‘Inspirational’ St. Charles Army veteran believes any goal can be achieved with enough determination

Army Chief Warrant Officer Patrick Scrogin is a father, husband, soldier, leader and war hero who believes anything can be done with enough determination and willingness to work hard and sacrifice.

Scrogin lost half of his left leg after being badly wounded in a helicopter crash during his second tour in Iraq. After barely surviving the crash, he spent months in hospitals undergoing almost 60 surgeries. He willed his way to recovery and today walks unhindered on a prosthetic leg, works as an air traffic controller for the Chicagoland area and supports veterans wherever he can.

Scrogin was born and raised in Missouri, where his father owned a crop dusting business. He learned to fly planes at a young age, sitting on his dad’s lap in the cockpit at age 4. By 16, he was a licensed pilot and had a commercial license by the time he was out of high school.

“Instead of doing the normal teenage stuff and getting in trouble, I was up there flying,” Scrogin said.

Scrogin comes from a patriotic military family. He had an uncle in the U.S. Army and an uncle in the U.S. Navy. Scrogin said he remembers the sense of pride he had for them as a kid and said his four children, Terence, Paige, Kaylee and Wyatt, have been or will be raised the same way.

“I think there’s something to be said for growing up in a military household and seeing people stand up and fight for our country, especially as a kid, when it’s conveyed in the right way,” Scrogin said. “It was a proud feeling as a kid when you look at your uncle and see the awards and decorations on his chest.”

Scrogin joined the National Guard between his junior and senior year of high school. He said while he felt proud to serve his country, he found the National Guard to be boring. After high school, Scrogin moved to Texas, where he worked as a crop duster pilot while still active in the Guard.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Scrogin was crop dusting a field in West Texas. Scrogin said he remembers bringing his plane in to reload for spraying and there wasn’t anyone around to fill the tanks. Annoyed that he had no help, Scrogin left his aircraft to find out where everyone was and found them surrounding the TV, watching the news footage of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center.

Thinking it must have been a horrible accident, Scrogin went back out to finish dusting the field. Shortly after, a call on the radio informed him that the second tower had been hit.

Scrogin quit his job that day and signed up for the U.S. Army the next day.

“I remember feeling kind of vulnerable,” Scrogin said. “As an American, nothing like that had ever happened. I felt like [enlisting] was what I needed to do.”

Scrogin set off for basic training in Georgia in 2002. During his training, his first daughter was born with complications and he had to return home for a month before finishing.

In 2003, he was deployed on the ground in the first invasion of Iraq. He said he remembers the moment he realized he was meant to be in the air. It was during the battle of Najaf.

“I distinctly remember, in the very first part of the war, we were fighting down below the city and the helicopters were flying overhead,” Scrogin said. “I just remember looking up and I smelled that jet fuel and I was like, man, that’s what I need to do.”

Scrogin said his first deployment was eye-opening and his platoon was in the midst of the action for most of its tour.

“It’s a war. It’s just chaos. It’s scary, it’s exciting and very intense at times,” Scrogin said. “You rely on your brothers and sisters to get through it. You have losses and that’s hard to deal with, but you know when you join the military, it can happen at any time, so you just try to block it out and fight through it.”

He returned to the states for flight school about a year after his deployment. He said the helicopter training came naturally to him having spent so much time flying. At the top of his class, he had his choice of what to fly and chose the Kiowa Warrior helicopter (OH-58D) because they work very closely with the soldiers on the ground.

After more than a year of flight training and several other training and leadership schools, he was redeployed to Iraq as a pilot in command in 2006. During that deployment, he piloted more than 200 combat missions and logged more than 600 hours of flying with night vision goggles.

Scrogin said pilots are the eyes for the commanders on the ground. He was involved in an array of missions, including convoy escorts, rescues and search and destroy missions. And he was involved in one of the biggest air assaults of the war.

At 2:30 a.m. March 1, 2007, Scrogin said he was flying a mission over northeastern Iraq when the helicopter he was piloting “just quit all of a sudden.”

