Sean Penn Article "Camp Penn" in Vanity Fair July 2010

An article was released online for Vanity Fair, {but the print and publish for our taste won't be out till the July issue on June 8th.}

Here's the article in case in get's removed and hard to find online:

If it looks as though Sean Penn is just another Hollywood star courting headlines with a camera-ready cause, look again. With a midlife milestone looming (Penn turns 50 in August), his marriage to Robin Wright Penn seemingly finished (“She is a ghost to me now,” he observes), and a teenage son, Hopper, having recovered from a life-threatening skateboard accident, the Oscar-winning actor decided to redirect his focus and his priorities. Instead of shooting another film or hawking his latest (Fair Game, in which he portrays Ambassador Joseph Wilson, playing opposite Naomi Watts as “outed” C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame), Penn ended up committing himself to the people of Pétionville, a once-affluent Haitian suburb where he now runs a camp for 50,000 displaced earthquake survivors.

As Vanity Fair’s July issue reveals in detail for the first time, a week after the quake hit last January—killing an estimated quarter of a million people—Penn, a longtime political activist, joined forces with L.A.-based, Sarajevo-born philanthropist Diana Jenkins (creating the humanitarian organization J/P HRO), lined up crisis veteran Alison Thompson to assist in recruiting an A-team of relief volunteers, and flew from his home in Malibu to a ravaged hillside in Port-au-Prince—with a dozen doctors in tow. Ever since, Penn, wearing camouflage khakis and carrying a Glock handgun, has been living in a tent not much larger than an army-surplus locker. And this spring the actor and his organization—who toil alongside Haitian colleagues, fellow aid workers, and army rangers—were designated by their fellow NGOs and U.N. officials as the “camp manager” of the Pétionville facility.

Author Douglas Brinkley, the historian, V.F. contributing editor, and a decade-long acquaintance of Penn’s (the pair volunteered in New Orleans in 2005 shortly after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina), traces the humanitarian and personal motivations of the typically press-averse Penn, examining his desire to become an activist in the Phil Ochs mold. “I wanted to give back something more to help struggling people, but I didn’t know how best to do it,” Penn tells Brinkley. “I was for 20 years in a relationship with Robin and 18 years with children. I didn’t have time to commit to anything—for real—in places like Iraq, except to denounce the war. But now I’m single. I can lend a hand.”

For the past five months, Penn’s home base has been the sprawling tent city set up on the former Pétionville country club. (He has left only for a short fund-raising swing, to attend the Oscars in March, and to testify about Haiti on Capitol Hill in May.) As the camp has been buffeted by outbreaks of TB, malaria, dengue fever, and diphtheria, and as the rainy season threatens to bring new potential perils (mud slides, disease, civil unrest), Penn spearheads relief efforts, helps relocate displaced families, and works to arrange deliveries of emergency medical supplies—in one instance coordinating with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to airlift in morphine and other drugs.

The U.S. military, it turns out, are among Penn’s strongest supporters. “My politics are not in line with Sean Penn’s,” states Major General Simeon Trombitas, a frequent guest at J/P HRO compound. “But we are allied in trying to save lives and alleviate human suffering. He is a doer and not a talker...and I respect that immensely.” Lieutenant General P. K. Keen, deputy commander of the U.S. Southern Command, concurs: “In a humanitarian crisis you can be a neutral—always pinching your knuckles white. Or you can operate an NGO the way Mr. Penn does.… He intuitively knew how to both work with the U.N. and break its bureaucracy down.... I applaud the leadership he has shown. He doesn’t have to do this.”

Says Penn of Keen, recalling a recent ceremony at which the general bestowed several commendations on Penn for his Haitian crisis work: “Keen gave me this look in the eye—a look of pride. It meant more to me than any movie award.”

While Penn has abiding respect for scores of his U.N. and NGO compatriots, he is careful to point out what he sees as an inherent risk whenever diverse, committed groups vie to make their mark on the world. “Many people in the U.N. and NGO disaster-relief community share much with Hollywood: envy, Schadenfreude, and the cover [that] bureaucracy gives to a cult of unimaginative ambulance chasers—all of whom want to claim it was they who ‘made the movie’ on Haitian relief.”

Penn insists he will remain in Haiti for the long haul. “There is no exit for me until there is more life than death,” Penn says. “I can always see light in any situation. It’s just the way I’m made. I’m capable of making foolish commitments. Of being a fool. But I can see the light very clearly in terms of the ‘big picture’ for Haiti.”

Adds Penn: “There is a strength of character in the people who have, by and large, never experienced comfort. That’s exactly the character that our Main Street culture lacks and needs in the United States. In other words, we need Haiti.”

While J/P HRO has helped bring about a real social-engineering achievement, Penn says that the displaced people of Port-au-Prince have given him a gift as well. “It’s a reciprocal thing. They have returned to me something I had lost—my humility.”

Vanity Fair’s July issue, which contains the full text of “Welcome to Camp Penn” by Douglas Brinkley and photographs of Penn’s efforts by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson, hits newsstands in New York and Los Angeles on June 2 and will be released nationwide on June 8.