Maybe Just Help People?

Illustration by Mark Matcho

If you want to really understand life as an adult, a life in full, consider service of some kind: the Peace Corps, the military, City Year in Boston. In a world increasingly divided by algorithms and echo chambers, service remains one of the few true ways to break out of our social bubbles and discover the vast tapestry of human experience.

Most people first coming into the job market know only a small sliver of real life. They know their own tribe, and they know their neighborhood. When I grew up, people didn’t stray far from these two constants.

My two best friends in college were raised in privilege: vacation houses, foreign travel, elite boarding schools. Both of them were asked to leave college because of bad grades, too much partying, and cutting classes—the fun squad. At the time, there was a draft in effect. If you were physically and mentally fit, military service was compulsory.

Both of them enlisted in the Army, where they met and served with young men from all walks of life. Everyone was equal in basic infantry training: shaved heads, demeaning harassment from the sergeants, the lowest of the low in the pecking order. Both of my friends came out loving the experience: smarter, more mature, and their wiseass attitudes gone.

Service prepared them for being adults like nothing else could have. They came back to finish college. More sober, and grateful for what service taught them. They both graduated with high honors and went on to distinguished careers in publishing and law. They both have said that in many ways, their service time was the best educational experience they’d had in their lives. One of them even told me, “It woke us up.”

Their experience was typical of that unique period in American history, the years after World War II and Korea, just before Vietnam. Back then, military service wasn’t a question of if, but how, a time when America was universally patriotic. Of course we’d serve.

For those of us coming of age then, the military offered numerous paths. You could choose between the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and the Coast Guard, generally for a two-year hitch. You could also join the Reserves or the National Guard, or the Marines for six months of active duty and several years of Reserve duty. This meant a night a week at the South Boston Army Base, now the Design Center (swords into plough shares), plus one weekend a month at Fort Devens, way out on Route 2. Add to that two weeks each summer at various camps or forts around the country. If you chose two years, there would be no reserve duty. Many of my friends and I chose the Reserves, too eager to grab hold of our first jobs in the real world.

Most of you reading this have gone to college. Remember seeking advice from older students about gut courses and easy-grading professors (before grade inflation)? When I was a college senior, several recent graduates told me, “Enlist in the Army. Go into basic training in the fall when the weather is good. Then get out in the spring. Easy, except if there’s a war.”

Every soldier starts with basic infantry training for two months, my friends went on. “Designate the Medical Corps, after Basic. You’ll be trained in San Antonio, Texas, at Fort Sam Houston. Winters are mild, and you’ll get out in April. San Antonio is a treat. You’ve probably never had real Mexican food in your life.” I enlisted as coached and dragged along my best friend from high school, Zeke, who had a satirical view of almost everything and a dislike for authority. We figured that it all would be a little better with a buddy.

Right after Labor Day, we showed up to the South Boston Army Base at about 6:30 a.m. with small carry-ons holding not much more than a random shirt, a pair of slacks, and a Dopp kit. Slightly scared, we boarded a bus with about 30 other young guys. A bunch of them were wise guys from Eastie, loud and showing us all how tough they were, and all with “DA” (duck’s ass) haircuts, and an attitude that the military was a piece of cake. Two sergeants sat in the front, escorting us. One of them stood as the bus took off. “Yuck it up, you assholes,” he said. “In your not-too-distant future, you’ll be sobbing your baby eyes out.” Not exactly an era when everyone got a participation prize. When we arrived at Fort Dix, we drove past hundreds of yellow-painted low buildings and barracks, planted in rows on a bleak New Jersey landscape. About as graceful as a Gulag.

There are many clichés about military life. One of them is “Hurry up and wait.” Processing was endless: a physical; “bend over, touch your toes”; collect your uniforms, fatigues, dress clothes, and boots; shave your head; test your eyes (I got two pairs of glasses…free, not tortoiseshell); and shots in both arms at the same time. The wise guys from the bus, their DA haircuts gone in the piles of hair on the floor, began to cry with the shots. No longer so brave, looking like nervous little boys.

What did all of this do? It was the old, time-honored plan to tear us down and build us back up. To become infantry soldiers, ready for combat. By the end of the first week, it had started to work. Almost all of us troopers were from New England, except for about 50 young men from Puerto Rico, also subject to the draft. Many of them were not fluent in English. Roberto slept in the bunk above me, usually crying himself to sleep. He had told me, “At home, we were told that in North America, we would be murdered in our sleep.” All the Puerto Rican recruits slept with bayonets under their pillows, fearing the rumors were true. I told Roberto, “That is crazy; we’re just as scared as you are.”

