Heroes in a hero’s no man’s land

This month, we have been remembering the many victims of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as well as many more Americans who have sacrificed their lives or suffered life-changing injuries in military operations over the last 10 years. But one important group of heroes will be remembered only privately, their service and sacrifice lost in a no man’s land of legislative language and confusion over what they represent. 

I am talking about the men and women who trained police forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, serving under dangerous conditions to help bring about the rule of law and establish responsible policing in countries that have never known it. The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, where their names should be inscribed, is closed to them by an oversight in the law. We should commit ourselves to rectifying that injustice.

{mosads}Establishing modern policing — or in the case of Afghanistan, the beginnings of modern policing — was a priority for our government, which dedicated billions of dollars to the effort. The idea was that creating new police forces would put security in the hands of civilian government, aid the transition to democracy and speed the return of our troops. 

My husband, Darrell Wetherbee, was one of the police officers who answered our government’s call and volunteered as an International Police Officer (IPO). He went to Iraq to train and mentor police — not in a police academy, but in police garrisons and on the streets of Iraq, where he and his colleagues accompanied, monitored and advised their Iraqi counterparts. Darrell and I were both police officers in Maine, and I understood and supported his decision to volunteer for this duty. 

On Sept. 17, 2006, Darrell was killed by a sniper outside the police station in the city of Hawija, near Tikrit, Iraq. Darrell’s name is not on any memorial to those who have sacrificed their lives for our country, nor is the name of any of the 19 IPOs killed in the line of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the 12 killed in the Balkans. For several years, the families of these police officers have attempted to get their loved ones’ names placed on the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. We have been told that the legislation that established the memorial doesn’t allow it because, officially, they were employees of a private company.

The Department of State contracted private companies to recruit, prepare, equip and sustain the police trainers and mentors sent overseas to carry out policing and police-training activities. Companies such as DynCorp International, PAE and L-3 MPRI then recruited professional police officers and former police officers to conduct the training.

These officers were employees of a government contractor, but they took their orders, strategies, tactics and assignments from the Army or the State Department, and they functioned individually as if they were government employees. (Darrell was part of the U.S. Army’s Civilian Police Assistance Training Team, a component of the Multinational Security Transition Command-Iraq.) They even worked in teams with military police. And when they died, their hometown police forces buried them with full honors.

My husband was motivated by a desire to serve his country. I now know many IPOs and many family members of IPOs killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they say the same thing. Police officers have a strong ethic of public service, and many of these volunteers were military veterans who wanted to contribute again. Yes, they were paid well, and some people have argued that that fact makes them somehow less deserving of honor. This attitude reflects a misunderstanding of how people working for contractors were paid. Darrell earned the rough equivalent of a GS-12 civilian employee serving in Iraq and receiving hardship and danger pay premiums. But no agency — not the State Department, the Defense Department or the CIA — has denied its fallen employees the honor they are due because they received extra pay for the dangers they faced. In retrospect, can anyone say that that compensation was not justified?

It is time to recognize the police who have served our country overseas for their contributions and their sacrifice. Our country could not carry out stability operations without them, neither in Iraq and Afghanistan nor in the other places they have served — the Balkans, Haiti, East Timor or even the Palestinian territories. They have been part of a vast citizen exchange, transferring not just policing skills but also their democratic values as American citizens who enforce the law with honor, compassion and a strong sense of justice.

I have always believed that the event that took Darrell’s life could be traced directly back to the 9/11 tragedy, almost as if a time bomb had been set and had ticked away for five years and six days, until it finally exploded with his death. Since then, I have shared a bond with the families of other fallen IPOs, all of whom feel, as I do, that the selfless service and noble deaths of our loved ones are being unjustly ignored. A change in the language governing the national police memorial to include police officers serving on official U.S. government police missions abroad can change that. A simple act of Congress would bring these heroes out of the no man’s land they now inhabit and ennoble their sacrifice. 

Wetherbee is president and founder of International Police Survivors, an organization that provides support to families of police officers killed in U.S. government police missions overseas.