Sea Stories

by William H. Mcraven

  The meet lasted about thirty minutes, and Bremer and his party departed Camp NAMA. As word of the meeting leaked out, speculation about the treatment of Saddam, his whereabouts, and his final disposition were all subjects of banter on the news stations.

  One commentator implied that we were likely torturing Saddam and using drugs to get vital information on the location of the WMD. At one point, the hype got so out of control that the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, General Doug Brown, called me directly to confirm that we were not using drugs to elicit information. I reassured Brown that no drugs were being used and that in fact, Saddam was living better than most of the soldiers at Camp NAMA. He remained isolated in the small room and I kept a doctor and an Army Ranger in attendance at all times. Saddam received a medical checkup every day and we delivered food from the dining facility for each meal. Initially, I expected to hold him for only a day or two before we moved him to Basra and then out to a Navy ship in international waters. That plan was quickly scuttled by General Abizaid, who subsequently directed me to hold Saddam until further notice.

  I had three overarching concerns with respect to Saddam’s detention and protection. Would he commit suicide? Would one of our Iraqi colleagues try to kill him (the Jack Ruby scenario)? Would the Iraqi insurgents attempt to storm the facility and break him out? Camp NAMA was only a few hundred yards from a main road in which hundreds of Iraqi trucks moved every day to supply U.S. troops. While I thought most Americans wouldn’t care if Saddam was assassinated or committed suicide, he was now my prisoner and therefore I had an obligation, both morally and legally, to keep him safe until the chain of command or the Iraqis could decide his fate.

  In an effort to ensure Saddam’s safety, I directed that all Iraqis be barred from entering the jailhouse. This was difficult for many of our staunch Iraqi allies who saw my order as an affront to their loyalty. It was, but the consequences of failure outweighed their sensitivities. Additionally, I reinforced our small jail facility by establishing exterior fighting positions and placing Rangers and some of our great 1st Cavalry soldiers along the main avenues of approach. Within forty-eight hours I felt comfortable that I had all the right precautions in place to ensure Saddam’s safety.

  On day three of Saddam’s incarceration, Abizaid called to tell me that “another government agency” was taking over the questioning of our prisoner. I wasn’t happy, but the topic was not open for discussion. I “requested” that General Abizaid send me a written order directing me to hand over the prisoner. He completely understood my concerns and was kind enough to oblige.

  I expected that the other government agency would take Saddam to an undisclosed location and question him there, but as it turned out, they wanted to keep Saddam at Camp NAMA and continue with the dialogue at our location. Additionally, they knew that our translator, an intelligence officer who worked for me at Camp NAMA, had developed a relationship with Saddam, which would be beneficial to their efforts.

  When the other government agency’s team arrived, I made it clear that Saddam’s health and welfare remained my responsibility. Concerned that their techniques might be more aggressive than the established military procedures, I wanted to ensure that I had a vote in anything that occurred at Camp NAMA. As it turned out, my fears about the team were completely unfounded. They were professional, courteous, followed the rules to the letter, and complied with every one of my requests.

  The questioning was more like an interview than an interrogation. The team spent four to six hours a day talking with Saddam, trying to build rapport in hopes of finding the WMD or the whereabouts of Captain Speicher. Saddam was surprisingly chatty and seemed to enjoy the banter that went on between the team and him. It was obvious from the start that he had no idea of the location of Captain Speicher. While the Navy MIA was of great concern to the United States, to Saddam he was just another pilot lost during the first Gulf War. Whatever happened to Speicher was below Saddam’s level of oversight.

  There were also no weapons of mass destruction, and no matter how many times the team reengaged Saddam on the issue, the answer was always the same. Iraq didn’t have nuclear WMD. It was not the answer we were hoping for.

  When asked about the Kurdish genocide, sarin gas that killed tens of thousands of Kurds in the north of Iraq, Saddam was dismissive and replied with a shrug of his shoulders, “That was Ali, not me.” Chemical Ali, Saddam’s closest friend, had been placed in charge of the Kurd situation up north and resorted to unspeakable atrocities to wipe out the population. It was only through the U.S. imposition of the Northern No-Fly Zone in 1992 that the Kurds survived.

