Some cadets are nearly abducted off the streets by police recruiters, some are insurgents, some are criminals, and some just need the money. While many have selfish motives, many more hope to contribute and make a real difference in improving their country. Kerns admires those Iraqis who manage to hold on to this mindset while becoming police officers, despite all the forces and cultural barriers in their way.
When her cadets return to Iraq, they will find themselves working with many leaders who don’t or won’t share their concept of what a police officer ought to be. Many of their superiors have grown up with a ruthless dictatorship as their example of how to enforce the law. Those cadets who believe in a democratic cause and believe there is a better way to live will have a long, lonely, and painful road ahead. Kerns agrees with the program’s director, Ted Weekely, when he says, “We are planting the seeds. Whether or not those seeds sprout in this lifetime or another remains to be seen . . . but they will sprout. Change is in the works.”
During her time with the Memphis Police Department, Kerns spent about fifteen years as a uniformed police officer, four years in narcotics investigations, and eight years as a violent crimes investigator. In 1997, she was working the night shift known as the Dinosaur Squad because it always seemed to draw older officers with the seniority to bid on the shift over junior officers. Like a scene from the old sitcom Barney Miller, nearly every evening Kerns’ police lieutenant would converse with her over coffee at the station. Night after night, he seemed to have a new idea about what he was going to do when he retired. No one ever seemed to take him seriously, but many of the officers wondered aloud about what he planned to do next.
The question always drew a few chuckles, some of the officers would roll their eyes, and others would say, “Oh, I don’t believe you asked him that question!” Several officers would head straight for the door. “Time to roll,” they would say. Everyone knew they were in for a long-winded story. Kerns never minded. She would just smile and say, “Let’s hear it, Larry,” and Larry always accommodated her. He had no delusions about the reaction of the other officers. He didn’t much care. His good friend Kerns always lent an ear, and for that he was grateful.
So on one particular night, Kerns pops the standard question. She recalls, “Larry became excited and pulled out a mutilated, crumpled-up piece of paper. As he carefully unfolded it, he exclaimed, ‘I’m gonna retire. I’m gonna fill out this application with DynCorp. I’m gonna make eighty grand a year, and I’m going to Bosnia to train those folks over there how to be good policemen.’”
For some reason this piqued her interest. “Where’s Bosnia?” she asked. “Who are you going train? How do get a job like that? What are the qualifications? I sat up in my chair, walked over to the coffeepot for a refill, and strolled on over to get a closer listen to just what it was that Larry was up to this time.
“I had been mulling over retiring myself. Police work was getting old. Even with a perfect investigation and a mile of paperwork, too many criminals were just getting a walk, too many cops moving up the chain of command solely because they are [with] the in-crowd. Trying to be a good cop can just beat you to death after a while. I was tired and frankly felt I had been put out to pasture. It was getting awfully hard to look past the administrative murk and see anyone who cared. I looked over the qualifications and thought to myself, I could do this! Perhaps it was time for a change. I took that ratty piece of paper over to the copier, pressed out the creases as best I could, and made a reasonably ratty copy of the document.
“The idea was growing on me. By the end of my shift the next morning, I was excited to go home and have a sit-down conversation with my husband. If there was half a chance that DynCorp would accept me, the only real obstacle I could foresee would be the stress of being away from my husband for a year. We had been married eighteen years. He and I needed to seriously sound this out. We had many conversations over the next several days. I would look at my husband, Ken, in the eyes and ask him directly, ‘If I go, will this be OK with us? I mean will you be OK? Can we handle the separation?’ My husband, who was also a police officer, supported and encouraged me. I felt he could see that I was excited about the prospect, and he never once gave me reason to doubt that our marriage wouldn’t hold together.
“I started faxing information and applications back and forth to DynCorp. The thought processes had started a ball rolling [that] was now irreversible. Over the next several days, I realized that I was retiring regardless of how the application to DynCorp came out. I gave my notice, had a party, and retired all within a matter of days. I hadn’t yet heard anything definite from DynCorp, but it didn’t much matter. I was hanging up my police uniform.
“It was Thursday of that week and my husband and I planned a little celebration vacation. He and I were going to head out to California with my nephew and my mother to just kick everything loose for a couple of weeks. The decision to retire had lifted a huge load off me and I was really looking forward to the trip. We took our time en route to San Diego, arriving on a Monday, to a waiting message from DynCorp, telling me they wanted me in Ft. Worth the next Saturday morning for training prior to deployment to Bosnia. It was like a hot flash. I mean, reality struck like a lightning bolt. It’s kind of one of those things: Be careful what you ask for because you might just get it. I flew out of California Thursday, spent one day packing for a year’s absence from home, and flew to Dallas-Fort Worth Saturday morning. The rest of my family continued to the Grand Canyon, arriving back in Memphis after I had already departed for the Balkans.
