60 Minutes (1968) s45e28 Episode Script
Counterinsurgency Cops | Robin Hood | Invisible Wounds
In the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers have been waging what's known as counterinsurgency.
They're supposed to be both warriors and community builders, going village to village driving out insurgents while winning the hearts and minds of the population.
But counterinsurgency has had mixed results - at best.
We met a Green Beret who is finding out -- in his job as a police officer -- that the strategy might actually have a better chance of working, right here at home, in the USA.
Call him and his fellow officers counterinsurgency cops! They're not fighting al Qaeda or the Taliban, but street gangs and drug dealers in one of the most crime ridden cities in New England.
[Mike Cutone: Turning now, turning now on Orchard.
.]
Mike Cutone is a Massachusetts state trooper, part of a special unit targeting gang crime in the city of Springfield.
[Mike Cutone: Put your hands behind your back, stop resisting! Read him his rights in Spanish.
Get the gun?.]
He's also a Green Beret, who - after returning from Iraq - had an "aha moment" when he was talking to a gas station manager in Springfield.
Mike Cutone: Gang members would come in there, pull out a weapon, point it at employees or patrons, take what they want and walk out.
No one was calling the Springfield Police and no one was calling the state police.
Lesley Stahl: What this community was dealing with was gangs.
They are a criminal enterprise.
How are they like insurgents in Iraq? Mike Cutone: Insurgents and gang members both want to operate in a failed area, a failed community or a failed state.
They know they can live off the passive support of the community, where the community is not going to call or engage the local police.
The similarities to the Iraqi town he had lived in and defended were so striking, that he sat down and wrote out an action plan for Springfield.
Mike Cutone: We had this concept of what we would call a pilot team, where you would handpick select troopers, give them specific training and embed them in the community and start winning over the community.
He proposed his plan, a counterinsurgency program, to Springfield's deputy police chief, John Barbieri.
Lesley Stahl: But he was saying he was going to bring military tactics into an American city.
I mean, you must have had some qualms about that.
John Barbieri: Well once it became clear that he wasn't talking about checkpoints or fast roping from helicopters, that he was talking about going door to door organizing the neighborhood into a collaboration to report crime, to get involved in solving their own problems, it became obvious to me that that was exactly the type of program I needed for this neighborhood.
Barbieri and trooper Cutone took us to a housing project in that neighborhood, known as the North End.
Lesley Stahl: I heard that there were gang members on motorcycles with AK-47s on their backs, right out here- John Barbieri: They were very well-organized.
They had lookouts.
They disappeared when the sector cars came.
Lesley Stahl: They were just riding right up here in front? John Barbieri: They were establishing the fact that this was their territory and they were willing to fight to keep it.
Deputy Police Chief Barbieri was desperate for a way to break the gangs' hold on the community.
So three years ago he agreed to let Cutone and a small team of elite troopers -- most of them war veterans too - target the North End, which had become a violent marketplace for some of the cheapest heroin in the whole country.
In addition to drug busts, they walked the streets, knocked on doors, hung out in neighborhood shops trying to woo the locals.
[Mike Cutone: Here for pastries today, food? Woman: Yes Mike Cutone: Outstanding, this is the best place in Springfield!.]
But there was a lot of skepticism: Not everyone welcomed the troopers.
Mike Cutone: I could remember one door, the last knock of the day I had.
A grandmother comes out and she just tee'd off on me.
Wanted nothing to do with me, used colorful language, said the police were racist, etc.
, etc.
But they kept at it, almost daily.
[Mike Cutone: Trooper Mike Cutone, nice to see you, sir.
.]
And eventually began developing sources and tips.
Mike Cutone: We're not just using bad guys for information and getting information.
We're using the other 99 percent of the population that live there.
Winning them over.
They become our eyes and ears.
And the floodgates have opened for criminal information that we can go after now.
Lesley Stahl: The floodgates have opened? Mike Cutone:: Yes, they have.
Lesley Stahl: That much? Mike Cutone: Yes, that much.
Myself and the other troopers, my phone is ringing constantly, every day, either text messages, they'll send me pictures of where they located guns, they'll send me e-mails of who's selling drugs.
One of the keys to building trust in Iraq, Cutone says, was having his counterinsurgency team move into the town, sending a message: "We're not going away.
" Lesley Stahl: Yeah, but eventually you drive off.
Mike Cutone: We do drive off, but when we drive off, we've given them a template on how to control their town independently and without fear.
With the uncertainty about counterinsurgency's ultimate success overseas, the troopers and local police are determined to build something permanent in Springfield.
[Mike Cutone: As always, remember why we are here.
.]
And essential to that is a regular Thursday "elders" meeting.
Local residents come together with politicians, police, health and housing organizations, educators, businessmen and Latino leaders.
Lesley Stahl: So how important are these meetings to the overall mission? Mike Cutone: They're crucial.
What we found out is you had all these different groups that do good work for low income folks in troubled areas.
None of 'em were talking with each other.
So the Thursday meeting brought all these people together.
Karen Pullman, a nurse from Baystate, raises her hand at one Thursday meeting and says, "Hey, I want to create a walking school bus.
" We're, like, "What's a walking school bus? That's great.
" Fear of the gangs was so high that parents and kids were often afraid to walk the streets.
Mike Cutone: Carlos, Miguel, nice to meet you Carlos.
Now, big burley troopers and teachers walk neighborhood kids to school.
It's a strong visual message to the families there that the troopers and police are protecting their children and taking control of the streets back from the gangs.
Mike Cutone: And that's the beauty of the Thursday meeting.
It's empowering the residents and the people that come to it.
Kit Parker: Lesley, they're just like the village elder meetings I was doing in every village I patrolled in-- in Afghanistan.
Major Kit Parker is a professor of engineering at Harvard.
He also led counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan.
Kit Parker: The key thing with counterinsurgency based on my experience is: Make a friend.
Make a friend.
I don't have to find the enemy, I have to find a friend.
If you find your friends, they're going to take ya to your enemy.
He was on National Guard training one weekend two years ago, telling a group from his unit that he wanted to find a police department to test out using counterinsurgency against gangs.
Believe it or not Mike Cutone was in his unit.
Mike Cutone: And then I shared with him, hey we're doing this in Springfield and his eyes lit up.
Lesley Stahl: His eyes lit up? His jaw dropped is what he told us.
Mike Cutone: Yeah.
Kit Parker: He said he had a bad gang problem in the north end of Springfield.
He said people were riding around on motorcycles with assault rifles slung over their back.
And I got this vision of Mogadishu.
I got this vision of Kandahar Province where I saw this all the time.
Two guys on a motorcycle, one's got a AK-47 on his back.
And then I told Mike, I said: "I teach a class at Harvard.
Let me see if I can bring this class in on this.
" And so, last spring, Parker turned his junior engineering class into a counterinsurgency lab.
Kit Parker: Help me understand what kind of intelligence I need to collect when I am in the field, whether it is in the North End, I'm on Main Street standing by the taco truck, or if I am in Kandahar City.
That's the kind of data I need.
Parker had his students with their computer smarts develop software for intelligence collection.
With it, the troopers are building a database of gang members, similar to what Special Forces are doing overseas.
[Trooper: You have to do tattoos.
.]
The troopers collect data as they book suspects; like criminal histories and tattoos.
[Trooper: Two tear drops.
.]
And use the information to make maps of the gangs' social networks - who they know and who they associate with.
Once a gang's key figures are identified, the troopers try and remove them from the streets in hopes of fracturing the entire network.
[Mike Cutone: Hi ma'am, how are you doing today?.]
Cutone brought Parker and his students onto the streets of Springfield so the class could survey the residents to see if any of the symptoms of that failed community had been alleviated.
Kit Parker: They took a look at everything from STD rates in neighborhoods where you have gang activity.
Litter, graffiti, school attendance, all of these things.
