Photograph by Whitney Curtis
Pat Heavey left an MBA program at Harvard Business School because he wanted to serve in Vietnam. He led an Army platoon, came home with a Purple Heart and lost heart for the corporate world. He spent the next three decades counseling and advocating for other vets. Along the way he started a series of small businesses, and in 2004 he opened the nation’s first dedicated Veterans Business Resource Center to help other vets (one in five of whom are unemployed) succeed as entrepreneurs. There are now three such centers, in St. Louis, Boston and Flint, Mich.—but their 2008 funding was halved by the Veterans Corp., a congressionally mandated nonprofit that’s now under investigation for financial mismanagement.
Heavey was about to start an employment-training program for wounded vets, teaching them various identification technologies now required by the Department of Defense, when he learned his funding had been slashed. When we talked in July, he was waiting to hear about federal funding and writing desperate letters to his board. He said he’d already received “two $1,000 checks from a chaplain in California and a $25 check from a retired Catholic nun—things that bring tears even to these crusty old eyes.”
After you lost half of your funding, you had a chance to be rescued by the feds, right? We were going to get some money directly from Congress, an earmark. But Bush wanted only the war in that bill.
How’d you manage the earmark in the first place? It’s a real Alice-in-Wonderland experience. First you have to get a sponsor—for us that was [Sen.] Kit Bond and [Rep. Russ] Carnahan in the House. They lined up all kinds of support for it—Kerry, Kennedy, other leading senators—so we got into the bill under a little rider, probably five words long. Easy to overlook, easy to strip out.
And after it was stripped out, you wound up in a second supplemental appropriations bill? Yes. Sen. Bond said if they took it out, he’d write an amendment to put it back in. So they put it in, because after all, he is one of the cardinals of the Senate, one of the big dogs. We’re also written into the 2009 appropriations bill, but that’ll get munched over a million times.
Did you learn politics in Vietnam? No, I wasn’t very interested in politics when I was in the military. Most people in the military are pretty apolitical; they’re duty-driven. They vote 60 percent Republican—although this may be the election that breaks that. If I’d been deployed five times, John McCain would have to do a whole helluva lot more than appear on my television.
What did Vietnam teach you? It taught me self-reliance. It cured me of racism—and it had some work to do there, too. I mean, I’m from St. Louis! Vietnam made me believe there actually was such a thing as the greater good. And it engendered in me a devotion to those people who put their lives on the line. Not just in combat; it isn’t that simple. There are a lot of ways to die in the military, a lot of ways to get poisoned. And no one knows the depth of that commitment at the moment they raise their right hand.
What did you do when you came home? Worked for the Illinois governor, assessing candidates for patronage jobs. Then I got appointed to the board of the Veterans Service Centers of Southwestern Illinois, and we learned peer counseling and used it for every kind of problem: drugs, alcohol, divorce, anger … We had psychedelic bumper stickers made that said things like, “Call the VSC: We Deal in Straight Dope.”
How did you get funding then? That was back in the day when governors had discretionary funds, and it was also during the time of the greatest social re-engineering program of the era: the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. Everybody in the world had a grant under CETA.
Now getting money requires strategizing and string-pulling. So how do you win the game—that is, if you think politics is a game? Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s a game, except it’s real. You have to proceed on the premise that unless you are a bona fide bad guy, most of the people who represent you want to please you. But there’s a hierarchy of help, from whoever answers the phone to a caseworker or junior aide. You will probably see the senator an hour during the course of a year, in five- or 10-minute increments, and he will know you because that nice blond lady on his staff will whisper, “That is Pat Heavey,” and he’ll say, “Pat, my God, it’s good to see you.”
So what do you do between audiences? You have to remember that seventh-grade civics film about the bill with the little legs on it, you have to promote your cause constantly and you have to think, “Is there any reason not to do this?” Those reasons can be many in number, some of them very small but still deal-breakers.
What turned you into an advocate for veterans? I was so appalled—and I am not a man easily appalled. I mean, I’ve seen some shit. But I was appalled by the way I saw my fellow veterans being treated.
So the reception really was as hostile as people say? We certainly weren’t welcomed by most of the VSOs [veterans’ service organizations]. They were run by World War II guys, and as far as they were concerned, we were a bunch of pathetic losers: We lost the war, and we looked like hippies. So we kind of decided we’d have to form our own institutions, rather than going to governmental agencies. The same thing’s happening now with Iraq vets, at a very accelerated pace.
