A front row seat

Kent Abernathy looked around and wasn’t quite sure if he belonged.
On the campus of the United States Military Academy at West Point, he seemed surrounded by sons of generals.
He was in class with students who had already taken calculus, an opportunity he didn’t have as a member of the final graduating class at Redkey High School.
“I really felt like a fish out of water, a kid from Redkey,” said Abernathy, who last week became commissioner of the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles. “It was a little bit overwhelming at the beginning. It wasn’t probably until my second year up that I realized, hey, I can do this as well as everyone else up here.”
That realization, sparked by a few key moments during his time, led to a career that has taken him to Germany, Korea, Iraq and the Pentagon, not to mention being involved in one of the biggest moments in motor sports history.
One such moment came while serving as an usher for the Thayer Award ceremony during his first year at West Point. An older man began chatting with the young cadet, remembering his days at the academy and how many things were still the same.
A nervous Abernathy remembers glancing down at the man’s nametag to learn he was Maxwell Taylor, a famous World War II general who had also served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“Here’s this guy you’re talking to like you would fellow alum,” said Abernathy. “That was kind of the first awakening.”

Later, when he was a platoon leader for younger cadets during summer training, he realized it didn’t matter whether he was from New York City or Redkey.
“From that point on, it became … everyone else, they’re just people,” Abernathy said.
While growing up and attending school in Redkey, a military career wasn’t really on Abernathy’s mind. But he met some cadets while attending Hoosier Boys State and decided to apply for a nomination to West Point, which he received from both Congressman David W. Dennis and Sen. Birch Bayh.
He got into the school on Bayh’s nomination, and after graduation in 1979 went on to start his military service as an armor officer at Fort Knox, Kentucky. He later attended helicopter school at Fort Rucker, Alabama, and had his first flight assignment for a year in Korea.
Upon returning to the United States, Abernathy served the remainder of his time on active duty as a member of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, until leaving active duty in 1986.
Looking for his next career, he interviewed at IBM, Pfizer, Coca-Cola and Pepsi among others, but nothing really excited him until he spent a day with one of his wife’s relatives who worked in banking in New York.
“I literally just started writing letters to banks, finding folks and trying to network,” said Abernathy.
That resulted in a job with Chemical Banking Company (now Chase) in New York, where he started in the corporate credit training program. He later moved to a smaller banking operation in Westchester County, New York, and when it was bought by a larger firm he chose to leave the East Coast.
“That’s when I decided to come back to Indiana,” Abernathy said. “Which I had always kind of wanted to anyway, and that was just a good excuse.”
He took a job with Merchants Bank (now PNC), which became National City Bank soon after his arrival.
There he set up the financing for the Indy Racing League when it made its split from CART.
“I’m one of the few bankers to end up on the sports page of the Indianapolis Star,” Abernathy said, noting that he was demonized in a piece by former Star columnist Robin Miller.
He spent about three years with National City and then moved on to become a senior lender for Bank One, but after another merger and about three years there he wasn’t having much fun anymore.
So he began working on his own as a consultant while continuing, as he had ever since leaving the active military, to serve in the National Guard.
“I’d gotten back in just because it was a chance to do some flying,” he said.
But he rose through the ranks to become a colonel, and on Sept. 2, 2001, he took over as commander of the battalion and aviation brigade.
Then, 9/11 happened.
That attack changed Abernathy’s life, as it did so many others.
One of his former pilots was serving in the Pentagon and there was a need for additional help, so Abernathy applied and became a team chief in the Army’s 24/7 operation center.
It was supposed to be a six-month assignment. It lasted six and a half years.
He collected information for senior Army leadership, much of which was used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Congress. Occasionally, he interacted with the situation room of the White House.
He kept getting asked to stay, but about two and a half years into his time there he made a decision. He didn’t feel right continuing to work out of Washington, D.C., with so many soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I’m not going to fight the war here in the Pentagon. It’s not right,” Abernathy, the son of a World War II veteran, told his boss. “You can either send me downrange or send me home.”
So he was deployed to Iraq, where he served as chief of staff of the Iraq Assistance Group that trained the Iraqi security forces. He worked for about his first six months out of Aw-Fal Palace, one of Saddam Huessein’s former palaces near Baghdad International Airport.
He spent about a year overseas, and then returned to the Pentagon for another two and a half years. His duties in his second stint in D.C. included a six-month interim running the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) under General Martin Dempsey, now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and later Gen. David Petraeus.
He then returned to the Army’s operations center, where he remained until he hit mandatory retirement age, becoming chief of staff for Indiana Department of Environmental Management in 2010 and the commissioner of the Indiana BMV last week.
From West Point to the Pentagon, it’s a career he never could have imagined.
He recalls a day that he was walking into the Pentagon and ran into a former Redkey High School classmate, who had been in the Air Force and was also working at the facility.
“And we were sitting there laughing,” said Abernathy. “And we were saying, ‘Man, what are the chances that two kids from Redkey … would be standing on the steps of the Pentagon doing what we’re doing.’
“I’ve been pretty blessed to have a front row seat on history, in a lot of ways.
“I’ve been fortunate to see all the stuff and meet presidents … and work for Petraeus and work for Dempsey. But at the end of the day, I’m just as comfortable going back home.”