They found that since the counterinsurgency operation started, North End schools have seen fewer discipline problems and drug offenses and that litter and gang graffiti is no longer everywhere in sight -- important indicators, Parker says, that the community is no longer totally under the gangs' control.
Kit Parker: What we're seeing is that the number of calls for service is going up in the North End.
So that means-- Lesley Stahl: They're reporting crime.
Kit Parker: That's right.
They're reporting crime.
And I see, that means the legitimacy of the Mass State Police and the Springfield PD has increased.
And the residents of the North End realize they are their instrument to clean up their neighborhood.
Teddy Cupack: I've been robbed 55 times that the police know about, but not lately.
At the Thursday community meeting we attended, residents like Teddy Cupak said this is the first time the police have really made a difference in the North End.
Teddy Cupak: This is what I want to get across, this concept does work.
It sort of flushes them out.
I don't know where they go.
I hope they get help.
Mike Cutone: Well, hey, Teddy, some of 'em are going to work, and some are going to jail and some leave.
Teddy Cupak: That's right.
[Mike Cutone: That's my cell number, don't give my cell number out.
I don't want to get prank phone calls at three in the morning.
If you are really looking for a job, we know a guy that hires kids and puts them to work doing construction work.
.]
Lesley Stahl: But let me ask you something.
Those functions that you are performing, that sounds to me like a social service job instead of a police job.
Mike Cutone: If the government is not going to do it, or individuals aren't going to do it, why can't the police provide leadership or partner up with the community and say, "Hey, here's a plan.
This is what we want to do to help.
" Because the status quo of traditional policing, it ain't just gonna work.
It's not gonna work.
Lesley Stahl: But you are still making drug arrests.
Mike Cutone: But see you are misconstruing it like you're going to eliminate drugs completely.
You're not.
What you want to do is reduce it to a level where you can manage it and then single them out one by one versus having it rampant throughout the city.
Springfield police say they are managing it in their target neighborhood of the North End where, they say, violent crime fell last year by 25 percent.
Drug offenses dropped nearly 50 percent.
[Mike Cutone: How long ago did that happen, sir?.]
To show us how they're using the tips they're getting to fracture the gang networks, Cutone took us on a nighttime drug raid.
[Police radio: Target's out, target's out.
.]
It was like a military operation, adapted in interesting ways for an American city.
Mike Cutone: They are in what looks a bread truck, an unmarked bread truck.
But the bread truck was filled with a SWAT team, looking like soldiers riding into battle.
[Police officers: State police, search warrant! State police search warrant!.]
As they burst in, someone on the second floor hurled something out the window.
Lesley Stahl: What do they got? Cop: Looks like a Glock.
A semi-automatic pistol.
They also found around five grams of heroin and arrested three young men the police say are drug dealers, members of a local gang -- one of them just 15 years old.
But that wasn't the most important thing the team did that night.
Very quickly, Cutone and the troopers turned their attention to the neighbors.
Mike Cutone: I'm sorry, what is your name? Carlos: Carlos.
Mike Cutone: Carlos, nice to meet you.
I like your rosary, I got one in my pocket.
Even on these kinds of operations, they put on the charm offensive.
Mike Cutone: We want to engage these other folks and let them know what's going on and why we're here.
Lesley Stahl: And that was part of the operation? Mike Cutone: Absolutely.
This summer, Mike Cutone and his Army unit are being deployed to teach counterinsurgency to the Afghan forces.
Having brought what he learned at war home, he now wants to bring what he's learned on the streets of Springfield back to Afghanistan.
[Mike Cutone: Good to see you, you take care.
.]
Ask Wall Street bankers the net worth of Paul Tudor Jones, and they'll tell you, $3.
6 billion.
He's one of those hedge fund managers.
But ask a homeless child or a struggling family and they'll tell you that a spreadsheet is no way to measure a man.
Paul Tudor Jones wonders that if billionaires, like him, are such geniuses, then why do nearly two million people live in poverty in New York City alone? In 1988, he started a charity called the Robin Hood Foundation.
Twenty five years later, Robin Hood has given away more than one and a quarter billion dollars.
It's become the city's largest private backer of charter schools, job training and food programs.
Tudor Jones has learned hard lessons -- for a latter day Robin Hood, it turns out giving to the poor is harder than he thought.
And as for taking from the rich? Well, he finds it's best to distract them.
This looks like an Arena concert.
But it's a private party for the super rich.
The Robin Hood Foundation's annual fundraiser seats 4,000 in Manhattan's convention center.
[Seth Myers: It's amazing who is here tonight, give yourselves a round of applause.
It's like the one percent has its own one percent.
.]
They laugh, because it's true.
Billionaires, stars and athletes are here for the 22nd year to lay credit cards at the feet of Paul Tudor Jones.
[Paul Tudor Jones: Brothers and sisters of Robin Hood, new ideas, different ideas, crazy ideas, those are the ones that change the world and boy, does the world outside these walls need changing.
.]
Scott Pelley: What do you see when you look around the city? Paul Tudor Jones: I see people in pain, people in need, people at times without hope, looking for something that will give them some compelling future.
I see too many people in homeless shelters, on food stamps.
I think a lot of us don't like to focus on it, but it's a significant part of this country that needs to be addressed.
There was a time he was focused on himself.
This is Paul Tudor Jones in the 1980s, age Paul Tudor Jones: My mother told me I was gonna be a preacher.
I always wanted to be a millionaire or a movie director.
Scott Pelley: So you chose millionaire? Paul Tudor Jones: I don't know if I chose millionaire, I ultimately got to that point, yes.
That point and far beyond.
But his mother had seen something of a preacher and months after that documentary, Tudor Jones caught a glimpse of it too.
It was 1986, one Sunday night.
[Harry Reasoner: Millionaire with heart of gold offers hope to ghetto kids.]
Harry Reasoner met Gene Lang, a millionaire who guaranteed college tuition for every kid in one Harlem class.
[Harry Reasoner: Are they good kids? Do you like them? Gene Lang: Oh I love them.
I look at them now, all of them, as an extension of my family.
.]
Paul Tudor Jones: Well, the second that program finished, I picked up the phone.
I called Gene Lang.
And I said I wanna do what you're doing.
Scott Pelley: You know, I'm curious what it was about that program and about where you were in your life that ignited that spark in that moment? Paul Tudor Jones: There was probably a hole in my soul.
And I didn't really know it at the time.
And all of a sudden, here was this man that showed the joy of giving.
So the lesson that I learned was that there was a whole new journey in my life that was ahead of me that I had not yet even realized was there.
So he adopted a school too, confident that if he showered it with money, the students would thrive.
Paul Tudor Jones: I was throwing everything in the world I could at it.
I was taking them on trips every summer and providing after-school services.
We put so much time, energy, and love into them.
But he failed.
After five years, the grades in his school were no better than average.
Paul Tudor Jones: I felt like I had failed a great deal of those kids.
But failure, a lot of times, is the fire that forges the steel for success, right? There are going to be stops, there are gonna be failures.
There are gonna be setbacks.
But you grow from those and you get better and it becomes transformative.
Turned out a preacher's compassion needed a little Wall Street ruthlessness.
So Tudor Jones and his friends set up Robin Hood to invest in poverty programs in the same hardnosed way they invested in businesses.
Their offices are filled with analysts and accountants who help the best ideas develop and measure the results without mercy.
Mary Alice Hannan: My relationship with Robin Hood has evolved over the years like mother-daughter, you know, friend-and-foe-- Sister Mary Alice Hannan's soup kitchen in the Bronx had lived "hand to mouth" for almost a decade and then came Robin Hood with an offer to invest and expand.
Scott Pelley: Friend and foe? Mary Alice Hannan: Friend and foe.
I mean this in a loving way, but I loved and hated them in 30 seconds.
