Will Bardenwerper - The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid

More Praise for The Prisoner in His Palace

Bardenwerpers examination of how soldiers, trained to focus on the inhumanity of the enemy, struggle to frame and reframe that inhumanity is the focus of The Prisoner in His Palace . The books action will pull you along like any great military adventure, but bubbling underneath is an absorbing and sometimes heartbreaking survey of young men grappling with a moral certitude that begins to shift below the desert sands theyre standing on.

Tim Townsend, author of Mission at Nuremberg

In the American imagination, Saddam Hussein functions as nothing more than a two-dimensional despot, a monster who terrorized and gassed and desecrated his own people. He was. He did. Will Bardenwerpers The Prisoner in His Palace reveals something else about Saddam, though, something less simple than that known caricature and certainly more troubling: he was a human being, a human like all of us, a human being with hopes and dreams and regrets that woke him in the dead of night. Saddam wrote poetry and longed for his family and treated the American soldiers tasked with guarding him during his trial with kindness and generosity of spirit. This is a brave and piercing book.

Matt Gallagher, author of the novel Youngblood and Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War

The Prisoner in His Palace finds humanity in a singularly inhuman figure, Saddam Hussein. Through meticulous reporting and beautiful storytelling, Will Bardenwerper has crafted a portrait that is both deeply moving and deeply disturbing. This book challenges the tired constructs of good versus evil that have led us into so many ill-conceived wars.

Elliot Ackerman, author of Green on Blue

An astonishing, riveting story that brings the reader face-to-face with the specter of Saddam Hussein in captivity. As twelve young American guards spend their days in the same room with this brutal gangster-killer, a chilling, Shakespearean portrait emerges. Intriguingly, we meet a man who, while sometimes manipulative and petty, is also avuncular, joking, charming, wistful, and physically affectionate. There is even a scene of the Beast of Baghdad hugging an American soldier in a moment of tenderness. This is an unforgettable, essential read.

William Doyle, author of A Soldiers Dream: Captain Travis Patriquin and the Awakening of Iraq and PT 109: An American Epic of War, Survival, and the Destiny of John F. Kennedy

A moving and perception-altering book that exposes how wrong we are in so much of what we assume about war. In the fifteen years that America has been at war weve imprisoned, injured, and killed thousands of foreign citizens. Its time we got to know some of them. Will Bardenwerper introduces us to a name we know well, but a story about which we know little. Saddam Husseins execution was not just about the death of a tyrant. Its about the Americans who were tasked with guarding him, interrogating him, and preparing him for his death.... Mr. Bardenwerper forces us to turn our gaze not only on those we have killed but on those who were there to see the task done.

Eric Fair, Pushcart Prizewinning essayist and author of the memoir Consequence

What an astonishing story. Through meticulous research and a keen eye for detail, Bardenwerper does the near impossible: convinces the reader to empathize with Saddam Hussein during his sad final days. The Prisoner in His Palace is a deeply human book, and though we all know the ending, I couldnt put it down.

Brian Castner, author of The Long Walk and All the Ways We Kill and Die

Will Bardenwerper has written a bracing account of Saddam Husseins final months through the eyes of those who guarded and interrogated himeyes that are uncomfortably opened to the complexity of evil. Reminiscent of twentieth-century Nazi character portraits such as Gitta Serenys Into That Darkness , Bardenwerpers The Prisoner in His Palace will be many things to many people. To this writer and combat veteran, it is an exhilarating, extraordinary, and damning look in the mirror.

Adrian Bonenberger, author of Afghan Post

The Prisoner in His Palace is an important contribution to the literature from Americas 9/11 wars. Will Bardenwerper has written a concise and engrossing account of the final days of Saddam Hussein. The stories of the American soldiers who guarded the Iraqi leader serve as a sharp reminder of wars complexities, contradictions, and costs.

J. Kael Weston, author of The Mirror Test: America at War in Iraq and Afghanistan

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-1783-1

ISBN 978-1-5011-1785-5 (ebook)

This book is dedicated to my parents, Walter and Patricia.

That afternoon there was a party of tourists at the Terrace and looking down in the water among the empty beer cans and dead barracudas a woman saw a great long white spine with a huge tail at the end that lifted and swung with the tide while the east wind blew a heavy steady sea outside the entrance to the harbor.

Whats that? she asked a waiter and pointed to the long backbone of the great fish that was now just garbage waiting to go out with the tide.

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

The American soldiers who guarded Saddam Hussein in his last days, the self-dubbed Super Twelve, were forbidden from keeping a journal, or from even mentioning their mission in communications with loved ones back home, so theres no documentary evidence to confirm the exact date of some of the episodes recounted here. The soldiers were, however, later interviewed by Army historians as part of the Armys oral history program. I was provided these interviews by Michael Gordon in 2010 as I assisted him with research for his book The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama . Consequently, in constructing this books chronology, I began with the recollections the soldiers shared in these oral histories before conducting nearly sixty hours of my own interviews with some of the soldiers. (Those interviews are among the nearly one hundred I conducted with government officialsboth U.S. and Arabas well as scholars, spies, lawyers, and others with unique insights.)

If a passage is enclosed in quotation marks, it means that I obtained it from an interview or material published elsewhere.

Much of the dialogue in this book wasnt recorded as it happened, and in these instances the speakers words arent in quotation marks. The remarks do, however, faithfully represent the recollections of people involved in the conversations and, in the case of Saddams interrogation, declassified FBI accounts.