“Well, I ended up in eastern Slavonia, near the Croatian-Serbian border along the Danube. I spent a year trying to keep the Croats from abusing the Serbs and vice versa. I became the regional civilian police human rights coordinator and had my hands full investigating allegations and counter-allegations between the two groups. I saw so many injustices and so many families destroyed and homeless. If Serbs had moved into a Croatian family’s home while it was vacant during the war, many times the Croatian family was just SOL. It was there that I really started to realize how good we have it back in the States.
“A year later I came back to Tennessee. DynCorp soon wanted me to go to Kosovo. My husband told everyone how proud he was of me. He completely supported me taking another contract in eastern Europe. That should have been a clue that something was really wrong, but he just seemed to be so proud of me—more so than in several years. It wasn’t until I served about four months in Kosovo, prior to the NATO involvement there and returned home for a few months, before the lightbulb went on and I realized he had hooked up with one of my ‘friends.’ So the marriage ended, and finding myself alone and needing to pay off some end-of-marriage debt, I returned to Kosovo for another six-month contract.
“On returning from Kosovo in 2000, I became an agent for the West Tennessee Judicial Violent Crime and Drug Task Force, directed by the Shelby County District Attorney General’s Office. But I was never the same again. The quality of the people I had worked with overseas defied description. The bonding, the camaraderie, the mission, and the professionalism of the contractors was like something I had never felt before. I missed the excitement and the sense of purpose.
“If you have worked in the contracting business, you instantly have access to a network of contacts and people who know people. The people you have worked with become like family. They travel around the world. One may be in Idaho, another in Afghanistan, another in Kosovo. The network helps the network. I put my SOS out on the network in 2004. There was a lot of discussion about the U.S. building an Iraqi police academy in Hungary. We were all pretty excited. Hungary, compared to Bosnia or Kosovo, is a pretty nice place. When the Hungarian government balked at the idea, the U.S. government scrambled to find a new location. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan agreed to host the academy, and almost overnight Iraqi police applicants were pouring into Amman, Jordan, for eight weeks of police training.” With a new sense of purpose, Kerns signed up with SA
IC (Scientific Applications International Corporation) and headed to the Middle East.
Iraqi cadet police training consists of four weeks of general police/law enforcement subjects and four weeks of operational tactics. General subjects include such courses as policing in a democracy, gender issues, and antiterrorism. The last four weeks cover operational policing, which includes firearms, defensive tactics, tactical driving, and practical applications (i.e., officer survival). The class is broken into four color groups; black, white, green, and red. These are the colors of the Iraqi national flag. Classes in these last four weeks are independent subjects and the colored groups will rotate between instruction committees (i.e., the black group may go to firearms, and red may go to defensive tactics for their first week).
When Kerns arrived, about three months after the academy had opened, she was assigned to its practical applications unit. She was placed for the first introductory week with two other police officers, a Swedish and a British female who were responsible for officer survival training to a group of around forty Iraqi men. “Everyone thinks this would have been terribly complicated given the attitudes Arab men generally hold toward women,” Kerns remarked. “Interestingly, I found that their attitude toward Arab women versus their attitude toward Western women is often very different. Watching a lot of U.S. movies has shaped their perceptions. U.S. women, especially U.S. policewomen, are frequently portrayed in movies as aggressive, take-no-prisoners, martial arts experts. As long as you don’t start acting like some sort of ‘girlie girl’ and you take control of your class from the start, you can usually maintain good order and discipline.
“All our local contractors are tied one way or another with the Jordanian royal family. Tri-Services has the contract for base services.” Kerns laments the problems: “Millions of American dollars are being spent here. The priority for facilities and equipment seems to be for administrative functions. Buildings have been finished for four months, but we are not allowed to use any of them for training purposes.
“Tri-Services is supposed to supply food, water, office supplies, uniforms, language assistants, and cleaning staff. The instructors here find themselves having to go into Amman and buy supplies out of their own pocket. We have all sorts of problems with the Jordanian contractors. For example, they provided pencils that break when you attempt to sharpen them and crates of pens that don’t write. They put in cheap fifty-dollar desks and bill us for three hundred dollars. They charge thirteen dollars for a pair of foam earplugs that go for less than a buck in the States. We had about two hundred ‘ghost’ interpreters for the last six months. They were on the payroll but no one ever sees them. We’re all pretty disgusted with this treatment.
“We are in desperate need of ‘red guns’ [the rubber ones used in training]. We need vehicles for role-playing stop-and-search operations. Student uniforms are in short supply and many times a student has to go through the entire eight weeks in his sweatsuit and flip-flops. Cadets are told to bring no more than four changes of clothing. That’s kind of comical, since many of them don’t even own four changes of clothing. The age range is supposed to be between twenty and thirty-five, but we have many come here [who] are sixteen and I know I have taught a few [who] were pushing fifty. The younger ones, when we catch them, are sent back.
“Training these cadets is an experience I’ll never forget,” Kerns reflects. “The biggest challenge is getting them to take initiative. They are afraid to make decisions. Everything in their society, until now, was either given to them or they were directed what to do. Traditionally, taking initiative could get them tortured or killed by their superiors. They are afraid to speak up, afraid to ask questions, and afraid to assume responsibility. They are accustomed to simply taking orders and never questioning or clarifying directives. In a sense, they are like slaves who have just been freed and their newfound independence is uncomfortable. In order for a policeman to be effective, he must be able to make fast decisions and react in a rapid manner. Even more important is that he be proactive in his police work. Always waiting for another officer to tell him what to do won’t work.
