed to invest in leaders at the local level to make sure that our leaders knew how to run the chapters effectively. We have 212 chapters across the country and we want to challenge veterans to think about how they stay physically and socially active. Sometimes that means challenging yourself to do something physically that you didn't do before. If you weren't a big runner then try for a half marathon. If you've never done triathlons then maybe you learn to swim. There's power in learning new skills, especially new physical activity skills. If they have never done CrossFit that’s not something to be afraid of. We'll teach you the technique. You could probably use some yoga in your life to find your inner calm. It's all these various physical activities that we offer that exist out there already but we bring that into community that cares and advocates for you.
Can you talk about the Positivity Project?
MSE: Our mission is to empower America's youth to build positive relationships and become the best version of themselves. The history of this goes back to when I was in grad school in 2009 and I started studying positive psychology. I started studying the 24 character strengths that make up a person's soul. The character traits include integrity, bravery, fairness, humility, self control, kindness, enthusiasm, and gratitude. There are 24 attributes that exist within all of us. I look back and it was so eye opening to me to learn that character was so much deeper than I thought. The military in my mind simplified character down to integrity, bravery, and a sense of duty. The deeper you dig you realize that character also includes creativity. There is a massive part of character in having self control, being able to love and being able to forgive. It is these more deeply-woven interpersonal traits and characteristics that we need. I learned that when I was in grad school. I was posting about this on social media in 2014, or 2015, or something like that. There were two guys that I grew up with, and one was a fourth grade teacher and one was the principal at the school and they said, "Hey, how can you bring positive psychology to kids?" It was the first time I’d been asked this question.
I said very honestly, "I don't know. My oldest is only four years old right now and I just don't know. But I think you can do it." He said, "Well, how would you go about doing that?" I got back to him and said that I’d think about teaching one character strength per week since there's 24 of them and that's a good chunk of your academic year. I also told him I’d think about really prioritizing the importance of relationships and teaching children to prioritize relationships in their life. The number one idea to finding a positive psychology is that relationships are the number one driver of our satisfaction in life. You can have all the success in the world, all the wealth in the world, and achieve everything in the world. At the end of the day, your relationships are paramount to your well being. We've seen from the research that says people with strong relationships really live happier, healthier, longer lives.
You are less likely to drink yourself to death, less likely to smoke cigarettes, take drugs and less likely to be isolated when you've got good relationships. Relationships end up affecting your heart, your blood pressure, and your likeliness of getting heart disease. Relationships are massive. If you've read Sebastian Junger’s book, “Tribe,” the whole notion of the book is that we're built for community and we're built for relationships with other human beings. When we don't get that it gets really ugly really fast. The information age has wreaked havoc on relationships, because we can spend so much of our time interacting with people on email and on text. I'm tweeting, snapping too and all that which can be fine in moderation. The problem is that it often replaces real life interaction and building real relationships with other humans. This was the backbone and the framework for the positivity project.
The project had an awesome framework and we knew we would need to bring this to other schools. The co-founder of the Positivity Project is my friend Jeff who is a veteran of Iraq. Between the two of us we have a total of 50 months downrange and I knew he’d be great for this mission. We've been on the move for the past three and a half years now. We went from having one school to having 528, which is over 315,000 kids in the program. It's amazing. We have over 42,000 teachers and are continuously growing with no outside funding. It has been us just basically charging schools to train teachers. We haven't received any real significant funding yet but when that comes it's going to really take off. Our goal is to be in 2,000 schools by 2022 annd then eventually 10,000 schools by 2027.
Who have been your ambassadors for the project, and how do you decide who to bring into the program?