And I'm sure they felt the same way about me.
Love was nice but Robin Hood wanted data.
Who was being served, how many, what was the cost? Did the data support expansion? And where was the nun's business plan? Mary Alice Hannan: So I'm like, "OK.
" Scott Pelley: You're just trying to get through today? Mary Alice Hannan: Today, right.
So the first thing was a five-year strategic plan and I went, "Ugh, alright.
" And it was a long, tedious experience.
And it was wonderful and we came up with all these spectacular goals and that was really, really good.
Yay, yay! It was the follow up of the goals that became the challenge.
Paul Tudor Jones: We started asking grantees, "What are your goals?" and then holding them accountable and yet, at the same time, providing management expertise and providing administrative help and legal help and help to secure buildings.
So we weren't just holding them accountable.
We were helping them along the way.
Robin Hood invested 5 million in the kitchen's expansion goals and now they're serving more than twice as many as before.
But when programs don't perform, Robin Hood takes the money back.
Paul Tudor Jones: Every year we probably de-fund because the fact that they're not wonderful.
Not because of the fact that they're not trying real hard, but because we're not getting the results.
Scott Pelley: You do that to 5 percent to Paul Tudor Jones: Yes, because we're always trying to find new things, and by definition, you're gonna fail at times.
It's what you have to do to be at the forefront of actually finding a way to kick poverty's ass.
Recently Robin Hood's board of directors met at the soup kitchen.
The personal net worth of the board adds up to $25 billion.
Robin Hood takes all of its expenses from the board members, so 100 percent of donations are given to the poor.
Just like its namesake.
Paul Tudor Jones: If you said to me what part of our success is due to our name, I'd say it's a big part of it 'cause it's a great name, right? It says everything.
Scott Pelley: Is that what happens at that gala we went to? Taking from the rich? Well, you put the arm on them.
Paul Tudor Jones: But many years from now, when you look back on your life and you are at your end, would you trade those fleeting luxuries for one chance, just one chance to return to this night.
And give a hundred thousand people a chance to grab their dream.
Scott Pelley: You were shaking people by their ankles.
Paul Tudor Jones: You cannot have significance in this life if it's all about you.
You get your significance, you find your joy in life through service and sacrifice.
It's pure and simple.
Big charity galas often bring in $3 million to $5 million.
Tudor Jones took in more than $57 million this night.
The money goes to about 500 projects.
Robin Hood spent 130 million last year, with a heavy emphasis on schools.
Scott Pelley: You are graduating your first class.
Jabali Sawicki: Hallelujah.
Jabali Sawicki is headmaster of what was a crack house.
An old school in Brooklyn had been abandoned as the neighborhood collapsed.
Jabali Sawicki: It's dilapidated.
It's falling down.
People walk by and they put graffiti on it.
That's exactly how people viewed African American boys at the time.
Sawicki was hired by Tudor Jones.
And they opened the Excellence Boys Charter School, grades K through 8.
Tudor Jones believes that his experiment with that middle school in the 1980s failed because he caught the kids too late.
Paul Tudor Jones: The only way to break the cycle of poverty statistically is higher levels of education attract higher levels of income.
The only way to beat poverty in America is to completely, totally transform our public education system.
It's the only way.
Now Robin Hood is supporting younger kids in 80 schools.
It spent $35 million turning the crack house into a crack program.
They call students here "scholars.
" The day is long and they don't waste a minute.
Not even when they're passing from one class to the next.
New York City's Department of Education tells us the Excellence Boys School is significantly better than average in math and science, and slightly better in English.
The boys have reached the city's top 20 percent even though some of them start the day in homeless shelters and others in troubled homes.
Scott Pelley: There was a shooting near the school recently.
How did the boys handle that? Jabali Sawicki: A tragic event.
The father of one of our scholars was murdered one block away.
And to make matters even worse, two of our other scholars in the school witnessed the entire thing.
Scott Pelley: What did you tell the boys? Jabali Sawicki: That in 15 to 20 years, they're gonna be the men that are out on the street, navigating that world.
Excellence symbolizes the greatest mechanism for us to create a world where no one ever has to see their father buried, or no one ever has to walk up to the casket, look into that father's closed eyes, and ask mommy, is he sleeping? And we told them, "That's why we do this.
" This is the graduation of the first class to go from kindergarten to eighth grade.
Some of them are headed to top prep schools.
Scott Pelley: When you're standing up there, looking across all those faces, what are you going to see? Paul Tudor Jones: I'm going to see first and foremost, men of character After that failure with the older kids, Tudor Jones is focused now on the starting line.
Paul Tudor Jones: Today we're going to blow this.
The race starts after you leave this room today.
Are you guys ready? I can't hear you.
Are you guys ready? Ready, set, (whistle blow) After 25 years of Robin Hood, countless lives have been changed but the city's poverty rate doesn't.
It's about 20 percent year in and year out.
If Robin Hood is a hedge fund for humanity, then a Wall Street trader would say that Tudor Jones is buying on the "futures" market -- a bet that investing in young children and families will pay big dividends in the next generation.
Paul Tudor Jones: I don't think there's ever actually a point where you can say I won.
It's a constant battle.
I could see myself, I could see myself with the coffin lid dropping and me still knocking on the top of it, trying to get out, 'cause I think there'll still be a war to fight.
Scott Pelley: And more to do.
Paul Tudor Jones: And more to do.
We all learned a lot in recent years about the dangers of head injuries from contact sports like football.
We now know that a hard hit can cause brain damage that only becomes apparent after an athlete's playing days are over.
Football is violent, no doubt, but it's nothing compared to war.
And just as the National Football League has struggled to come to grips with head injuries so has the military - but on a much vaster scale.
An estimated quarter million servicemen and women have suffered concussions over the past decade of war.
Tens of thousands -- no one knows the precise number -- are dealing with lasting brain damage.
The Pentagon, which did not recognize the problem until the war in Iraq was almost over, is now scrambling to treat these invisible wounds.
And soldiers suffering from them sometimes end up wishing they had a wound people could see.
Ben Richards: If I could trade traumatic brain injury for a single-leg amputation I'd probably do that in a second.
You heard that right -- retired Army Major Ben Richards would rather endure the disfigurement and disability of losing a limb than live with the aftershocks of the concussions he suffered in Iraq.
The first one happened on Mother's Day 2007 when his armored vehicle was rammed by a suicide car bomber.
Ben Richards: Everyone that was in the vehicle, walked away with a pretty significant concussion.
My head hurt for about a week.
I was nauseated for a week.
Literally couldn't see straight.
David Martin: So what do you do when you have symptoms like that? Ben Richards: Go out again and fight the next day.
David Martin: What are you doing going back into combat? I mean, you've got men you're responsible for Ben Richards: Exactly.
That's why I went back into combat.
In two months of fighting, seven of the 17 armored vehicles under Richards command were destroyed.
Richards had a second vehicle blown out from beneath him just weeks after the first.
Ben Richards: Once again we all walked out with all of our parts and pieces.
Richards had no visible wound but he had suffered an injury that would end his Army career and very nearly ruin his life.
Farrah Richards: He spent a lot of time by himself in closed rooms.
Farrah Richards could see her husband was a changed man when he came home but couldn't see why.
Farrah Richards: As a spouse, I wasn't thinking "he has traumatic brain injury.
" That wasn't even something that I really knew about.
Doctors at Ft.
Lewis, Washington, told Richards he was simply suffering from post-traumatic stress, a diagnosis that would hang over him for four years.
Ben Richards: If you have post-traumatic stress disorder and you are not improving through counseling, then it's your fault.
David Martin: You're not trying hard enough? Ben Richards: It was my fault that I wasn't getting better.
Not willing to give up on a promising young officer, the Army promoted Richards and gave him his dream job: professor at West Point.
But he found himself blanking out in the middle of class.
