By Frederick Woodward

When you meet Patrick Kopytek, the first thing you notice about him is the uprightness of his posture. He turns 74 this March, but he doesn’t look it. His blond hair hasn’t grayed out fully and his stance is tall and proud, defying gravity’s relentless drag toward the earth. As he starts to walk, though, he displays a pronounced limp, the result of a wartime injury that should have left him dead.

Upright… unvanquished… in a word, noble. Patrick’s appearance isn’t typical. Neither is his story.

Patrick Kopytek was born seven years after the end of World War II to a Navy veteran named Walter and his wife Berniece. Walter was a mechanic in a line of working men. Berniece came from European nobility. Both of their families had come to Detroit from Poland in the early 1900’s.

Some of Patrick’s earliest memories trace back to his father’s workbench. Others were made at his mother’s rocking chair. Here, Berneice catechized her firstborn in the noble lineage of Polish knights that he possessed. Patrick’s ancestors numbered among the Winged Hussars that fought under King Jan Sobieski III and repelled the Muslim siege of Vienna, rescuing the West from the threat of the East. Patrick, their direct descendent, sees himself as bound to them by both bloodline and the bond of their common Catholic faith.

Like the thousands of other Polish Catholic boys in Detroit, Patrick was enrolled in the city’s Catholic school system. Unlike most of his peers, though, Patrick was a problem child. His green eyes glittered and he smiled slightly as he recalled the myriad trips he had made to the principals office. By age ten, his attitude, paired with a brilliant intellect, had earned him a reputation that extended well outside of Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic School on Detroit’s east side. At this critical time in his young life, Patrick found himself approached by none other than educational agents from the recently formed Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency.

Here’s how he remembers the story:
“There were certain behaviors that I had when I was a young man that my parents couldn’t understand, and at the time, psychotherapy was not a thing people would think of – especially for children. My reputation as both gifted and problematic had become very well known at that point, and attracted the attention of some handlers from the then-secret federal program MKUltra.
These agents were looking for a certain profile of young men that they thought that they could effectively build psychological mechanisms in. So at this point, handlers from MKUltra stepped in and they told my parents that the only way that I would have a normal life and be free from these behavioral issues would be if they gave my guidance and training over a special program.
And you know, that’s what my parents chose. They were at a wit’s end.”

Choir practice, altar boy practice, hockey practice – Patrick’s MKUltra handlers came up with increasingly creative and frequent excuses to take him out of the school week and train him within the program. Shortly after Walter and Berniece assented to his placement within the program, Patrick was administered an oath of home enlistment in the United States Air Force. He hadn’t turned eleven yet.

Upon entering the program structure, Patrick found himself grouped into a cohort of twenty young men. This cohort was given the codename Spartan. Each individual, however, was only known to his peers within the program by his codename. The nineteenth recruit, Patrick was designated ‘Spartan 19,’ or ‘Spartan XIX.’ This became first his moniker and then his call sign. To this day, he vividly remembers his handlers addressing him by it.

Near the end of their time in high school, Patrick and his comrades – who remained known to each other only via their respective call signs – became increasingly aware of a common factor among them: each suffered from some manifestation of what is now known as bi-polar disorder. Previously, the men had only been aware that each shared the Catholic faith and was educated in the parochial system.

As Patrick recalls:
“The disease bipolar wasn’t listed in the psychological illnesses book until the early or mid 1980s. But as near as I can make out, this disease was one of the key characteristics that the MKUltra directors were looking for so they could manipulate it during the indoctrination sessions they held for us.”

The discovery of this additional element became cause for concern among the group – and the handlers took notice. Shortly after this realization, the program structure was modified significantly to reduce the amount of time the trainees were allowed to spend with each other alone. A few months later, Patrick was removed to Michigan Technological University, where his handlers decided a course of academic study for him and began training him for active combat roles. The rest of his comrades were catapulted across the nation – one to the University of Minnesota Duluth, another to South Dakota State University. He never heard from them again.

It was at this time that Patrick learned he was bound for the Vietnam front as soon as his basic studies and skills were cemented. His first taste of action was as a freshman in his second semester in what amounted to combat engineer training. By the end of his second year, he had participated in nearly half a dozen training missions. By the close of junior year, he had been informed that a first lieutenant’s commission was awaiting him.

