It’s just days after the bloody Nasiriya ambush during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and US Marines are still jumpy. Platoon Commander Jake Harriman is patrolling a smoking, pockmarked highway south of Bagdad when he spots a white car speeding toward his position. “Another car bomb,” Harriman thinks as he signals his men to take the car out. Before he can give the order to open fire, though, the car suddenly stops. The driver exits, sprinting toward the Marines. Harriman trains his weapon on the man.
Suddenly, a black truck peals into view and lurches to a halt behind the white car. Before Harriman can react, six men dressed in black Fedayin uniforms jump out and fill the small car with bullets from their automatic weapons. At the sound of shooting, the driver of the car turns and sprints back toward his vehicle, screaming.
“Take them out,” Harriman says, and his men immediately take several quick, precise shots with their M-16s. Pop … pop … pop pop pop pop.
Harriman approaches the car, stepping past the crumpled bodies of the Fedayin commandos. In the passenger seat, the driver’s wife is slumped against the door, dead from bullet wounds to the head and chest. In the back seat is a baby girl, tiny body full of bullet holes. The only survivor is the driver’s 6-year old daughter, whom he holds gingerly in his arms, weeping while she quickly bleeds to death. Harriman lowers his weapon, steps quietly to the man’s side and begins to weep too.
Harriman (above, right) is 6’3″ and well muscled, with a blonde mop of hair that makes him look more like a surfer than a former Marine. He speaks carefully, chewing his words a little before releasing them from the side of his mouth. “That was the beginning of an awakening in me,” Harriman says of the incident. “From all we’d experienced and heard, this man was likely from a dirt poor village where the deal was, ‘We’ll feed your family and send your kids to school if you just strap on a bomb and blow yourself up. Oh, and by the way, we’ll rape and kill your wife and kids in front of you if you don’t.’ This guy had no real choices, so he was coming to us for help.” Experiences like this one — and there were plenty, says Harriman — made him think: maybe the best way to fight terrorism wasn’t only to kill terrorists; maybe the best way to fight terrorism was to fight poverty.
Eight years and a Stanford MBA later, Harriman now lives in Africa where he runs Nuru International, his nonprofit designed to conduct sustainable community development in conflict zones, post conflict zones and failed states — dangerous areas where the forces of poverty and religious extremism are in violent convergence. Nuru‘s mission is simple but ambitious: end extreme poverty and, as a direct result, contribute to ending terrorism. Nuru employs a five-pillar community-development strategy that tackles healthcare, economic development, clean water and sanitation, agricultural development and education.
His first successful pilot project is in an extended community of 23 villages in Kuria, the second poorest district in Kenya and Harriman’s full-time home. While not the extreme conflict zone that Harriman envisions for Nuru moving forward, Kuria is an ideal place to test Nuru’s effectiveness as a sustainable community-development program. But Harriman doesn’t plan to stay in Kuria for long. The success of a Nuru project is measured in terms of the community’s ability to make Nuru’s direct involvement obsolete within five years. This approach will allow Harriman to stay on the move, replicating his model in increasingly fragile regions like Somalia, Afghanistan and DRC, where conditions are ripe for terrorist recruitment. Nuru will be successful, says Harriman’s mentor, Stanford professor, Irv Grousbeck, because “Jake’s smart, practical, has good people skills, a small ego and this strong vision that is burned deeply into his psyche.”
Though Harriman seems certain of his decision to beat carbines into ploughshares, it has come at a great cost. “It wasn’t easy for me to leave the Marine Corps,” says Harriman, who graduated with distinction from the Naval Academy and had planned on a lifelong military career. By the time Harriman found himself questioning his life as a Marine, he had already led numerous special combat operations in Iraq, the Horn of Africa and other conflict zones, commanded an elite special operations platoon of Force Recon Marines, received the Bronze Star and was being tapped for high-level career military posts. But it was his platoon, he says, that was the toughest to leave. “You’re not fighting for some guy in the White House; you’re fighting for the brother on your left and the brother on your right so they can get home safely. You don’t want to let your guys down.”
But aside from the difficult choice to leave the Marine Corps, Harriman is reticent about the sacrifices he’s made to pursue his vision. “I’d venture that there are few moments when Jake’s just chillin’, thinking about nothing, watching bad TV,” laughs longtime friend and fellow Force Recon Commander Don Faul. Faul, now a Facebook executive, pauses for a moment and continues more seriously, “You know, he’s not married. I mean, he’s chosen a hard life. He lives in a very poor part of Africa. He’ll be moving a lot. He pays himself next to nothing. Finding a soul mate who’s up for that kind of life will be tough.” This hard life, says Faul, has disrupted and even destroyed some close relationships and has kept Harriman isolated and, for the moment, bereft of the family he longs for. “That part’s been very difficult for Jake,” says Faul.
With some prodding, Harriman admits to the difficulties: “It’s certainly come at a cost,” he says, and haltingly alludes to severed relationships, a lack of money and a peripatetic life. “But I don’t regret the choice,” he concludes firmly. “This is what I was made to do, man. I wake up every day with a sense of purpose and drive that I’ve never had before. This is my life. I’ll be doing this forever.”
There are lots of easy ways for you to help Jake Harriman and Nuru International achieve their goals. Learn what you can do, right here.
Photos courtesy of © Nuru International, 2010.