  When questioned about the murder of his two sons-in-law who fled to Jordan with Saddam’s daughters and then naively returned thinking all was forgiven, like a Mafia don, Saddam replied, “It was family business.”

  Over the course of the next ten days, the team continued their questioning, but it was becoming clear that the interaction was giving Saddam a source of pride that wasn’t helpful. From his vantage point, he had the upper hand in the discussions, and as such, he felt empowered. The team was aware of the dynamic and eventually decided that nothing more would be gained from their continued dialogue. After two weeks they departed, without having obtained much insight into the critical questions, which we had hoped to have answered.

  During Saddam’s stay, I visited the small room once a day to talk with the doctor and the guard to ensure everything was okay. Each time I entered, Saddam would stand up and attempt to engage me in a conversation. I would motion for him to sit down and never addressed him directly. I had given a standing order that no one was to talk with Saddam unless I granted approval. As the days went by, Saddam’s haughtiness and confidence began to wane, and with every visit I made, and every conversation I didn’t have, his frustration grew and his sense of power diminished. Over time, the change in his personality was dramatic.

  About three weeks into Saddam’s imprisonment, General Abizaid came by the holding facility to meet with the military intelligence team and to thank them for their efforts in capturing Saddam. At one point I asked Abizaid if he wanted to meet Saddam. Without hesitation Abizaid said, “Why in the world would I want to meet with that megalomaniac?”

  In a strange way, the starkness of his answer surprised all of us. The Saddam we saw every day was a broken old man in an orange jumpsuit who sat quietly on his cot hoping to talk with anyone who would listen. But the real Saddam was indeed a megalomaniac. On his hands was the blood of tens of thousands of his own citizens. He had gassed another ten thousand Iranians during the ten-year Iran-Iraq War. His sons and his close friends were deranged human beings who took perverse pleasure in the pain of others. His secret police protected Saddam with a degree of ruthlessness not seen since Stalin’s era. Saddam viewed himself as a historic Arab figure who ruled like the pharaohs of old with godlike authority over the lives of his subjects, but in reality he was just evil.

  After thirty days of holding Saddam at Camp NAMA, I received orders to move him to a military police facility where the former President of Iraq would be interned until his trial. By early January 2004, we were in the midst of a growing insurgency. Al Qaeda in Iraq was becoming a real threat to stability. Car bombs and suicide bombers were commonplace. The rise of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Sunni extremists was creating untold problems for an American military that had come to dislodge Saddam’s army and now found itself fighting a shadow force of Iraqi insurgents.

  On his final day at Camp NAMA, I decided to gamble and ask Saddam to go on television and order the insurgents to surrender. I developed a plan with my translator and rehearsed my remarks so the translator knew exactly what I wanted to say and how. While I had no illusions as to the potential for success, I also felt I had nothing to lose.

  As I entered the small room, Saddam stood up, smiled, and began to engage me in conversation. I remained stoic and asked him to sit. He attempted to maneuver me to the cot and himself to a nearby chair. I
grabbed him by the shoulders and gently but forcefully placed him back on the cot. His demeanor immediately changed. He did not like being told what to do.

  I began my pitch by telling him that the war was over and that U.S. forces were fully in control. While nine months after the invasion that fact might have seemed obvious, but during the interrogations it was clear that Saddam didn’t know the current status of the fight. A small grin appeared on his face. It was a smile of satisfaction. He knew there was something else I wasn’t telling him just yet.

  I continued by saying that there were many Iraqis who had not yet laid down their arms, and as such, we were killing a number of his citizens who didn’t need to die—the war was over. He remained silent, waiting for my offer, which he seemed to know was coming.

  To save his people the anguish and to help rebuild Iraq to the great nation it could become, I offered Saddam the opportunity to make a video asking for the remaining fighters to lay down their weapons and begin the reconstruction.

