ALL THROUGH MY CAMPAIGNS and my first year as mayor, I continued my regular Reserve duties, usually driving two hours for a drill weekend in Illinois. Working eight-hour days, a relaxing contrast from my day job, and spending time with sailors from all walks of civilian life, was a healthy antidote to the all-absorbing work I had in South Bend. By law, I could not engage in politics or perform civil duties during the forty-eight hours a month plus two weeks a year that I was active. It was a forced, but welcome, change of pace from the constant activity of being mayor. And there was even something welcome about being a more junior employee for a while, rather than the boss. Back home, I was responsible for the conduct of a thousand employees and the well-being of a hundred thousand residents. On drill weekends, I was responsible for my own paperwork, and that of a handful of sailors and soldiers assigned to my branch.
Deployments are part of the bargain for reservists, but so is “dwell time”—the idea that the military will try to give you plenty of time in between mobilizations, so that ordinarily you only have to deploy once every five years, unless you go out of your way to spend more time on active duty. The urgency of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars put some strain on this model, with exhausted service members being called up more and more frequently, but by the time I joined in 2009, the pace was again fairly steady. I had little concern about being abruptly called up in those first few years. Besides, it was extremely rare for an ensign to be deployed, because your early years are mostly spent figuring out the basics of management and military bearing—knowledge normally not attributed to officers until they have at least made it to the rank of lieutenant, junior grade.
But as time went by, I advanced in rank and skills, and grew more likely to be mobilized. By 2013, rumor had it that the intelligence community would see an increase in deployment orders, including involuntary call-ups. One drill weekend, I encountered an unusually grumpy Lieutenant Murray, who explained that he had been abruptly and involuntarily called up for duty in East Africa. In his case, that meant suspending a successful law practice, leaving a spouse and kids, and packing his bags for Djibouti; he was very much a key employee at his solo office, but that, too, did not rate a “yes” answer on the screening questionnaire. The “Needs of the Navy” came first.
Before even taking office as mayor, I had made sure our team had a clear plan on what to do if I got mobilized. Some decisions would have to depend on the circumstances, of course, but we gathered all the information needed on legal and regulatory procedures and made several contingency plans. Now, with deployment orders coming in more and more frequently—especially for officers holding the rank of lieutenant, which was what I would become in late 2013—I told the team at home to be ready, and made sure my chain of command knew that I would rather go sooner than later, and would rather go to Afghanistan than anywhere else. Because I was a specialist in counterterrorism, Afghanistan represented the best place in the world to practice my craft. It was also a country, troubled but also hauntingly beautiful, that I had gotten to know while a civilian adviser at McKinsey. If my turn was coming up to get mobilized, I wanted it to be there.
“AN ADVENTURE IS ONLY an inconvenience rightly considered,” said my friend and colleague Scott Ford, quoting G. K. Chesterton as he raised a glass of scotch. A few of us friends had gathered for one last dinner and round of drinks before I headed to Chicago with my parents, orders in hand, and then off to the sequence of bases and waypoints that would lead me eventually to Kabul. We got into the good whiskey, and shared jokes until late at night.
It was a good way to think of the coming deployment: an adventure, among many other things. But I also noted, with guilt, that this would be more than an inconvenience for my administration. We were full-steam-ahead on a number of ambitious initiatives, as I’ve described: addressing a thousand vacant houses, staging for the 150th anniversary celebration of the city, and redesigning the two major arteries in our downtown streetscape, to name a few. My office staff and department heads would now have to continue making progress on all of these efforts without me there to supply political cover, day-to-day guidance, or media engagement.
But by the time I got my official orders in the fall of 2013, calling me up to report the next February for duty with the Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell, we were prepared. Kathryn Roos, my hyper-competent chief of staff, had worked so closely with me that she could intuitively gauge how I would answer most questions before they even came to me. And Mark Neal, the city controller whom I had asked to assume the role of deputy mayor in my absence, would be an excellent community voice in my stead. Mark was an accomplished business leader, a former CFO of a major health company in town whose work for the city was uncomplicated by political aspirations: our original arrangement had called for him to serve the city for two years as controller before going back to private life. But right about the time he was getting ready to leave the administration, I had to approach him with an almost comically disruptive request: to temporarily take over and lead the city during my deployment. He declined—which I took as further proof that he was the right person for the job. There was no personal ambition here, no political agenda; he just wanted what was best for the city. I persisted, and eventually he agreed.
Over breakfast at my house shortly before leaving, I went over final plans with Mark. Here’s what to do if there’s a weather emergency. Here’s the best way to get ahold of me abroad. Here are the main priorities to stick with, and the ones we can sacrifice if we have to. Then, gently smiling as he did whenever we were about to tackle a delicate issue, Mark raised the one question no one else had wanted to ask: “What if you don’t come back, Pete?”
I glanced down at the table, trying to field the question the same as if I had been asked what to do if the council denied a mid-year budget appropriation. “There’s a letter in the desk drawer upstairs.” That was for the personal stuff. As for the city, “It would be a vacancy. They’ll have to find someone new, and it will get political. I guess if it gets to that point, I won’t be any help.”
SOON I WAS AT NAVAL STATION GREAT LAKES, completing the first stages of mobilization and commencing the strange shift in identity and status that awaited me. The base commanding officer was away, so the command master chief did the honors of signing off on my deployment packet after I had completed the scavenger hunt of requisite medical, fitness, training, and administrative checks. He looked over the paperwork one last time in his office and asked if I felt I had everything in order on the personal side.
“Got any kids?”
“No.”
“Wife?”
“Nope.”
“Girlfriend?”
“No, I’m single.”
“Well, that’ll make it easier.”
“Is your employer supportive?”
“Very,” I answered, thinking of Kathryn, Mark, and the rest of my staff. “Everyone has been great.”
“That’s good. If you still feel that way when you get back, you can put them in for an ESGR [Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve] Award.”
“I’ll remember that,” I muttered. But that would be like giving myself an award, I thought, so it probably wouldn’t work in this case.
“You said you work for the city, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, you should definitely put them in for the award, then, especially if you need to brown-nose a little. When they do those award presentations the elected officials always come. They love standing next to military and they just eat that shit up.”
A FEW WEEKS LATER, I sat poker-faced in a training room as a furious commander berated the troops at Camp McCrady, outside Fort Jackson, South Carolina. We had been there for a few days, all Navy personnel assigned to Army-style jobs in combat zones, being trained to serve as the land-based “dirt sailors” we were about to become. It came after Great Lakes, after Norfolk, the last stage before going overseas. We learned Army lingo, convoy operations, and, of course, shooting. But some officers had been underperforming, and the executive officer was not pleased.