Patrick Kern and his brother grew up north of San Francisco, in Marin County. Their father, who grew up in the projects, enlisted in the Army to become a dental technician. When Patrick graduated from high school in 1987, he attended West Point and chose the Army. His branch was Armor. His brother enlisted in the Marine Corps.
The FBI has me out on Staten Island, doing surveillance on these organized crime goombahs. I’m on my way home one day and see an M1 battle tank rolling down the freeway.
When you graduate from West Point, your obligation is five years of active service, four years reserves. My active service is done.
In October of 1992, a little over a year after graduating, the Army sent me, a brand-new second lieutenant, on my first combat tour along the Kuwait-Iraq border. The Kuwaitis and Iraqis were going at it. Department of Energy guys were there to issue us the ammo for our tanks—kinetic sabot rounds made with depleted uranium, designed to penetrate hardened steel and armor.
I did another tour there in 1993. When I came back, I did two years as a platoon leader and then another two as an executive officer. Then I punched out and went pretty much straight into the FBI, and now here I am working organized crime for the New York City field office.
As I watch the tank rolling down the highway, I’m thinking, I don’t know what unit that is, but that’s the unit I’m going to join. And that’s how I get exposed to the 1st Battalion of the 101st Cavalry. It’s an old unit from New York that became a tank battalion back in the day, and it’s right here in Staten Island.
“You’ve got to turn on the TV,” a friend of mine says.
I’m barely awake as I hold the phone to my ear. I was out late the night before and planned on sleeping in. I’ve got to go into work later in the day.
I sit up in bed, in my apartment in New Jersey. “What’s going on?”
“Plane attacked the tower.”
I turn on the TV, thinking back to an accident from the 1940s, when a B-25 accidentally flew into the Empire State Building. The plane my friend said flew into the tower—it has to be the same situation: an accident.
Then the second plane hits and I know what’s going on.
I pack a bunch of extra clothes and then I grab my military uniform. I throw my dog tags around my neck, throw my shit in the car, hit the siren and drive my ass into the city. I’m about fifty miles out.
By the time I’m on the road driving into the city, the state troopers have already cleared the highways. I get a police escort for about thirty miles and then he breaks off and I go right through the Holland Tunnel and pop up into the disaster.
The FBI has a garage on the West Side Highway. When I arrive, I see a lot of FBI personnel already there. They’re using the garage as a command post. It’s mass confusion.
I meet with my supervisors and then we try to figure out where our people are. The big bosses are trying to figure out what they’re going to do next while trying to get accurate information on what exactly happened.
The phones are limited. When I’m able to use one, I call my master gunner.
In 1998, when I took over company command, the Army had gone from eighteen active-duty divisions down to ten. A whole bunch of soldiers who got out of the Army were young, experienced, and still wanted to serve. During the mid-1990s, the Guard had an influx of these former soldiers. These guys are now cops and firemen and state troopers and corrections officers. Some are district attorneys. They’re talented people with professional careers.
When I get ahold of my master gunner, I tell him to call up our guys, have everyone go to the Armory, post guards, and secure it. Two of my platoon leaders are there in a couple of hours. They roll the tanks out on the street, which somehow immediately gets back to the adjutant general in the governor’s office. I get a phone call from some major who screams at me to get my tanks out of the street.
I hang up on him.
When I’m not talking to the agents and FBI personnel around me, I’m on the phone making more calls. Nobody seems to have a handle on what’s going on—if another attack is coming, if there are more planes in the air.
Later in the day, the Bureau decides that agents will go on twelve-hour schedules. The National Security branch gets days. Criminal—my branch—gets nights. I’ll be working from 10:00 p.m. to 10:00 a.m. every day, for the foreseeable future.
When the FBI releases me, I drive to Staten Island, report to my battalion commander, and help him get organized. By seven o’clock that night, all my guys have rolled in, dressed in their gear. They’re ready to do what they’ve been trained to do. They operate well in this sort of environment.
Each day, when my twelve-hour shift for the Bureau ends, I head over to Battery Park, where my battalion commander has set up headquarters. There, for the next couple of weeks, I get tasked out to different military guard checkpoints surrounding the zone around the rubble.
The Bureau is my priority. Any free time I have I spend with the battalion commander or out with my guys.
We then get tasked to guard the Williamsburg Bridge. It’s basically a security detail—nothing hard, just keeping an eye out and interacting with the civilians, who tell us how it gives them a sense of calm, seeing soldiers out there with M4s.
Our presence has another effect: it shuts down a known place where crack dealers meet up with all the junkies. The crack dealers and junkies are pissed off because the National Guard has taken over their site and shut down the drug trade.