  He looked directly at me and said in Arabic, “Would you ask your men to surrender?”

  It was a question I knew was coming. “If it meant saving my countrymen, yes. I would ask them to surrender.”

  It was a lie and Saddam knew it. He responded, “I don’t think so.”

  “You will undoubtedly hang for your crimes,” I continued. “Do you want to be remembered as a petty dictator like Mussolini, or do you want to be remembered as a patriotic Iraqi who tried to save his country.”

  “We shall see if I hang for my crimes,” he said, his arrogance back on full display.

  “Then this is the last time we will see each other. I will be transferring you to another facility tonight.” Saddam seemed shaken by my final comment. I stood up and promptly left the room.

  Later that night, under tight security, I handed over my prisoner to the commanding officer of the military detention facility on the Baghdad airport. I would never see Saddam Hussein again, but I would continue to fight in Iraq for another six years until U.S. forces departed in December 2010.

  On December 30, 2006, after a lengthy trial, Saddam Hussein was hanged for crimes against the Iraqi people. Thirteen years later, as Iraq remains a troubled nation, haunted by ISIS and Al Qaeda, and often on the verge of sectarian war, some may ask whether the U.S. effort was worth it. There were no WMD, and the fracture of Iraqi society caused the death of thousands of innocent people and the loss of over three thousand American and allied lives. I have no good answer. I have only hope. I hope that someday from the ashes of this war will arise a stronger, more representative, more inclusive Iraqi government. I hope that from the broken pieces of countless Iraqi lives will come a man or woman who will change the course of history: develop a cure for cancer, bring peace to the Middle East, or lighten the darkness. I hope that the families of the fallen warriors will find peace in knowing that their loved ones died serving valiantly, protecting their fellow soldiers and halting the spread of Saddam’s evil.

  I can only hope.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE

  BAGHDAD, IRAQ

  2008

  Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!” screamed the young Algerian man. The women in the crowded market grabbed their children and began to run. But it was too late. Looking down at his suicide vest, his face ashen and covered in sweat, the wide-eyed boy reached for the handle to ignite the blocks of explosives wrapped around his waist. According to later reports, there was no hesitation; his reward awaited him in heaven, and the sooner he martyred himself, the sooner he would be with Allah. And in his mind, the twenty-one men, women, and children who died that day would all be sacrifices for the cause of Islam. It was the eightieth suicide bombing that year. Over two hundred Iraqi civilians had perished so far, and one man, one man who remained untouchable, was responsible for all the carnage.

  I was tired, bone tired. The kind of tired that was so exhausting you have trouble breathing. The kind of tired that makes you wonder whether you will ever be strong again. The kind of tired that makes you realize you’re not nineteen anymore.

  It was early October 2008 and I had just returned from a combat mission in Baghdad with the Army Rangers. At fifty-three years old, lugging around an M-4 rifle, with body armor back and front, a Kevlar helmet, and three hundred rounds of ammo was just hard on the old body. But nothing gave me more satisfaction than spending time in the field with the soldiers.

  However, I hadn’t planned to be fifty-three when that opportunity finally came around. Now, as Stan McChrystal used to say, I was just a “battlefield tourist,” a three-star admiral who occasionally rode along on combat missions. But in my own defense, riding along also gave me a much better understanding of what my troops had to deal with every night.

  The mission ended around 0200. I had returned to my headquarters at Balad Air Base, dumped my gear, and fallen into my rack completely wasted. The temperature outside hovered around a hundred degrees, but the small one-room air conditioner pumped wonderfully cold air into my stark white aluminum sleeping unit. I bit an Ambien in half and quickly fell asleep.

  “Sir, wake up.”

  “What?”

  “Sir, wake up! Colonel Erwin is on the phone. He needs to talk with you immediately.”

  I sat up and looked at the clock. Three o’clock in the morning.

  “I know, sir,” whispered my aide, Major Pat Lange, with only a bit of regret. “But he said it’s really important.”