He got this evaluation from the head of his department: "Major Richards can't teach .
.
.
unable to accomplish any aspect of his job .
.
.
unable to come to work on most days.
.
.
suicide risk high.
" Ben Richards: I was in such a bad place mentally that I was really looking for a way out.
I don't think I was ever suicidal.
But I wasI was thinking of ways that I could break my leg or something because two weeks in the hospital, that was a better option for me.
In the military, concussion was an invisible -- and therefore neglected -- wound.
It took an outsider -- Dr.
David Hovda, director of the Brain Injury Research Center at UCLA -- to prove to the Pentagon that even a mild concussion can result in serious injury.
David Hovda: And the thing that was remarkable about this particular image was that this was the face of the hidden wound that people didn't see.
The brain on the right shows normal activity.
The one on the left is a UCLA football player who had suffered a concussion which left him dazed, but able to answer simple questions.
The one in the middle is a patient in an unresponsive coma.
David Hovda: We scanned both of those individuals.
The nearly identical images showed Hovda for the first time the physical damage even a relatively mild concussion can cause.
David Hovda: This was so stark, it looked people in the face and they said, "This is the face of concussion.
" Pete Chiarelli: That was a eureka moment for me, absolutely a eureka moment, because that's what we were experiencing down range with our kids.
Retired Army General Pete Chiarelli served two tours as a combat commander in Iraq but admits he was clueless about brain injury when he became the number two man in the Army in 2008.
Pete Chiarelli: I had no idea that traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress were, in fact, the two largest categories of injuries that we had.
Chiarelli found that traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress accounted for 36 percent of the disabling injuries suffered by soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Amputations accounted for 10 percent.
David Martin: What did you think when you first saw those numbers? Pete Chiarelli: It just absolutely floored me.
I couldn't believe it.
Desperate to do something, General Chiarelli brought Dr.
Hovda to the Pentagon to brief the military medical establishment.
David Hovda: So I gave my shtick and then a couple of the, of the medical doctors stood up and they said, you know, "We really appreciate you coming here, but what you're advising us to do is bad medicine.
" And I said, "What do you mean bad medicine?" And they said, "Well, if you take an individual out of the, of theater, of a, of a battle and let them rest because they've had a concussion before you put them back in, they're going to believe that they're brain injured and you're going to make them worse.
" David Martin: Bad medicine .
.
.
among doctors those must be fighting words.
David Hovda: Yeah, I was very--I was very shocked when I heard that.
Pete Chiarelli: There's a stigma associated with anything that occurs above the neck with the brain.
And that same stigma was something that I saw in the military.
David Hovda: And General Chiarelli called me on the phone and he said, "Now you understand our problem.
Now you understand how bad it is.
" Chiarelli didn't wait for the argument to be settled.
In late 2009, he issued new orders to all Army units in Afghanistan - any soldier with a concussion had to be held out of the fight until he was fully recovered.
Pete Chiarelli: But, the problem is, if you have a second concussion before the first one is healed, then we see cognitive issues.
Long-term cognitive issues can develop that cause all kinds of issues.
It's a problem Dr.
Hovda had seen before as a consultant to the National Football League.
David Hovda: Are these individuals that are going come back from Iraq and Afghanistan that have had repeat mild traumatic brain injuries, are those going to be like the retired NFL players that are committing suicide who have problems with dementia? While the military scrambled to prevent future brain injuries, a private citizen named Arnold Fisher, for years one of the military's greatest patrons, set out to help troops already suffering from invisible wounds.
For information on Arnold Fisher's foundation, click here Arnold Fisher: We owe them.
Head of one of New York's most successful construction firms, Fisher offered to build a state of the art brain injury center.
His foundation would raise the money.
All he asked of the government was to stay out of his way.
Arnold Fisher: We can build it in half the time, half the cost and twice the quality.
Fisher had already built a $52 million facility for amputee care in San Antonio.
[Arnold Fisher: That's their building.
.]
Then he raised $72 million in private donations to build a brain injury center at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center just outside Washington, D.
C.
[Arnold Fisher: For traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress.
.]
It opened in June 2010.
Fisher called the new building the National Intrepid Center of Excellence - NICoE for short.
It is a mental health facility like no other in the military.
Each patient is assigned a seven-person team of specialists and examined by the latest in brain scanning technology.
[Technician: We can see the orbits.
We can see the inner ear area.
We can see the nerves.
.]
James Kelley: This particular machinery gathers would actually capture somewhere between three and 400 such images.
Dr.
James Kelley, the director of NICoE showed us how one soldier's brain looked normal in a conventional CT scan while more sophisticated screenings revealed physical damage.
James Kelley: Using the more advanced technology called SWI just in that same plane of the brain there are multiple black dots, unequivocal evidence of traumatic brain injury.
David Martin: No more guess work.
I mean, that's--that's a big deal in any field.
James Kelley: It's huge.
We've been able to detect in more than a third and not quite half of our patients' abnormalities that hadn't been seen in any previous imaging.
David Martin: Nearly half the, the soldiers who come here are seeing for the first time that they have physical damage to their brains.
James Kelley: It's between 40 and 50 percent.
But here's the catch: NICoE treats only 20 patients a month.
So just a fraction of the servicemen and women suffering from traumatic brain injury ever get in the door.
Technician: All right.
Here we go.
David Martin: And what are the estimated number of cases of traumatic brain injury? James Kelley: Traumatic brain injury has been diagnosed over the last 11 years in about a quarter of a million service members.
Most of them have simple concussions and will recover.
But tens of thousands - the Pentagon is not sure exactly how many - have serious, perhaps permanent, injuries to their brain, injuries which, because they're invisible, can be hard to explain.
Sgt.
Allen Hill suffered concussions in Iraq and Afghanistan but it wasn't until he got his brain scanned at NICoE that he could prove he wasn't just faking.
Allen Hill: There's folks out there that just accuse soldiers of being malingerers, of faking symptoms and that's like calling me a coward and I'm not.
David Martin: So when you see that physical damage to your brain, what does that say after a year of being told you were a malingerer? Allen Hill: Makes me want to whip someone's ass for that kind of carrying on.
Doctor: I'd like to show you the brain MRI images that you had done.
After four years of blaming himself for not getting better, Ben Richards came to NICoE and found out he was suffering from more than post-traumatic stress.
There it is - a significant loss of activity on one side of his brain.
Ben Richards: It does seem to really affirm that this is a physical injury.
You know, I've actually been damaged.
This is not something that's just made up.
It really lifts a burden that there's a reason why I have trouble getting back to that normal that - just always seems out of grasp.
And likely to remain out of grasp because doctors at NICoE cannot cure brain damage.
The best they can do is help soldiers cope with the lasting effects of their battlefield concussions.
David Martin: The science says you should have sat out.
If you had to do it over, what would you do? Ben Richards: I could not have made a different choice.
David Martin: Because? Ben Richards: In the fight we were in .
.
.
David Martin: It's OK, take your time.
Ben Richards: Some days we didn't come back.
We were out in our combat outposts five or six days a week, sometimes literally fighting from the walls of our combat outposts.
Maybe having a little residual traumatic brain injury seemed like the least of our worries.
[Marine: How you doing, sir? Arnold Fisher: How ya doing? Marine: Nice to meet you.
.]
No one is more moved by stories like that than 80-year-old Arnold Fisher .
.
.
[Arnold Fisher: We owe you guys.
You, know, we owe you guys a lot.
.]
who is once again a man on a mission: This time to raise $90 million to build nine more brain injury centers at military bases around the country.
[Manager: You just let me know what you need and when you need it.
We'll get it there.
Arnold Fisher: I'll hold you to that.
Manager: That's not a problem.
.]
One of the first is under construction at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
Arnold Fisher: People say to me the government should be doing this.
Yeah, the government should be doing this, but they're not.
So we do it.
