Throughout my life, Saddam Hussein grew from concept, to comedic bad guy, to a very real and personal enemy. His death in late December should have put that relationship to rest, the key phrase being should have.

P. Bradley Robb

Three years and two weeks prior to this publication, I was watching CNN when US administrator Paul Bremmer issued those now famous three words, “we got him” to cheers from those gathered for the press conference. As Bremmer spoke, I was only sixty or so kilometers away from Baghdad, dressed in desert camouflage, and waiting to catch a southbound plane for a few days of rest and relaxation in Doha, Qatar. I was surrounded by people like me, soldiers who had been in Iraq for months, and Kuwait even longer than that. We were men and women who had used Saddam and his cast of cronies as the focal point for a war in which the faces of the enemy looked dangerously similar to the people we were there to liberate and later protect.

For us, the announcement was personal. The tiny airport terminal at LSA Anaconda erupted into cheers, drowning out all but the strongest of thoughts. I mentally repeated the words over and over again. We got him. We got him. We got him. I shook hands with the soldiers I had been serving with. Elated, we smoked cigarettes next to the latrines. As pictures of Saddam began to fill the screen, particularly that of his medical screening process, it became apparent how far this man had fallen. The reality that the once pompous man had been living in a hole was utterly evident. His time in hiding was echoed tenfold by his appearance. Gone was the smart little beret and neat mustache, replaced by wild hair and a beard that redefined bedraggled. How could this be the man who promised that our blood, the people in the room particularly, would run through the streets of Baghdad? How could this feeble wretch be the one who promised the mother of all battles?

Saddam first came into my life at the same point as just about everyone else in my generation. I was ten or so when Iraq invaded Kuwait. The green night vision footage of Patriot missiles over Kuwait, and the now timeless footage of laser-guided bombs sent through the doors of buildings was forever etched in my brain. When coalition boots finally hit the ground in 1991, Iraqi forces folded so quickly that America had a new pop culture punching bag. Saddam and his beret and his mustache were lampooned at every opportunity from the military spoof Hot Shots to a recurring role as Satan’s domineering lover on South Park. For the 1990s, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq replaced the former Soviet Union as the de facto bad guy. Saddam was, for all intents and purposes, a largely fictionalized character despite being alive and still up to his dictatorial tricks.

Basic training came with the fatherly insights of one particular drill sergeant, a Staff Sergeant Kirpan who had been to Desert Storm. Wearing the combat patch of the First Infantry Division, Drill Sergeant Kirpan sat my platoon down one day and said with a great deal of certainty, “We are overdue for a war, and the next one is going to be an urban war.” Though I can’t be certain, I think that Drill Sergeant Kirpan was thinking of one man, of Saddam. During what is now called the first Gulf War, the 1^st Infantry Division had engaged and destroyed eleven Iraqi armor divisions, establishing American supremacy in the open desert. But, when the 1^st had stopped at the now infamous Highway of Death and forced Iraq into a ceasefire, they had to a point been forced to leave the job unfinished.

After reaching my first duty station, and the duty stations that followed, I was constantly reminded of Saddam and his forces. Many of the middle ranking noncommissioned offices wore a combat patch on their right shoulder. They were young soldiers during the war nine years earlier, but they each spoke of the war, of their experiences, of what they learned and how their training paid off. They spoke of Saddam. A man who became the figurehead of a war a decade prior was dominating my landscape of military understanding. I almost felt like I knew Saddam. I was, by circumstance more than chance, forced to study him from afar.

I arrived to the war just after the initial invasion and was forced to spend a week in Kuwait. While there I watched the war much as my family back home did, on CNN. Most of days and nights were spent in limbo, waiting on a C130 to take us from Kuwait up to LSA Anaconda where we could convoy to our various Forward Operating Bases. Days were spent sleeping on the wooden floors of large circus tents and nights, well, those were spent talking as there was not much else to do. Topics of conversation ranged along the typical lines, what we missed, last thing you did before you left, and could you believe that the temperature was already above 140 by eleven that morning? But, the one topic of conversation, the one question that everyone asked was whether Saddam had been killed yet.

We all knew it was only a matter of time. Despite literally being issued a full deck of people to look for, our attention remained fixed on the Ace of Spades. We knew that Saddam had done enough to earn that card. The sheer volume of life lost at his commands was mentally overwhelming.

He has so many crimes to choose from, but the one that always comes first to mind was the 1988 nerve agent attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja. Having been in the Army for a handful of years, I had been exposed to so many classes on nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare that I could recite on command the signs of a nerve agent attack. What starts out as a runny nose and tight chest quickly escalates to vomiting, beyond defecation, and onto the really rough stuff. Switching ever nerve on, every muscle in the body flexes in unison, an act in direct opposition to the body’s give and take system of operation. This, of course, stops things like the heart and lungs from functioning and is, quite possibly, one of the worst possible ways to die.

Prior to his capture, I kept a constant eye out for Saddam. Most of my days were spent on convoys, shuttling men and supplies between my Forward Operating Base and Baqubah or LSA Anaconda, and on a few rare occasions, Tikrit. Sleeping in Saddam’s summer palace was as close to the former dictator as I ever physically got. The building was so immense that it put the combined insensitive stylings of Donald Trump and an entire season of MTV’s Cribs to shame. When contrasted to the mud huts that many Iraqis are forced to live in, the ones that line the highways and burn their trash en masse in open fields, it’s a shame his people didn’t rise up on their own.

Or is it? Saddam used Sarin on his own people, an action that stands as a far cry from the man so commonly mocked for the past fifteen years. Saddam, of course, didn’t limit himself to mere chemical weapons. Mass murder, unmarked graves, torture, his portfolio of death was as diversified as any could possibly be. As a leader he ruled with an iron fist, and it is a fist that has been stained with blood so many times that no one doubted he would use it again. While the media here present Saddam as incompetent, he was anything but. He was capable and cold, at best a monster amongst men, a ruthless blight upon the face of this planet, but I think this knowledge was lost upon him.

As Saddam was lead to the gallows he looked ever the dignified leader. His hair was neat and freshly dyed. His beard trimmed. His shirt and pants pressed. His leather shoes shined. He turned down the mask offered to him and maintained an air of hard grace and defiance as the noose was fitted about his neck. An apology was out of the question, there was no admission of any guilt; this man refused even to offer up fear. He knew that his death would mean little, and would fix even less than that. When that noose fell, the planet had one less monster.

I turned off the television after the news confirmed Saddam’s death. I grabbed a jacket and went out to the pub. The walk down should have been a happy walk, one that shared the same sense of elation that the news of Saddam’s capture had. It didn’t. As I passed by a few others meandering about the Friday night streets of my small city, they didn’t even seem to know that Saddam had finally been killed. I couldn’t help but think that for me, that noose fell hollow, it fell empty. Saddam was dead, this was true, but he had died without learning the lessons he truly needed to learn. His December 2006 appeals process claimed not that the conviction was wrong, but that the court was unjust. I don’t think that the court was unjust, but I do think that the verdict was. The hanging of Saddam will do little, and what it will not do is repair the mistakes, replace the peace that he stole from his own people. It will not bring back the dead. It most certainly won’t return the peace to the night air. All killing Saddam did was take up another six foot plot of land outside of Tikrit, Iraq and perhaps give Iraq’s citizens one night of easy sleep. All wishes for actual justice aside, I am glad that he is dead.

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