What you may not know is that a bronzed tassel is attached to each of the four swords which in turn attaches to a bronzed woven basket about the size of two minivans; each of these baskets is filled with the helmets of Iranian soldiers killed in the Iran/Iraq War. Many of them have bullet holes in them the size of silver dollars. Sunk into a strip of cement connecting the bases of the two hands holding the swords are more helmets, so that when the armies marched across the parade grounds, they would trample upon them.

It is exemplary of Sadaam Hussein’s sociopathic ghoulishness. Nobility is possible in warfare, and it is possible to be the reluctant warrior, as the United States has traditionally been. World War II began in 1937, and we weren’t in until 1941, and Vietnam was well in play when we stepped into that hornet’s nest. Ours is also not to gloat. The heads on pikes and Mi Lai were out of control soldiers, not presidential policy, as in the case of “The Hands of Power”.

The top “Sadaam’s a bad guy” anecdote came from a Captain who had taken us on a tour of many of Sadaam’s palaces. One was reserved for his mistresses and his rape victims. When Sadaam saw a woman he found attractive, he had her kidnapped and brought to him along with her mother. If she didn’t agree to the sex, her mother would be tortured until she relented. The mother would sometimes then be killed, sometimes released. Once having served her purpose, one or multiple times, the woman was placed in a cage and thrown into the huge manmade lake outside the palace near Camp Liberty.

The Captain had participated in a recovery effort that pulled up the cages containing skeletons and half decomposed female bodies. They stopped the mission after 120 were pulled up. There is now no boating or bathing permitted in the lake. It lies dormant as a shrine to these tortured women.

Just across the lake from that palace is a jaunty, fun, sandstone castle, with crawl spaces all throughout, and irregularly shaped rooms inside, some with low ceilings, others with rough finishes and odd angles. It was a playhouse for Sadaam’s bastard children, born of regular mistresses whom he did not kill. When they would have his children, they would live with them in their own homes, in parts of the palace and at what the soldiers have come to call Camp Flintstone.

There was a group of about a dozen soldiers in up-armored Humvees resting before going out on a mission in the red zone. The entire band, ten out of ten of us had gone out to see the parade grounds, and we were greeted warmly by them. We befriended them quickly, taking pictures and asking where they lived and racking our brains for common interest or experience that would make for good smalltalk. Some were musicians, and all of them were young, men and women, Asian, African American, Hispanic, Caucasian. They looked like America.

We goofed around with them for about fifteen minutes, and then they drove into Baghdad, the most dangerous city in the world.

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