Nine would enable the military to care for of new cases they are expecting even with the war in Afghanistan winding down.
They're supposed to be both warriors and community builders, going village to village driving out insurgents while winning the hearts and minds of the population.
But counterinsurgency has had mixed results - at best.
We met a Green Beret who is finding out -- in his job as a police officer -- that the strategy might actually have a better chance of working, right here at home, in the USA.
Call him and his fellow officers counterinsurgency cops! They're not fighting al Qaeda or the Taliban, but street gangs and drug dealers in one of the most crime ridden cities in New England.
[Mike Cutone: Turning now, turning now on Orchard.
.]
Mike Cutone is a Massachusetts state trooper, part of a special unit targeting gang crime in the city of Springfield.
[Mike Cutone: Put your hands behind your back, stop resisting! Read him his rights in Spanish.
Get the gun?.]
He's also a Green Beret, who - after returning from Iraq - had an "aha moment" when he was talking to a gas station manager in Springfield.
Mike Cutone: Gang members would come in there, pull out a weapon, point it at employees or patrons, take what they want and walk out.
No one was calling the Springfield Police and no one was calling the state police.
Lesley Stahl: What this community was dealing with was gangs.
They are a criminal enterprise.
How are they like insurgents in Iraq? Mike Cutone: Insurgents and gang members both want to operate in a failed area, a failed community or a failed state.
They know they can live off the passive support of the community, where the community is not going to call or engage the local police.
The similarities to the Iraqi town he had lived in and defended were so striking, that he sat down and wrote out an action plan for Springfield.
Mike Cutone: We had this concept of what we would call a pilot team, where you would handpick select troopers, give them specific training and embed them in the community and start winning over the community.
He proposed his plan, a counterinsurgency program, to Springfield's deputy police chief, John Barbieri.
Lesley Stahl: But he was saying he was going to bring military tactics into an American city.
I mean, you must have had some qualms about that.
John Barbieri: Well once it became clear that he wasn't talking about checkpoints or fast roping from helicopters, that he was talking about going door to door organizing the neighborhood into a collaboration to report crime, to get involved in solving their own problems, it became obvious to me that that was exactly the type of program I needed for this neighborhood.
Barbieri and trooper Cutone took us to a housing project in that neighborhood, known as the North End.
Lesley Stahl: I heard that there were gang members on motorcycles with AK-47s on their backs, right out here- John Barbieri: They were very well-organized.
They had lookouts.
They disappeared when the sector cars came.
Lesley Stahl: They were just riding right up here in front? John Barbieri: They were establishing the fact that this was their territory and they were willing to fight to keep it.
Deputy Police Chief Barbieri was desperate for a way to break the gangs' hold on the community.
So three years ago he agreed to let Cutone and a small team of elite troopers -- most of them war veterans too - target the North End, which had become a violent marketplace for some of the cheapest heroin in the whole country.
In addition to drug busts, they walked the streets, knocked on doors, hung out in neighborhood shops trying to woo the locals.
[Mike Cutone: Here for pastries today, food? Woman: Yes Mike Cutone: Outstanding, this is the best place in Springfield!.]
But there was a lot of skepticism: Not everyone welcomed the troopers.
Mike Cutone: I could remember one door, the last knock of the day I had.
A grandmother comes out and she just tee'd off on me.
Wanted nothing to do with me, used colorful language, said the police were racist, etc.
, etc.
But they kept at it, almost daily.
[Mike Cutone: Trooper Mike Cutone, nice to see you, sir.
.]
And eventually began developing sources and tips.
Mike Cutone: We're not just using bad guys for information and getting information.
We're using the other 99 percent of the population that live there.
Winning them over.
They become our eyes and ears.
And the floodgates have opened for criminal information that we can go after now.
Lesley Stahl: The floodgates have opened? Mike Cutone:: Yes, they have.
Lesley Stahl: That much? Mike Cutone: Yes, that much.
Myself and the other troopers, my phone is ringing constantly, every day, either text messages, they'll send me pictures of where they located guns, they'll send me e-mails of who's selling drugs.
One of the keys to building trust in Iraq, Cutone says, was having his counterinsurgency team move into the town, sending a message: "We're not going away.
" Lesley Stahl: Yeah, but eventually you drive off.
Mike Cutone: We do drive off, but when we drive off, we've given them a template on how to control their town independently and without fear.
With the uncertainty about counterinsurgency's ultimate success overseas, the troopers and local police are determined to build something permanent in Springfield.
[Mike Cutone: As always, remember why we are here.
.]
And essential to that is a regular Thursday "elders" meeting.
Local residents come together with politicians, police, health and housing organizations, educators, businessmen and Latino leaders.
Lesley Stahl: So how important are these meetings to the overall mission? Mike Cutone: They're crucial.
What we found out is you had all these different groups that do good work for low income folks in troubled areas.
None of 'em were talking with each other.
So the Thursday meeting brought all these people together.
Karen Pullman, a nurse from Baystate, raises her hand at one Thursday meeting and says, "Hey, I want to create a walking school bus.
" We're, like, "What's a walking school bus? That's great.
" Fear of the gangs was so high that parents and kids were often afraid to walk the streets.
Mike Cutone: Carlos, Miguel, nice to meet you Carlos.
Now, big burley troopers and teachers walk neighborhood kids to school.
It's a strong visual message to the families there that the troopers and police are protecting their children and taking control of the streets back from the gangs.
Mike Cutone: And that's the beauty of the Thursday meeting.
It's empowering the residents and the people that come to it.
Kit Parker: Lesley, they're just like the village elder meetings I was doing in every village I patrolled in-- in Afghanistan.
Major Kit Parker is a professor of engineering at Harvard.
He also led counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan.
Kit Parker: The key thing with counterinsurgency based on my experience is: Make a friend.
Make a friend.
I don't have to find the enemy, I have to find a friend.
If you find your friends, they're going to take ya to your enemy.
He was on National Guard training one weekend two years ago, telling a group from his unit that he wanted to find a police department to test out using counterinsurgency against gangs.
Believe it or not Mike Cutone was in his unit.
Mike Cutone: And then I shared with him, hey we're doing this in Springfield and his eyes lit up.
Lesley Stahl: His eyes lit up? His jaw dropped is what he told us.
Mike Cutone: Yeah.
Kit Parker: He said he had a bad gang problem in the north end of Springfield.
He said people were riding around on motorcycles with assault rifles slung over their back.
And I got this vision of Mogadishu.
I got this vision of Kandahar Province where I saw this all the time.
Two guys on a motorcycle, one's got a AK-47 on his back.
And then I told Mike, I said: "I teach a class at Harvard.
Let me see if I can bring this class in on this.
" And so, last spring, Parker turned his junior engineering class into a counterinsurgency lab.
Kit Parker: Help me understand what kind of intelligence I need to collect when I am in the field, whether it is in the North End, I'm on Main Street standing by the taco truck, or if I am in Kandahar City.
That's the kind of data I need.
Parker had his students with their computer smarts develop software for intelligence collection.
With it, the troopers are building a database of gang members, similar to what Special Forces are doing overseas.
[Trooper: You have to do tattoos.
.]
The troopers collect data as they book suspects; like criminal histories and tattoos.
[Trooper: Two tear drops.
.]
And use the information to make maps of the gangs' social networks - who they know and who they associate with.
Once a gang's key figures are identified, the troopers try and remove them from the streets in hopes of fracturing the entire network.
[Mike Cutone: Hi ma'am, how are you doing today?.]
Cutone brought Parker and his students onto the streets of Springfield so the class could survey the residents to see if any of the symptoms of that failed community had been alleviated.
Kit Parker: They took a look at everything from STD rates in neighborhoods where you have gang activity.
Litter, graffiti, school attendance, all of these things.