MSE: We need to make this a major priority for our kids. We have on our board side, Kerri Walsh Jennings, the gold medalist and Elizabeth Hasselbeck. They’ve been tremendous. Jake Wood from Team Rubicon is also on the board. Will Reynolds, who is on the board of team Red White and Blue with me. The first seven years of the organization we had this great mixture of mostly vets. I believe that eight of the founding 11 board members were veterans. It is now trending a little bit away from that. We still have a substantial veteran presence on the board. The growth has been pretty remarkable in a period of three years and this is really about the future of it. How do we help to really re-emphasize the importance of character and character strengths? How we treat other people and what our capacity to build relationships to connect with each other, is at the forefront of our thoughts. If we can develop those skills in kids from a very young age then our fundamental belief is that it's going to have a profound effect on the nation as a whole. We have a lot of challenges right now in our country and our youth are going to be the ones facing that soon.
People in the long term don't have the ability to live in an instant gratification world. But, we live in a culture where we want things now and we want to see impact immediately. We talk about quarterly profits and needing to get funding instantly. Everything in our society is so driven by “the here and now.” At the end of the day the real power of life is in the aggregate and the cumulative. It's in what happens over a sustained period of time not what happens this week or this year. That’s really difficult because there's a tension there and you’re almost forced to make things work this week or this year. But my question for others would be, “Do you have a 5, 10, 15, 20 year vision for your life? This is personally speaking about how you live personally, but also it’s about building and growing an organization for the long term. The reality is long term is what really matters and however you get there in the short term iis of little use when it comes to success. It's really about being able to sustain a movement. That’s the real goal.
So what's the what's that look like? Going forward with the positivity project?
MSE: We're just continuing to measure and assess in showing the impact and building in the technology. We have to be able to show that we can build a sustainable organization. We only have two full time staff, my co-founder and myself. We do have people doing some contract work here and there. We are being patient but also preparing ourselves for the possibility of explosive growth. We just don't have the people to do it yet. Our big focus right now is on high school. There's very little character education on social emotional learning strategies for high school. It's tough these days in high school, because of all the distractions with cell phones and social media. It’s just added a ton of fuel to the relationship fire. Relationships are hard to begin with romance, family, friends, co-workers and all of those things are very difficult already but the information age has made it harder. It’s dumped a bucket load of diesel fuel on that fire so we need to be ready to really help on the high school level.
How did you meet your wife?
MSE: We were down in Austin and my now wife along with my sister were both bridesmaids in the same weddings for their friend Adele. Adele grew up with my sister. My sister Monica was a bridesmaid as well and they had moved down to Texas to teach in Dallas. Genevieve (wife) and her were roommates and they were both bridesmaids. The weekend of the wedding, which I was not at, Monica told Genevieve that she should meet me. She told her that I was at Fort Hood. I was set up by my sister and ironically I set her up with her husband later (laughs). He was one of my classmates at West Point, the captain of the soccer team and he needed a date for ring weekend. Ring Weekend is when you get your ring before you start your senior year. He reached out to me and said, "Hey, your sister and some friends, maybe they want to come to a party and hang out." I ended up setting her up with him. They got married and then she turned around four years later and introduced me to my now wife.
My wife is very independent. She was born in Utah and her parents separated when she was young. Her mom was actually the first regional manager of Starbucks, in Texas or in Dallas in like 1992 or something like that. She was raised from an early age to be independent in her own success. These are both great things in a military spouse. Deployments often leave the spouse at home on their own for many months at a time. A military spouse has to figure everything out. There has been so much growth for us as a team for Red White and Blue. We are working on co-authoring the book titled "Lead Yourself First.” (published in 2017) Both of those things started in 2010 at the same time that we became parents for the first time. We moved on to the Positivity Project and launched that literally 3 weeks before Mathias is born. We had this trend of starting nonprofits and having kids in the interim (laughs).
