The Prisoner in His Palace Read online

  They didn’t know it yet, but in a few months they’d be playing a pivotal role in a historical drama they couldn’t have imagined.

  The men—there were no women in the squad—had grown reasonably tight in the months preceding deployment. They’d performed countless training missions back at Fort Campbell to prepare for deployment, which they expected would be spent carrying out assignments common for military policemen—for example, guarding detainees and providing convoy security. And during the training lulls those who were single grabbed some downtime at Kickers bar or the Lodge in nearby Clarksville, Tennessee, while the married among them stuck with more domesticated routines, such as taking turns babysitting each other’s kids so that they could enjoy dinner with their wives at the popular Yamato’s Japanese steakhouse off post.

  Those who’d deployed before, like Hutchinson, Art Perkins, Tom Flanagan, and Chris Tasker, were familiar with the routine. Less so Tucker Dawson, Adam Rogerson, and Paul Sphar, for whom this was an altogether new adventure. Sphar had barely been allowed to deploy at all, due to his persistent weight problems. In the months leading up to their leaving for Iraq, Sergeant Chris Battaglia had “run the dogshit” out of Sphar to trim his ample midsection. The young private stood out from the others for reasons other than his weight, though. The fact was, he seemed a better match for a skate park or mosh pit than a military parade ground. He was covered in tattoos, proud to have almost a “full shirt” of them.

  The soldiers had arrived in Iraq after a marathon journey that took them from Fort Campbell to Maine to Germany to Kuwait to—at last—BIAP’s floodlit tarmac. The temperatures had continued to linger in the nineties even after the sun had set, and before the men had even finished unloading their bags, their clothes were drenched in sweat. It was a not-so-subtle reminder that they were far from home, and that this was for real.

  CHAPTER 2

  Baghdad, Iraq—August 2006

  Upon arrival at Baghdad International Airport, each soldier in the twelve-man squad was issued an initial magazine containing thirty rounds of 5.56 ammunition. As the men were shuttled by local “hajji buses”—run-down vehicles that wouldn’t be out of place in communist Havana—to Freedom Village, the collection of containerized housing units, or CHUs, that would serve as their new homes, they took notice of the ubiquitous Hesco barriers and concrete walls designed to provide cover from the incoming mortar and rocket fire.

  That the fortifications suggested potential danger was both sobering and exciting. Unbeknownst to the new arrivals, they were in fact stepping into a cauldron of violence whose temperature had been steadily rising since the initial invasion had unseated Saddam Hussein in 2003. It was now the summer of 2006, and U.S. commanders were so alarmed by the escalating Sunni versus Shia violence in Baghdad that twelve thousand additional troops were being rushed in. Just days before Hutch and the others had arrived in Iraq, a Sunni suicide bomber had detonated himself outside one of Shia Islam’s holiest places, the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, killing 35 and injuring 122. Volunteers would scramble for hours afterward to mop up the blood and collect body parts.

  Confronting the deteriorating security situation would be the work of another day, though. For now, giddy excitement gripped those who were experiencing a war zone for the first time, and everyone—not just the greenhorns—rushed to lay claim to creature comforts that would have been unimaginable in previous conflicts. In a peculiar way, this ritual of appropriation reminded Specialist Adam Rogerson of scenes from the MTV show The Real World, in which new roommates arrive at their group house and madly scramble to claim the most desirable living spaces. In the case of Rogerson and his squad mates, the hunt was on for fridges and televisions sold cheap by the National Guard unit they’d be replacing. Though the conditions were hardly luxurious by standards back home, those who’d deployed before into more austere circumstances recognized that they now had it pretty good.

  The squad would spend its first week shadowing the outgoing National Guard unit. These transitions were always a little awkward, because the soon-to-be departing soldiers were fatigued, somewhat jaded, and itching to get home, while the incoming units brimmed with enthusiasm—especially the younger soldiers eager to put their training to use.

