Written on that paper are names.
They are the names of soldiers in his brigade who gave their lives for the freedom of strangers.
“Some have died, and some have been wounded,” he said in a telephone call Wednesday from Iraq. “When I get home, I will probably frame it and put it on my wall and keep it forever. I will never forget those brave men and women that have died. This isn’t our country. We are far away from home and loved ones and family. We are fighting for the freedom of another people.”
Wilson grew up here. As a boy, he sold The Pilot.
“I used to ride my bicycle and sell papers to people when they were coming out of the mill,” he said. “My daddy went overseas, and we lived with my mother’s family for a while until he could call us over. We went to Aberdeen Middle School.
“I used to go over early morning, grab the paper, get to J.P. Stevens. I had to get there early, because I had to be the first one. If you’re the first one, you would sell all your papers every time. I’d get a big stack of papers, be the first one there, get the prime spot. I would sell them and go back again. I was thinking about that the other day. Things to remember, sometimes.”
Wilson was in a hurry again last Saturday. His 1st Brigade Combat Team was heading out on a surprise raid, yet another attempt to find the elusive Saddam Hussein.
“We have been on multiple raids, probably 500-plus,” he said. “We have had multiple raids where Saddam Hussein could possibly have been there. He wasn’t. But each time we got some type of information that would lead us one step closer to where we needed to go. On the 13th of December, it all came together.”
It All Happened Fast
Darkness had fallen along the banks of the Tigris. The weather was getting wintry.
“It was a cold ride,” Wilson remembers. “Driving in the Humvees, it was really chilly. It was a little brisk on your nose there. Soldiers had some of their cold weather underwear on, their polypro, their gatornecks and stuff like that. They were dressed for it, but it was chilly. There was a light dew. Initially there was no moon.”
Their objectives were two farmhouses, code-named Wolverine One and Wolverine Two, where a recently captured informant told them the former dictator might be hiding, possibly in an underground bunker of some sort.
Things were happening swiftly.
“There was so much going on, everything is moving,” he said. “You are listening to the radio — 50 thousand things are going on at one time. You are wondering about security, ‘Are we going to take fire?’ Of course, we had overwhelming manpower. We had another whole mechanized troop ready to pounce if we needed them. But we didn’t. It was quiet; no shots were fired, no casualties.”
A startling coincidence played a part.
“We moved very swiftly and rapidly in the hours of darkness,” Wilson said. “It just so happened — we didn’t plan it; we didn’t do it — but the lights went out at the same time we were attacking. It was just a coincidence that electricity in that town went out at the same time we were moving. So it was total darkness in Ad-Dawr. We didn’t pull that plug.”
It is not rare for that to happen in Iraq. Electricity goes out sometimes for a couple of hours.
Report Confirmed
“Wolverine One was a little further from us (in the command unit with its commander, Col. James Hickey),” Wilson said. “We were closer to Wolverine Two, because that was the possible target house for the underground facility and possible place for Saddam. We were 300 meters behind Wolverine Two.”
The radio spoke. Special operations troops reported that they might have Saddam Hussein.
“The message came in,” Wilson recalls. “We were sort of sitting there in shock, I think. ‘Is this really it?’ No one was really saying anything out loud. Col. Hickey was on the radio. He had a lot of traffic coming in. He was talking to his commanders on the ground.”
Their initial reaction was a wait-and-see attitude.
“So when that came up, when the commander from the Special Operations forces there said, ‘Hey, Col. Hickey. This is a possible HVT-1,’ they were like, ‘OK, they are checking it out; they are not for sure ” he said. “Then they called back the second time, and it was confirmed. They were positive — not 100 percent but really, really sure — that this was Saddam. They were getting him prepped to move him out to a secure place in Tikrit by helicopter. They said, ‘Get on up; we are securing him now, and we are going to fly him out really fast.’ ”
Wilson said they didn’t talk about what might have happened. They just got going.
“We weren’t saying much,” he said. “We moved with Col. Hickey to the target house on Wolverine Two. When we got there to the target area, everyone was smiling and patting each other on the back, saying ‘Good job! We did it!’ That’s when it really sunk in. We had captured Saddam.”
‘Big Load Lifted’
Wilson looked at the OH-58 helicopter carrying Saddam away and thought of the names on the list in his pocket, of other soldiers still carrying on.
“Watching him fly away felt like a big load had been lifted off of us,” he said. “Eight months of hard work was not for nothing. Every raid made a difference, but that one — I felt the whole world had been lifted off our shoulders. Now the Iraqi people can get on to their future and a better way of life. This guy is gone, and can never, ever hurt anybody in this country.”
Some names will never be known, he says.
He cannot talk about which special operations units took part, or who those soldiers were.
“Their story can’t be told,” he said. “To protect them and their identities, I have to say ‘Special Operation forces.’ Those are great soldiers, and I wish their story could be told. They have special things they have to do. We have worked with them a lot, this brigade.”
Wilson examined the foam block that covered Saddam’s hole.
“It had cloth handles,” he said. “It was like a Styrofoam cooler, but it was a Styrofoam block. It had been dirtied up. It was made to look like a rock. Those handles were actually up. It is assumed that those two individuals that fled the target house actually had Saddam get into the hole. Then they put this block on top, put the mat over it, and then camouflaged it with dirt.
“Saddam couldn’t do that for himself. He couldn’t do that from inside the hole. Someone had to do it for him. Then, what those two individuals did, they fled that scene, trying to take U.S. forces away from that target house.”
Like a mother bird fleeing the next to protect her young, these men hoped to draw attention away from Saddam’s hiding place.
“Trying to mislead us, take us away from the area, is what they tried to do,” he said. “But our alert soldiers saw something. It didn’t look right. They investigated it, and we found the hole.”
‘A Sweet Victory’
Saddam’s money was found in a metal footlocker inside the mud hut where he lived.
“We assume that was where Saddam was sleeping,” Wilson said. “Those were his clothes. He went down in the hole to hide. We found approximately $750,000 there.”
Wilson personally carried the footlocker full of cash out to the truck.
“Col. Hickey told me to,” he said. “For a little while I was a rich man, money-wise. It really wasn’t mine, but I carried it out. Material things. I am a rich man anyway, with my family and the thing God has provided me.”
Wilson cautions his soldiers not to relax their guard just because of Saddam’s capture.
“When I talk to soldiers, I tell them, ‘It is a sweet victory. We got Saddam,” he said. “But the battle still goes on. Stay alert, stay focused, stay visual. Everyone is still prepared and mission-oriented. We are going to stay alert, do our raids, do every raid the same way every time.”
Wilson thinks younger soldiers see old hands such as he almost as father figures.
“I like to talk about the soldiers,” he said. “Generals, officers whatever they are — the missions, the plans — it’s those soldiers on the ground that execute those missions and are always in harm’s way all the time.
“That is why I am still in the Army, to the best of my ability to take care of those soldiers; that’s what I am charged to do. Officers, senior NCOs — they can pretty much take care of themselves. But some of these young men and women — they are looking for guidance and help.”
