PROFILE An American story By S.D. Liddick; photos by Lawton King Patrick Malay, a third-generation Irishman and one of Buffalo’s sons, was a decorated commander in Fallujah and is now one of the vital components in Iraq’s complicated rebuilding process. Patrick John Malay is a tow-headed, working-class product of Buffalo and the youngest of four sons in a patriotic Irish-American family. His pinkish white skin is that of a baby—the kind a poke turns to white and then ruddy before it fades back to coral. The face, though, reminiscent of General Westmoreland, is serious. On a clear and chilly day in the middle of December, it peers out the window of a V-22 Osprey. Colonel Patrick John Malay during a key leader engagement with Iraqi General Ra’ed in Al Qaim (on the border with Syria). The rotors tilt from vertical to horizontal and the aircraft drops slowly, like a helicopter. Everything turns to brown and the Osprey goes blind as the fine dirt of the Syrian Desert is kicked up in the backwash. Malay, meanwhile, is lost in thought, recalling two uncles—John and Francis Lionel—who died in World War II. (Francis was posthumously awarded the Silver Star.) The colonel thinks about his Browning rifles—gifts of another uncle—and the way that life increasingly resembles a series of overlapping circles. The legacy of those absent uncles made an impression on the young Malay and added to the impact made by wild Uncle Dan, a soldier who brought far-flung gifts like exotic scarves and soft silk jackets back from Vietnam. As a teenager, Malay was a wrestler at Iroquois Central High and wanted to follow the lead of his father Joseph, who was a Marine during WWII. A knee injury precluded the boy’s enlistment; it was a setback. Out of high school, Malay began classes in criminology at Erie Community College and worked a string of jobs—construction, bartending, woodcutting, and setting trap lines—with the idea of becoming a cop. Then one of his former coaches encouraged him to try the Corps again. With the knee now passing muster, Malay enlisted in 1981 and went through boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina. He was then stationed at the Reserve Depot in Buffalo, where he went on to take a bachelor’s degree in sociology from UB. Afterwards he joined the Corps’ Platoon Leaders Course and was commissioned in 1984. Twenty-four years later, Malay breaks out of reverie as the Osprey hits the deck with a light thud. A Marine airman lowers the rear ramp and signals a dozen passengers to dismount. Outside, the colonel makes his way to a group of ten officers. They are waiting on a desolate field of dirt in a remote outpost on Iraq’s border with Syria, a place called Al Qaim. The men fall in behind Malay as a young major briefs him on the key leader engagement he’s about to enter. Malay is now a full bird colonel and in charge of 36,000 square miles of Iraqi territory in the western half of Anbar Province, and in control of the illustrious Fifth Regiment, the Corps’ most decorated. The shooting is largely over in Anbar Province, and Malay’s capable team of officer-level advisors is busy rebuilding infrastructure and establishing a government capable of standing on its own when the Marines pull out by edict of the Security of Forces Agreement in 2011. Malay’s job description has changed dramatically since his last deployment. He has put down his rifle and become a diplomat of the cloak-and-dagger variety. The meeting in Al Qaim is with the general in charge of Iraq’s 28th Division—a former Saddam soldier named Ra’ed. Malay has spent the past forty-eight hours in briefings, discussing the general’s family life, history, ability as a leader, and his relationship with the Coalition. The brass at RCT-5 (Regimental Combat Team) is confident Ra’ed is the best man for the job in the region; he will be America’s best hope in far western Iraq. The plan is to dump lucrative construction contracts and small business micro-loans in Ra’ed’s territory—through Ra’ed’s officials. The strategy is ingratiation through economic opportunity and the colonel likens it to greasing the small cogs that turn the big wheels of the machine. Malay will later have meetings with area leaders and tell them why Ra’ed’s main competition, a man who actively abets the insurgency, is bad for business, the region, and the tribe. This is part of the high-level—and tricky—negotiating job Malay has assumed since returning to Iraq in 2008. (His first deployment was in 2003 and his second in 2004.) That second tour saw heavy fighting in Fallujah. Malay was awarded the Bronze Star with a V for valor, but, like many who have been in combat, he doesn’t have much to say about the experience. His comments are reserved for the young men who fought under him. “I can’t tell you how proud I am of these young Americans,” he says. “I watched young men who would pull their dead buddies from a firefight, put them in a body bag, redistribute that man’s ammunition, and then check their watches to realize it was only ten o’clock in the morning—they had a full day left of it. Watching that kind of single-minded determination and bravery was an honor.” The colonel also speaks with begrudging respect of some of the enemy he faced in the battle for Fallujah—though he’s careful to distinguish. The foreign fighters who came to Iraq for money or under the ideological guidance of religious fanaticism (or both) were dross, he says, a threat to both Americans and Iraqi civilians. Former-soldier Iraqi nationals, on the other hand, were intelligent and quick to learn, as well as disciplined and brave. “We’d have two fronts going on,” Malay says, “in different parts of town. And we realized they were sharing intel from one side to the other—the soldiers in one battlefront were learning from our