The Remarkable Life
of
Colonel Dan Kern
By: Chase Muro
Rewriting the story does not mean pretending the earlier chapters never happened.
It means they do not get to decide the ending.
At 19, Dan could not have known where the road from that courtroom would lead. He could not have known that the Army would become a career spanning more than four decades, or that one day soldiers would call him Colonel. He could not have known about the restaurants, the children, the grandchildren or the wars still waiting for him.
And he certainly could not have known about Nancy.
That part of Dan's story begins with a restaurant, several women, a cocktail server with an idea, and one of the most disastrous attempts at getting a first date imaginable.
Somehow, it worked.
Part Two: Soldier, Husband, Father
By the time Dan Kern began building a life in Portland's restaurant world, the young man who once stole Timberline Lodge's Saint Bernard was moving in a different direction.
He was sober. He was serving in the military. He was studying communications and beginning to discover that his life did not have to follow any conventional path.
In fact, very little about Dan's life would prove conventional.
At various points, he would be a soldier, radio disc jockey, restaurant owner, husband, father and military commander. Sometimes several of those roles existed at once.
But when Dan looks back now, the accomplishments that matter most to him are not the businesses he built or the military positions he held.
They are the people.
His wife.
His children.
His grandchildren.
And the faith that, after years of anger and wandering, increasingly became the center of his life.
From the Army to the Airwaves
After leaving active Army service and joining the Washington Army National Guard, Dan studied communications.
For a young man who had once struggled to find direction, broadcasting opened another world. Dan remembers working as a disc jockey for KQIV-FM 107, which he described as a major soul music station on the West Coast.
Dan said he was the station's only white employee.
But the music was familiar territory.
Dan had grown up in a racially mixed neighborhood, knew Black music and, as he will readily tell you, knew how to dance. Radio gave him another place where his personality could work for him.
Still, Dan eventually decided broadcasting was not where his future belonged.
"I don't want to do radio," he remembers thinking.
He wanted to own a restaurant.
Like several other turns in Dan's life, the path into the restaurant business was not exactly planned.
Dan remembers being at the Bottle Shop Tavern on Broadway in Northeast Portland when he intervened in a drunken confrontation. That encounter eventually led to a relationship with restaurateur Frank Peters.
Dan went to work for him.
He had never even tended bar.
Eventually, Dan became a part-owner of one of Peters' restaurants in Seattle. When that business relationship ended, Dan took his buyout and returned to Portland.
Now he knew what he wanted to do.
Abernathy's
Dan and two partners founded the Broadway Inn at Broadway and Jefferson.
They made an offer, remodeled the property and, in 1976, opened Abernathy's.
Dan remembers it taking off.
Abernathy's was fine dining, with a large bar and what Dan recalls as an enormous liquor selection. He says the restaurant carried more than 300 brands and attracted prominent Portlanders, athletes and other recognizable customers.
For Dan, it was a home run.
More restaurants followed, including Ainsworth and Jr.'s.
There is an irony in a man whose life had nearly been destroyed by alcohol finding success in a business where alcohol was everywhere.
But Dan was sober.
And he stayed sober.
He was also still serving in the military.
That is one of the unusual things about this period of Dan's life. The restaurant business was not something he did after the military. The two careers overlapped.
While customers were eating dinner and ordering drinks at his restaurants, Dan was simultaneously building a military career that would eventually take him far beyond Portland.
Before that happened, however, Dan had another part of his life to straighten out.
His relationships with women.
Dan does not try to make himself look particularly good when he tells that story either.
Dan Had a Problem
By 29, Dan was successful, sober and operating restaurants.
His dating life was another matter.
Dan admits he was seeing multiple women and lying about it.
Eventually, the situation caught up with him in spectacular fashion.
Three women showed up at one of the restaurants.
At the same time.
Dan's business partner had had enough and told him he needed to stop.
Dan listened.
He ended the relationships and decided he would remain celibate for a month. He also had a fairly specific idea of the kind of woman he hoped he might eventually meet.
Dan wanted a Catholic woman.
He wanted someone who could sing.
Someone who could dance.
And, Dan admits, he wanted her to be beautiful.
A cocktail server named Jackie Chavez heard the list and told Dan she knew someone.
Her name was Nancy.
Nancy was Catholic. She was a singer and actress. She owned a business.