“I had six and a half seconds,” Scrogin said. “Time kind of slows down when you’re in that kind of situation. Your training kicks in and you just try to stay calm and fly it until it stops.”

Scrogin said alarms were sounding inside the helicopter and everything was beeping and flashing as he tried to bring the chopper and his crew down safely all while using night vision goggles. The helicopter hit the ground with 20 G-forces, he said.

“I remember waking up and hearing my co-pilot moaning,” Scrogin said. “Everything felt funny. I couldn’t feel anything below my waist.”

He armed himself, preparing for an enemy attack, before realizing his tibia and fibula were shoved through the top of his knee. His leg was cut off clean below the knee and his calf and foot still were in his boot. Scrogin said he tossed the boot – still containing his severed appendage – aside and began tending to his wound.

Though pitch black outside, Scrogin could feel the blood gushing from his knee. After applying QuikClot and a tourniquet, he realized his goggles had been pushed into his eyes on impact, breaking his left orbital and leaving his left eye hanging from the socket.

“I remember giggling to myself, like ‘holy [expletive], this is it,’ ” Scrogin said. “I just laid there and I remember the first thing I heard was an American voice and I was so relieved. That’s when I passed out. The last thing I remember was feeling the heat of the Blackhawk’s engine as they lifted me on.”

Scrogin said he was clinically dead for five minutes on the helicopter ride to the hospital before being resuscitated. He was unconscious for weeks and had to be resuscitated twice while being transported between hospitals in Iraq, Germany and eventually Washington, D.C., he said.

He said he was in a medically induced coma for the entire trip from Iraq and Washington, D.C., and the only thing he remembers is waking up once in the German hospital and seeing all of the instruments that were keeping him stable and panicking, thinking he had been captured, before they put him back under.

Scrogin said when he arrived in Washington, D.C., he woke up as he was being taken off the plane and though not coherent, he remembers being greeted by a crowd of people on the tarmac laying blankets and flags on him. He was brought out of sedation in the Washington, D.C., hospital for the first time since Iraq and was reunited with his family.

He said he couldn’t figure out at first why everyone was crying and when his brother told him he was missing a leg, he didn’t believe him.

In addition to a severed leg, Scrogin had nine fractured vertebrate, his spine was detached from his pelvis, which was broken in five places, his left arm was broken and his left hand was shattered, requiring three partial amputations and reattachments. He also had multiple injuries and contusions to his face and head.

Scrogin spent the next four months in a hospital bed and underwent almost 60 surgeries.

Scrogin was transferred from Washington, D.C., to an Army hospital in Texas to be near his family shortly after his return to the states. His road to recovery was not an easy one and his family was told by many doctors that most of his goals for the future were impossible. He said he went through a brief phase of depression during his time spent bedridden.

While feeling discouraged in the Texas hospital, he met a severe burn survivor in passing outside his room. Though the man’s fingers and face were burned off, he gave Scrogin a bandaged thumbs up that changed Scrogin’s mindset on his situation and road to recovery.

“I told myself right then that I was never going to complain or feel sorry for myself because I had a lot to live for and it can always be worse,” Scrogin said. “That really changed my outlook on it and from that point on it was just extreme determination to get up and get better and make the best of what I had.”

Scrogin said he often would kick the doctors out of his room for telling him what he would no longer be able to do. When he started rehab, the doctors told his family that it would take over a year before he could be released, but two months later he was out of the hospital and doing rehab on his own.

“When somebody tells me I can’t do something, I’m going to do it,” Scrogin said. “At first, It was kind of demoralizing because people were telling me, ‘You’re not going to do this,’ and doctors were telling me, ‘You’re not going to fly again.’ Once I got out, I started the path to prove them all wrong.”

He spent about a week in a wheelchair before starting on crutches and after a few weeks on crutches, he was fitted for his first prosthetic leg. Within weeks of getting his first prosthetic, he visited his brother and piloted an aircraft again for the first time since Iraq and less than a year since his crash.

After flying, he went back to the hospital and, against the doctor’s recommendation, had his leg cut shorter to fit a different prosthetic so his knees would be the same length while sitting to fit more comfortably in the cockpit. Soon he was flying planes and helicopters again regularly.

