Iraq, through the eyes of a veteran NBC reporter

The scribblers among us frantically scratched notes into pads. Cameramen marked time codes so they could easily find the sound bite again, and the snappers took pictures of every angle, their big black cameras clicking like crickets.

The troops were playing it up. The soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division were the “landowners” here, in charge of the entire Tikrit area. Their commander, Major General Raymond Odierno, an ogre of a man with a bald head and a no-nonsense personality, said, “Saddam was caught like a rat.”

But in reality the elite U.S. Special Operations Forces code-named Task Force 121 did most of the work. U.S. officials said Saddam was located after the “hostile interrogations” of several of his relatives and bodyguards. Odierno said “five or ten” of them were arrested about ten days before Saddam’s capture. On the day of the predawn raid, roughly six hundred soldiers from the 4th ID provided perimeter security to ensure no one escaped as members of Task Force 121 moved in, raided the farmhouse, grabbed Saddam, and choppered him south to a prison at the Baghdad airport, where he was identified by former aides, among them soft-spoken, gray-haired former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz. But members of Task Force 121 don’t give interviews, so to the 4th ID went the glory. Sorry, Task Force 121.

Looking back, it’s easy to see why so many people, including me, were generally optimistic back then. Saddam was in custody. U.S. forces had killed his hated sons, Uday and Qusay, five months earlier. President George W. Bush had just stopped by Baghdad for a surprise Thanksgiving Day visit to the troops. U.S. military officials said at the time there were only about five hundred to seven hundred insurgents, many of them former Iraqi intelligence officers or members of Uday’s paramilitary force, the Fedayeen, operating in about a dozen cells in the Baghdad area.

But even then, violence was starting to pick up. Two days before Saddam was captured, militants threw a grenade at a U.S. patrol in Baghdad carrying Time magazine writer Michael Weisskopf and photographer James Nachtwey. The grenade landed between the two journalists as they were stopped in traffic. Weisskopf reached down and threw the grenade out of the vehicle. It exploded in the air, blowing off his hand. Nachtwey was also wounded, but the veteran war photographer was able to keep taking pictures throughout the ordeal. Tough guy.

That’s one of the reasons we liked Odd Job.

I had driven to Tikrit to cover Saddam’s capture in Odd Job, the affectionate nickname for our homemade satellite truck. It’s what Iraqis call a “bongo truck,” a pickup with a rear cab covered in a canvas tarpaulin. Our engineers — the unsung heroes of the news business, our Task Force 121 — fit it with a portable satellite dish, generators, tanks of diesel fuel, and enough cables to make it into a self-contained TV uplink. But it was Iraqi style. Unlike the white TV vans with telescopic dishes emblazoned with company logos that rush to crime scenes in the United States, Odd Job was rusted and painted to look like any other truck in Baghdad transporting onions or sheep. We liked it that way. Even back in December 2003, you didn’t want to be seen. But stealth and discretion were our only defense at the time. Less than a year later, Iraq had become so dangerous we were forced to develop the most complex, expensive, and often inhibiting security procedures in the history of combat journalism.

The soldiers from the 4th ID gave us an hour to explore Saddam’s hideout before heading back to their HQ, ironically in one of Saddam’s most lavish palaces just a few miles away. The soldiers lived on green folding cots in the palace’s huge rooms of green and white marble. Although the palaces looked impressive, like giant wedding cakes, the construction was shoddy. The crystals in the giant chandeliers were plastic. The toilets often didn’t flush. The sinks with gold-plated faucets leaked. Hundreds of soldiers packed the building, nearly all of them young men away from their wives and girlfriends. You could almost smell the testosterone. A soldier told me that a few months earlier a visiting female reporter was sleeping topless on a cot, just covered with a white sheet.

“And it kept falling off!” he said.

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