Dan initially resisted the setup, but as his self-imposed month of celibacy neared its end, he finally agreed.
Then he saw her.
Dan describes what happened next in the simplest terms possible.
Love at first sight.
"God put an arrow through my heart," Dan said.
It might have been the beginning of a beautiful love story.
Instead, Dan almost got the police called on himself.
One of the Worst First-Date Plans Imaginable
Dan wanted to take Nancy to lunch.
Apparently, simply asking her seemed insufficient.
So Dan came up with a plan.
He called Nancy pretending to be someone named Terry Bartholomew, whom Dan presented as an agent connected to Jack LaLanne. Under this false identity, he invited Nancy to lunch at Salty's.
Dan kept the charade going long enough that Nancy became frightened.
This was not romantic.
Police became involved.
Jackie, the woman who had introduced the idea of Nancy in the first place, learned what Dan had done and told him to call Nancy and tell her the truth.
So Dan confessed.
Nancy's response was understandable.
She thought he was insane.
She told him never to call her again.
For most people, that probably would have been the end of the story.
Dan went to his florist.
The florist suggested 40 long-stemmed yellow roses arranged in a crystal vase.
Dan went big.
He brought Nancy the flowers.
She still rejected him.
Then, several days later, Dan's phone rang.
Nancy was willing to have lunch with him.
At Salty's.
This time, presumably, Dan would attend under his own name.
"We have never been separated since," Dan said.
The story is funny now because we know how it ends.
Nancy became Dan's wife.
But she also became something much larger in his understanding of his life.
Nancy helped bring Dan deeper into the faith he had spent years finding his way back to.
And Nancy's family gave Dan something he had been missing since he was 11.
Finding Another Father
Nancy came from a large Catholic family.
She was one of seven children, and the faith Dan had grown up with was deeply embedded in her family life.
Her father became especially important to him.
Dan had spent much of his life without his own dad. Now, as an adult, he found another man willing to mentor him.
Dan describes Nancy's father as a surrogate father.
He watched how he lived.
He watched the prayer life, the rosaries and the devotion to the Catholic faith. He saw what it looked like for a man to make faith part of everyday family life rather than something reserved for Sunday.
Nancy's father lived to 95.
Decades after the angry 11-year-old Dan had blamed God for taking his father away, Dan found himself recognizing the gift of having another father placed in his life.
That is how Dan tends to understand these moments.
Not coincidence.
Providence.
Today, one of the things Dan and Nancy do together is attend daily Mass.
Dan calls it their date.
"We're on a date with God," he said.
During the homily, Nancy will sometimes put her hand on Dan's leg.
After everything they have lived through together, there is something quietly beautiful about that image.
Dan and Nancy, sitting next to one another at Mass.
Still on their date.
Four Children, Nine Grandchildren
Ask Dan about his proudest moment outside the military and his answer moves quickly toward family.
Dan has four adult children and nine grandchildren.
He is proud to be their father and grandfather.
One memory captures how seriously Dan tried to balance military responsibility with fatherhood.
Dan was a battalion commander in the middle of a field exercise when one of his sons was graduating from kindergarten.
The graduation was at 8 in the morning.
Dan remembers finally getting his troops settled around 1 or 2 a.m. Then he left, traveled over the mountain and made it to the graduation.
Afterward, he had to turn around and go back.
It is the kind of story a father might tell with pride, and Dan does.
But he does not use that one successful moment to pretend he always got the balance right.
That is where his answer becomes more complicated.
Because while Dan was becoming a senior military leader, the country was asking more of him.
There was Katrina.
Afghanistan.
Iraq.
And there were children at home.
One of Dan's sons began struggling seriously with drugs during those years.
Dan talks about it with the perspective of a father who has had a long time to wonder what he could have done differently.
He wishes he had been more present.
"Be Present"
For all the lessons Dan learned about leadership in the military, one of the lessons he now emphasizes most strongly is directed toward fathers.
Be present.
Dan provided for his family. He loved his children. He sent them to Catholic schools and believed he was giving them a strong foundation.
Looking back, he thinks there were things he delegated that he should have taken more responsibility for himself.
Dan believes a father should be a spiritual leader in his home.
He wishes he had understood that more deeply when his children were young.
It is an interesting admission from a man who spent much of his adult life being paid to lead.
Dan could command soldiers.
