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Josh Webster served four tours of duty in Afghanistan before joining the leadership of disaster relief group Team Rubicon.

Joshua Maverick Webster ’09 believes that work—and life—should be “more fulfilling than just a paycheck.” That ethic, plus a dedication to service and country, led this past president of the Military Veterans Organization at UCLA to serve four tours of duty in Afghanistan, two as an Army Ranger and two as an Air Force Pararescueman.

The indefatigable soldier/scholar registered for classes on a laptop in a little firebase in Helmand province outside of Kandahar. Seven days after returning to the States, he was in Westwood. Webster, whose mantra is to “look for the hardest job that I can do and do that,” wanted to keep using his training to help people and he had an idea to launch a veteran disaster relief group.

In 2009, as he was about to graduate and depart for his final tour in Afghanistan, a friend, Anthony Allman ’08 (founder of the Military Veterans Organization), asked him, “Remember that organization you wanted to start? Somebody else got there first. His name is Jake Wood and he goes to UCLA Anderson.”

Along with ex-Marine William McNulty, Wood launched Team Rubicon after watching coverage of the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010. The two vets realized they were trained to provide exactly the kind of help the devastated country needed. And so, despite advice not to proceed from government and large aid organizations, Team Rubicon members crossed the Artibonite River, which separates the Dominican Republic and Haiti, carrying crucial gear and medical supplies to the people of Port-au-Prince. They had crossed a river and committed to a risky course—ergo the Rubicon moniker.

Today, TR’s former soldiers and doctors, paramedics, firefighters and other trained disaster relief specialists (many of them vets themselves) continue to “bridge the gap,” as they call it, between the moment a disaster happens and the point at which conventional aid organizations respond. Teams have gone to Burma, Chile, Pakistan, Sudan, Turkey and the Central African Republic—and last year they came to the aid of victims of the tornadoes that tore through Alabama and Missouri.

Not surprisingly, TR did turn out to be the perfect next mission for Josh Webster. Wood, who left Anderson after a year to devote all of his time to TR, told him, “As soon as you’re back from Afghanistan, call me.” Webster started as a Team Rubicon regional coordinator for volunteers and today is director of personnel and readiness—TR’s version of a human resources director. He’s also led or served on TR missions to Sudan and Turkey.

His first task was to set up a searchable online database. “If there’s an accident in Hawaii, I can isolate the doctors, paramedics and nurses with military experience on the West Coast who have traveled to the Pacific islands before,” Webster explains. “We’re building out our own Internet portal. And we can hit up volunteers on social media when there is a disaster—sign them up instead of us having to call and ask, ‘Are you prepared to go?’”

Webster estimates that when he began his database, TR had 300 or so volunteers. Today, it has 1,000. These authentic American heroes continue to race to wherever people are in need, and the group is broadening its mission to include partnerships with organizations like Habitat for Humanity’s Homes for Heroes project.

“We have an adage in the military: ‘We all have strong backs,’” says Webster. “It’s really not that difficult to motivate a bunch of vets to get out there and help somebody.”

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Click here for video of the address.

Thank you Chancellor Ward, deans and distinguished professors, friends and family, Bucky Badger, and of course the graduating class of 2011.  It is an honor to be here today, and to be allowed to share with you this incredible milestone in your life.

I remember my own graduation, just six short years ago.  In the weeks and months leading up to it, I ignored the repeated emails asking me to reserve my gown with the University bookstore.  When, one week before the ceremony, I finally decided to go in and purchase one, I sauntered up to the counter, chest full of pride, and said “I need a graduation gown.”  Without even looking up from his Daily Cardinal, the guy behind the counter asked, “Name?”  Not knowing why needing my name was necessary I responded, “Jacob Wood.”  He typed it into the computer, and, in between obnoxious sips of Starbucks coffee, stated, “you didn’t reserve one.”  I soon learned the hard way that the bookstore doesn’t keep gowns stocked for six-foot-six, two hundred and forty pound men, and that as far as gowns were concerned, I was out of luck.  Running out of options, I quickly called a couple of guys on the football team that had graduated the previous December; after a few calls, I finally found a gown that would fit.  Disaster averted!  On the day of the ceremony I showed up here, to the Kohl Center, with my family in tow…only to find out that the gowns had changed.  You see, my gown was a shimmering sateen black, standing amid an ocean of dark, dull matte cloth.  My mother, who knew the level of procrastination I was capable of, was mortified.  When asked by my peers what the deal was with my gown, I simply responded, “It’s an honors robe.”  And thus began my glorious transition to Wisconsin Alum.

