Firefighter’s Son Is in West Point Class of 9/11

Patrick Dowdell lost his father four years ago in the World Trade Center, but he keeps him close by.

He wears a steel bracelet stamped “Lt. Kevin Dowdell 9-11-01” with his West Point cadet grays. Pictures of his father in his firefighter uniform are taped to the wall in his quarters. He tries to live by his father’s standards.

“I think about him,” Dowdell said. “If he was here right now, ‘What would he think about this? Or about that?’ I think he’d be pretty excited about what’s happening.”

He is now a senior, or “firstie,” at West Point, set to toss his cap in the air at graduation in May. His class was the first to enter the U.S. Military Academy after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the looming reality of Army life is particularly poignant for this 22-year-old from New York City: The son who lost his father to terrorism is poised to join the fight against it.

“I’m going to go into the infantry,” he said, “and I want to kill terrorists.”

West Point, with its castle-like buildings on the Hudson River, is a couple of hours north of the Dowdell home in Queens.

Dowdell’s journey here was not easy even before it took a detour through ground zero.

He was wait-listed for the academy early in 2001, but his father wanted him to try again the next year.

A natural schmoozer, Kevin Dowdell always had new people for Patrick to meet, more papers to get through, another call to make.

“My father would say, ‘Your grandfather was a butcher and I’m a firefighter,’ ” Dowdell recalled. “ ‘You shoot for the next better thing. Aim for something higher.’ ”

The father helped nudge the son along until the crisp Tuesday morning he rushed to the smoking towers with the firefighters of Rescue 4.

Dowdell believes his father was in the South Tower when it fell, though he’ll never know for sure. All that was found of the 46-year-old was his pry bar etched with his initials. It’s kept at the family’s home.

Dowdell knew his father wouldn’t want him to curl up and surrender, so he kept trying, even lobbying city officials for recommendations at a Christmas party for Sept. 11 families.

He was accepted to West Point in spring 2002.

He has changed in the three years since his arrival. He has packed on some more muscle and grown a bit, to 6-foot-2. But Dowdell claims he did his real growing up in the months after Sept. 11 -- when he was grieving with his mother and younger brother and digging through the ruins of the World Trade Center as a volunteer.

Despite the tragedy, he maintains a quick laugh and easygoing manner. Jason Winkle, his combatives instructor, calls him a “quiet leader.” Capt. Eileen Granfield, a former advisor, said Dowdell’s natural charisma would help him command soldiers in the field.

“You can’t help but to like him,” Granfield said.

It hasn’t been all accolades, though. Punishment for an infraction last year forced him to miss spending the anniversary of the attacks with his family. As his mother walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to ground zero, he was marching in circles by his barracks in full dress uniform.

Right now, Dowdell is in countdown mode, ticking off the months until he becomes a second lieutenant.

He will request an infantry assignment this fall. If granted, he will probably ship out to a “hot zone” in Iraq or Afghanistan. He feels a patriotic duty to join the fight, but stresses he is motivated by the deaths of all terrorism victims, not just his father’s.

“It’s not that I have something to prove, or some score to settle. I don’t. I just want to do what every other guy here is doing,” he said.

“I haven’t been bottling up my rage for four years getting ready to explode. That’s when you become unsafe.”

The plan right now is to graduate in May and then train up, maybe through 2006, before getting his first post.

Dowdell is required to serve five years in the Army. Beyond that, he doesn’t know if he’ll stay in the military or do something else, such as get a business job in New York City.

That’s far in the future.

His plan for Sunday was clear: to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge with his mother.