He could manage businesses.
He could operate restaurants.
He could handle enormous responsibilities.
But leadership at home was different.
There were no military orders that could guarantee a child would be okay.
There was no operations plan for fatherhood.
Dan's son eventually found sobriety and later bought a house next door to him.
For Dan, who has spent more than 50 years sober himself, that carries enormous meaning.
The story is not one Dan tells to condemn himself.
It is a lesson.
If he could tell a younger father something now, Dan would tell him not to assume there will always be another day to show up.
Be there.
When One Door Closed
The restaurant business had brought Dan tremendous success, but eventually that chapter began changing too.
A business opportunity involving the Keg restaurant organization appeared to be setting Dan up for an even larger future in the industry. According to Dan, he had invested in the company and was preparing for an arrangement involving several restaurants.
Then it fell apart.
Dan was offered a financial settlement to walk away.
For a man who had built his civilian identity around restaurants, it could have felt like everything was being taken away.
Dan went home and told Nancy.
Nancy saw it differently.
Dan remembers her telling him that maybe God was trying to move him somewhere else.
The next morning, the phone rang.
It was a general.
Dan was offered the opportunity to return to full-time military service as an artillery battalion commander and serve as a deputy chief of staff for the 81st Brigade.
Dan took the job.
He would spend another 13 years on active duty and, according to Dan, go to war three times.
Once again, Dan looked at the sequence and saw something more than coincidence.
A door closed.
Another opened almost immediately.
The Education He Never Expected
The Army kept asking more of Dan.
So did his mentors.
One general who had played an important role in Dan's officer career told him he needed to finish his education.
Dan had studied communications and earned an associate degree, but now he needed more.
He finished his degree.
Eventually came War College.
Then a master's degree.
For the boy who had struggled after his father's death, fought at school, drank, stole and found himself standing in front of a judge at 19, the trajectory was remarkable.
Dan does not tell it as a story about pulling himself up entirely by his own strength.
He keeps mentioning people.
Mentors.
Priests.
Commanders.
Nancy.
Her father.
People who saw something in Dan, challenged him or appeared when he needed another direction.
And behind all of them, Dan sees God.
Psalm 91
Dan's Catholic faith increasingly followed him into military life.
As he rose through the enlisted and officer ranks, Dan came to value military chaplains deeply. Catholic chaplains were especially important to him.
Sometimes finding one required creativity.
Dan remembers recruiting Air National Guard Catholic chaplains to accompany his units into the field. If a priest needed a little encouragement, Dan knew something that might work.
A helicopter ride.
Dan would offer rides in an OH-58 or Black Hawk, sometimes taking chaplains along the Columbia River and toward the training areas.
The deal was simple.
Dan would get them into the helicopter.
They would come into the field and celebrate Mass for the soldiers.
One priest Dan remembers especially fondly was Father Rick Sirianni, a fellow Central Catholic graduate.
There was also one passage of Scripture that became particularly important to Dan.
Psalm 91.
Dan calls it the Soldier's Prayer.
He learned it from his uncle Chuck, a Battle of the Bulge veteran. Years later, Dan included Psalm 91 in his own military retirement program.
The boy who once said he hated God had become a military
commander making sure his soldiers had access to chaplains and Mass.
But Dan's faith was about to be tested in ways no church, classroom or military exercise could reproduce.
Because eventually, training ended.
Dan went to war.
The Life Behind the Uniform
It would be easy to tell Dan's story by following the promotions.
Enlisted soldier.
Officer.
Battalion commander.
Senior military leader.
More than 40 years of service.
But that would leave out the life underneath the uniform.
While Dan was learning how to lead soldiers, Nancy was beside him.
Part One: The Kid Who Stole the Saint Bernard
Before Colonel Dan Kern spent more than 40 years serving his country, before Afghanistan, before military commands and War College, before marriage, children and grandchildren, he was a 19-year-old headed in a very different direction.
Dan was drinking heavily. He was getting into fights. He had already been arrested more than once, and in 1971, he and his friend Rob made a decision that would eventually put them in front of a Multnomah County judge.
They robbed Timberline Lodge.
And somewhere in the course of that night, they also stole the dog.
Not just any dog. They stole Heidi, Timberline Lodge's Saint Bernard mascot.
