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

About the Book

 

In the haunting tradition of In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song, this remarkably insightful and surprisingly intimate portrait of Saddam Hussein lifts away the top layer of a dictator’s evil and finds complexity beneath as it invites us to take a journey with twelve young American soldiers in the summer of 2006. Trained to aggressively confront the enemy in combat, the men learn, shortly after being deployed to Iraq, that fate has assigned them a different role. It becomes their job to guard the country’s notorious leader in the months leading to his execution.

Living alongside, and caring for, their “high value detainee” in a former palace dubbed The Rock and regularly transporting him to his raucous trial, many of the men begin questioning some of their most basic assumptions—about the judicial process, Saddam’s character, and the morality of modern war. Although the young soldiers’ increasingly intimate conversations with the once-feared dictator never lead them to doubt his responsibility for unspeakable crimes, the men do discover surprising new layers to his psyche that run counter to the media’s portrayal of him.

Woven from first-hand accounts provided by many of the American guards, government officials, interrogators, scholars, spies, lawyers, family members, and victims, The Prisoner in His Palace shows two Saddams coexisting in one person: the defiant tyrant who uses torture and murder as tools, and a shrewd but contemplative prisoner who exhibits surprising affection, dignity, and courage in the face of looming death.

In this artfully constructed narrative, Saddam, the “man without a conscience,” gets many of those around him to examine theirs. Wonderfully thought-provoking, The Prisoner in His Palace reveals what it is like to discover in one’s ruthless enemy a man, and then deliver him to the gallows.

 

272 pages (hardcover)
June 6, 2017
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Saddam Hussein has interested me a lot recently, mostly because I never really knew much about the guy. He was the Big Bad Guy all the way Over There in my life, but it wasn’t until later, when I was older, that I started really looking into him. Researching what he was all about. It hasn’t been until really, really recently that I’ve started researching some of the absolutely horrible things his government did while he was in power. In fact, the starting point for this recent research can be seen on a blog post on this very website, wherein I talk about Saddam’s public Ba’ath party purge. 

 

I picked up this book mostly because I can’t find a gigantic, overly detailed biography about Saddam Hussein, written recently. Instead, in one of my nonfiction book groups, someone posted about this book and said it was fantastic and I decided to give it a try. 

 

It’s not an overly detailed biography. In fact, I’d hesitate to even call it a biography. And it’s also not long, clocking in at just under 300 pages, it was a seriously fast read, and extremely gripping. Ultimately, this book was a lot different than I expected it to be, and it left me thinking some very deep thoughts about some very uncomfortable topics. I saw someone say this book is about the banality of evil, and perhaps that hits close to the target but I’d hesitate to fully agree with that, either. Instead, this felt a lot like a book about masks. The masks we wear, that obscure the human underneath. 

 

The Prisoner in his Palace tells the story of the twelve American soldiers assigned to guard Saddam while he was kept in one of his palaces during his lengthy trial. It took about a year, which was plenty of time for the relationships between Saddam and his guards to change. Perhaps if Saddam had been angry and dictatorial while in captivity, things would have been different, but he wasn’t. Rather, he appeared to be just another old man, kind and eager to talk. The book speculates that his captivity was probably the first time in his life he’d ever felt safe, and thus his paranoia was at a minimum, so he relaxed. 

 

It’s an awkward book to read in some respects, because while there aren’t a lot of details about some of the things Saddam did, there are enough, and they are horrible. However, Saddam himself, while in captivity, was like the average grandfather that lives down the street. He was kind. He told stories. He played games and joked around. It was hard to square the man the soldiers were confronted with every day for a year, with the man who did all these horrible things while in power. And yet, the evidence is there, and none of them denied his crimes at all, ever. He did these monstrous, horrible things. He absolutely was a criminal. A bad man who has done bad things. Yet he was a really nice guy to those around him while in captivity, often apologizing for outbursts during his trial, asking after their families and children, telling stories about his life while they sat around his space heater at night. He was painfully, uncomfortably flesh and blood.

 

And perhaps this is where the book hit me the hardest, because it forces the reader to really look at mankind a bit differently. Can nice people do horrible things? Yes, of course they can, but sometimes when we are forced to peel away the mask and see the man underneath, things can get a bit... thorny.

 

Ultimately, these twelve guards became, if not friends, then friendly with Saddam. They all formed relationships with him in one way or another, and when he died, they all mourned and none of them ever quite recovered from the experience. As one guard says at the end of the book, the dictator deserved to die, but he mourned the man. And that's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to realize that's a reality these soldiers had to face and deal with. It's uncomfortable to know that nice men are capable of gassing entire populations and doing horrible things. Evil is supposed to be evil, not nice, and that's what this book forces readers to examine. Maybe it is the banality of evil. Maybe it is about masks we wear, or the complexities inherent in our natures. Whatever it is, it hit me like a sucker punch to my soul. 

There is one part in the book where a soldier asks him if it bothers him that there's so much fighting going on in Iraq, and Saddam said, after some thought, "I only ever wanted peace for my people." I can't tell you if that is true or not, or if it was just a line he was throwing out to make his soldiers like him, and I doubt any of them could answer that definitively either. It's hard for me to wrap my head around a man who did such horrible, awful, unimaginable things to so many people, with a man who just wanted peace. Perhaps, in his mind, the end justified the means. Again, this is only speculation, but this book stripped Saddam of his monster persona, and showed me a man. Flawed, horrible, guilty of unimaginable crimes, yes... but a man, regardless. 

 

Ultimately, The Prisoner in His Palace doesn’t attempt to show Saddam as a fantastic person. He is guilty of unimaginable crimes against humanity. His regime was dictatorial and tyrannical. He was an absolute monster who did monstrous things and yet. 

 

And yet. 

 

The human condition is extremely complex, and that is where this book shines. It doesn’t excuse Saddam, but it peels back the mask and shows you a bit of the man underneath. It humanizes a monster, and that’s… uncomfortable. 

 

In fact, I dare say, it is rare that I have read a book that so fundamentally explores the nuances of mankind, and the masks we wear, more powerfully than this one. 

 

“Thought-provoking” might be an understatement. This book flat out haunted me.

 

5/5 stars