We started three nonprofits and technically my name is on the paper as the chairman, the founding chairman, the founding president, and CEO. It’s actually the other people who have really done the work and my wife especially there at that school. There is another woman that works with us named Francis Glass that has done a lion's share of the work. We've done everything from figuring out how you start a school, how to recruit students, to get the building ready, to figuring out the curriculum we want to teach so that we aren’t just like every other school. In this entire process, we're just talking about passion for hard work along with a desire to serve and to be a value to other people. You have to be able to put that above your own comfort and convenience because it's very easy and very tempting to try to optimize your own happiness. When you live life that way, like I did in my 20’s, at times it's fun. When you're in the moment, you tend to feel that way but then on the long term it really lacks any true . You wake up the next morning when you are out partying until 2 a.m. and then you get the other side of short-term fulfillment, which is a big hangover. The switch flipped for us when we got married and as we became parents. It really flipped in 2010 when we became parents and when we launched Team Red, White, and Blue. It really was about understanding that we were relentlessly committed to a life of service. It became about focusing on spending a lot of what traditionally might be free time on building organizations that were directed to making a positive impact on the future of the country.
Where’s the mindset change for you?
MSE: I think a lot about raising our kids has been placing an emphasis on future orientation. It's very easy to catch yourself living in the here and now. There's power in being present in the moment where you're at. There's a tension between that and then thinking big picture, long term. If you're always trying to optimize your utility of something right now, or optimize your own happiness, or your own comfort right now, it's a double edged sword. The thoughts that puts your frame of mind on, “How do I make this better for me?” can be a dangerous one. The reality is we need more fuel thinking and going back to understanding the importance of tribe and asking, "How do we make this better for the community? How do I make this better for the team? How do I make this better for the country?” You need all of that. You can't sit there and not be focused on yourself but you also can't over focus. I know for me that's been the big mindset shift that we've had. This is how I would think about framing it the most effective.
Ego and arrogance is usually what drives short term thinking with no long term outlook. It's all about the here and now. Short term thinking can cause lots of problems. How do you think about the big picture? We need to get there as a society. This is why relationships are challenging, because the reality is we have access to so many people and options right now. It's so easy to just kind of choose what you want and when it doesn’t go exactly your way, look elsewhere. It's not a big deal in this society. When you're in a tribe or a community, you figure it out because you're in this together and you rely upon each other. You do need some short term thinking obviously, because you have to be paying attention to the road right now in order to move forward. If you don't pay attention you could find yourself swerving and get yourself or someone else hurt. You have to be concerned somewhat about the here and now. The balance has to be there. It’s the same thing with technology. Technology is great and can be awesome but if its out of balance, which it is for most people, it’s extremely problematic. It's the same thing, short term, long term, you have to have both ways of thinking. You just need a balance. I think a lot of us are way too focused on the short term and not enough on the long term.
What spawned the decision into starting a high school?
MSE: I knew a Special Forces soldier here and he came to me and said, "Hey, I've got an eighth-grade student and I know that you've got experience getting organizations off the ground. I really think we need to get a Catholic school going here." The Diocese, which is kind of the organizing governing body of the Catholic Church, there's not enough demand for it here. The Diocese of Raleigh would only open a Catholic high school in the Fort Bragg area if there was enough students (400) who wanted to attend....which there wasn’t. So we had to make a decision---go forward with the school as an independent high school, or not do it at all This is why we have five students right now but next year it will be fifteen. We knew that if we were going to create a Catholicism-inspired, different High School educational experience that we had to do it in a non-traditional way. My friend came and said, "Hey, can you lead us through this?" I decided that was the path I was supposed to be on so I agreed to it. I went home and told my wife that I thought we needed to do this. She remembers it a little bit different than me (laughs). She probably remembers me coming home and saying, “We're going to launch a high school.” She might be right. I remember coming home and saying, “I think we need to do this now and I need your help. I remember her reply, “I'm in.”
At the end of the day, she and Francis are really the ones who have created success on the day-to-day operations side of the house. They basically had a job where they hadn’t been paid for two and a half years. The two of them have worked about 25 hours to 30 hours per week. They are the ones making this operation work. It's been quite the heavy lift. There have been some days when you think to yourself, “Am I supposed to be here? Is this what we're supposed to be doing? Why the hell did I do this?” We've definitely had a lot of those days. It's just hard and it can be completely frustrating. There are those times where we wonder if funding is coming in or when we will get more students. But, overall, we are super stoked about where we're at. We really are building a different model with our students. We've got this explicit focus on building a sort of service mindset, developing character and leadership skills within our students. That's a measured part of what we do.