They found that since the counterinsurgency operation started, North End schools have seen fewer discipline problems and drug offenses and that litter and gang graffiti is no longer everywhere in sight -- important indicators, Parker says, that the community is no longer totally under the gangs' control.
Kit Parker: What we're seeing is that the number of calls for service is going up in the North End.
So that means-- Lesley Stahl: They're reporting crime.
Kit Parker: That's right.
They're reporting crime.
And I see, that means the legitimacy of the Mass State Police and the Springfield PD has increased.
And the residents of the North End realize they are their instrument to clean up their neighborhood.
Teddy Cupack: I've been robbed 55 times that the police know about, but not lately.
At the Thursday community meeting we attended, residents like Teddy Cupak said this is the first time the police have really made a difference in the North End.
Teddy Cupak: This is what I want to get across, this concept does work.
It sort of flushes them out.
I don't know where they go.
I hope they get help.
Mike Cutone: Well, hey, Teddy, some of 'em are going to work, and some are going to jail and some leave.
Teddy Cupak: That's right.
[Mike Cutone: That's my cell number, don't give my cell number out.
I don't want to get prank phone calls at three in the morning.
If you are really looking for a job, we know a guy that hires kids and puts them to work doing construction work.
.]
Lesley Stahl: But let me ask you something.
Those functions that you are performing, that sounds to me like a social service job instead of a police job.
Mike Cutone: If the government is not going to do it, or individuals aren't going to do it, why can't the police provide leadership or partner up with the community and say, "Hey, here's a plan.
This is what we want to do to help.
" Because the status quo of traditional policing, it ain't just gonna work.
It's not gonna work.
Lesley Stahl: But you are still making drug arrests.
Mike Cutone: But see you are misconstruing it like you're going to eliminate drugs completely.
You're not.
What you want to do is reduce it to a level where you can manage it and then single them out one by one versus having it rampant throughout the city.
Springfield police say they are managing it in their target neighborhood of the North End where, they say, violent crime fell last year by 25 percent.
Drug offenses dropped nearly 50 percent.
[Mike Cutone: How long ago did that happen, sir?.]
To show us how they're using the tips they're getting to fracture the gang networks, Cutone took us on a nighttime drug raid.
[Police radio: Target's out, target's out.
.]
It was like a military operation, adapted in interesting ways for an American city.
Mike Cutone: They are in what looks a bread truck, an unmarked bread truck.
But the bread truck was filled with a SWAT team, looking like soldiers riding into battle.
[Police officers: State police, search warrant! State police search warrant!.]
As they burst in, someone on the second floor hurled something out the window.
Lesley Stahl: What do they got? Cop: Looks like a Glock.
A semi-automatic pistol.
They also found around five grams of heroin and arrested three young men the police say are drug dealers, members of a local gang -- one of them just 15 years old.
But that wasn't the most important thing the team did that night.
Very quickly, Cutone and the troopers turned their attention to the neighbors.
Mike Cutone: I'm sorry, what is your name? Carlos: Carlos.
Mike Cutone: Carlos, nice to meet you.
I like your rosary, I got one in my pocket.
Even on these kinds of operations, they put on the charm offensive.
Mike Cutone: We want to engage these other folks and let them know what's going on and why we're here.
Lesley Stahl: And that was part of the operation? Mike Cutone: Absolutely.
This summer, Mike Cutone and his Army unit are being deployed to teach counterinsurgency to the Afghan forces.
Having brought what he learned at war home, he now wants to bring what he's learned on the streets of Springfield back to Afghanistan.
[Mike Cutone: Good to see you, you take care.
.]
Ask Wall Street bankers the net worth of Paul Tudor Jones, and they'll tell you, $3.
6 billion.
He's one of those hedge fund managers.
But ask a homeless child or a struggling family and they'll tell you that a spreadsheet is no way to measure a man.
Paul Tudor Jones wonders that if billionaires, like him, are such geniuses, then why do nearly two million people live in poverty in New York City alone? In 1988, he started a charity called the Robin Hood Foundation.
Twenty five years later, Robin Hood has given away more than one and a quarter billion dollars.
It's become the city's largest private backer of charter schools, job training and food programs.
Tudor Jones has learned hard lessons -- for a latter day Robin Hood, it turns out giving to the poor is harder than he thought.
And as for taking from the rich? Well, he finds it's best to distract them.
This looks like an Arena concert.
But it's a private party for the super rich.
The Robin Hood Foundation's annual fundraiser seats 4,000 in Manhattan's convention center.
[Seth Myers: It's amazing who is here tonight, give yourselves a round of applause.
It's like the one percent has its own one percent.
.]
They laugh, because it's true.
Billionaires, stars and athletes are here for the 22nd year to lay credit cards at the feet of Paul Tudor Jones.
[Paul Tudor Jones: Brothers and sisters of Robin Hood, new ideas, different ideas, crazy ideas, those are the ones that change the world and boy, does the world outside these walls need changing.
.]
Scott Pelley: What do you see when you look around the city? Paul Tudor Jones: I see people in pain, people in need, people at times without hope, looking for something that will give them some compelling future.
I see too many people in homeless shelters, on food stamps.
I think a lot of us don't like to focus on it, but it's a significant part of this country that needs to be addressed.
There was a time he was focused on himself.
This is Paul Tudor Jones in the 1980s, age Paul Tudor Jones: My mother told me I was gonna be a preacher.
I always wanted to be a millionaire or a movie director.
Scott Pelley: So you chose millionaire? Paul Tudor Jones: I don't know if I chose millionaire, I ultimately got to that point, yes.
That point and far beyond.
But his mother had seen something of a preacher and months after that documentary, Tudor Jones caught a glimpse of it too.
It was 1986, one Sunday night.
[Harry Reasoner: Millionaire with heart of gold offers hope to ghetto kids.]
Harry Reasoner met Gene Lang, a millionaire who guaranteed college tuition for every kid in one Harlem class.
[Harry Reasoner: Are they good kids? Do you like them? Gene Lang: Oh I love them.
I look at them now, all of them, as an extension of my family.
.]
Paul Tudor Jones: Well, the second that program finished, I picked up the phone.
I called Gene Lang.
And I said I wanna do what you're doing.
Scott Pelley: You know, I'm curious what it was about that program and about where you were in your life that ignited that spark in that moment? Paul Tudor Jones: There was probably a hole in my soul.
And I didn't really know it at the time.
And all of a sudden, here was this man that showed the joy of giving.
So the lesson that I learned was that there was a whole new journey in my life that was ahead of me that I had not yet even realized was there.
So he adopted a school too, confident that if he showered it with money, the students would thrive.
Paul Tudor Jones: I was throwing everything in the world I could at it.
I was taking them on trips every summer and providing after-school services.
We put so much time, energy, and love into them.
But he failed.
After five years, the grades in his school were no better than average.
Paul Tudor Jones: I felt like I had failed a great deal of those kids.
But failure, a lot of times, is the fire that forges the steel for success, right? There are going to be stops, there are gonna be failures.
There are gonna be setbacks.
But you grow from those and you get better and it becomes transformative.
Turned out a preacher's compassion needed a little Wall Street ruthlessness.
So Tudor Jones and his friends set up Robin Hood to invest in poverty programs in the same hardnosed way they invested in businesses.
Their offices are filled with analysts and accountants who help the best ideas develop and measure the results without mercy.
Mary Alice Hannan: My relationship with Robin Hood has evolved over the years like mother-daughter, you know, friend-and-foe-- Sister Mary Alice Hannan's soup kitchen in the Bronx had lived "hand to mouth" for almost a decade and then came Robin Hood with an offer to invest and expand.
Scott Pelley: Friend and foe? Mary Alice Hannan: Friend and foe.
I mean this in a loving way, but I loved and hated them in 30 seconds.
And I'm sure they felt the same way about me.
Love was nice but Robin Hood wanted data.
