On This Day in History: December 13

The capture of Saddam Hussein

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In 1984 a young Patrick Swayze and the mom from Back to the Future and even Jennifer Grey, a few years before she and Patrick were Dirty Dancing, went guerrilla warrior against commie invaders of ‘murica in a jingoistic rah rah we’re so badass movie titled Red Dawn. Nineteen years later Operation Red Dawn found a dirty and pathetic Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole in northern Iraq. And yeah, they named the operation after the fucking movie.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: December 13, 2003--

When the U.S. invaded Iraq for the second time because of a bunch of weapons of mass destruction that never existed/George Jr. wanted to finish daddy’s job for him, Saddam went into hiding because he was pretty sure ‘murica wasn’t fucking around this time and wanted him deader than a betrayed Kurd in 1991. That’s a little history joke for you, except not really a joke, because in the 1991 invasion of Iraq the U.S. encouraged the Kurdish people to rebel against Saddam, then stood back and watched as Saddam mercilessly crushed that rebellion. It wasn’t the only time the U.S. fucked over Kurdish people, but that’s another tale.

Saddam was “High Value Target Number One,” and the U.S. launched a massive manhunt to track the fucker down. In the preceding six months Task Force 21, which was a combined special operations group that included Rangers and Delta Force, had conducted a dozen raids and hundreds of interrogations to find Hussein. A few dozen of those interrogations involved his family members, and by mid-December they learned Saddam was hiding on a farm south of his hometown of Tikrit.

In the Red Dawn movie, the guerrilla fighters called themselves “Wolverines” after the high school football team, because teenage football players are more than a match for trained soldiers from the Soviet Union and Cuba because freedom > commies. On December 13, 2003, TF21 launched its raids on two sites they named Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2, but Saddam couldn’t be found. Psych!

The American soldiers were just about to leave when one kicked a piece of flooring, exposing a spider hole (a military term used to describe a small, one-man foxhole). At first the soldier thought it might be the beginning of an enemy tunnel system and was about to toss in a grenade, but then Saddam popped out. Despite not offering any resistance, the soldier brained Saddam with the butt of his rifle. Maybe not a bad idea though, as Hussein did have a Glock pistol on him. Also, fuck that guy. Clobber away. Saddam was put on trial, found guilty of crimes against humanity, and sentenced to death. The execution was carried out on December 30, 2006.

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