  The soldiers from Campbell were initially assigned a grab bag of missions, some resembling those they’d trained for, and others falling into their laps by default, since they were a well-trained combat support unit that was part of the Army’s storied 101st Airborne Division. The twenty-first-century American Army was still in many ways a tribal institution, and within its various hierarchies, the 101st was regarded as “squared away”—Army parlance for “competent and professional.”

  “Our squad was good at what we did,” Adam Rogerson would later say with pride. “We trained hard, learned how to call in nine-line medevacs, stick IVs in each other, and went on lots of twelve-mile ruck marches.” These things mattered to Rogerson, and indeed to most of the squad, which exhibited a pride bordering on cockiness that is common in hard-charging units.

  CHAPTER 3

  Baghdad, Iraq—summer of 2006

  The twelve MPs were tasked with overseeing security at a hospital staffed by American medical personnel who were responsible for treating both coalition service members and Iraqi insurgents wounded in combat operations. Located just inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, the facility was a grim, nasty place. The doctors were buffeted by relentless waves of trauma injuries, and they labored long hours to save lives in a dilapidated building in which blood would sometimes pool on the floor and flies were a persistent menace. Some of the suspected insurgents had to be handcuffed to their beds as they were treated. Chris Tasker, who, like Hutchinson, had been “hell-bent” on enlisting after the attacks of September 11, once had to pin down a suspected insurgent who’d been shot in the neck and was flailing around on his gurney. Not caring about the man’s allegiances, the doctors struggled intently to peel back his torn flesh and treat his hemorrhaging wound.

  Some days the squad never left the hospital. They made themselves useful by helping the nurses replace dressings on the same insurgents they thought they’d come to this country to capture and kill. Many of the squad members were frustrated to be essentially “babysitting bad guys,” some of whom were only in their early teens but already spitting on the Americans who were laboring to take care of them. Looking back later on the experience, Rogerson said, “They didn’t like us, and we didn’t like them, but they had to see us every day, and we had to see them.”

  The squad was also assigned periodic convoy escort missions, which at least got them out of the hospital, and more closely resembled what they’d imagined doing in Iraq. Every trip “outside the wire,” as soldiers referred to patrols beyond the secure perimeter of their operating bases, entailed a degree of risk, which was actually welcomed by some of the less experienced and more eager troops. Specialist Art Perkins wasn’t one of them. Already in his mid-thirties, Perkins had left the Army and married a woman he’d met while stationed in Germany. But then he reenlisted years later. Bespectacled and knowledgeable on a diverse array of topics, Perkins reminded Rogerson of the comedic actor–turned–pundit Ben Stein. Perkins exhibited Stein’s dry wit and curmudgeonly manner. Some soldiers took to calling Perkins “Snapple,” after the trivia questions inside the tops of the juice bottles, since he would volunteer so many random facts. To Hutch, “Old Man Perkins” seemed like “an unsuccessful tweedy professor who had all this random knowledge,” and whose attitude was the antithesis of the “hooah” brand of enthusiasm that the Army inculcated in young recruits.

  One day the squad was tasked with providing security for a convoy bound for the U.S. Embassy, a mission that most welcomed, since it might provide an opportunity to enjoy the State Department cafeteria. As they snaked their way through Baghdad’s often chaotic streets, Rogerson stood in the Humvee’s turret manning the .240 machine gun, doing the best he could to remain vigilant, scanning for potential roadside bom
bs, waving Iraqi traffic to the side, and, unavoidably, baking in the overpowering sun. He looked forward to the relief that would come when they finally reached the embassy and he could strip off his body armor. He imagined his inflamed back muscles relaxing after hours of forced tension. Upon arriving at the embassy, shirts soaked in sweat, looking like they’d just dragged themselves from a swimming pool, the soldiers dismounted from their Humvees and quickly stripped off the suffocating protective gear they were required to wear outside the wire. Everyone’s mouth watered as the men envisioned the spread of food and cold Gatorades that awaited. All but one, that is. Perkins refused to leave his vehicle. He was volunteering to stay behind, which was unnecessary, since they were already in the secure Green Zone. The soldiers were confused and asked Perkins why he wasn’t joining them. Then Rogerson noticed that not only was Perkins’s uniform top soaked, as were most of theirs, but so, too, was a large area around his crotch. He’d peed himself.