Immediately upon completion of his training, which was recognised under the abstract title ‘facilities engineering,’ Patrick was assigned to active duty. His unit: the famous Red Horse Squadron, an Air Force construction battalion whose chief objective at the time was to advance the front lines of attack in hopes of rescuing American POWs from the North Vietnamese. While not standardized, the work followed a routine process which helped alleviate some of the psychological perception of danger. Until it didn’t.
Patrick describes what happened best:

“I was the officer in charge of one of the Red Horse Squadron construction battalions, with eleven other engineers assigned to my command. We had a pretty good routine down– we’d go in, build quickly, and get out. We didn’t see much of the enemy, but we always knew they were in the vicinity.
In late August, we were assigned to build a landing pad for some of the advance assault aircraft. We kitted up and got the chopper ready. Comms approached and informed us that the site was prepped and the perimeter ahead of it was still secure, so we loaded up and got in the air. But as we approached the freshly cleared landing zone, the mission went bad. From the far treeline across the field, we started to receive gunfire. It was like little twinkles, coming from the darkness under the heavy tree cover.
Our chopper had these two door guns, one on either side. Right away, our pilot brought the bird around sideways so that our door gunner could return fire. But as we get turned around, an impossible shot from the ground hits the door gunner in the throat and kills him. I cut him out of his harness and pulled him into the craft and told the load master to take care of him while I scrambled forward to grab on and take the door gun and I started to return fire along that tree line.
Trouble was, I saw a man on the ground close to us. He stepped out into the clearing and before I could get him, he launched a shoulder mounted rocket propelled grenade at us. This grenade hit the cockpit of the chopper and touched off the fuel lines, causing an explosion that blew me out the door.
At this point, the chopper was still about two to three hundred feet above the drop. Luckily, we were descending over triple canopy cover trees. After I tried briefly to fly, the branches of the trees began to retard my path towards the ground. I hit the ground on my back, the chopper blew up behind me, and I passed out.”

The next thing Patrick remembers is regaining consciousness, only to find his left foot bent up towards his shoulder. He took it with his right hand and relocated it to its proper placement, before blacking out from the pain. The next time he woke up, he was in enemy hands.

“I was captured by three teenage girls who were serving as Vietcong soldiers. They proceeded to stand me up and then beat me back down, at which point I would pass out until they stood me up again. They did this repeatedly until an NVA office came in and started screaming at them.
He must have seen my uniform and told them I was valuable because I was an officer and needed to be interrogated and they couldn’t kill me. So he left and they tied me up with another Marine enlisted personnel. Here I am 21, but this kid’s only 17. And so as senior officer, I was responsible for him.
The girls tied his and my wrists together around a bamboo tree, each of us with our back to the opposite sides of it. The dusk had fallen almost completely, and I guessed they were going to move us in the morning, but I know if they moved us, they’d be taking us deeper into NVA territory, and we wouldn’t be likely to survive, especially if I couldn’t get my injuries treated. So I spent my wakeful time loosening the bonds and calming this kid down and telling him that I could get the both of us out of here.
Sometime in the predawn hours, two guards came to check on us, and when they got close enough, I eliminated them. I left those bodies in such a shape that the NVA would think that they were dealing with a demon.”

At this point, Patrick’s memory becomes a little more patchy. He remembers activating a hidden transponder he had been given that the NVA soldiers missed when they searched him upon capture, and navigating east toward the water, leaning on the young Marine for support. When they got close to the sea, a party from a Navy destroyer picked them up and choppered them out to a Navy carrier that had advanced surgical facilities on board. Patrick remembers the next interaction vividly.

“When they unloaded me from the chopper, the Navy doctors wanted to cut my leg off, but I started causing a huge ruckus. I got hold of someone’s .45 and told them I would blow the head off the first one who tried.
Right in the middle of this, in walks this Marine Corps general, and he asks me ‘Lieutenant, what’s going on?’ I straight up said to him, ‘General, as you can see, I’m Air Force, and these are Navy doctors, and they can’t take my leg because I’m Air Force and they’re Navy.’
Well, he bought that, and he told them to back off. And then he turned to me and said, ‘Lieutenant, I stopped by to thank you for bringing my son out alive with you.’”