Dan can laugh about parts of the story now, more than half a century later, because some of the details are almost impossible not to laugh at. But beneath the Saint Bernard, the stolen hot-chocolate machine and the trail through the snow was a young man in real trouble.
Long before Dan became a colonel, he was a kid trying to figure out how to live without his father.
The Day Everything Changed
Dan was 11 years old when his father died in an accident.
His father owned Dick Kern Hardware across from St. Charles Catholic Church in Portland. When he died, Dan remembers five priests being on the altar for his funeral. His father's death shook not only the family, but the parish community around them.
At home, the consequences were immediate. Dan's mother was left raising seven children, and Dan remembers there being very little money. She was, in Dan's words, a "devout Catholic" and a "great mom," but there was only so much one mother could do while trying to keep a roof over everyone's head.
Dan began learning to take care of himself.
Sometimes that meant doing things he is not proud of.
"If I wanted a new coat, I couldn't ask my mom," Dan recalled. "I'd just go out and steal it."
Something else changed after his father's death too. The Catholic faith Dan had grown up with suddenly became much more difficult to understand.
Dan was angry with God.
"I think I hated God from the time I was 11 and Dad died," Dan said.
That anger lasted for years.
Eventually, however, several priests at Central Catholic High School began making an impact on him. Dan remembers Father Forbes and Father Campbell watching over him, while Father McHugh held him accountable when he got into trouble.
And Dan got into plenty of trouble.
He boxed. He studied martial arts. He fought often enough that other young men learned they could point him toward somebody else and watch what happened.
Dan remembers friends finding the toughest guys at other high schools and betting money that he could beat them up. At the time, Dan thought those boys were his friends. Looking back, he sees it differently.
"They used me because they were afraid to fight," Dan said.
The realization leads Dan back to something deeper than fighting.
"I didn't know that, and that's how low my self-esteem was."
There is an important distinction in the way Dan talks about those years.
He does not excuse what he did because his father died. He does, however, understand the connection now in a way he could not as a teenager.
There was a hole in him.
He did not know what to put in it.
A Very Bad Night at Timberline
By 19, Dan's drinking and behavior had become serious.
Then came Timberline Lodge.
Dan and his buddy Rob were drinking Jack Daniel's the night they robbed the lodge. They took money and other property, and somewhere in the middle of that drunken night, they also ended up with something considerably harder to explain.
Timberline's mascot at the time was Heidi, an enormous Saint Bernard with the familiar keg around her neck. Dan remembers the dog coming out as they were leaving, and somehow Heidi ended up going with them.
Being drunk, Dan had another idea. He tried to open the keg around Heidi's neck to see if there was whiskey inside.
There wasn't.
Somehow, Dan, Rob, the stolen property and Timberline's Saint Bernard all made it off the mountain.
The next morning, Dan woke up in his hotel and headed down the hall to use the bathroom. Still trying to piece together the night before, he stepped in something.
He looked down.
Dog poop.
Then Dan looked up and saw an enormous Saint Bernard looking back at him.
"We don't own a dog," Dan remembers thinking.
Slowly, the previous night's decisions began coming back to him.
But apparently one trip to Timberline was not enough.
Dan went back to the lodge the next day. This time, he wanted hot chocolate.
He went into the kitchen and tried to get some from a machine. When he could not get the machine to work, Dan did what apparently seemed reasonable to him at the time.
He ripped it out of the wall.
There was one problem.
The machine was plumbed in.
Dan carried the hot-chocolate machine outside without realizing that he was leaving a trail behind him through the snow. If the first night's robbery had not already created enough trouble, Dan had now returned to the scene and made matters considerably worse.
There is humor in the way Dan tells these stories more than 50 years later. A stolen Saint Bernard, a keg with no whiskey in it and a hot-chocolate machine ripped out of a wall sound almost too absurd to be real.
But the consequences were very real.
Dan's drinking was out of control. He was getting arrested, making increasingly reckless decisions and burning through the patience of people who had continued trying to help him.
This time, those people were running out of options.
The Judge, the Lawyer and the Army
Dan and Rob were arrested.
On Dec. 11, 1971, they found themselves in a Multnomah County courtroom.
Dan's attorney was Bob Jordan, who had been a close friend of Dan's father. After his father's death, Jordan had continued trying to help the boy his friend left behind. When Dan got arrested, Jordan was there.
But this time was different.