My friend Zeke and I would tell Roberto and a few of his companions from the barracks stories of American history, Boston-based: Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, the British “lobster backs,” and about our own immigrant family backgrounds. They knew I was an awful bed maker, and they gave me a deal: They’d tighten my bed every day, perfect…if I’d tell them stories. They eventually told me tales of growing up in Puerto Rico and how much their homeland meant to them. We became friends. Roberto also told me, “Most of us know a lot of inglés. But if we tell the sergeants ‘no comprendo,’ they won’t push us for the bad jobs.”

After several weeks of hearing “no comprendo,” the sergeants took back the high ground. At 5:30 one morning, the top sergeant, “Bones Bernard,” shocked us awake, blowing his whistle and screaming, “Up, up, you pieces of dung, drop your cocks, and grab your socks.” The day was launched.

Still dark outside, we assembled in rows, dressed in our battle fatigues. Bernard looked like the actor Lee Marvin, a veteran of combat in Korea, hawk-faced, muscles everywhere, including his eyelids. He gave us the orders of the day and then added, “And you Puerto Rican personnel: From this moment on there will be no more of this ‘no comprendo’ shit. Comprendo?” And there wasn’t.

As late autumn settled in, they started to stand tall. We marched with field packs and M-1 rifles for miles in the cold, wind, and rain, and bivouacked, sleeping in two-man pup tents. My tent mate was 6-foot-3, and his head stuck out of the tent, tucked into a field cap with earflaps. He snored enough to wake up any enemy within several miles.

One of our sergeants was Elroy, who had a voice like the great baritone Paul Robeson. We jumped when he yelled at us, which was all the time. And he had a great sense of humor, unless it was directed at you. “Spooner,” he’d yell, “I’m gonna throw you so deep in the grease pit (in the mess), they’re gonna have to feed you by slingshot.” But he chose me to be a platoon guide, calling the cadence while we marched. “Sound off, drag it on down,” and he wanted me to make up lyrics to the cadence, and the lyrics had to be…well, irreverent.

There is a certain joy in seeing raw recruits develop into comrades, and a certain joy in marching in cadence, singing at the top of our voices.

There is a certain joy in seeing raw recruits develop into comrades, and a certain joy in marching in cadence, singing at the top of our voices. For some of our platoon, the toughest thing was the latrines. In our barracks, six toilets in a row. In the middle of the latrine. No partitions. No privacy. “Get over it,” Bernard would say. “You’re not at your momma’s breast anymore.”

Does this all sound abominable? By the fourth week, we were proud of what we were doing. We helped the guys who needed help. We laughed at the other four barracks in our company for not shaping up. We wanted the approval of the sergeants. We came from every corner of Boston and the suburbs, college guys and high school dropouts. Men who would be lawyers and stockbrokers and cops and trash collectors. We became friends, and we were a team. The Army forced me to grow, to rub elbows and share forced marches, to crawl under barbed wire and fix bayonets, to drink beer and have appreciation for people whom I might never have met. In fact, every man I knew who served in the military has agreed that it was one of the defining experiences of their lives. It taught us about every stratum of society. Priceless.

We were blessed that we served in peacetime. But even then, we were a band of brothers. Two months after basic training, after a graduation ceremony no less, we all dispersed on leave to our homes to prepare for the next stop: the forts around America for learning your “MOS”: the specialty you chose at enlistment. I was advised by older guys in college to choose the Medical Corps.

“Why?” I asked.

“Don’t be a schmuck,” they said. “You go to basic training in the fall. Not too cold, till November. The Medical Corps is centered in San Antonio. Winters are warm. You go to classes every day. You go to Mexico on weekends. Fifteen-cent tequila sours. And other entertainment.” So that’s what I did. With my school pal, Zeke, we enlisted in the
Medical Corps.

In our medical unit, there were guys from every section of the country, from Seattle, the Michigan peninsula, Nashville, Utica, Amarillo, the Finger Lakes of New York, Harlem. Every layer of society. The surprise was that we also had a bunch of Major League Baseball players in our unit.

