Micronesia’S Medic Of Mercy Soldier Ordered To Care For 12 Ends Up Treating Thousands
Medic Patrick Kern’s military orders seemed straightforward: Care for 12 Air Force engineers building roads and offices in the Pacific island state of Chuuk. Treat a few locals. Perform some physical exams.
But within weeks, Kern was fighting a measles epidemic that sickened 800, arranging two emergency Air Force flights to bring in medicine and cots and calling in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention so he could vaccinate 3,000 children.
On his second tour to Chuuk, which ended last month, Kern led a joint team that treated more than 11,000 people.
Military history is peppered with missions of mercy - from the Berlin airlift to Operation Restore Hope in Somalia.
This is the story of one man, one country and a boat.
The man is Patrick J. Kern, a 38-year-old Air Force master sergeant from Spokane. The country is the Federated States of Micronesia, a scattering of islands poking out of the vastness of the Pacific Ocean 600 miles southeast of Guam. The boat is a 25-foot Boston whaler he taught himself to navigate to reach more than 11,000 islanders ailing from everything from tuberculosis to leprosy. Now he’s trying to help buy such a boat for the impoverished public health department there.
In the month Kern has been home, he’s opened the Chuuk Medical Relief Fund at Global Credit Union and is contacting international relief groups to try to continue his work. He’s adjusting to being back home. “I feel a sense of responsibility about what I know,” Kern said. “I know what they need there to save lives.”
“When you do something like that and feel so good about it, you can’t just walk away,” said his wife, Linda.
As a medical technician stationed at the Fairchild Air Force Base Survival School, Kern cares for some of the healthiest people on earth: young fliers and navigators undergoing the rigors of survival training.
He rotates from the base to field camps in the Colville forest where students sleep on the ground in 4 feet of snow and 15-degree weather. He’s treated broken bones, cuts, burns and flu bouts, and searched for lost hikers and downed airplanes.
Since late 1994, Kern also has served two eight-month tours in remote Chuuk, formerly the Truk Islands, the main Japanese base in the Central Pacific before World War II. Known as the “Gibraltar of the Pacific,” the Japanese Navy anchored there was protected by coral reefs and giant guns in caves, author David Stanley wrote in the “Micronesian Handbook.” In February 1944, the United States attacked, sinking 60 Japanese ships and downing more than 250 planes in the shallow Chuuk lagoon.
Today those sunken hulks make for some of the best scuba diving in the world, but the future of Chuuk is not so clear. The United States took control of it and other strategic islands of the Federated States in 1947 under a United Nations trusteeship. Then, in 1986, under the Compact of Free Association, the Federated States became an independent nation with the United States maintaining $1.3 billion in economic support and defense over 15 years.
As part of that commitment, the U.S. military maintains civic action teams that build roads and public buildings and offer community medical assistance.
Instead of seeing visitors in his military office or on an occasional visit to a Head Start program, Kern headed out with local help, visiting islands where there are no roads, electricity or basic health care.
Visits to homes where people complained of the “sickness” led him to identify the measles outbreak that eventually killed 30. He hired a boat operator and, with Chuukese public health nurses, began visiting the 20 scattered islands and atolls, setting up makeshift clinics as he went. When he left in 1995, he was confident the collaboration would continue.
It didn’t. Returning last spring, he found the outreach had all but stopped.
The boat operator was gone. Chuuk hospital was infested by termites, its refrigeration and laboratory broken. It was a hospital that guidebooks said was “where you go to die.” Nevertheless, hundreds of islanders were seeking medical care there daily.
Kern went to his commander, Maj. Brian Ouellette of Hill Air Force Base in Ogden, Utah, and the Chuukese governor, Ansito Walters. The men persuaded the Navy to upgrade the hospital instead of a visitors lounge at the airport. The Navy approved renovating the pediatric ward, the outpatient area and the emergency room.
Kern resumed his trips around the lagoon and outlying areas, putting the naval boat in the water himself every morning at 6 a.m., taking out just before dark. He organized Chuukese doctors, dentists and social workers and made more than 50 outreach trips.
They endured being stranded when their small boats broke down on the open ocean. They suffered fungal and skin infections in the tropical heat. At one point, 20 volunteers crowded into a small commercial ship for a 22-day stint in the Lower Mortlock Islands 180 miles away.
They gave immunizations, antibiotics, lessons in personal hygiene, sanitation, treating alcoholism and family planning. They treated more than 400 children for scabies - the itch mite.
“It takes a special type of person to do that, an action figure basically,” said Capt. Richard Miller, a physician’s assistant and longtime colleague of Kern’s at Fairchild. “He’s a real humanitarian.”
“He’s always been driven,” Linda Kern said.
While her husband was in Chuuk, Linda collected and packed up clothes, toys and dishes, shipping the packages to her husband to distribute to local families. Baby clothes were particularly popular. Her co-workers in the accounting department at Kaiser Trentwood pitched in with postage and donations. The couple’s daughters Bailey, 10, and Jordyn, 12, emptied their closets and collected items at school.
While in the Mortlocks, Kern had a bizarre reunion. During his ‘94-‘95 tour, he had arranged for a woman in labor to be airlifted to a hospital for an emergency Caesarean section, which resulted in a healthy son. On this trip, Kern was astounded to find Teflin Mony in labor again. Her second child also was healthy - a boy she named Patrick K.
Other Air Force team members became involved, volunteering for trips. One carpenter from Oklahoma adopted a local infant.
Like many of the men and women who have served in the Pacific over the past 50 years, they worry about the future of the islands. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has slowly withdrawn from the Pacific island nations, taking diplomats, educational programs and economic support from these once key areas. The Compact of Free Association is set to end in 2001.
Kern wants to ensure that local health workers have the means to deliver basic health care: namely affordable medicine, fuel and a boat. He’s hoping to raise money and arrange the contracts to provide the supplies. He doesn’t know if he will return to Chuuk for the Air Force or as a civilian, but he feels at some point, he’ll be back.
On his last trip to the Mortlock Islands, the team treated a boy who had been stabbed in the chest with a machete. Kern’s team sewed up the wound, gave him antibiotics, and then left. What if the team hadn’t been there?
“I know it’s happening every day, and they’re living with it,” Kern said. “That’s the part I can’t ignore.”
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