Dan remembers Jordan leaning over and telling him, essentially, that he was done.
Dan was 19 years old. Jordan had tried to help him repeatedly, but Dan could not keep living this way and expect somebody else to rescue him.
Take the deal, Jordan told him.
The judge placed Dan and Rob on probation and encouraged them to enter military service.
Dan is careful about that distinction. The judge did not order him into the Army.
"He didn't order us," Dan said, "but he sure as heck pointed us."
The stolen property had to be returned, and restitution had to be made.
Heidi went home too.
Dan and Rob enlisted.
Looking backward from everything that followed, it would be easy to make that courtroom the moment Dan's life instantly changed. It would make for a cleaner story.
Dan's life was not that clean.
The Army gave him direction, discipline and eventually purpose, but the problems that brought him into that courtroom did not simply disappear when he put on a uniform.
Alcohol was still there.
December 11
After his arrest, Dan entered a diversion program in Multnomah County while waiting to ship out.
Part of the program involved Antabuse, a medication used to discourage drinking by causing an adverse reaction if alcohol is consumed. Dan remembers having to report to his local druggist, Dr. Gilman, near 24th and Fremont in Northeast Portland, and take the medication.
It worked.
Dan did not drink.
He shipped out and remained sober for nearly two years.
Then, in December 1973, Dan came home on leave.
A woman he knew invited him to a party at a cabin on Mount Hood. Dan was interested in her, and he went.
There was alcohol everywhere.
Dan had been sober for almost two years, but standing at that party, he decided one beer would be all right.
One Budweiser.
Dan drank it.
Then he asked where the woman who had invited him was.
She was upstairs.
With her boyfriend.
Dan had thought she was interested in him. Now he was standing at a party holding the first beer he had consumed in nearly two years and realizing that he had given up his sobriety over something that had never existed in the first place.
He walked outside.
Dan smashed the bottle against a post and left.
What happened during the drive down Mount Hood is one of the moments Dan still regards as a dividing line in his life.
He was furious.
At first, he yelled and screamed.
Then Dan began talking to God.
"Lord, what is my problem?"
Dan did not ask God to help him become a more responsible drinker. He did not ask for enough strength to get through the next party.
He wanted the desire gone.
Dan made it to his mother's house and slept in the basement.
He returned to Fort Lewis afterward and eventually transitioned from active Army service into the Washington Army National Guard.
Dan dates his sobriety from Dec. 11, 1973.
He says he never drank again.
More than five decades later, what seems to matter most to Dan is not simply that he stopped drinking. It is what happened to the craving.
It never came back.
Dan believes he knows why.
"God took it away," he said.
The Making of a Soldier
The young man entering the Army did not look much like the man who would eventually retire.
Dan spent six years enlisted before becoming an officer. When asked to compare himself then with the colonel he eventually became, Dan did not say the younger version was worthless.
Quite the opposite.
"I had a chip on my shoulder," Dan said, but he also knew how to take care of people.
"The person then had the right heart," Dan said. "But he didn't have the confidence."
That is an important piece of Dan's story because leadership would eventually become one of the defining themes of his life.
The angry kid who had once been used by other boys to fight their battles eventually became responsible for other people's sons and daughters.
The teenager who had struggled with his own self-worth would someday be responsible for developing soldiers and officers.
The young man who had been pointed toward the Army from a courtroom would remain in uniform for, as Dan remembers it precisely, 40 years, six months and 19 days.
But that career did not unfold in isolation.
Dan was building another life at the same time.
He went to school.
He worked in radio.
He entered the restaurant business.
He became a father.
He met Nancy.
And somewhere along the way, the Catholic faith he had once rejected after his father's death became central to how he understood almost everything that had happened to him.
Back to Timberline
Years later, Dan found himself back at Timberline Lodge.
By then, the 19-year-old thief was long gone. Dan was there snowboarding with his son Gabe, and Gabe had two Saint Bernards.
Dan took the dogs for a walk.
Near Timberline's loading dock, he encountered members of the lodge staff with the current Saint Bernard mascot. Naturally, the dogs became acquainted, and Dan started talking with the people there.
Eventually, he told them something.
He was the guy who stole Timberline's mascot in 1971.
Their response was not what Dan expected.
They knew the story.
Dan remembers the realization moving through the group.
"You're the guy."
