William Doyle - A Soldiers Dream: Captain Travis Patriquin and the Awakening of Iraq

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Table of Contents

To my son, Brendan, and my wife, Naomi

To the family of Travis Patriquin, and to all military families

AUTHORS NOTE

For six months in 2006, a charismatic young American military officer and Afghanisthan war veteran with a passion for Arabic culture helped his colleagues and the tribes of Iraqs Anbar province achieve a historic victory against al-Qaeda and engineer a major turning point in the Iraq War.

This book is my attempt to tell his story, largely through his own words and the memories of the people who knew and loved him.

I first learned of Captain Travis Patriquin in August 2007, when I read an article by Martin Fletcher in the Times (of London) about a U.S. Army soldier and Arabic linguist who was being hailed as a martyr by Iraqis. In the history of the Iraq War, Id never heard of such a thing. An American soldier was being publicly hailed as a martyr by Iraqis. I had to find out more about who this man was.

Fletchers story told of the late Captain Travis Patriquins key role in the American military effort to help Iraqis launch the Anbar Awakening, a tribal revolt against al-Qaeda in Iraq that directly led to sharply lower levels of violence in the former center of the insurgency, Anbar province, and elsewhere in Iraq, and had major ripple effects that shaped the course of the Iraq War.

I was amazed by Patriquins story, and as I interviewed scores of his American and Iraqi colleagues, I came to realize that Patriquins journey is critical to understanding Americas experience in the Middle East and perhaps to understanding Americas future on the world stage.

This is not a book mainly about combat, though there is combat in it. It is not a book about an authors experience with troops at war. There are many good books about that, and this isnt one of them. This is not a book about generals, or power struggles in the corridors of the White House, the Pentagon, and Washington think tanks. It is not a micro-history of the Iraq War, or counterinsurgency policy, or the famous surge, or combat operations in Anbar province, or, for that matter, the Awakening. Lots of good books have been written, or will be, about all that, too, hopefully many of them by Iraqis.

And this is not intended to be a work of hagiography that exaggerates the contribution of one man to the course of the Iraq War. Tens of thousands of Iraqis, Americans, and others have died in the struggle to bring stability to that tormented land, and in the scheme of things each of those sacrifices is equally infinite to those who have died and to their loved ones.

As for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have served in Iraq, I think Patriquins colleague Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Tedesco said it well when he told me: Travis was a unique individual who made a very significant contribution. But there are thousands of men and women who fought in Iraq in a variety of different units before and after our time, who did great and glorious things for their nation, stories that will never be told. If in honoring Travis we can in some way illuminate the contributions and sacrifices of the common soldier, then Im all in favor of it. He was exceptional but he was also representative of the quality of the individuals that are the strength of our military.

This book explores the experience of one soldier who served in Afghanistan, and then Iraq, who played a crucial role in shaping events there in a pivotal place and moment of the war, and was killed. This is a view of the Iraq War from a very narrow focusthat of a single American soldier, who happened to help shape a turning point in the conflict.

This book is based largely on hundreds of interviews I conducted with about one hundred and fifty of Travis Patriquins family, friends, military colleagues, and Iraqis who worked with him closely, and on Patriquins own personal and professional writings.

It is also based on thousands of pages of documents obtained by the author from various sources inside and outside the U.S. military. These documents, many of them not previously available to the public, include U.S. military meeting reports, situation reports, memos, e-mails, after-action reports, data sheets, maps, PowerPoint presentations, and intelligence briefings. Some documents and interviews were given to me anonymously or not for attribution.

And this book is based on the memories and journals of four people who worked with Patriquin on a daily basis as Arabic interpreters and cultural advisors in Iraq: a Syrian-born American named Majd Alghabra; a Syrian-educated American, Sterling Jensen; and two native-born Iraqis, Atheer Agoubi and Saad Mohammed, the latter of which is a pseudonym.

American politicians, pundits, and generals have stumbled over one another to take credit for reductions in violence and improved conditions in Iraq, claiming they resulted from their support of the American troop surge beginning in early 2007. But the success of the surge was largely made possible by the Awakening. And the Awakening may not have succeeded as it did without the crucial early efforts in 2006 of a very small group of American army and marine officers to support it, and particularly the work of one American soldier, Captain Travis Patriquin. Patriquin was loved by Iraqis as a brother and formed one of the closest connections with the Iraqi people ever achieved by an American soldier.

When I first met Patriquins wife, Amy, she said she thought her late husband would have loved the idea of someone writing a book about him. She said she had only one thing to ask of metell the truth.

Thats what Ive tried to do.

This is the story of a man who helped the Iraqis engineer a turning point in the Iraq War.

It is the story of one of the over 4,400 American military men and women who have died in that conflict, a war that so far has killed almost 100,000 Iraqi civilian men, women, and children. They were two body counts that Travis Patriquin dreamed of stopping.

This is the story of how sometimes, one soldier can help change the course of a war.

Get to know their families, clans and tribes, friends and enemies, wells, hills and roads.... If you succeed, you will have hundreds of miles of country and thousands of men under your orders.

T. E. LAWRENCE, IN THE ARAB BULLETIN, 1917

I support world peace! One carefully placed round at a time.

SIGN ON TRAVIS PATRIQUINS DESK, 2006

Gods plan is unknown to us, but there is a plan,
I believe that with all my being, and were all a part of it.

CAPTAIN TRAVIS PATRIQUIN

Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,

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