  Colonel Mark Erwin was the Army special operations task force commander. He was a magnificent officer, and we had worked together off and on for the past five years. Mark was tall and lean, with the build of an All-American soccer player—which he had been at Wake Forest. Years earlier, when Erwin was a squadron commander and I was a new one-star admiral, we had become friends. As a Navy guy in an Army world, I appreciated the friendship, and Mark taught me a lot about how his task force worked. He was a tough disciplinarian, and now as the Army task force commander, he expected a lot from his men. His task force had without a doubt some of the finest soldiers in the world.

  I grabbed the phone, cleared my throat, and tried to shake off the effects of the Ambien.

  “Mark. What’s up?” I said, trying to sound completely awake.

  “Sir,” he answered, with a tinge of panic in his voice, “my guys crossed the Iraqi border and went into Syria.”

  “I’m sorry,” I responded. “Say that again.”

  I could hear the exasperation on the other end.

  “Sir, the sergeant major and five other guys are in Syria.”

  “When you say, ‘in Syria,’ what exactly do you mean?”

  “Sir, they’re about fifteen kilometers inside Syria, heading toward Abu Ghadiya’s hideout.”

  Abu Ghadiya. Damn…

  Abu Ghadiya was the most wanted man outside Iraq. No one had facilitated more suicide bombers or been responsible for more American and Iraqi deaths than him. For years he had been operating from across the border in Syria, facilitating the flow of hundreds of terrorists into Iraq, young radicalized men from around the Middle East and North Africa.

  Syria was technically our ally at the time. We had an embassy in Damascus and we routinely shared intelligence on Al Qaeda high-value targets. But for some reason, the Syrians seemed to turn a blind eye toward Ghadiya. It was reported that a Syrian intelligence officer had been running him for years, helping him hide from the Americans and other Syrian officials.

  Ghadiya always operated within close proximity of the Iraqi border, but not so close that we could just stroll across and grab him. He frequently visited a town called Abu Kamal, but rarely stayed there longer than twenty-four hours.

  After taking command of Task Force 714, I reviewed the existing plan to capture or kill Ghadiya and wasn’t satisfied that anyone would approve it. The plan called for a large helicopter assault force with fifty Army Rangers and twenty Army task force operators. Five helicopters carrying the assaulters would f
ly from Iraq across the border, avoiding Syrian air defenses, land en masse, surround the compound, capture or kill Ghadiya, and then return to Iraq. The plan also required an overhead combat air patrol and even on-call artillery. In my mind, it was way too conventional and much too large a footprint for anyone to support. Nevertheless, soon after taking command, I had timidly presented it to General Dave Petraeus, in hopes that we could garner some support for trying to get Ghadiya. Petraeus had appropriately scoffed at the plan and we went back to the drawing board.

  After the Petraeus briefing, I called Mark Erwin into my office and challenged him to come up with a small package, something unconventional, something worthy of his task force. Within two weeks he came back with a plan. But there was one strange request… he wanted to procure high-end mountain bikes so his men could ride across the desert, allowing them to move much faster without being detected. I think he assumed I would laugh him out of the office, but I loved the idea—until now.

  “Okay, Mark,” I said, trying to sound calm. “Let’s get them back to Iraq as quickly as possible.”

  “Yes sir. I have already recalled them, but it’s going to take them a few hours to get back across the border.”

  “Well, I’m meeting with Petraeus at 0700, will they be back by then?”

  There was a slight pause. “Sir, if everything goes okay, we should have them back by around 0800.”

  “All right, Mark. No worries. Do what you need to do to get them back safely and let me know immediately if anything goes south.”

  “Roger, sir, understand.”

  I could tell Mark wanted to say something else. “What is it, Mark?”

  “Sir, I’m sorry,” he said painfully. “I have been pushing the guys hard, maybe way too hard. We have been working for weeks trying to find a way to breach the border undetected and get into Syria. Tonight the sergeant major found a way and decided to keep going.”