Employees gathered around. They wanted to hear about it. They wanted a photograph.
The young man who had once left Timberline with stolen property, a hot-chocolate machine and a Saint Bernard had returned decades later with his son and two Saint Bernards of his own.
Dan could only laugh at the absurd symmetry of it.
"Somebody tell me God doesn't have a sense of humor," he said.
Dan sees moments like that through the lens of faith.
He calls his life blessed.
Not perfect.
Blessed.
There is a difference.
A Story Does Not Have to Stay the Same
Dan does not hide the ugliest parts of his past.
In fact, he seems to understand that the story loses something important if those pieces are removed.
If we begin with Colonel Dan Kern, the senior military officer, it would be easy to assume that this was always the trajectory. That the discipline, leadership, faith and responsibility were there from the beginning.
They weren't.
There was a boy grieving his father.
There was anger at God.
There were fights.
There was alcohol.
There were arrests.
There was a stolen hot-chocolate machine.
There was a Saint Bernard in a hotel that absolutely did not belong there.
And there was a courtroom where a 19-year-old was forced to confront the possibility that people were no longer going to keep rescuing him from himself.
Dan's story matters not because those things vanished.
They didn't.
They became part of what came next.
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Dan what the words Everyone Has a Story meant after everything he had experienced.
"We all have a story, every one of us," Dan said.
Dan believes those stories are almost always more complicated than they appear from the outside. People carry wounds, mistakes, victories, failures and experiences that the person standing next to them may know nothing about.
But Dan also worries that people forget they are not permanently trapped inside those experiences.
"My fear is that people don't really realize that they can rewrite their story constantly," Dan said.
Few people could make that observation with more personal evidence behind it.
Dan cannot rewrite the night at Timberline.
He cannot change what happened after his father died. He cannot go backward and take away the alcohol, fights, arrests or choices that brought him into court.
While he was building restaurants, children were growing up.
While he was deploying, life at home continued without him.
Some moments he made.
Others he missed.
Some decisions he remains proud of.
Others he would change if he could.
That honesty matters.
Dan does not talk about leadership as though rank somehow made him immune to failure. In fact, some of the lessons he speaks about most passionately now came from recognizing where he believes he fell short.
Be present.
Take care of people.
Do not assume someone else can fulfill a responsibility that belongs to you.
And hold on to your faith.
Those lessons would follow Dan overseas, where leadership stopped being an abstract idea.
In Afghanistan, decisions could mean whether somebody came home.
Dan would mentor Afghan military leaders and command in a multinational environment. He would learn that sitting down with someone over flatbread and chai could sometimes accomplish what force could not.
An Afghan general would unexpectedly tell Dan to delay a convoy.
An interpreter named Azim would overhear a plot and come running to warn him.
Dan would lose soldiers.
And he would experience one of the hardest responsibilities a commander can carry: standing at a family's door and telling a mother her son was never coming home.
For Dan, those experiences changed the way he understood war, leadership and the people on the other side of a conflict.
They also strengthened a conviction that had been developing throughout his life.
Everyone standing in front of you is more than what you can see.
Everyone is carrying something.
Everyone has a story.
Part Three: War, Faith and Everyone Has a Story
By the time Dan Kern arrived in Afghanistan, the 19-year-old who had once stood before a Multnomah County judge was long gone.
In his place was Colonel Dan Kern, a senior military leader with decades of experience behind him. During his final tour in Afghanistan, Dan served as a senior mentor in a multinational environment, working alongside personnel from seven nations and helping mentor Afghan military leadership.
Dan had learned how to command.
Afghanistan would teach him something more complicated.
It would teach him about relationships between people who came from different countries, spoke different languages and sometimes stood on opposite sides of a war. It would teach him that kindness could travel farther than expected, that trust could save lives and that military leadership was about much more than defeating an enemy.
It would also teach Dan about loss.
Dan says 23 soldiers under his leadership died.
For a man who had spent much of his career learning how to take care of people, there were some people he simply could not bring home.
The General's Mother
One of the stories Dan tells from Afghanistan begins not with a battle, but with a mother.
Dan was mentoring an Afghan brigadier general when word arrived that the general's mother had become sick in a rural province. She needed medical attention, and getting her to it was not simple.
Dan had resources available to him.
He decided to use them.