I spend Christmas pulling a security detail on the Williamsburg Bridge. I think about the day the planes hit the towers. I think about my friends who died there and I think about agents like Lenny Hatton, who jumped on a fire truck and went down to the World Trade Center to help. That was the last anyone saw of him.
A lot of the FBI agents who were down near the WTC that morning and survived came right back to work all covered in dirt, filth, and dust. Some people can handle events like that. Others can’t, like this kid in my unit. He’d been in one of the Towers, got out and survived, and now he’s broken. Done.
We have to release him from the unit. He’s not mission-focused, which makes him a liability.
Years later, I’ll read this book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, written by a military guy named Dave Grossman. He’ll talk about how courage is like having money in the bank. Everybody has money in the bank, but some have more than others. And every time you go out and get into a bad situation, you take a little bit of money out of this bank. If you keep taking money and don’t put any in, you’ll reach a breaking point.
There’s no shame in it. Some people hit it earlier than others. When it happens, you need to step away and go someplace where you can recharge, put money back into that account. You have to step away and recharge so you can come back stronger.
When my command ends in 2002, my obligation to the Army is done, and I’m done with the military. The Bureau offers me what’s called an OP, an office of preference, and I choose San Francisco. I’m a senior agent, and my FBI career is getting busier and busier. In 2004, I’m given an amazing opportunity: Oxford accepts me into its MBA program.
Mario, my old battalion commander back in New York, calls me and says, “Hey, the division has been alerted. I’m now the big dog who puts the whole shebang together for the commander. I want you to come over to Iraq and be my deputy.”
“I’m going to Oxford.”
“No, you’re coming to be my deputy.”
“I’m taking a year off and going to Oxford. I need a break.”
“No, you’re going over to be my deputy.”
We go back and forth like this for days.
The Bureau isn’t going to pay for my MBA. To go to Oxford, I have to take a leave of absence and go a year without pay, plus take out a loan to pay the eighty thousand dollars for this one-year MBA program. I start crunching the numbers and start thinking maybe I don’t want to take on this kind of debt.
Mario keeps calling and pressuring me. I finally make a decision.
“I’ll give you one year,” I tell him. “I’ll be your deputy G3 for one year.”
I take a military leave from the FBI and ship back to upstate New York for training. When I get there, Mario tells me he gave my job away to someone else.
“You’re now the CHOPS,” he says.
“What the fuck? You said I can be your deputy G3, and now I’m chief of operations? That’s a step below.”
“There’s another CHOPS—this other major. He’s going to be the senior CHOPS. You’re going to be the junior. He’ll get nights, you’ll get days.”
This is just getting better and better, I tell myself. I shouldn’t be so surprised by Mario’s actions. This is typical Army. No good deed goes unpunished.
In 2004, IEDs are becoming a huge problem in Iraq.
The 278th Cav is still equipped with the light Humvees. To give them some protection, they turn them into these Mad Max–type vehicles, bolting on steel and making turrets. When I go out on combat patrols, I sit on Kevlar blankets with these ad hoc steel doors, a little periscope for windows.
I travel to pretty much every major city in the four provinces. I file report after report back to the division commander and my G3 about the bloodbaths I see on the battlefield.
When the Iraqis are not attacking us, they’re attacking the elections that are going on. A chief of police from one tribe gets elected, and the other tribe assassinates him. We have another election. Another guy wins, and then he gets assassinated. The Sunnis go after any Shiites who go out and vote. Suicide car bombs go off and kill anywhere from seventy to eighty people.
It’s a daily occurrence.
When they’re not killing each other, they’re mortaring our forward operating base and using IEDs to try to take us out on the roads.
In the beginning, the IEDs are mostly old Soviet 155 shells planted in a road with wires. When they detonate one, shrapnel gets into the target vehicle. The explosions are not catastrophic.
Then they start using EFPs—explosively formed projectiles made in Iran. They’re diabolical. A single EFP can penetrate an armored Humvee as well as Bradleys and tanks. We start losing drivers here and there. When the enemy buries a whole bunch of these EFP explosives in the road, it can shred a Humvee, kill four or five guys at one time.
When my deployment ends in 2005, we’ve sent seventy-two kids home in body bags.
What people have a hard time understanding is that Iraqi culture isn’t wired for democracy. All these Iraqi tribes are basically interconnected. They’re all brothers; sisters; third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh cousins—and yet they’ve hated each other for centuries. They’re all at each other’s throats, vying for power.
Their culture values death. They have no problem killing three hundred people with one car bomb—men, women, and children. Someone there had to explain to me that when an old man dies in the Arab culture, it’s a tragedy because an old man is full of irreplaceable wisdom, knowledge, and experience. But if a child dies, their attitude is, “We’ll make more.”
Every day while I was over there, we would ask ourselves the same question: how do we deal with this situation?
To this day, I still don’t have an answer.