The Prisoner in His Palace

Read The Prisoner in His Palace Storyline:

In the haunting tradition of In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song, this is the bizarre tale of twelve young soldiers deployed to Iraq expecting to face the enemy in combat, but find themselves protecting the enemy's most infamous and fearsome leader—Saddam Hussein—in the months before his death.What the self-dubbed "Super Twelve" experience in the Fall of 2006 is cognitive dissonance at its most extreme. Expecting to engage with the enemy "outside the wire," they're suddenly tasked with guarding a notorious dictator until he can be hanged. Watching over the Coalition Forces' most "high value detainee" in a former palace and regularly transporting their prisoner to his raucous trial, the men gradually begin to question some of their most basic assumptions. Saddam proves complex—voluble, charming, and given to displays of affection. Perhaps most shockingly, in his Spartan stoicism and the courage he shows facing death, he eventually coaxes...