Dan arranged for two Black Hawk helicopters to retrieve the woman and bring her to a hospital at Bagram. What had initially caused considerable concern turned out to be treatable. She received fluids, recovered and was eventually returned home.
Dan had helped the mother of a man with whom he was building a professional relationship.
Then, sometime later, that relationship may have helped save Dan's life.
Dan and his people were preparing to travel when the Afghan general told him to wait.
Forty-five minutes.
Dan listened.
Before Dan's convoy reached the area, an improvised explosive device detonated along the route.
Dan believes the general had received advance information through a family connection and delayed the Americans because Dan had helped his mother.
Whether every detail behind the warning could ever be known with certainty, Dan has never been uncertain about what the episode means to him.
"That's God," Dan said.
He sees the story as one of many moments in his life when an act, relationship or apparent coincidence eventually connected to something much larger.
It also reinforced something Dan was learning about Afghanistan.
Relationships mattered.
Sometimes they mattered more than anyone realized at the time.
Azim Was Late
Another story began because an interpreter was late.
Dan remembers an Afghan interpreter named Azim Ulfatti, whose name he spelled aloud during our conversation. Azim was educated at Kabul University, spoke multiple languages and had studied journalism. He also worked with the Americans, which Dan said put both Azim and his wife at risk.
Azim was normally dependable.
Then one morning, he was late for the bus.
The delay left him outside a gate at a military compound in Kabul. While there, Azim overheard a conversation.
Something was wrong.
Dan said Azim understood what the men were saying and recognized enough about them to realize they were discussing a plot to kill Dan and members of his staff.
When Azim finally got inside, he went looking for Dan.
Dan remembers the warning being direct.
"You're gonna die! You're gonna die!"
Dan's response sounds exactly like Dan.
"Well, I'm not dying right now. What's up?"
What followed was no joke.
Dan gathered members of his staff and moved quickly on the information Azim provided. French personnel who knew the Afghans on the installation became involved as well.
According to Dan, within 24 hours the effort uncovered additional men, two trucks and four suicide vests.
The intended target, Dan said, was a luncheon connected with a battle handoff, the process in which an incoming unit's leadership meets with the outgoing unit to begin assuming responsibility for the mission.
The plan, as Dan understood it, was to attack the gathering from below.
"Azim saved our lives," Dan said.
For Dan, the story did not end when the threat was stopped.
He worried about Azim and his family.
Dan later helped Azim with the process of coming to the United States. According to Dan, Azim went on to work with the Department of the Army or Department of Defense, later married, had children and built a life in the Washington, D.C. area.
Once again, one of Dan's war stories ultimately becomes a story about a relationship.
A man Dan depended on for language and cultural understanding became the man who heard something others could not.
He listened.
Then he ran to warn them.
"People Are Human Everywhere"
After decades in uniform, Dan could have answered a question about the lessons of war in any number of ways.
He could have talked about tactics.
Weapons.
Training.
Command.
Instead, Dan talked about people.
"People are human everywhere," he said.
That belief shaped the expectations Dan placed on the soldiers serving under him.
When American soldiers entered another country, Dan expected them to understand that country's culture and respect its people. He did not consider cultural awareness an optional courtesy.
It was part of the mission.
Dan said he was willing to remove soldiers from certain assignments if they could not behave respectfully toward the people around them.
Dan had no illusions about where he was.
This was war.
If someone fired at his soldiers, they could return fire.
But Dan came to reject the idea that success could simply be measured by the number of enemies killed.
"You cannot kill enough bad guys," Dan said.
For Dan, there had to be another part of the mission.
Talk to people.
Understand what they need.
Build relationships.
Find what can be resolved.
Dan remembers sitting down with people who might have had connections to the Taliban or al-Qaeda and sharing flatbread and chai. The point was not to pretend there was no conflict. The point was to find out whether something could be solved without more bloodshed.
Dan describes himself as a "relater."
That ability became one of his most important tools.
"War is hell," Dan said.
But Dan also came away believing that peacekeeping and relationship-building must be part of what military service attempts to accomplish.
"So let's find what we can resolve," he said.
Then there were the things that could not be resolved.
Twenty-Three
Dan says he lost 23 soldiers.
When he says the number, he does not linger over it or decorate it with military language.
"Too many."
About half of those deaths occurred when Dan was not physically present, he said.
That did not mean he escaped what came afterward.