I am sure that many of you were hoping for a more distinguished speaker to come here today and deliver this charge.  Unfortunately, Aaron Rodgers, President Obama, Lady Gaga and that dude on the show Happy Endings who wears the Wisconsin hat, all had other things going on.  The Badger Herald Editorial Staff shed light on this issue in a recent article; and I quote, “Although the efforts of current class officers are appreciated, the university’s inconsistent organizing of commencement events from year to year ensures the absence of top-tier speakers.”  Well, I may not be top-tier, but I’m certainly happy to be here.

So why am I here?  I’m a graduate, but only made the Dean’s List one semester and have nothing to do with stem-cell research.  I played football, but was an under-performing scholarship athlete and never even sniffed the NFL.

I suppose I am here because six years ago I made a choice.  Six years ago I chose to take my double major from this incredible, world-class institution and trade it in for a rifle and a pair of dusty boots.  I enlisted into the United States Marine Corps infantry, as a private, and was shipped out to Southern California to begin my training.  A year later I was in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle with the Second Battalion of the Seventh Marine Regiment.  Two weeks after arriving, my squad of thirteen men was attacked; I lost a friend, Blake Howey, in the explosion and my squad leader Sergeant Rosenberger was wounded and evacuated.  I am proud to say that today, at this very moment in Pennsylvania, Kyle Rosenberger is being commissioned a Lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and our nation’s military will be in good hands for years to come.  After that night I was promoted to corporal, and for the next seven months I helped lead that squad through more explosions, ambushes and firefights.  We lost more men, more limbs and more innocence, and at the end of 2007 we returned home different men than when we had left.

The next year I joined the prestigious Scout-Sniper platoon.  I went to sniper school, where for three months everyday was an excruciating test of mental and physical willpower.  Sniper school is one of the most difficult schools the military offers, with a selection process that begins way in advance of the first day; of the 34 men that started my class, less than half would graduate.  Only three weeks after graduating I found myself in Afghanistan, working on a six man team in the Helmand Valley.  For seven months our little team ran reconnaissance missions in the most dangerous city, in the most dangerous province, in the most dangerous country, on earth.  Every night we would leave the wire and walk into a countryside controlled by the Taliban, trying to wrestle back control for the Afghan government.

I want to share with you a lesson I learned while on those nightly missions in Afghanistan.  I was the point man in my team, which simply means that when we walked on patrol, I walked in front.  More simply put, if there was a land mine or booby trap laid on our path, I was going to be the man to step on it.  For the first few months I would walk our routes in perpetual fear, afraid every step I took would be my last—it caused me to miss checkpoints and lose my footing and make more noise than we could afford to make.  It wasn’t until I learned to let go of my fear, to walk those nights with confidence and cool, that I became an effective point man.  There were still intersections I had to cross that required me to close my eyes and clench my teeth, but I never stopped pressing on.  As you leave here today, you embark on a similar journey—you’ll have fewer landmines, but you’ll perhaps have more uncertainty. You enter adult life with a downtrodden economy, an uncertain labor market, foreign markets in shambles, and two political parties unwilling to create solutions.  You will begin jobs, relationships and endeavors and come to intersections in life that will make you cringe.  You will be tempted to tread cautiously, to hunker down and wait; but I challenge you to move forward boldly, to live life fully and to never look back.

After Afghanistan I left the Marine Corps in October of 2009 and began applying to graduate school; like every young adult my age, when you have no plan for your professional life, you go get an MBA.  I finished my applications in early 2010; only days later I woke up, much like I had on 9/11, and turned on the news.  Unbeknownst to me, an earthquake had ripped through Port Au Prince only hours before. The images that greeted me on the screen were ones of utter destruction; I sat and watched, transfixed, for hours, before finally deciding that I needed to go and help.  In the following hours I scrambled to assemble a team.  I called numerous friends who had numerous excuses not to go, until I called my former Wisconsin roommate, Jeff Lang.  I posed the question to him, “Jeff, will you go to Haiti with me?”  His response was simple: “Sure dude.”  We started raising money and awareness on Facebook, and within minutes I received a call from my friend and fellow Marine, William McNulty.  I picked up the phone and he immediately stated, “Jake, It’s McNulty.  I want in.”

Team Rubicon was born, and within 96 hours we were in Port Au Prince, surrounded on all sides by sights of destruction, smells of burning debris, and the screams of thousands of injured.  For the next two weeks we worked in small, fast moving teams, we went into parts of the city other response organizations wouldn’t go because of security concerns and conducted medical triage clinics.  In that brief period of time we treated thousands of patients, and saved hundreds of lives.  There in Haiti we discovered the first of two problems that Team Rubicon seeks to address; that problem is that the current disaster response system is inadequate; it’s slow, inefficient, lacks transparency, and isn’t engaging the best talent.  Military veterans, however, have spent 10 years honing the skills needed to provide life saving medical care, logistical support and risk mitigation in situations similar to those found in disaster zones.