While working towards a career in aviation, he piloted helicopters and commercial airplanes and got certified as an instructor before he met a representative with the Federal Aviation Administration. Though he had no interest in being an air traffic controller at the time, the representative told him that he wouldn’t be able to do the job anyway because of his previous trauma, which was more than enough motivation for Scrogin.

Scrogin said air traffic control was never a passion, it was more of a desire to prove someone wrong who told him that he couldn’t do something. While generally a calm and collected person, Scrogin will be the first to tell you that he doesn’t like other peoples’ opinions on what somebody can or can’t do.

“I never pictured myself being an air traffic controller sitting in a dark room because I’ve always been a pilot and I’ve always loved to fly,” Scrogin said. “For me, it was more of an ‘I’m going to show you that anybody can do anything they want to do if they put their mind to it.’”

Scrogin said in addition to the motivation of being told he couldn’t, he was attracted to the job because of the skill and fortitude it required. He said an air traffic controller has to be able to think quickly and critically, be good at math and be decisive in a high-stress environment.

He medically retired from the Army in 2008 and was hired by the FAA two weeks before his 31st birthday in 2009. After training, he worked in San Antonio and St. Louis for a few years, but said he was bored with the small volume of traffic in St. Louis. He decided to come to Chicago because of the challenge it presented as one of the busiest air traffic hubs in the nation.

Scrogin is now a supervisor at Chicago Terminal Radar Approach Control in Elgin. He said the job is about safety and he finds it rewarding helping pilots who are having issues or are lost. He said the challenge of staying mentally focused and engaged on the job is what he enjoys most.

He said the work is also intimate to him, having experienced engine failure and lived through a crash, and he enjoys being able to apply his passion and knowledge from a lifetime of aviation every day.

“It’s such a cool thing to see it all come together with how many planes are going in and out of Chicago every hour,” Scrogin said. “Controllers don’t get enough recognition for what they do.”

He and his fiancee (now wife) Alexa moved to St. Charles in March 2022 and had their firstborn, Wyatt, in August this year.

Scrogin often works six days a week and has a newborn at home, so he is limited on the time he currently can give, but said he always will be there for veterans and makes time to speak at events on their behalf whenever he can.

Since coming to St. Charles, Scrogin has given several speeches at events. He talks about the importance of patriotism and helps to raise money to support troops and veterans. He is a certified peer counselor for veterans and often takes wounded veterans out flying.

Dean White is an Illinois Republican State Central Committee member and owner of fence contracting company Peerless Fence in St. Charles. White met Scrogin through a charity event for Scrogin this year held by the Gary Sinise Foundation, which is building a house in St. Charles for Scrogin and his family.

White said the first thing he noticed about Scrogin was his humility. He said because Scrogin so often was on the giving side, it was clear to see how uncomfortable he was receiving the donation, but Scrogin remained humble and appreciative.

“His best qualities are his humility and humanity,” White said. “He’s just a nice human. He’s someone who I would be happy to consider a role model for my own kids. He’s willing to help veterans in any way and he’s never complaining. He’s the type of guy you want in your foxhole.”

White said it is incredible the amount of grit Scrogin has to contribute at such an incredibly high level both in his community work and his high-intensity job as an air-traffic controller despite all he has endured.

White said Scrogin is an inspiration to all Americans, and to him, Scrogin represents American values.

“What he represents transcends party lines,” White said. “If you can’t get inspired by his story, then you’re missing something.”

Scrogin said his service prepared him for life. He said he would tell a young person thinking about joining the military that they need to figure out their reason for joining and if they are doing it for the right reasons, he would encourage them to go for it.

“In my opinion, everybody should serve in some capacity at least for a couple years,” Scrogin said. “I joined the military to fight for this country, so for me it was an easy decision.”

Scrogin insists he wouldn’t change a single thing about his life if he could. He said his accident is part of his life’s story and his resulting battle helped define who he would become as a person.

“I’m just taking it day by day and trying to do the best I can possibly do every day,” Scrogin said. “That’s the goal right now.”