  Accounts differ as to what had triggered the unfortunate release. Some contended that Perkins simply couldn’t hold it anymore, while others suggested that a distant explosion or outbreak of small arms fire had spooked the Old Man, causing him to lose control of his bladder. Whichever theory was correct, Perkins would be mercilessly reminded of it for weeks. Specialist Rogerson and Private Dawson were the chief teasers. They constantly referenced the Will Ferrell comedy Talladega Nights, in which a young boy says, “And I never did change my pee pants all day—I’m still sitting in my dirty pee pants.” Dawson, a fresh-faced twenty-year-old who looked like he’d just stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, reminded the more awkward and less photogenic Paul Sphar of the “new kid in school who’s trying hard to impress the cool people right off the bat.” Rogerson, the popular jock who wasn’t many years removed from roaming the hallways of North Ridgeville High School outside Cleveland clad in his Rangers football jersey, was the perfect ally, and to Perkins’s continuing dismay, he was their perfect foil.

  After one especially long and hot patrol, Rogerson began wrestling with his .240 machine gun while the rest of the squad knocked out their usual post-mission tasks. Old Man Perkins happened to be pontificating—or so Rogerson considered it—and the grimy, sweaty Ohioan tackled the smaller, somewhat chubby Perkins. Rogerson pinned Perkins on the ground and wrapped him up in the strap of his machine gun. Later admitting to a tinge of guilt for his overheated outburst, Rogerson explained, “He was my roommate, and I liked him, but I’d just had enough.”

  Meanwhile, the rhythm of life in Iraq—the loading up of the gun trucks, going out on convoys, and returning to base to steal some time for relaxation—continued. In this, the squad of MPs was not unique. U.S. soldiers across Iraq were embarking on hundreds of patrols, largely indistinguishable from theirs, every day.

  Hutchinson remembers the moment when everything changed.

  Their transition from an ordinary squad of military policemen to the Super Twelve, as they’d take to calling themselves, began one night as Hutch returned from a mission and looked forward to some downtime to relax. He was the father of two young daughters and one son, and tried to visit the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation (MWR) tent as often as possible to call home and hear his kids’ “crazy little stories.” It was a routine he’d grown familiar with over the past five years, since he’d spent more of that time deployed than at home. The MWR tents were charmless yet treasured. They included a bank of phones and some Internet terminals, separated by plywood partitions, at which soldiers would queue up to briefly tap into the currents of life back home. On this night, though, Hutch wouldn’t get the opportunity to talk to his wife, as he was summoned to a meeting with his squad leader, Sergeant Luke Quarles.

  Quarles, who hoped to qualify for the Army’s Special Forces when he got back to the States and had been spending his downtime in Iraq pursuing an exhausting fitness regimen to improve his chances, told his assembled team, We have a mission change, boys. No more convoy escorts. No more watching low-level hajjis. You may not like it, you may like it, but bottom line is, we’re gonna do it. We’ve been assigned a high-value detainee.

  This news, while intriguing, didn’t come as a shock, since “detainee ops” were a common assignment for military policemen. What came next, however, was anything but common.

  The detainee was Saddam Hussein.

  For an instant, there was a collective intake of breath, then the smart remarks started. “We should kill him!” someone half-jokingly exclaimed. Fuck him, let him burn, thought Hutch.

  Chris Tasker was dejected when he learned the news. “I was bummed, since I wanted to be on patrols outside the wire, not guarding people.”

  As anyone who has ever joined the Army knows, “closing with and killing the enemy” is a core objective that the institution continually reinforces. This ethic is ingrained in any number of ways, from having soldiers achieve marksmanship proficiency by shooting hundreds of rounds at life-sized silhouettes to conducting bayonet drills while chanting, “What makes the green grass grow? Blood, blood, blood!” It’s all designed to erode a person’s natural aversion to taking a human life, so that if the time comes in battle, a soldier won’t hesitate to pull the trigger.