Are you noticing anything different about the Iraq vets? You talk to a lot of these young guys, and you listen to them, and you realize they’re not really back. What they talk about is their unit, what their buddies are doing in Afghanistan and Iraq and how much they’d like to rejoin them—I’ve heard that even from a guy with no legs. They’re a lot quicker than we were, though, quicker on the uptake. They have a higher expectation of what the government should be doing for veterans.
Have you seen any improvements in the system, any rewinding of the red tape? A revolutionary thing happened this summer: The Veterans Administration put its claim forms on its website. Previously the only way was to walk into a VA hospital and ask the receptionist, who sends you to talk to the nice man from the American Legion or the VFW—anyone who would be presumed to be knowledgeable but not have the full imprimatur of the VA, so the things they tell you can’t be binding.
What shifted your interest from counseling to entrepreneurship? After you work with enough people who are troubled … I have walked in on suicide scenes where clients blew their brains out. One guy ate a can of Drano. In the old days, the police would call us in because they figured we knew how to talk to this guy better than they did. I got tired of all that violence; entrepreneurship looked like a walk on the sunny side of the street.
But how’d you come to the idea in the first place? I was an entrepreneur myself, because I had to be. I do not have the qualities of a good employee—like deference. I had put together six businesses, sold four of them. I wondered if there were any figures available—the government counts everything—and there were not. So I began to push the Small Business Administration to do a study, and it turned out vets were disproportionately represented among entrepreneurs.
Why? No one knows. I think it’s “Ain’t gonna work for no sergeants anymore.” Or “I got in this place and didn’t know where I was or what I was doing, and now I can do things I didn’t think I could do before.” Some of it’s having self-discipline and the ability to plan and lead. And after combat, the hardship of “Oh, I gotta go open up the door again and sell things” kind of pales.
What was your earliest experience of a small business? My dad was the first full-time employee of H&R Block, in Kansas City. I knew Henry and Dick Block like they were my uncles. They did the tax returns, my dad checked them, and I took the translucents of the tax returns to the processing center, because there weren’t copy machines in those days.
H&R Block’s now an $800 million company—is that your model? Nope. I’m interested in lifestyle businesses, where you make just enough money to support your lifestyle. I have no regard for money. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand money; it’s just that the emotional attraction money has for a lot of people is not a part of my personality. I’ll probably die under a bridge somewhere—but it makes me free in ways that most people can’t understand.
Give me an example of an entrepreneur you’ve helped. Ray Hill comes in, he’s perfected this American Pilsner craft beer, but he can’t crack the big time, get into the supermarkets. Well, one of our board members is buddies with Scott Schnuck, so the four of us went out to what used to be Busch’s Grove and had a little lunch, and Mr. Schnuck’s beverage manager tested the beer and said it was great, and a month and a half later, two lawyers from Anheuser-Busch walked in the door.
Do you think people are threatened by vets’—especially Vietnam vets’—solidarity? I think it’s a little intimidating, and I’m glad it is. It’s more than camaraderie. Overcoming adversity, staying on mission—when you share that kind of experience, you speak a common language. You tend to drop a lot of your pretensions around your fellow veterans; you drop your guard. There’s not a veteran in St. Louis I can’t walk up to and have a conversation with. Now if I was that good with women, my life would be different.
Have you ever thought of charging vets for the business counseling that you offer? No.
What’s the biggest sacrifice you ever made for your country? [An hour later, after avoiding two repeats of the question.] During the Tet Offensive, I was visiting a reconnaissance training facility about four clicks—2½ miles—south of Hue. When the attack came, the North Vietnamese army surrounded Hue, and we were caught between their lines and suffered a lot of casualties. I got bayoneted: They slipped that blade right here [he points to a scar between his neck and shoulder], and it bled profusely. I passed out, and when I woke up I was in a body pile. It was 100 degrees, and there was this stench—burned flesh, and when the body dies, it loses control of its excretory functions. I kept trying to get an arm out so I could wave or a foot so I could kick, but I was three deep in a pile of 20 or so bodies, and I couldn’t move. I lay there for two days, going in and out of consciousness, listening to the sounds of firefight all around us and wondering if they’d ever find me.
