I ran across this article in Stars & Stripes today. It’s nice to see Travis Patriquin’s famous slideshow being vindicated in al Anbar. (The link is to another page of this blog where you can click to view the presentation).
The Ready First Combat Team will be rotate out of Anbar before too long. The next brigade in will have large shoes to fill.
I hope this trend continues. All the way to Baghdad.
It’ll still take a couple years. Diplomacy with the Sunnis means winning the locals one local leader at a time. There are a lot of locals still there.
There are also still Shi’ite militias and foreign fighters to deal with. And there’s only one way to deal with them. We’ve tried diplomacy with al Sadr before. We’re crazy to try again. The Jaysh al Medhi knows only one thing: When defeated, sue for peace, and regroup later. It’s time to smash it (and it’s leader) once and for all. We won’t need to do diplomacy with an organization that doesn’t exist anymore.
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Click here for info on how to make a donation to Travis’ kids’ trust fund.
There was a memorial service for Travis in St. Louis on Saturday. They used his slideshow there, so more civilians have seen it. Good? Yes?
Chris,I wrote a book to honor Trav and included your “moxie’ comments about him in it. It is free at wwwthesoldiertrav.com. I wrote it for his family and Americans who are not given the chance to learn aboout the real humanitarians in the world, those in our own military. Thanks for your service and I am sorry for all the friends you have lost. It is humbling. Gerry
Gerry, I downloaded your online book and read the first page or so. Thank you for doing that, it looks like it’ll be an interesting read and I want to find out more about what you discovered.