  Now, though, after having spent months stoking these soldiers’ enthusiasm for mixing it up with the “bad guys” outside the wire, the Army was assigning them the task of standing watch over a prisoner in his jail cell.

  Sensing the frustration of Tasker and some of the others in the squad, Sergeant Chris Battaglia tried to boost morale, explaining: Dudes, you’re going to be guarding Saddam Hussein, that’s pretty cool.

  Yeah, I guess you’re right, it’s not that bad, Tasker responded. Still, he wasn’t convinced he’d get much out of the mission. His knowledge of Saddam was limited to the basics; he was aware of Iraq’s wars against Iran and Kuwait, for example, and, more generally, that Saddam had been “a vicious dude killing his own people.”

  Hutch also had reservations about the new mission. “At first I was really hesitant about it,” he later recalled. “Nobody wakes up one day and wants to spend time with a guy who’s been accused of all the things Saddam was accused of.” Hutch considered asking for a transfer before concluding that he’d never backed down from anything and wasn’t going to start now.

  The squad’s youngest member, Tucker Dawson, quietly marveled, Out of all the people in the Army, how did I get chosen to do this?

  CHAPTER 4

  Baghdad, Iraq—summer of 2006

  Steve Hutchinson was working nights again. But he was a world away from listening to country music and peeling drunken brawlers off each other’s back at the Midnight Rodeo in central Florida. His first shift guarding Saddam began at midnight.

  Hutch found himself in the bowels of the Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT), the courthouse that had been constructed to try Saddam and his seven codefendants for crimes against humanity. Beneath the courtroom was a collection of subterranean cells—essentially glass cages—in which Saddam and his codefendants would be held on the days when they were in court. When the proceedings were in session, the defendants would bunk there for up to a week at a time.

  The IHT was housed in a former Baath Party headquarters building, a hulking, pillared structure that bore a resemblance to many of Saddam’s palaces. The IHT had been established by the Americans and modeled on UN war crimes tribunals. The court had chosen to try Saddam for the reported killing of 148 Shiite residents of the Iraqi town of Dujail, in response to a failed assassination attempt that had taken place when Saddam had visited the town in the early 1980s. The Dujail crackdown was an odd choice as the first crime to prosecute Saddam for, given the other, more well-known killings for which he was thought to be responsible, most notably the chemical gas attacks directed at Iraqi Kurds during the Iran-Iraq War.

  The previous days had been an exhausting blur for Hutch. He and the rest of the Super Twelve had been forbidden from telling anyone about their new mission. Not only would they not be al
lowed to tell their loved ones what they were doing, but they wouldn’t even be permitted to keep a journal of their experiences. They were told that their email correspondence would be monitored, and that they’d be subject to random searches to make sure that they weren’t taking notes about what they were observing.

  With those warnings still echoing in his head, Hutch took a seat on an old metal chair outside Saddam Hussein’s shatterproof Plexiglas cell. The dictator appeared to be sleeping comfortably. His temporary home was at the end of the hallway, the last of four cells. The man whose palaces dotted the landscape above was now locked up in a subterranean hallway that had all the charm of a boiler room. It was dreary and claustrophobic. The cell itself looked a bit like a hospital nursery for newborns. A concrete wall was topped by Plexiglas starting around waist level so that the prisoner could be observed from the outside.

  The Super Twelve would eventually take to calling their temporary lodging beneath the IHT courtroom “the Crypt,” since their quarters, just down the hall from the detainees, was dark twenty-four hours a day to accommodate the fact that, at any given time, some of them would be sleeping. Life in the IHT was divided into eight-hour shifts, but it was the night shift Hutch was now settling into that was devoid of any noise whatsoever. “It was so deafeningly quiet that the silence was loud,” Hutch would later say.