“When problems develop in training they are afraid to report it to anyone. One of the recruits shot himself one day as he was holstering his 9mm Glock. There was still firing going on so the sound didn’t set off any alarms with the instructors. The guy continued on the firing line for probably an hour until one of the instructors near him noticed a pool of blood forming in the sand around his foot. When the instructor asked him what happened, he just calmly said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I accidentally shot myself when I was putting the gun in my holster.’ Fortunately it was a flesh wound in the thigh. The kid didn’t want to stop shooting or get reprimanded, so I guess he was going to just try and pretend for the next three weeks that nothing had happened.
“We try to inculcate in our students that torture is never an acceptable form of interrogation. When we ask them, ‘When can you use torture?’ We have conditioned them, or so we think, to respond in chorus with, ‘Never.’ Of course, we never seem to get everyone to say, ‘Never.’ Inevitably several students will always seriously respond that torture can be used when you haven’t gotten the answers you want. Sometimes, as instructors, we have to just shrug and laugh to ourselves, ‘Well, at least torture is now a last resort and not the first option.’ I guess that’s progress.
“On another day, when I was teaching a class on setting up police checkpoints, I asked the class how many in the room had been stopped at checkpoints, and a dozen or so hands went up. I called on one of the students to describe his experience. So the student says, ‘My friend and I were running guns out of Syria. I saw the checkpoint coming up and I got away but my friend got caught.’ I thought to myself, Oh, this is just great, and I’m training you to be a policeman. On yet another occasion, I had a student ask if he could call his mother. He explained that when he was in Iraq, his mother had sent him to buy a loaf of bread. He bumped into a police recruiter and next thing he knew he was here in Jordan. He was concerned that maybe his mother would be worried and he should probably call her. Trust me, every day here brings a new surprise.
“Our training time is precious. These students have a whole lot to learn in a very short period of time. Most of our cadets will only get to practice a house search or vehicle search one time. After that they will be in a war zone doing it for real. We are hampered by the fact that everything we say has to be translated into Arabic and that eats away at our available time. Our Kurdish students understand Arabic but most of them don’t read or write it. When we first started the academy, all the books and tests were in Arabic, and the Kurds really didn’t say much of anything until it came to test time and they couldn’t take the final exams.
“We have students whose relatives have come through an earlier class. Our graduates are being killed every day. Sometimes it is a family member of a student sitting in front of us. We had a cadet in my class this week [who] has two brothers that had come through our training and both were killed in a bombing at the beginning of the week. The family requested that we don’t tell their son. They plan on telling him when he gets back home. I look at the student every day and ask myself, What kind of homecoming for him is this going to be?
“One of our newly graduated classes got off the plane in Iraq, boarded a bus, and was slaughtered by insurgents while on their way home. It was very hard to take. Many of these young men are so proud of what they have become at our academy. They are anxious to go home and show off their new stature to their family and friends. Many of them have so much optimism for the future of their country. As instructors I think we really understand, maybe more so than our students, the perils they will face when they return home.
“In one class, I was helping another instructor conduct training on building searches. I role-played the part of a sleeping person. I was a ‘bad guy’ laying on the sofa when the students entered the room. As one of the students found me lying there in the dark, he was just stan
ding there. So I rolled off the sofa and attempted to ram him with my head—how ladylike of me! Unfortunately, and very much to my surprise, he did exactly what we trained him to do, he simply stepped aside. By that time, my body weight and momentum couldn’t be stopped. I rammed my head into a metal wall—denting the wall—and knocking myself silly. I heard what sounded like several bones cracking in my neck and it scared me as I fell backward onto the ground. I just knew that I had broken my neck. After a day of ice packs, it turned out that I was OK, but I am still working out the kinks.
“During Ramadan, Muslims are required to not eat or drink anything from sunup to sundown. We’re in the desert here so you can imagine what ‘no water’ all day is like. They eat breakfast before sunrise, which is about 4:20 a.m., and then they have nothing until after sundown, when they are served iftar, a small snack of dates, water, juice, or soup before prayer. After the fasting period, everyone eats and drinks until they are about to blow up. They stay up late into the night, just partying in general. This lasts for four weeks and is tied to the phases of the moon. During the fast, they are also not allowed to have any physical contact with the opposite sex—no touching, no holding hands, and, of course, no kissing.”
Kerns writes home about the impact of Ramadan at the police academy, “It has been six days since the beginning of Ramadan and already it is an eye-opener. People are mad at each other all the time. There are fights in the streets and arguments everywhere. At the camp the local staff is about 98 percent Muslim. Muslims who don’t fast infuriate those who do. It is against the law in Amman for a Muslim to smoke in the street, or to eat in public before sundown. If they do eat or smoke they are expected to do it in private so as to not offend those who are observing the traditions of Ramadan.
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