Who was being served, how many, what was the cost? Did the data support expansion? And where was the nun's business plan? Mary Alice Hannan: So I'm like, "OK.
" Scott Pelley: You're just trying to get through today? Mary Alice Hannan: Today, right.
So the first thing was a five-year strategic plan and I went, "Ugh, alright.
" And it was a long, tedious experience.
And it was wonderful and we came up with all these spectacular goals and that was really, really good.
Yay, yay! It was the follow up of the goals that became the challenge.
Paul Tudor Jones: We started asking grantees, "What are your goals?" and then holding them accountable and yet, at the same time, providing management expertise and providing administrative help and legal help and help to secure buildings.
So we weren't just holding them accountable.
We were helping them along the way.
Robin Hood invested 5 million in the kitchen's expansion goals and now they're serving more than twice as many as before.
But when programs don't perform, Robin Hood takes the money back.
Paul Tudor Jones: Every year we probably de-fund because the fact that they're not wonderful.
Not because of the fact that they're not trying real hard, but because we're not getting the results.
Scott Pelley: You do that to 5 percent to Paul Tudor Jones: Yes, because we're always trying to find new things, and by definition, you're gonna fail at times.
It's what you have to do to be at the forefront of actually finding a way to kick poverty's ass.
Recently Robin Hood's board of directors met at the soup kitchen.
The personal net worth of the board adds up to $25 billion.
Robin Hood takes all of its expenses from the board members, so 100 percent of donations are given to the poor.
Just like its namesake.
Paul Tudor Jones: If you said to me what part of our success is due to our name, I'd say it's a big part of it 'cause it's a great name, right? It says everything.
Scott Pelley: Is that what happens at that gala we went to? Taking from the rich? Well, you put the arm on them.
Paul Tudor Jones: But many years from now, when you look back on your life and you are at your end, would you trade those fleeting luxuries for one chance, just one chance to return to this night.
And give a hundred thousand people a chance to grab their dream.
Scott Pelley: You were shaking people by their ankles.
Paul Tudor Jones: You cannot have significance in this life if it's all about you.
You get your significance, you find your joy in life through service and sacrifice.
It's pure and simple.
Big charity galas often bring in $3 million to $5 million.
Tudor Jones took in more than $57 million this night.
The money goes to about 500 projects.
Robin Hood spent 130 million last year, with a heavy emphasis on schools.
Scott Pelley: You are graduating your first class.
Jabali Sawicki: Hallelujah.
Jabali Sawicki is headmaster of what was a crack house.
An old school in Brooklyn had been abandoned as the neighborhood collapsed.
Jabali Sawicki: It's dilapidated.
It's falling down.
People walk by and they put graffiti on it.
That's exactly how people viewed African American boys at the time.
Sawicki was hired by Tudor Jones.
And they opened the Excellence Boys Charter School, grades K through 8.
Tudor Jones believes that his experiment with that middle school in the 1980s failed because he caught the kids too late.
Paul Tudor Jones: The only way to break the cycle of poverty statistically is higher levels of education attract higher levels of income.
The only way to beat poverty in America is to completely, totally transform our public education system.
It's the only way.
Now Robin Hood is supporting younger kids in 80 schools.
It spent $35 million turning the crack house into a crack program.
They call students here "scholars.
" The day is long and they don't waste a minute.
Not even when they're passing from one class to the next.
New York City's Department of Education tells us the Excellence Boys School is significantly better than average in math and science, and slightly better in English.
The boys have reached the city's top 20 percent even though some of them start the day in homeless shelters and others in troubled homes.
Scott Pelley: There was a shooting near the school recently.
How did the boys handle that? Jabali Sawicki: A tragic event.
The father of one of our scholars was murdered one block away.
And to make matters even worse, two of our other scholars in the school witnessed the entire thing.
Scott Pelley: What did you tell the boys? Jabali Sawicki: That in 15 to 20 years, they're gonna be the men that are out on the street, navigating that world.
Excellence symbolizes the greatest mechanism for us to create a world where no one ever has to see their father buried, or no one ever has to walk up to the casket, look into that father's closed eyes, and ask mommy, is he sleeping? And we told them, "That's why we do this.
" This is the graduation of the first class to go from kindergarten to eighth grade.
Some of them are headed to top prep schools.
Scott Pelley: When you're standing up there, looking across all those faces, what are you going to see? Paul Tudor Jones: I'm going to see first and foremost, men of character After that failure with the older kids, Tudor Jones is focused now on the starting line.
Paul Tudor Jones: Today we're going to blow this.
The race starts after you leave this room today.
Are you guys ready? I can't hear you.
Are you guys ready? Ready, set, (whistle blow) After 25 years of Robin Hood, countless lives have been changed but the city's poverty rate doesn't.
It's about 20 percent year in and year out.
If Robin Hood is a hedge fund for humanity, then a Wall Street trader would say that Tudor Jones is buying on the "futures" market -- a bet that investing in young children and families will pay big dividends in the next generation.
Paul Tudor Jones: I don't think there's ever actually a point where you can say I won.
It's a constant battle.
I could see myself, I could see myself with the coffin lid dropping and me still knocking on the top of it, trying to get out, 'cause I think there'll still be a war to fight.
Scott Pelley: And more to do.
Paul Tudor Jones: And more to do.
We all learned a lot in recent years about the dangers of head injuries from contact sports like football.
We now know that a hard hit can cause brain damage that only becomes apparent after an athlete's playing days are over.
Football is violent, no doubt, but it's nothing compared to war.
And just as the National Football League has struggled to come to grips with head injuries so has the military - but on a much vaster scale.
An estimated quarter million servicemen and women have suffered concussions over the past decade of war.
Tens of thousands -- no one knows the precise number -- are dealing with lasting brain damage.
The Pentagon, which did not recognize the problem until the war in Iraq was almost over, is now scrambling to treat these invisible wounds.
And soldiers suffering from them sometimes end up wishing they had a wound people could see.
Ben Richards: If I could trade traumatic brain injury for a single-leg amputation I'd probably do that in a second.
You heard that right -- retired Army Major Ben Richards would rather endure the disfigurement and disability of losing a limb than live with the aftershocks of the concussions he suffered in Iraq.
The first one happened on Mother's Day 2007 when his armored vehicle was rammed by a suicide car bomber.
Ben Richards: Everyone that was in the vehicle, walked away with a pretty significant concussion.
My head hurt for about a week.
I was nauseated for a week.
Literally couldn't see straight.
David Martin: So what do you do when you have symptoms like that? Ben Richards: Go out again and fight the next day.
David Martin: What are you doing going back into combat? I mean, you've got men you're responsible for Ben Richards: Exactly.
That's why I went back into combat.
In two months of fighting, seven of the 17 armored vehicles under Richards command were destroyed.
Richards had a second vehicle blown out from beneath him just weeks after the first.
Ben Richards: Once again we all walked out with all of our parts and pieces.
Richards had no visible wound but he had suffered an injury that would end his Army career and very nearly ruin his life.
Farrah Richards: He spent a lot of time by himself in closed rooms.
Farrah Richards could see her husband was a changed man when he came home but couldn't see why.
Farrah Richards: As a spouse, I wasn't thinking "he has traumatic brain injury.
" That wasn't even something that I really knew about.
Doctors at Ft.
Lewis, Washington, told Richards he was simply suffering from post-traumatic stress, a diagnosis that would hang over him for four years.
Ben Richards: If you have post-traumatic stress disorder and you are not improving through counseling, then it's your fault.
David Martin: You're not trying hard enough? Ben Richards: It was my fault that I wasn't getting better.
Not willing to give up on a promising young officer, the Army promoted Richards and gave him his dream job: professor at West Point.
But he found himself blanking out in the middle of class.
He got this evaluation from the head of his department: "Major Richards can't teach .
.
.
unable to accomplish any aspect of his job .