The second problem we address presented itself nine months ago, after Team Rubicon had deployed teams to crises situations in Chile, Burma, Pakistan and Sudan; it manifested when one of Team Rubicon’s original members, and a dear friend of mine whom I had served both my tours alongside, killed himself in Houston, Texas.  His name was Clay Hunt, and he was an incredible human being, and an adopted Badger fan.  Clay didn’t kill himself because of what happened to us in Iraq and Afghanistan, he killed himself because of what he lost when he came home—purpose, self worth and community.  When the dust settled, we reevaluated Team Rubicon’s mission and decided that this second problem—the issue of veteran reintegration—was more important, and we’ve renewed our focus on providing our nation’s veterans with an opportunity to continue their service, only this time they’re using the skills they learned for war to help their neighbors following disasters.  Mother nature has provided plenty of opportunity, with tornadoes ripping through Tuscaloosa and Joplin, and Hurricane Irene beating down the Eastern Seaboard.

So now you are sitting there, and you are asking yourself, “So what? What do Haiti and Clay Hunt have to do with me?”  It’s really quite simple.  You see, many of you sitting here today have the next five years of your life mapped out, you have it all planned—you are going to go work on Wall Street, or Obama’s campaign, or at any number of the corporations headquartered in Minneapolis or Chicago, because the job market will not affect you; you will get married and buy a house, because the credit crisis will be over by then; soon enough your children will go to college, because tuition costs will stop rising.  My friends, I want to let you in on a little secret that only took me five years to learn…life might have other plans.  And here’s another secret…that might not be a bad thing.  You will face obstacles and choices and problems that you will not anticipate.  I ask that when you see an obstacle, that you climb it; a choice, that you make it; and a problem, that you solve it.  And if you do those things, if you clench your teeth and close your eyes and walk forward into that uncertainty, then I will let you in on my final secret…you just might fail.  But failure isn’t always bad—I failed as a football player, and it made me a United States Marine.

I want to leave you with one final story.  While in Afghanistan my sniper team was embedded for a few weeks with an Afghan Army unit. One of the soldiers looked eerily like Ashton Kutcher, since he was a native Pashtun, we naturally called him Pashtun Kutcher.  One day I was sitting around a small fire sharing tea with the soldiers; wearing a camouflaged Wisconsin Badgers hat that I would often don between patrols.  At one point in the gathering Pashtun Kutcher leaned over and tugged on the brim of the hat, he pointed at the Motion-W, and asked through an interpreter what it meant.  Again through the interpreter, I told him that it was my University.  Not understanding me, I quickly explained that it was a place where young men and women gathered to live, learn and of course, party together.  At first, the idea of Western Universities offended Pashtun Kutcher’s conservative moral code; but after a minute of staring off into the sky and nodding to himself intently, he said something to the interpreter, who then turned to me and said in broken English, “Mr. Jake, he said that maybe one day, Kandahar can have such a place.”

I tell you this story, not to shed light on progress in Afghanistan, but to shed light on progress in America.  You see, in a few moments you will walk across this stage and receive a diploma from one of the great public institutions in this country; the University of Wisconsin exists because of the great state of Wisconsin, and the state of Wisconsin exists because of this nation that we live in—and it comes back full circle, because the United States is made possible by people like you.  We are living at a time when Congress has an all-time low approval rating, crooks abound at the tops of industry and scandal permeates our nation’s most respected institutions.  If we choose to focus only on that it is easy to be discouraged, but, if we remember that we have the greatest framework ever created to enact change—freedom to speak, freedom to learn, freedom to decide and elect—then we can make it better.  Other places in this world hope to one day achieve what we have at our fingertips; in the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea, let us embrace it.

On, Wisconsin.

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KMBC: Vets Group That Helps In Disasters Opens KC Office

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Jake Wood serves as President of Team Rubicon, the organization he co-founded following the massive earthquake in Haiti. Team Rubicon unites the unique skills America’s returning veterans offer with the expertise of medical professionals; all while interactively engaging donors through social media. As president, Jake is focusing on establishing Team Rubicon’s organizational vision in order to direct sustainability and scalability.

As a leading veteran advocate, Jake speaks around the country on the issues facing returning veterans. He is also a member of numerous veteran-focused committees, including the Clinton Global Initiative, Veteran Innovation Center Executive Operating Committee and the VA Emergency Response Committee. Jake has authored and published articles related to veteran issues and disaster response in outlets such as the Huffington Post and Foreign Policy.

