25 brownie points if you name the city right now. No peeking!! The headline? Oh, yeah...
An Indiana-raised son of an Argentine immigrant, Oclander had spent his adult life defending his nation. After the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he spent most of the next two decades in the 82nd Airborne Division, rising through the officer ranks. He deployed twice to Iraq and once to ÂAfghanistan. When he returned, he took an assignment planning future military missions on the Pentagon's Joint Staff.
One day in August 2011 a headline from Chicago caught his eye: "Boy, 13, Dead from Gunshot on Basketball Court." A week later, he read a story about another child in Chicago who had also been shot to death.
Oclander began to track homicides in Chicago. He compared the tallies of attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan that he received through his classified computer to the violent deaths in America's third-largest city.
"Chicago Homicides Outnumber U.S. Troop Killings in Afghanistan."
Seems like we saw that at the 'burg, as well.
He wondered what he, a career soldier, could do. With his leadership skills, his commitment to fitness, and his experience in mentoring young soldiers, he thought he had a special set of skills for working in a classroom.
Oclander sent out his résumé to some of the country's largest charter school networks and public school systems. Your background is great, he was told, but do you have a teaching credential? Do you have classroom experience? When he said no, the universal response was thanks, but no thanks.
Unwilling to give up, Oclander tapped West Point's alumni network and connected with a fellow graduate in Chicago who ran a mentoring program. From him, Oclander learned that Illinois allows charter schools to hire teachers without credentials. The man urged Oclander to contact the Noble Network of Charter Schools. When Oclander got in touch with Noble's chief Âexecutive, Michael Milkie, he was invited for an interview.
"I don't have credentials. I don't have classroom experience," Oclander told Milkie at the Âoutset. "If that's a deal killer, let me know and I won't waste your time."
"I hire talent," Milkie said. "I don't hire credentials."
Which is, I suppose, a part of what's wrong with American schools.
Three months later, Oclander was teaching a course on leadership at a Noble school on Chicago's crime-ridden West Side. It didn't take long for students to learn that Mr. O wasn't like their other teachers. Junior Dennis Martir decided to show up the old soldier. Junior Dennis Martir challenged Oclander to a push-up contest. The competitor in Oclander couldn't resist.
Students around them counted. Martir pumped out forty. Oclander hit sixty.
A few days later, Oclander pulled Martir aside to ask whether he had ever thought about applying to a service academy. Martir said he was thinking of enlisting in the army to become a rank-and-file soldier, if he couldn't land a college scholarship.
Oclander explained that the academies provide a four-year college education for free, but they do require a five-year commitment to the armed forces upon graduation. "It sounds like the perfect combination for you," he said, urging Martir to apply for a weeklong summer program at West Point.
Spoiler - the kid gets nominated to West Point.
Martir had picked up some of that skill on the streets and at home. But it was Oclander, he said, who taught him more than anyone else how to smash through barriers to achieve a goal that he hadn't even known Âexisted 20 months earlier.
"He has made the impossible possible for me," Martir said a few days before his high school graduation.
As the two lunched at a ÂBrazilian restaurant, Martir told Oclander he was inspired by his career in uniform as much as he was by what Oclander had to say. He looked over at Oclander and said, "When I'm done with being a soldier, I want to be like you. I want to find a way to keep Âserving my country." Not bad, for a kid from a dead-end Chicago neighborhood.
Excerpted from For Love of Country: What Our Veterans Can Teach Us About Citizenship, Heroism, and Sacrifice by Howard Schultz and Rajiv Chandrasekaran (Knopf).