The Veterans Group Rebuilding Disaster Zones as a Form of Therapy

Illustration by Michael Houtz

Rural Florida meant large snakes flattened like colorful ribbons on the road. It was large churches at large intersections, small churches in the husks of former convenience stores, and liquor stores, open until midnight, that provided the only light in miles of darkness. Rural Florida was a brown widow spider crawling down my chest while I took a piss in the woods.

I’d never been to rural Florida, specifically the Big Bend region, the niche between the panhandle and peninsula, but that was true for a lot of us: a hundred-plus volunteers doing hurricane relief work with an outfit called Team Rubicon. Team Rubicon, or TR, is a veteran-led organization that swoops in during natural disasters. They’d been in Florida for three months, having arrived within hours of August’s Hurricane Idalia, a Category 4 hurricane that was the biggest to hit the Big Bend area since 1896. The destruction it caused was mainly felt in Florida—houses razed, several people killed, losses estimated to be between $3 and $5 billion. Since the hurricane, dozens of volunteers, mostly veterans but also plenty of civilians, had cycled in and out of TR’s base camp in the small town of Mayo, for long days of mucking out homes, chopping down trees, basically just trying to restore lives that had been wrecked by the wind and rains. “We embrace the suck,” a former Marine in his twenties told me one night, grinning.

The evening I arrived, camp resembled a military base hastily constructed next to a football field. There was a mess hall, many trucks, many power cables snaking across the ground. I was assigned a billet in one of a dozen or so bunk trailers, complete with air conditioning. Numerous volunteers who’d done this before called our quarters “Camp Bougie,” because they were used to deployments where you slept on cots in a VFW, or a high school gym, or simply in a two-person tent on the side of a road.

Team Rubicon was founded by a pair of young American veterans, former Marines Jake Wood and William McNulty, after 2010’s devastating earthquake in Haiti. They’d flown to the island simply to help—not tethered to any organization, not sure of what they were doing, exactly, they just felt an obligation to hop on a plane and play a part. Wood wrote later, “I had not felt such a compulsion since waking up nearly ten years earlier on September 11.”

Thirteen years after its inception, Rubicon has launched over 1,200 operations domestically and around the world, and has a volunteer roster that’s 160,000-plus. In mid-October, in addition to the operation I joined in Florida, TR had multiple active relief efforts underway—another storm response in Florida, emergency operations and wildfire work in Maui, flood recovery in Chicago. Basically, for the past decade-plus, if a disaster strikes the United States, never mind disasters around the world, there’s a good chance a team of “grayshirts”—in reference to the TR volunteer uniform of plain gray T-shirts—was on the ground.

My friend Victor sometimes uses his vacation time to do disaster relief. Last year, after Hurricane Ian pummeled Florida, he recalled working alongside a Rubicon crew in Fort Myers. “Intense folk!” he texted me. “But damn they looked like they were actually doing something.”

It’s not surprising that veterans make capable relief workers: the grit, the skills, maybe an innate desire to help people. The question I had, considering how these women and men had already volunteered so much for their country, and in some cases, in a few of my friends’ cases, been mentally tormented by the process—the question I had was why the hell they’d answer the call. Hadn’t they given enough?

For those of us who didn’t pledge to defend our country, who’ve never been a spouse or relative to such a person, it can be easy to see veterans two-dimensionally, even one-dimensionally. Virtuous or brainwashed. Honorable or traumatized. During Vietnam, veterans were spat on in the street. Since 9/11, they can elect to board first on flights. How America sees and treats its veterans is frequently bizarre.

But Team Rubicon regards veterans as a population that has more to give, if approached the right way. “We view the veteran as this incredible resource we can unlock,” Art delaCruz, TR’s CEO and a former Top Gun instructor with six combat deployments, told me. “They might have taken off the uniform, but under that uniform were all these muscles they built—as a first responder, or as an infantryman, or a pilot, or a logistician.”

I rolled off my bunk at o-five-hundred hours. Breakfast was eggs, grits and bacon, gallons of coffee. At sunrise, we gathered in a big circle for assignments. DelaCruz had been quick to point out that while Team Rubicon was veteran-led, its volunteers were everybody, and the group looked it: all ages, men and women, from across the States. (For anybody who signs up for a week’s deployment, TR covers all costs, from airfare to room and board.) My assigned team was about a dozen, including several veterans from Michigan who worked for Ford, one of Rubicon’s sponsors; they were volunteering through a larger partnership between the automaker and the nonprofit.

We rolled out in a pair of F-150s and drove half an hour through the countryside—peanut farms, chicken farms, cattle operations. Our site that day was an acre set back in remote woods. An old woman lived there, we were told, living rough. Multiple tarps were strung through the trees, shading little domestic arrangements—plastic chairs, basic cooking equipment, a garden of seashells, a teddy bear, and potted plants. But those trees, cracked and leaning, were why we were there: lots could topple at any minute, injuring her or somebody else. (We heard multiple squatters lived nearby.)

Art delaCruz, Team Rubicon CEO

One volunteer, who’d done other TR missions, warned me to keep an eye out, to “watch my six,” he said he once wandered into a backwoods moonshine setup in Kentucky. “You stumble on somebody’s still, a secret pot farm in California, you get out of there fast. You don’t want to surprise anybody who doesn’t want to be surprised.”

So maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised, about two hours later, when I was deep in the forest “swamping”—hauling brush—when Florida Man quietly materialized, as if a creature from the woods himself. Camouflage pants, green hoodie, dark beanie. Smoking a cigarette with hands so dirty they could’ve been dipped in tar. “What’re y’all doing here?” His name was David, he said. He looked over my shoulder at the volunteers operating chainsaws. “FEMA came out here before—they’re absolute crap,” he said distastefully. “You guys have already done a ton more work.”

David asked if I wanted to see his camp. He’d been living off-grid for the past year and a half, subsisting on venison. We reached a clearing where he had a tiny house and a couple vehicles that looked bombed-out. “It’s real cool what you guys are doing,” he said, touring me around his spot. “And hey, you’ll wanna pace yourselves. I cleared this land myself, I weighed 198 pounds when I came out here.” David pulled up his sweatshirt; I could see his ribs. “Remember,” he shouted when I left a few minutes later, “pace yourselves!”

It was a good reminder, I thought, walking back toward the sound of tree-felling, that there are millions of ways to live in this country—and disasters don’t strike everyone the same. Worse, more are coming. According to NOAA, in the 1980s, in the United States, the typical time between “billion-dollar disasters”—events where damages and costs reach or exceed $1 billion—was 82 days. From 2017 to 2021, it was down to 18. There were more billion-dollar flood events from 2010 to 2023 than in the ’80s, ’90s, and aughts combined.

After a sandwich break, I asked a couple of the veteran volunteers, basically, what the hell they were doing out there. Coyle, 32, a former Marine who resembled a Chris Hemsworth stunt double and now works for Ford, said he got to feel a sense of brotherhood again, a shared mission of hard work. For Scott, 46, who was previously in the Air Force and is also now employed by Ford, it’s been cathartic to focus on solving people’s problems in an extremely tangible way. “You sit in meetings all day, you kinda tread that water, but coming out here, joining everyone together—I love it.”

Another Air Force vet, who didn’t want to be named, told me, “I realized after I left [the military], I don’t miss the circus, but I do miss the clowns.”

I shared how, as I understood it, people’s experiences in the armed services often were as different as their reasons for joining. An acquaintance of mine, an ex-Marine, considered his service the most meaningful thing he’d ever done. Whereas another friend, also Marines, struggled daily with PTS, post-traumatic stress. I later spoke to another veteran volunteer, Timothy, who went by T.K. “I am 100 percent PTSD through the federal government,” he told me quietly. His trauma derived from a domestic engagement, he explained, not foreign: five months of recovery work in the hellish aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I asked him what he saw; he said he didn’t want to talk about it. Though there’d been a period, after his deployment, he'd been so unable to leave the house, the only way he could play catch with his kids was from his bed.

“I went through 12 years of hell after [getting out],” he said. “The VA had me on 26 different psych meds.” Today, both of his arms were sleeved with tattoos. One referenced the amount of veterans that die by suicide each day. “That number’s probably out of date now,” he said soberly. T.K. lived in Michigan, where, in addition to his work with Team Rubicon, he’d started several organizations to help veterans; by helping them, he said, he helped himself. “Team Rubicon gives me something to look forward to. It’s organizations like this that literally can save lives.”

Meaning, I was to understand, the lives of the veteran volunteers as much as the people they served.

Team Rubicon, like many large organizations, has struggled during its growth. Lawsuits remain pending between the national organization and some of its international operations, over allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment by some of its leaders outside the States. A representative for TR said that Team Rubicon Global ceased operations in March of 2021, and that the legal case between the two entities is ongoing.

In Florida, at the end of the day, we cleaned the chainsaws and drove back to basecamp for hot showers, a hot meal, and a campfire that evening where different strike team members shared moments from the day. One of our group detailed how the highlight had come as a total surprise—when, mid-afternoon, the woman who was camping there arrived out of the blue. She was a tiny white lady in shorts, a purple T-shirt, and a pair of Vans. She looked to be in her sixties. She looked, as she slowly wandered through the trees, to be in utter shock. We’d cleared a ton of wreckage, chopped down and hauled away at least a dozen trees. “Oh my god, oh my god!” she repeated under her breath, and started to cry. “I just can’t believe it. God bless you all.”

Her name was Bobbie, she told me, though some people called her Miss Bobbie. She subsisted off Social Security checks and didn’t have much otherwise. She’d been living in the woods because her father had taught her as a little girl how to camp, and rents were expensive, and she felt more comfortable away from town. Then the hurricane struck, two trees fell right in front of her, she nearly died. She’d since been living out of her car, sleeping nights in a Walmart parking lot. Then, just the previous week, she’d seen a flyer for Team Rubicon in the public library, she said, and phoned the number. A day later a volunteer came out to inspect the site. “And now y’all are here. It’s amazing.”

Miss Bobbie went around the group and insisted on hugging each person. The hugs were not short. Everyone was tearing up. I stood next to Coyle, the lost Hemsworth brother. “This is what it’s all about,” he said under his breath. “It’s the fucking best.”

Rosecrans Baldwin is a frequent contributor to GQ. His most recent book, Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, won the 2022 California Book Award.

Originally Appeared on GQ