My roommate was Gary Geiger, then centerfielder for the Red Sox. Geiger had forearms like Popeye. The abundance of baseball players wasn’t exactly an accident. Major League teams told their players, “Go into the Medical Corps. Winter in Texas. We bet you’ll get time off to practice, get in shape.” And they did.

Perhaps 15 percent of our unit played professional baseball. Gary Geiger got me released from duty one afternoon a week to pitch for batting practice to about five pro-baseball players. I could throw it over the plate, and they could whack it over the fences at a college field in San Antonio, which the Army set up for us.

“You know,” I recall Geiger said to me. “At first, I thought this would be a pain in the ass. All I wanted to know was baseball and baseball players. Maybe I better pay attention to what others do in life. You never can tell what’s gonna happen.”

Looking back, I’d have to say I agree: After all, my time in the Army taught me more about so-called real life than any
other experience.

Jim Hughes is a jolly guy who lives to help people. He’s also a Boston real estate investor who operates not only here but in Latin America as well. So much in life happens by accident. Like so many of his generation, Jim faced being drafted into the Army during Vietnam, right out of grad school. At the time, he told me, he described the war as “The biggest mistake America had ever made…madness.”

During his undergraduate years at Dartmouth, where he majored in engineering, Hughes spent several summers working abroad—one at a steamship company in Finland and another at a brewery in Mexico City. But it was after graduate school, where he earned an MBA and a degree in metallurgical engineering, that he discovered something life-changing: If he volunteered for the Peace Corps and stayed in until he was 27, he could likely avoid the military draft.

Though Jim’s college years had been filled almost entirely with science courses, he had made one crucial choice back in high school—taking Spanish for his language requirement. But being good at the language was one thing, and adjusting to the culture was another. “I was a complete innocent abroad,” he told me. “What I really knew about was Cleveland, where I grew up. Wet behind the ears.”

President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps in 1961 as a volunteer organization to assist developing nations. The program required a two-year commitment, with months of intensive training before volunteers were sent to work in what was then called the Third World. As Jim shared his stories, I was reminded of the hit musical comedy The Book of Mormon, which follows two young Mormon missionaries dispatched to Uganda to convert local residents to their faith. The show playfully depicts their cultural misunderstandings and challenges in their mission work.

Jim described his Peace Corps assignment to Chile as “the adventure of my life.” A self-proclaimed “completely clueless American,” he was assigned to teach. While his official role was teaching quantitative finance, production management, and entrepreneurship, Jim quickly discovered a deeper mission. Chile’s harsh winters posed severe challenges for millions who lacked basic heating and plumbing. Many residents resorted to dangerous, jury-rigged heating devices that released toxic fumes. “We found dozens of discarded oil drums,” he said of the entrepreneurship class, “and thought, ‘We can turn them into furnaces for poor people.’” The project wasn’t without its mishaps—Jim lost his eyebrows during early experiments—but the success encouraged his class to also develop concrete toilets that could be flushed with buckets of water, replacing what he called “abominable” outhouses.

For Jim, an engineering major, these hands-on challenges proved transformative. “The Peace Corps taught me ingenuity and problem-solving,” he reflected. Now, decades later, Jim views his service as a defining chapter in his life. “[It] was the seminal event in making me aware of the possibilities out there in the real world,” he said. “It made me a better businessman, a better husband, and a better father.”

I’ve spent several years getting to know Erika Alvarez Werner, who first worked at City Year just after college in the late 1990s. After leaving to pursue jobs in government and the nonprofit sector, she returned nearly 25 years later and now serves as interim executive director and chief of staff. A smart and caring woman, Erika truly walks the walk in life, rather than just mouthing platitudes like those who merely talk the talk about giving back to society and helping others. While writing checks is easy, donating time shows your true colors.

Two Harvard Law School students founded City Year in 1988. Their dream was to put young people in charge in challenged communities to tackle whatever the biggest problems were in that neighborhood. For more than 15 years, it’s been focused strictly on education, providing support for those who need it the most in everything from English to math to sports—wherever they can mentor and inspire.

All of life is built on relationships—this is perhaps the most important lesson young people must learn. It’s why being physically present matters, whether in offices or schools, where real mentoring and education happen. But developing meaningful relationships requires stepping out into the world and beyond your comfort zone. It means straying from your familiar tribes, where everyone thinks and acts just like you. This is where programs like City Year make a difference. The founders recognized a need to improve education in Boston schools, creating a program where volunteers could enlist in service, much like the Peace Corps or military, to make meaningful connections and create change.

