My husband retired from the FBI in 2016. As a new agent, he spent four months at the Quantico FBI Academy before we were sent to our first office. He was assigned to a squad where he did stakeouts, chased fugitives, solved bank robberies, got into physical altercations and was shot at. There were nights I wasn’t sure he’d come home.
After five years, he was ordered to Puerto Rico, where we lived for 18 months. Over the years, we moved nine times. Agents are sent to field offices to get experience, then to FBI headquarters to do inspections of field offices and learn how things are run from Washington, D.C. Then back to a field office to be a supervisor, back to headquarters and back to a field office. It’s like being in the military, because you’re sent where you’re needed and assigned to cases that need investigating — but without the same family support system and close community we had during his prior military service.
Our children went to multiple elementary schools, middle schools and high schools. Every few years we uprooted ourselves, found a home, made new friends, found new soccer teams and doctors and orthodontists. It was hard, especially as our kids got into their teen years. While my husband loved serving our country, it came at a high cost. He worked long hours. He left before the kids were up and came home as they were going to bed.
After one move, we learned that one of our neighbors hated the FBI, so we had to be careful to never wear any shirts or caps with the FBI logo on them. This was in the early 2000s, before hatred of the FBI became mainstream.
My husband was on call weekends and holidays. Sometimes we had to cancel plans because duty called. He missed our oldest child’s eighth birthday because he spent two months in Oklahoma investigating the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building.
Later in his career, he worked in national security, traveling all over the world to protect U.S. interests. He prevented Chinese intelligence officers and their assets from stealing sensitive technologies and Russian intelligence officers from undermining our democracy.
One morning he packed a backpack and said he might not come home that evening. He didn’t. He spent four weeks in a foreign country, unable to tell me where he was.
Much of the time, I felt like a single parent. It was hard for me and a sacrifice for our whole family. We did it because my husband wanted to catch bad guys. And all the other FBI families we got to know were a lot like us.
The FBI isn’t perfect. Neither are the agents, analysts and support staff it’s comprised of. But every person I met in all those offices were there because they wanted to protect the country they love from enemies, both foreign and domestic. They were good people with families like us.
My heart is breaking that dozens of these people have been fired for doing their jobs. Thousands more worry and wonder when they will be fired. Many of them recently moved to new cities and put their kids in schools where they started the tough work of making new friends. Many of them have made careers but are a few years short of being eligible to retire. What will they do?
What makes it hurt even more is hearing my friends and neighbors say they are happy about what’s happening. It’s hard to express how isolated, sad, scared and angry I feel.
My family spent a total of 10 years living near Washington, D.C., visiting the monuments, the National Gallery and the Smithsonian museums, but I have never been inside the Capitol building. The people who attacked the Capitol are free while the people who did the work to bring them to justice are being punished. The world seems upside down. It makes no sense to me, but to the majority of the people in the red state where I live, somehow it’s a good thing. Who will protect us once the FBI and intelligence community has been hollowed out and intimidated into submission?