We're the only High School in America or the world, as long as I know where 30% of our student’s GPA comes from their skills, service, character, and leadership. We have a whole day dedicated to it every week and it's a big part of what we're doing. We're not just a high school that happens to be Catholic by having a theology class as a part of the curriculum. We start the day with prayer and then move into critical skills. We're really a different model that is focused on that service, that character, and that leadership. Those soft skills that we believe are really the economy of the future. We're gonna be fueled by your capacity to interact with other human beings.
How has your how's your faith noticed in the church now? Yes, it helps.
MSE: I'm a cradle Catholic. I went to Catholic High School Christian Martyrs Academy. When I was 18 through probably 30 ish with the deployment and all that I missed a lot of mass. I believe that everyone's got a faith journey. Sometimes people are believers, and they don't, or sometimes they're believers that are somewhat mad. There are all different ways. I study so many people, especially as you get older, if you're fortunate enough to grow older, you reflect on things more like what is the meaning and purpose of life. How do you conceptualize all this. like that. We take in oxygen to breathe. We breathe out co2 and plants need that. There is this whole relationship how the whole world works to me is just so powerful. I think, over the course of your life to think on Wherever people may be in their journey that's their journey. My window in those years was I still believe and I believe in my faith. I did all that and went to church when it was convenient for me and all that. It definitely provided a role especially when I was deployed. The proverbial there's no atheist in the foxhole was certainly true for me. My faith ramped up in intensity when I was deployed. I would talk it out with the Big Man and just like, say out loud, “I hope I make it home. I really hope all of our soldiers make it home.”
I was praying intently for that every day. Faith has definitely played a big role since becoming a parent. My wife got into the Catholic Church as a teenager and she's really led our family to be more involved in the church. Even small things like visiting people in nursing homes are things that my wife brought into our lives that just allows us to grow in our lives and resiliency. We don’t run from adversity in our house. I believe there are two major drivers behind resilience. When life kicks you in the teeth you need to find strength, and the other is developing rich relationships. If you have really strong relationships those people are going to be there to rally around you. If you get cancer or something really bad happens, you need both of those things. You need to be able to process that and find some sense in it. How do you discover the purpose to life?
The faith aspect has been really important for that. The other side is the relationship piece. How do you develop close relationships with friends and family? We need those people in our lives because eventually there will be a valley in your journey. No one lives forever here. How do you make sure that you've got the support network built around you to be able to process adversity? I think learning strength in relationship and how to deal with adversity have both played a big, consistently increasing role in my capacity to take on more stress. There are plenty of stressors in life naturally. If all you're doing is being stressed to make more money I don't know how you do that. My internal pressure comes from wanting to make this world a better place. I've got a very high threshold for stress because of that desire. I think all the time as long as I've got my health you can pile more and more stress on me. It's not going to faze me because I'm purpose driven. It may be stress but when it’s purpose driven I think you’ll always have the capacity to take on more.
We are all offered a chance to submit ourselves to actions towards a greater good, leaving a legacy that endures and spawns true change. Through continuous selfless service, Erwin has led from the front at a blistering pace leaving no stone unturned as he positions the veteran community for a chance at greater success. We speak so often of the veteran suicide epidemic but what are we doing to curb the pain and give this generation a chance at living out their potential? Mike has provided a blueprint not only in his career of military service but outside of that on the home front, leaving consistent examples of positivity and growth in a culture that so urgently needs it.
Check out Erwin’s various initiatives at www.teamrwb.org and www.posproject.org. You can also follow along on Instagram: @erwinrwb, @teamrwb, and @posproject.