Jake Wood founded Team Rubicon a year after returning from Afghanistan, where he served as a Marine sniper. It was January 12, 2010. Wood, then 26, was in boxers on his couch in Burbank, California, when, 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a previously unmapped fault line ruptured. The resulting 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed at least 160,000 people and displaced one million more. By week’s end, Wood was in the disaster zone, helping to splint the compound fracture of a 14-year-old girl and curing his post-deployment boredom with the comfort of chaos.
Wood didn’t go to Haiti alone. He spent the first four days after the quake assembling a team of eight volunteers, including two doctors, Team Rubicon cofounder William McNulty, a former intelligence contractor in Iraq, and Mark Hayward, a retired Army Special Forces medic. While Wood hustled in Burbank, McNulty, a compulsive and gifted organizer who lived in Washington, D.C., got permission from a contact at the Haitian embassy for the loose-knit team to transport medical narcotics and perform what amounted to a special-ops aid mission. McNulty, then 32, also used his connections as a Jesuit to set up a base of operations at a seminary in the disaster zone.
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