Two losses in particular affected him deeply because Dan was stateside and became involved in notifying the families.
One came in December 2004.
Dan was on leave at Mount Hood, snowboarding with a Boy Scout troop, when he received word that one of his soldiers had died.
Dan had to leave the mountain.
There was a chaplain to collect and a family to notify.
The soldier's parents were divorced, which meant separate notifications.
There is a formal process for what happens next. There are procedures and documents. There are things that must be explained and papers that must be signed.
But procedures cannot prepare someone for the moment a mother looks across her home and sees military personnel standing at the door.
Dan remembers the mother being in the kitchen.
She was holding a casserole.
She saw Dan and the chaplain.
She knew.
The casserole fell.
Then she collapsed.
Neighbors began gathering, wanting to get inside and help their friend. Dan and the chaplain still had responsibilities they were required to complete, but the human reality of what had just happened overwhelmed everything else.
Dan remembers the fundamental rule.
"You stay."
You do not tell a mother that her son is dead and then simply walk away.
You stay.
For all the extraordinary stories Dan can tell about Afghanistan, there is no clever ending to that one.
There is only a mother on the floor.
That is part of war too.
There Is Always a Nugget
Dan has been involved with Alcoholics Anonymous for years, and he says listening to other people tell their stories has reinforced his belief that there is something to learn from almost anyone.
"There's always going to be a nugget," Dan said.
Sometimes another person's story produces admiration.
Sometimes recognition.
"You know what? I did that."
That may be the most fitting place to end Dan's story, because it is really the reason Everyone Has a Story exists.
The person sitting across from you may have done things you cannot imagine.
He may also have survived things you know nothing about.
The colonel may once have been the kid in handcuffs.
The sober man may once have been the alcoholic.
The grandfather sitting beside his wife at daily Mass may once have been the angry 11-year-old who blamed God for taking his father.
The military commander may have once been the young man whose attorney finally told him he was done rescuing him.
And the man telling you to be present for your children may be telling you because he knows what it feels like to wish he had been present more often himself.
Dan's life does not fit neatly into a story about redemption, military service, Catholic faith, sobriety or family.
It contains all of them.
That is precisely Dan's point.
Everybody's story is complicated.
The Next Chapter
There is a photograph of Dan standing on a ridge in Afghanistan.
One of the French soldiers took it.
Dan is in uniform, with mountains rising behind him. By then, the young man from Timberline had traveled an almost unimaginable distance.
But perhaps the distance is not the most important thing.
Dan never erased where he started.
The robbery still happened.
The beer still happened.
His father still died when Dan was 11.
The soldiers Dan lost are still gone.
The years away from his children cannot be returned to him.
Rewriting your story, as Dan describes it, does not mean rewriting history.
It means deciding what comes next.
Dan's story contains a remarkable number of people who helped determine what came next for him. There were priests who watched over an angry teenager. There was Bob Jordan, his father's friend, who tried repeatedly to help him. There was a judge who pointed him toward military service.
There were military mentors who pushed Dan to become more.
There was Nancy.
There was Nancy's father, who became a father figure to a man who had lost his own decades earlier.
There was an Afghan general who told Dan to wait 45 minutes.
There was Azim, the interpreter who was late one morning and arrived with a warning that may have saved Dan and his staff.
There were soldiers who trusted him with their lives.
There were children and grandchildren waiting at home.
And through all of it, Dan sees God.
When Dan talks about people today, he seems less interested in where they are than in where they might still go.
He knows how badly a life can begin to unravel.
He also knows how much can happen after that.
More than 50 years after a young Dan Kern drove away from Timberline Lodge with stolen property, a ripped-out hot-chocolate machine and a Saint Bernard that did not belong to him, Dan can look back at a military career spanning more than four decades, a long marriage, four children, nine grandchildren and more than half a century of sobriety.
None of it changes the first chapters.
It simply proves they were not the last ones.
"We all have a story, every one of us," Dan said.
And as Dan's own life demonstrates, there may still be an extraordinary amount of story left to write.
---
Colonel,
Thank you for your service.
I know I probably shouldn’t be biased, but this is my favorite story yet. You have an amazing story, Colonel, and I feel incredibly honored to have the opportunity to share it.
Thank you for trusting me with your story. I hope I have done it justice.
God bless you.
- Your brother in Christ - Chase Muro