![]() And I think what struck a number of these soldiers was kind of the dignity with which he carried himself. But now he was a prisoner in his own palace. And I think it's fairly ironic that his last house, essentially, was a palace that he had built for himself. And the final location where these soldiers were responsible for guarding him was an abandoned palace. MARTIN: Can you paint a picture of what space he inhabited and how he occupied that space - imprisoned, on trial, facing what will inevitably be a death sentence?īARDENWERPER: Exactly. And then I think, also, part of it was a reflection of just Saddam's own personality and his charm that he would try to engage them in conversation. It was sort of inevitable that there would be some thaw in this relationship. They had to essentially always be within what one soldier called lunging distance of him in order to just safeguard him. How did their relationship with this prisoner start to evolve?īARDENWERPER: That was something else that struck me - was just the degree of intimacy that surrounded their time with Saddam. ![]() (Reading) For these young men, it was like visiting a zoo and being forced to watch a creature who, though deadly, rarely does anything but sit, only occasionally deigning to walk across the cage to thrill the assembled spectators. This is when you're describing the first few days of what it was like for these guys guarding Saddam Hussein. MARTIN: I'd like to have you, if you would, read a little bit from early on in the book. So it was kind of a mix of emotions, I think you could say. You know, at the same time, I think some of them were a little bit demoralized because they had also hoped that they'd be spending a little more time outside the wire, going on patrol, doing the things that they had kind of trained to do. I think one of them just blurted out, we should kill him. MARTIN: What was their initial reaction to this particular assignment?īARDENWERPER: Well, I think, initially, their reaction was, you know, we got this guy. And the next thing they knew, they were sitting across from the most wanted dictator on the planet. They were essentially young, American soldiers in their late teens, early 20s, some of whom were not far removed from basic training. I mean, I think what struck me about this story was the fact that these young men - they weren't special operators. ![]() They were - many of them were enlisted after 9/11, right?īARDENWERPER: Yeah. MARTIN: So this group of guys, these soldiers who came to be known as the Super 12 - tell us about them. Will Bardenwerper has written a book about the 12 men's experience titled "The Prisoner In His Palace." He joins us now to talk about it. That man was Saddam Hussein, who was on trial at the time in Baghdad. Instead, they spent months sipping tea, playing cards, smoking cigars with a graying old man in a bombed-out palace. They had trained for combat, and that's what they expected to do when they got there. In 2006, a group of men, soldiers in the Army's 101st Airborne Division, shipped out to Iraq.
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