tactics on the other front. They were smart and tough soldiers.” It’s the Americans who are now learning on the fly. With their weapons largely idle, the Marines have donned diplomat’s hats as they struggle to erect and legitimize a government and civil infrastructure—in a country just months out of civil war and where a heavy-handed autocrat ran the economy into the ground, years ago. The Fifth Regiment has made startling gains vis-à-vis security, economy, and bureaucracy in Anbar Province, and General Ra’ed is an integral piece in the puzzle. A short and heavy man, Ra’ed has a big smile and is quick to laugh. He sports a bushy Saddam-style mustache and his division is among the best in Iraq. He shares a bond with Malay—they’re professional warriors who’ve seen and survived grim combat—and that’s helped congeal their official relationship. If fact, the two men may have passed each other in battle, a fact that comes to light during a briefing. “He said the Americans didn’t fight fair, sir,” the major says with a smile. “He said he’d establish his units along an axis and the Americans would pick one pocket, overload it with fire, bust through, and pour everybody into the breach. They’d be gone before he could even line his men up to fight again.” The officers at the table chuckle: one man’s exhibition of flawless strategy is another man’s unfair fight. Malay points out that the Iraqis come from a region where a battle’s not considered over until one side is completely vanquished. The anecdote is emblematic of the cultural divide lying between the two commanders, but there’s no time to dwell on differences. The briefing moves on to another vagary in western Iraq’s complex political picture. Colonel Malay confers with Iraqi General Ra’ed in Al Qaim. Malay’s maternal grandfather, an O’Neill, was a transplant from Shannon, Ireland, and a stickler for running water, of all things. “You’ll want to turn that water off,” the man was constantly saying, or “You shouldn’t let that spigot run.” It was one of the personal and idiosyncratic details that defined him. Years ago, the colonel visited Ireland and found the old family farm. He even met the Irishman who now owned the spread. The man showed him where the water was kept, far from the main domicile. It had to be carried to the house by pail—which provided a window onto Grampa O’Neill’s quirks and traits. In a similar vein, Malay subscribes to many of the same hunting magazines his father did, and his most cherished possessions are the rifles handed down from his uncles. “Those men came up during the Depression,” Malay says. “They didn’t have a pot to piss in, but they were avid hunters and to own a good rifle was really something. The guns I hunt with today are the same Brownings they carried and turned over to me, guns they bought from the Far East Guntrader Company in Tokyo. Those guns and what they represent are connected to our culture, our family and roots—everything is cyclical; it all comes back again.” Uncle John and Uncle Francis, the Malays’ ineffable contribution to the American way, are still a palpable part of the conscience of a widely recognized family. The colonel’s maternal uncle, Hugh O’Neill, is a prominent cardiologist. Uncle Kevin left a Franciscan monastery to become a well-regarded Buffalo social worker, and Uncle Vincent is a long-time employee of the parks department. The colonel’s parents, Joseph and Mary Anne, meanwhile, still live on the family’s 100-acre farm in Alden. “My family came by that farm in 1946,” Malay says, “after my father and the uncles who survived World War II came home. My father came from a big family, five boys and five girls. The five boys went into World War II and two of them were killed in Europe. One was a paratrooper—he was killed in Italy—and the other one was killed on Christmas day in the Battle of the Bulge, in the Ardennes Forest. “When the remaining brothers got home from the Pacific—my dad and his twin brother were Marines and the youngest one was in the Navy—I think they were products of the yeoman’s myth. The idea was that if you had a farm and you were working, that was your mark in life. But it was a myth. They bought the farm and it had 1890s technology. They never did anything with it, because they realized they couldn’t make a living on it. And meanwhile, the auto industry was booming. A guy could go to work and make much more money being a truck driver or building the Niagara Mohawk Power Plant, working on the Scajaquada Expressway, or those sorts of things. “I think they all had some combat stress they were dealing with. The family was still reeling from the loss of the two oldest boys, who had worked during the Depression to support the family. They were big, strapping guys and the youngest ones had really looked up to them. So anyways, I had a traditional Irish-Catholic upbringing. Very family oriented, with a great sense of patriotism, which I think was a means of having some respect for the two that were killed.” Not surprisingly, Malay and his three brothers went into the service; two went into the Navy and two into the Marines. All four have earned master’s degrees and one is working on a Ph.D.—a fulfilling legacy for eighty-three-year-old Joseph, a product of the Depression who didn’t make it out of the eighth grade. The colonel, meanwhile, married in 2006 and has started on the next generation of Malays. Some had begun to wonder what the then-forty-seven-year-old soldier was waiting for. “I suffered a couple of concussions in Fallujah in 2004,” Malay says, “and my wife tells me that’s what finally knocked some sense into my head.” S.D. Liddick is a freelance writer based in San Diego who was recently on a four-month assignment in Iraq. SUBSCRIBE NOW Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top