Prior to Team Rubicon, Jake served 4 years in the United States Marine Corps. He was the Honor Graduate of his platoon in boot camp at Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) San Diego and continued his training at the Camp Pendleton School of Infantry. Jake graduated at the top of his School of Infantry (SOI) class of more than 300 students and was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. In 2007 he deployed with 2/7 to Iraq’s Anbar Province as a fire team leader. Following an IED blast in which his squad leader was severely wounded, Jake was combat meritoriously promoted to corporal and made squad leader. Following his tour, Jake was awarded the Navy-Marine Corps Commendation Medal with “V” for valor in the face of the enemy.

Upon returning from Iraq, Jake was offered a spot in the prestigious Scout Sniper Platoon. He attended the Scout Sniper Basic Course at Camp Pendleton and graduated 11 weeks later at the top of his class. He once again deployed with 2/7, this time to Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley in 2008; earning multiple commendations for his actions. Jake finished his career as an instructor at the Pre Scout Sniper Course in Camp Pendleton and left the Marine Corps a Sergeant.

Jake Wood holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin with a double major in business and political science. He played football for the Badgers for 4 years on a full athletic scholarship and was twice selected to the Academic All-Big Ten football team. In 2010, the University of Wisconsin awarded Jake with its “Forward Under Forty” award.

What are you working on right now?

I am working on the development and expansion of Team Rubicon, the 501(c)(3) veteran service and disaster response organization I co-founded in 2010. We are trying to secure corporate sponsors that will enable us to expand our domestic veteran engagement initiatives aimed at challenging veterans to continue their service in their local communities.

Where did the idea for Team Rubicon come from?

It was born out of the desperation that my co-founder, William McNulty, and I saw following the Haiti earthquake. Both former Marines, we realized that we were uniquely suited to help out in the chaotic situation developing in Port-au-Prince.

What does your typical day look like?

A lot of my day is devoted to email and conference calls, trying to establish relationships with adjacent organizations and pursuing funding opportunities–all this in addition to coordinating the development and execution of our programs.

How do you bring ideas to life?

We are an organization dedicated to action. In fact, one of our initial taglines was, “Inaction is not an option.” We believe that the moment a problem or issue is identified, it is imperative to address and solve it immediately–no matter how large or small. I think that it’s an attitude you’ll find in a lot of young veteran entrepreneurs; the status quo isn’t good enough.

What is the worst job you ever had and what did you learn from it?

Selling life insurance as an intern. It was horrible because of the cold calling, but it taught me a lot about what it takes to sell. I learned how to create a value proposition for people who likely saw none and how to get that value proposition across quickly and concisely. It has paid huge dividends as I go out and sell Team Rubicon’s concept, both for funds and for credibility.

If you were to start again, what would you do differently?

I’d find a way to pay myself sooner. I wasn’t able to dive in fully because I was constantly worried about putting food on the table–and my work suffered as a result. It took me a while to accept that it was okay to make money running a nonprofit, and the truth is, it has allowed me to pour myself even deeper into it.

What is the one thing you did/do as an entrepreneur that you would do over and over again and recommend everybody else do?

Accept that you don’t know everything and be willing to listen to people tear your idea apart. You have to have the humility to accept your own shortcomings.

Tell us a secret…

Team Rubicon is going to grow its veteran base 1,000% in 2012.

What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?

Veterans will soon be a force to be reckoned with in the entrepreneurial space. The sooner people recognize and harness that, the better off they’ll be.

What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?

I’m reading Unbroken right now. It’s the true story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic miler who joined the Army Air Force during WWII, was shot down, spent 2 months on a life raft and years in a Japanese POW camp. The lessons that can be gleaned from this book about human endurance and the capacity to carry on are priceless. Everyday you wake up, every single day is laughable compared to what Zamperini dealt with during that period.

If you weren’t working on Team Rubicon, what would you be doing?

I’d be launching one of the other business plans I’ve written in the last 2 years. No sneak peek at those though.

Who would you love to see interviewed on IdeaMensch?

General Clifford Stanley (ret.), the outgoing Under Secretary of Defense and former Marine General. He refused to accept the Department of Defense and Pentagon for what they are–bloated, bureaucratic systems of sycophants. He chose to rock the boat and make tough decisions that had the potential to break up the system. I think it’s the spirit of the IdeaMensch community; people often talk about change, but General Stanley decided to create it.

What’s the toughest professional decision you’ve had to make?

I chose to drop out of UCLA’s Anderson MBA program to pursue my entrepreneurial dreams. It was tough at the time–I was developing relationships and certainly learning a lot–but ultimately I think it will be the smartest decision of my life. I learn by doing, not by reading; and the network I’ve developed traveling the world with TR has far surpassed what Anderson could have done for me.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I try to spend my Saturdays and Sundays in the fall watching the Wisconsin Badgers and Green Bay Packers play football. It’s truly the only time my mind can completely wander away from work and focus on something, much to the dismay of my girlfriend.

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