If we’re lucky in life, we encounter people who inspire and mentor us—and they aren’t always older teachers or bosses. As a freshman in high school, having seniors take you under their wing can feel like divine intervention. I experienced this several times myself. The same magic happens with college-age summer-camp counselors teaching sports and arts to preteens. These young leaders become powerful role models, leaving lasting impressions that shape their younger charges’ lives. This is precisely what City Year achieves: lifting up others through mentorship.

Unfortunately, most people focus only on the immediate past and future, getting caught up in headlines without understanding the deeper stories beneath them. When it comes to Boston’s schools, we read about teacher strikes and discontent, but rarely about educators’ passion, empathy, and true grit. Even less attention goes to the young people who give us hope—the dedicated volunteers from City Year who carry forward the tradition of meaningful mentorship.

One of my classmates in college, Alan, retired from banking and had the urge to do something with meaning. He went through teacher-training in the Boston Public Schools and, after two years’ preparation, taught math in one of the high schools in Roxbury. He wore a sports jacket and a bow tie to work, which he told me several teachers resented. “I’m showing respect for the students,” Alan told me. “Set an example. They thought I was showing off.”

Alan is an idealist. He really believes that there is good in everyone. And he lasted four years in the job, finally so disillusioned that he quit teaching, frustrated with how much he felt that the education system in the city was broken. This was before City Year was invented. “I had some individual victories,” Alan told me. “But it was all rigged against me. I felt sorry for the kids.”

This is where the young people who signed up for City Year come in. Their role, as I mentioned, is like a junior counselor at summer camp, taking a whole load off the senior bunk counselor and figuring out how to add value to the culture of the bunk and the little family who live together in July and August.

I’ve spent time with several City Year volunteers, including Andrés Carbona McGov ern, who practically radiates enthusiasm for both his current work and future aspirations. “My stepdad was early in the City Year program,” he told me, “And my dad visited Ecuador where he volunteered to build homes for free. He was also part of a group trying to stop crimes on the MBTA, and once saved a kid from being stabbed on the Orange Line. Both my dad and stepdad were great models for me wanting to help people. ” Andrés’s own path led through the Academy of the Pacific Rim charter school to an associate’s degree from Bunker Hill Community College, and he is now pursuing a bachelor’s from UMass Boston.

As Andrés describes his teaching methods and hobbies, it becomes clear he’s someone who nurtures imagination through screens and visual impressions. He has deep roots in the city, and despite once toying with the idea of moving away, he plans on staying here. “I love Boston,” he says. “I want to open my own animation studio here. I want to create stories.”

Lili Bourne, also at City Year, told me, “I was born to give back. So much of the City Year success is something that’s difficult in urban public schools: one-on-one experiences. They’re tough to get in any setting. In medical practice, institutional mandate says you cannot spend more than 15 minutes with a patient. You can basically introduce yourself in 15 minutes, and that’s it. Healthcare joins education as a broken system in our country.”

“My job,” she says, “is to get the kids to believe in themselves. My typical day is 6 to 6, at school from 7 to 5. We work at developing relationships, getting the kids to trust us. Many of the students have very difficult home lives. So many teachers get set in their ways. Depending on the grade level, we’re often not that much older than the kids, so they trust us. We’re role models. Many of the kids tell us they want to be like us when they get older. That’s a giant compliment for what we do.”

LiLi’s energy seems boundless. “I’ve tried every sport,” she says, “softball, throwing the shot put. I minored in painting in school, photography, basically attacking life, which I try to pass on to the kids I counsel.” LiLi says she would like to work at a place with the same mission and values as City Year forever.

You can learn a lot from asking people, “What’s your all-time favorite book? And favorite movie?” It’s an easy character study. Even if they say, “I never read books,” that itself reveals a lot about the person. I asked the two young people the question.

LiLi says, “Harry Potter books and Back to the Future movie.” Andrés goes with Star Wars and Of Mice and Men for his book.

I wish that LiLi and Andrés had been mentors of mine. Their answers tell me that both of them love fantasy and childhood…and people. Their experiences at City Year also made me wish that my three children had done something as precious as this after college. LiLi and Andrés wouldn’t have traded it for anything.

Young people, go out and volunteer.