"If War Broke Us, Service Will Rebuild Us"

The Story of Jake Wood, Clay Hunt, and the Birth of Team Rubicon

Two Marines Come Home

Jake Wood and Clay Hunt served together in some of the most dangerous combat zones of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Jake deployed to Fallujah in 2005 and later to Afghanistan. Clay served in Iraq's Anbar Province in 2007 and in Afghanistan, where a sniper's bullet struck his wrist, earning him the Purple Heart.

Both came home changed.

They returned to a country that thanked them with parades and then forgot about them. The adrenaline was gone. The sense of purpose had evaporated. The brotherhood that had kept them alive was scattered across the country. In its place were nightmares, insomnia, hypervigilance, and a crushing sense of purposelessness.

Clay Hunt struggled especially hard. He sought help from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), but found himself trapped in a bureaucratic maze — months-long wait times for appointments, a revolving door of therapists, prescriptions that dulled the pain but never addressed the wound. He drank too much. He isolated himself. The system designed to help him was failing him.

Jake was battling his own demons, but he had one advantage: he never stopped looking for a mission.

Haiti, January 2010 — "We Can Go"

On January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti, killing over 230,000 people and reducing much of Port-au-Prince to rubble. Jake watched the coverage on CNN and had a thought that would change everything:

"People need help in a chaotic, dangerous environment. That's literally what I was trained for."

He called Clay. "Let's go to Haiti." Clay didn't hesitate: "When do we leave?"

Within three days, they had assembled a team of eight — fellow veterans and medical professionals — and flew to Port-au-Prince with no organizational backing, no budget, and a name they had barely settled on: Team Rubicon, after the river Julius Caesar crossed at the point of no return.

For two weeks, they pulled survivors from collapsed buildings, set up triage stations, and distributed supplies. They operated in areas too dangerous or chaotic for traditional aid organizations to reach. Their military training — small unit leadership, decision-making under pressure, comfort in austere environments — made them remarkably effective.

But something else happened in Haiti that no one expected.

Jake and Clay felt better.

The nightmares receded. The restlessness quieted. For the first time since coming home, they had a mission again — not to take lives, but to save them. The same skills that had haunted them in civilian life suddenly had redemptive purpose. The paradox was stunning: the antidote to the trauma of war was not the absence of intensity, but the redirection of it.

"When Do We Leave?" — Clay's Last Words to the World

After Haiti, Jake and Clay formalized Team Rubicon as a nonprofit organization. They deployed to the Chile earthquake, the Joplin tornado, and other disasters. The model was working — veterans were finding purpose, camaraderie, and identity through disaster response.

But Clay's darkness had not fully lifted. The highs of deployment gave way to the lows of daily life. The VA system continued to fail him. He moved cities, changed therapists, and kept searching for something stable enough to hold onto.

On March 31, 2011, Clay Hunt took his own life at his home in Houston, Texas. He was 28 years old.

Jake was devastated. The man who had answered "When do we leave?" — the man who had carried children out of rubble in Haiti — was gone. Jake had survived Fallujah, survived Afghanistan, but he could not save his closest friend from the invisible enemy that followed them both home.

"I couldn't save Clay. But I can make sure no one else falls through the cracks the way he did."

A Name Written into Federal Law

Jake channeled his grief into advocacy. He testified before Congress, describing in unflinching detail how the VA had failed Clay Hunt — and was failing thousands of veterans like him every day. He put a face and a name on the epidemic of veteran suicide that was claiming 22 lives per day.

On February 12, 2015, President Barack Obama signed the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for America's Veterans (SAV) Act into law. The legislation mandated independent evaluations of VA mental health programs, created incentives to recruit psychiatrists to the VA, established peer support programs, and expanded access to mental health care for veterans in their critical first year after discharge.

Clay Hunt's name was written permanently into the United States Code — a law that would reach every veteran the system had previously abandoned.

200,000 Veterans, One Mission

In the years since, Team Rubicon has grown beyond anything Jake and Clay imagined on that phone call before Haiti. As of 2024:

Over 200,000 registered veteran volunteers serve in Team Rubicon's ranks.
The organization has conducted more than 1,000 disaster response operations across the United States and internationally.
They responded to Hurricane Harvey (2017), Hurricane Michael (2018), the COVID-19 pandemic (2020), the Kentucky tornadoes (2021), Hurricane Ian (2022), and the Maui wildfires (2023).
Millions of hours of volunteer service have been logged.

But the numbers only tell part of the story. The deeper impact is measured in the veterans who found a reason to get out of bed. Who stopped drinking. Who called a friend instead of reaching for a gun. Who discovered that the skills they thought had only been useful for destruction could be instruments of salvation.

Research conducted in partnership with academic institutions has shown that Team Rubicon participation is associated with decreased symptoms of PTSD and depression, increased social connectedness, and a renewed sense of purpose among veteran volunteers.

Jake Wood has said:

"If war broke us, then service to others will rebuild us. Clay felt it first in Haiti. I'm just proving it in his name."

"He Still Runs With Me"

Every year, Team Rubicon members run races in Clay Hunt's memory. Jake runs too, wearing a bracelet engraved with Clay's name. He says he can feel his friend beside him — in the dust of Fallujah, on the broken roads of Port-au-Prince, and in the quiet moments after a long day of clearing debris from someone's flooded home.

The message Team Rubicon offers to every veteran who has lost their way is simple:

"You are not done yet. Your next mission is waiting."

That message began with a phone call in January 2010, and a young Marine's voice on the other end of the line:

"When do we leave?"

Clay Hunt (1982–2011). He is gone, but the law that bears his name and the organization born from his service continue to save his brothers and sisters in arms every single day.

"If War Broke Us, Service Will Rebuild Us" — The Story of Jake Wood, Clay Hunt, and Team Rubicon