*Given at UW-Madison, Sunday December 18th, 2011 for the December graduates of the Class of 2011.  Wood was a 2005 graduate of the University.

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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