They hadn’t signed up for this. The squad from the 551st Military Police Company was a dusty dozen who’d enlisted out of a c♔ombination of patriotism, a steady paycheck, or to straighten out their lives. They were stationed in Baghdad in the summer of 2006, guarding a hospital and sometimes serving as convoy escorts, until the day they were given a very special assignment.
Thei༒r orders: to guard and prote♓ct a “high-value detainee,” a man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, the author of acts of unimaginable cruelty.
On the first day ꧃of this new job, one of the squad’s specialists looked down at the prisoner’s face, a face he knew well from countless news stories and magazine covers.
It was S⛎addam Hussein, and at the moment𝓰, he was snoring.
The tyrant’s humble last days, and the experiences of his American guards, are recoun✱ted in Will Bardenwerper’s compelling new book, (Scribner). Over the course of writing the boꦺok, Bardenwerper, a former Army infantry officer who served in Anbar Province, interviewed members of the MP squad and drew from official Army oral histories to document Saddam’s confinement.
During the summer and fall of 2006, Saddam stood trial before the Iraqi High Tribunal, a court set up by Americans and run by Iraqis. He was to be prosecuted for ordering the executions of 148 Shiites from the Iraqi town of Dujail, following a 1982 assassination atte🔥mpt there.
Saddam’s American guards, who took to calling themselves The Super Twelve, were charged with keeping “the face of the Axis of Evil” alive, safe and reasonably happy during the trial♎. Public perception of American troops in Iraq was still smarting from the recent Abu Ghraib prison scandal; it was critical to the US mission that the former ruler not die or be injured while in custody. American leadership also wanted Saddam’s trial to run as smoothly as possible, and it was felt that keeping him content in captivity would help.
When they weren’t shuttling back and forth between “the C🙈rypt” (the basement complex beneath the IHT) and “the Rock” (an Alcatraz-like former palace on a small island near Baghdad’s airport), Saddam and the Super Twelve had plenty of time to kill. The guards gradually got to know Saddam, and he t🅠hem. For a man whose name was synonymous with evil, Saddam was remarkably pleasant. Over time, the relationship between the murderous ex-tyrant and several of his captors warmed to something just short of friendship.
His guards were struck by Saddam’s appreciation of simple pleasures. Though he once owned dozens of marble palaces (some equipped with gold toilets), he seemed reasonably content in his small prison cell. He took great enjoyment in sitting outside on a patio chair, writing at his desk (the guards hung a small Iraqi flag above the desk, to make it look more official), and smoking Cohiba cigars, which he stored in an empty 🦩box of wet wipes. Years before, he’d learned how to smoke them from Fidel Castro.
Saddam also enjoyed tending to a scrubby patch of dirt at one corner of his outdoor rec area, watering the weeds and “treating them more like beautiful flowers than the ugly growths they were,” Bardenwerper writes. He was meticulous about his food, too; he ate his breakfast in sections, 🎃first an omelet, then a 🌌muffin, followed by fresh fruit. If the omelet was “torn,” he would reject it.
One of the Super Twelve specialists noted that Saddam was especially given to sweets. “He supposed it made Saddam less intimidating, that he🌜 could yield to the siren call of a sugary muffin the way anyone else might,” writes Bardenwerper.
Saddam also listened to the radio — “He’d always stop tuning if he stumbled across a♛ Mary J. Blige song” — and liked to ride a rickety exercise bike that he called his “pony.” He joked that he was a gazelle, building up his leg strength to leap over the prison walls.
The erstwhile autocrat had a laugh that one guard described as being like “that Dracula dude from ‘Sesame Street.’”
Saddam seemed genuinely interested in his guards’ lives, asking after their families, and even wrote poems fo🍷r one guard’s wife.
Several of the guards had children, and Saddam would share anecdotes from his own fatherhood 🐎experience. One story about disciplining children was memorable, if not exactly relatable. Saddam recounted to his guards that his psychopathic son Uday once made a “terrible mistake” that made Saddam “very angry.”
Uday had, in fact, shot up a party, killingꦡ several people and wounding several more, inc𝔍luding Saddam’s half-brother.
“I was very angry with him so I burned all his cars,” Saddam told the guards, referring to Uday’s obscenely large collection of luxury automobiles, including hundreds of Rolls-Royces, Ferraris and Porsches. “Laughing wildly, the former dictator recalled how 𒁃he gleefully watched the inferno,” writes Bardenwerper. It reminded one guard of “a Jerry Springer episode on steroids.”
𝐆One guard later reflected, “Saddam had the best life you could possibly have in prison, and he liked us. I’m a🍌 true believer that if one of our helicopters went down and the insurgents came to get him, he wouldn’t have hurt us. We had a good relationship.”
But there may, of co🎀urse, have been 🦩some calculation to his warmth.
“I think that is kind of the million-dollar question: to what extent was this an elaborate manipulation or act, and to what extent 🐠was this a genuine human connection that developed between these groups of people,” Bardenwerper told The Post. “And ultimately, I don’t know if that question can be answered.”
The trial itself was punctuated by angry outbursts and speechifying from Saddam. He seemed less interested in defending himself, and more concerned with speaking to future historians, shoring up his legacy. The outcome of the trial itself seemed foregone. Everyone believed he would be put to death. But when he returned tဣo his quarters, he was again the cordial, almost grandfatherly chara🌺cter to his Army guards.
In the face of this terribly strange set of circumstances, the Super Twelve performed their duties wi🌼th remarkable poise and humanity. “I was impressed by their professionalism,” Bardenwerper observed, “given the fact that they really did not have any extensive training in dealing with a detainee of this stature. They had undergone all the usual training that military policemen have for dealing with detainees, but not a detainee who happened to be a former head of state.”
Whatever challenges they faced during their assignment, its conclusion may have been the hard🦄est for Saddam’s American guards. Bardenwerper reflected, “It’s more difficult to play a role in the death of someone you’ve grown to know as a human being than it is to shoot at an anonymous target from 300 meters . . . I’m not suggesting that that’s easy, but it’s certainly different from spending 24 hours a day with som🦂eone in the way that these guys did, and ultimately turning that person over to be killed.”
On his last day, knowing ๊the end was near, Saddam embraced his American captors. Then they delivered him to his executioners. It was an Iraqi-only affair. From where they were stationed, the Super Twelve couldn’t see the gallows. They only saw shadows and sounds: the crash of the trapdoor as Saddam dropped through it, cracking his neck.