.
.
unable to come to work on most days.
.
.
suicide risk high.
" Ben Richards: I was in such a bad place mentally that I was really looking for a way out.
I don't think I was ever suicidal.
But I wasI was thinking of ways that I could break my leg or something because two weeks in the hospital, that was a better option for me.
In the military, concussion was an invisible -- and therefore neglected -- wound.
It took an outsider -- Dr.
David Hovda, director of the Brain Injury Research Center at UCLA -- to prove to the Pentagon that even a mild concussion can result in serious injury.
David Hovda: And the thing that was remarkable about this particular image was that this was the face of the hidden wound that people didn't see.
The brain on the right shows normal activity.
The one on the left is a UCLA football player who had suffered a concussion which left him dazed, but able to answer simple questions.
The one in the middle is a patient in an unresponsive coma.
David Hovda: We scanned both of those individuals.
The nearly identical images showed Hovda for the first time the physical damage even a relatively mild concussion can cause.
David Hovda: This was so stark, it looked people in the face and they said, "This is the face of concussion.
" Pete Chiarelli: That was a eureka moment for me, absolutely a eureka moment, because that's what we were experiencing down range with our kids.
Retired Army General Pete Chiarelli served two tours as a combat commander in Iraq but admits he was clueless about brain injury when he became the number two man in the Army in 2008.
Pete Chiarelli: I had no idea that traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress were, in fact, the two largest categories of injuries that we had.
Chiarelli found that traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress accounted for 36 percent of the disabling injuries suffered by soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Amputations accounted for 10 percent.
David Martin: What did you think when you first saw those numbers? Pete Chiarelli: It just absolutely floored me.
I couldn't believe it.
Desperate to do something, General Chiarelli brought Dr.
Hovda to the Pentagon to brief the military medical establishment.
David Hovda: So I gave my shtick and then a couple of the, of the medical doctors stood up and they said, you know, "We really appreciate you coming here, but what you're advising us to do is bad medicine.
" And I said, "What do you mean bad medicine?" And they said, "Well, if you take an individual out of the, of theater, of a, of a battle and let them rest because they've had a concussion before you put them back in, they're going to believe that they're brain injured and you're going to make them worse.
" David Martin: Bad medicine .
.
.
among doctors those must be fighting words.
David Hovda: Yeah, I was very--I was very shocked when I heard that.
Pete Chiarelli: There's a stigma associated with anything that occurs above the neck with the brain.
And that same stigma was something that I saw in the military.
David Hovda: And General Chiarelli called me on the phone and he said, "Now you understand our problem.
Now you understand how bad it is.
" Chiarelli didn't wait for the argument to be settled.
In late 2009, he issued new orders to all Army units in Afghanistan - any soldier with a concussion had to be held out of the fight until he was fully recovered.
Pete Chiarelli: But, the problem is, if you have a second concussion before the first one is healed, then we see cognitive issues.
Long-term cognitive issues can develop that cause all kinds of issues.
It's a problem Dr.
Hovda had seen before as a consultant to the National Football League.
David Hovda: Are these individuals that are going come back from Iraq and Afghanistan that have had repeat mild traumatic brain injuries, are those going to be like the retired NFL players that are committing suicide who have problems with dementia? While the military scrambled to prevent future brain injuries, a private citizen named Arnold Fisher, for years one of the military's greatest patrons, set out to help troops already suffering from invisible wounds.
For information on Arnold Fisher's foundation, click here Arnold Fisher: We owe them.
Head of one of New York's most successful construction firms, Fisher offered to build a state of the art brain injury center.
His foundation would raise the money.
All he asked of the government was to stay out of his way.
Arnold Fisher: We can build it in half the time, half the cost and twice the quality.
Fisher had already built a $52 million facility for amputee care in San Antonio.
[Arnold Fisher: That's their building.
.]
Then he raised $72 million in private donations to build a brain injury center at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center just outside Washington, D.
C.
[Arnold Fisher: For traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress.
.]
It opened in June 2010.
Fisher called the new building the National Intrepid Center of Excellence - NICoE for short.
It is a mental health facility like no other in the military.
Each patient is assigned a seven-person team of specialists and examined by the latest in brain scanning technology.
[Technician: We can see the orbits.
We can see the inner ear area.
We can see the nerves.
.]
James Kelley: This particular machinery gathers would actually capture somewhere between three and 400 such images.
Dr.
James Kelley, the director of NICoE showed us how one soldier's brain looked normal in a conventional CT scan while more sophisticated screenings revealed physical damage.
James Kelley: Using the more advanced technology called SWI just in that same plane of the brain there are multiple black dots, unequivocal evidence of traumatic brain injury.
David Martin: No more guess work.
I mean, that's--that's a big deal in any field.
James Kelley: It's huge.
We've been able to detect in more than a third and not quite half of our patients' abnormalities that hadn't been seen in any previous imaging.
David Martin: Nearly half the, the soldiers who come here are seeing for the first time that they have physical damage to their brains.
James Kelley: It's between 40 and 50 percent.
But here's the catch: NICoE treats only 20 patients a month.
So just a fraction of the servicemen and women suffering from traumatic brain injury ever get in the door.
Technician: All right.
Here we go.
David Martin: And what are the estimated number of cases of traumatic brain injury? James Kelley: Traumatic brain injury has been diagnosed over the last 11 years in about a quarter of a million service members.
Most of them have simple concussions and will recover.
But tens of thousands - the Pentagon is not sure exactly how many - have serious, perhaps permanent, injuries to their brain, injuries which, because they're invisible, can be hard to explain.
Sgt.
Allen Hill suffered concussions in Iraq and Afghanistan but it wasn't until he got his brain scanned at NICoE that he could prove he wasn't just faking.
Allen Hill: There's folks out there that just accuse soldiers of being malingerers, of faking symptoms and that's like calling me a coward and I'm not.
David Martin: So when you see that physical damage to your brain, what does that say after a year of being told you were a malingerer? Allen Hill: Makes me want to whip someone's ass for that kind of carrying on.
Doctor: I'd like to show you the brain MRI images that you had done.
After four years of blaming himself for not getting better, Ben Richards came to NICoE and found out he was suffering from more than post-traumatic stress.
There it is - a significant loss of activity on one side of his brain.
Ben Richards: It does seem to really affirm that this is a physical injury.
You know, I've actually been damaged.
This is not something that's just made up.
It really lifts a burden that there's a reason why I have trouble getting back to that normal that - just always seems out of grasp.
And likely to remain out of grasp because doctors at NICoE cannot cure brain damage.
The best they can do is help soldiers cope with the lasting effects of their battlefield concussions.
David Martin: The science says you should have sat out.
If you had to do it over, what would you do? Ben Richards: I could not have made a different choice.
David Martin: Because? Ben Richards: In the fight we were in .
.
.
David Martin: It's OK, take your time.
Ben Richards: Some days we didn't come back.
We were out in our combat outposts five or six days a week, sometimes literally fighting from the walls of our combat outposts.
Maybe having a little residual traumatic brain injury seemed like the least of our worries.
[Marine: How you doing, sir? Arnold Fisher: How ya doing? Marine: Nice to meet you.
.]
No one is more moved by stories like that than 80-year-old Arnold Fisher .
.
.
[Arnold Fisher: We owe you guys.
You, know, we owe you guys a lot.
.]
who is once again a man on a mission: This time to raise $90 million to build nine more brain injury centers at military bases around the country.
[Manager: You just let me know what you need and when you need it.
We'll get it there.
Arnold Fisher: I'll hold you to that.
Manager: That's not a problem.
.]
One of the first is under construction at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
Arnold Fisher: People say to me the government should be doing this.
Yeah, the government should be doing this, but they're not.
So we do it.
Nine would enable the military to care for of new cases they are expecting even with the war in Afghanistan winding down.