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Journalism of Courage
After the gilded palaces and the tyrant’s life of luxury, it came down to this for Saddam Hussein: a final hiding place beneath a farmer’s courtyard that was as small and dark and dank as a coffin, and a decision to surrender that saved him from certain death at the hands of US troops.
The 43-year-old Chicago-born officer who led the raid, Col. James B. Hickey of the Army’s 4th Infantry Division, described how soldiers peering down the shaft with weapons and bright lights, with orders to kill Saddam if he put up a fight, held back when they saw he carried no body-belt bomb or gun. They hauled him out, handcuffed him and placed a plastic hood over his head.
In the small hut near the hole where former President Saddam Hussein spent his final hours of freedom, a dozen books were piled on top of a chest near the bed.
There was a book on interpreting dreams, volumes of classical Arabic poetry titled Discipline and Sin, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Personal care products sat atop a mini-refrigerator: a cake of Palmolive Naturals soap, a bottle of Dove moisturizing shampoo, a pot of moisturizing cream and a stick of Lacoste deodorant. Saddam wasn’t starving. The kitchen held a bounty of food: brown eggs, cucumbers, carrots, apples, kiwis and flatbread, plus orange marmalade, canned meat, a jar of honey and Lipton tea.
The bunker also contained signs of a man not used to roughing it: two cans of Raid, a fly swatter and antibiotics.
The only hints of luxury were a gilded face mirror, a garlic press, sweets—pistachio baklava, candied figs—and the books.
One of the surprises of a visit to Saddam rathole was its size. It was more cramped and airless than it appeared in photographs. Its entrance at ground level was barely large enough for a burly man like Saddam to squeeze through. A reporter of about the former Iraqi ruler’s size went down into the hole and discovered that Saddam would have had to lower himself awkwardly down the shaft. He then would have had to twist and slide until he was lying flat in the concrete-walled, wood-beam-roofed tunnel. The tunnel was about 8 feet long, 30 inches high and 30 inches wide. Even a few minutes in the tunnel was enough to foster claustrophobia. Those who built it had installed a small, 6-inch high ventilation fan above where Saddam appeared to have placed his feet, a jutting steel pipe for further ventilation and a miniature light that was out of order.
From this last miserable redoubt, at 8.26 pm on Saturday, the man who sent thousands of Iraqis to their deaths in battle and the torture chambers and the gallows made a decisive choice for life, his own and surrendered to the US troops.