As a sign of gratitude, Patrick remembers, the Marine commander ensured that his override of standard Navy medical procedure, which dictated amputation of the leg, would remain in effect. The commander, whose name did not remain long after his presence disappeared, then arranged for Patrick to be transferred to an Air Force receiving hospital for extensive and expensive surgery – a whole successive host of them in fact – before Patrick was returned stateside to the Walter Reed medical facility for several years of rehab and recovery.

The most surprising element of his recovery, for Patrick, is the fact that he was there for all of it. He doesn’t recall being contacted by his MKUltra handlers again after being discharged from the hospital. According to Patrick, each of the spartans in his program including himself was mentally programmed with a ‘kill switch.’ After a trigger phrase was pronounced to each man, his memory was supposed to reset permanently. Like a subject awaking from a hypnotic trance, after the kill switch phrase was uttered, the man would be effectively silenced permanently, unable to mentally access or share the knowledge and experiences he had gained while being in the program. But Patrick’s didn’t work. Maybe it was due to the mental or physical trauma of the helicopter crash. But Patrick thinks otherwise.

“I don’t think my kill switch worked for the simple reason that I had faith. Faith in and total reliance not only on the Blessed Mother, but my traditional Catholic faith. There was something in me which had a stronger and deeper claim on my conscience and mind than any mental programming I was subjected to.
That’s why I’m still here. Christ is my Lord. He’s my Savior. He’s my Commander. My allegiance to Him and the Church that He established prevented me from succumbing to everything that was thrown at me physically, mentally, and spiritually.”

Eventually, Patrick was released from Walter Reed. The move from there was without question for him: Return to Detroit, to his parish community he had left, and whatever elements of his family were still around. But that proved more difficult than he had anticipated.

While Patrick served in Vietnam, the vibrant social fabric of Detroit quietly immolated in the flames of the riots that took place in the 1960’s and 70’s, in a metaphor for the devolution of custom and culture across the West. Traditional ethnic and religious sub-atmospheres around the city were uprooted. The warm Polish Catholic enclave that Patrick had left wasn’t waiting for him when he returned. The home Patrick had envisioned returning to was no more.

However, Patrick is a stubborn man. He was determined not to let go easily of what he loved, and he didn’t. He found work as a contract engineer, working contract-to-contract across the city, and living in one of the remaining miniscule Polish Catholic enclaves that held on stubbornly within a city that more and more seemed to hate them and what they worshipped.

His life hasn’t been easy, though. After 25 years of working in the Detroit engineering scene, Patrick suffered the first of the three strokes he has had. Since being forced to medically retire, he’s been working odd jobs–first at a department store, then for a taxi service. But his spirit hasn’t diminished. For his 70th birthday, Patrick visited the eastside’s oldest Dodge dealership to pay cash for a red Hellcat – the very car he had wanted to purchase before he was deployed to Vietnam for the first time. He uses it to curry premium fares as a driver for Uber Muscle.

He takes pride in a few things. He enjoys his car – and understandably so – there aren’t many septuagenarian Poles burning up the Detroit streets in Hellcats. He takes pride in his lineage. He’s descended from nobility afterall, and he carries himself like a Polish knight might. But most of all, he finds solace and stability in the life of faith he leads. “I made a commitment after I got out of Walter Reed to place myself under the protection of the Blessed Mother, and to serve Christ Jesus as my Lord and Commander,” Patrick says. His green eyes are intense now, and unflinching. “We are the clay. He is the potter. And I feel in good hands,” he tells me.

If you go to a Catholic mass at one of the handful of Polish churches that remain in Detroit, keep an eye out for a tall, upright-standing man. His blonde hair isn’t fully grayed out, but when he approaches the communion rail, it’s with a noticeable limp. Yet when he kneels to receive the Eucharist, no trace of weakness is present.
All there is is the sight of a soldier presenting himself before his Commander.
A faithful soldier.

Epigraph:
Patrick Joseph Kopytek passed away on March 1, 2026, the feast of St. Joseph.
He died as he lived.
A faithful soldier.

Frederick Woodward is a junior studying Political Economy, Journalism, and Finance.