"So the Air Force has this task force developed," said Patterson, who lives in Georgia with his wife and kid. They are each given top-secret clearance so they can meet with drone personnel at Creech who are fatigued or troubled by occupational burnout, an extended response to chronic job-related stress.Īt just seven strong, with members rotating in and out in cycles, the HPT is lean-a sticking point for critics like Patterson, who question whether the HPT is enough to address the true scope of the problem. The Human Performance Team, or HPT, is comprised of an operational psychologist and physiologist, as well as a flight surgeon and a pair of chaplains and chaplain assistants.
"These are realities of war, and we just need to get over them as Americans. Sometimes when he watched video of people clearly dying in the wake of an aerial strike, he would laugh. The key thing that made it easier for him to sleep at night as a drone analyst, he said, is that he transitioned into that line of work right out of the military. Other times he would watch a quarter of a city block incinerate, struck by a Hellfire missile fired from an American drone. Sometimes Patterson would go days just staring at a video feed of a house, waiting for any sign of activity to report up the chain of command. "Sometimes it wasn't." It would get slow around Ramadan. "Sometimes it was pedal to the metal," he said. The building was festooned with all sorts of satellite dishes and communications antennas and surrounded by military vehicles-the tactical operations center, where Patterson worked at the brigade level. For two years, Patterson would get up in the morning and walk to a steel building at the edge of an American military base in Iraq. Patterson, now 37, was a member of US Special Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan before he took a gig as a drone analyst for a private military contractor.
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