This was the crew Sean became closest to, the guys he knew he'd be friends with for the rest of his life. Because who else could ever understand what it was like to bear witness to history, to meet and get to know the most wanted war criminal of our time, to affect, in some small way, the Course of Human Events? And to watch Saddam Hussein take a dump?

From Sean's diary:

Every day was basically the same with [Saddam]. At 0700 hours he was woken up, and he usually asked to use the latrine. At 0730 was breakfast. At 0830 the medics came and checked his blood pressure and gave him his medicine. Then, recreation, where he would water his plants, wash his clothes, sit and have coffee, a cigar, and talk to us. He would also feed the birds. 1130 was lunch, 1630 was dinner, 2030 was another medic visit, and 2200 was lights out, but he usually went to the bathroom right before that. He had 15 minutes to shower two times a week. He was always giving us fruit, candy, whatever he had. We got so used to him it was like he was one of our friends, but we knew our place and he knew his.

They don't believe he saw the statue of himself being toppled in Firdos Square on April 9, 2003; or if he did, he never mentioned it. He always told them his people loved him—and still loved him. He insisted that everything he ever did was for the "good of his people." Invading Kuwait, for example. "He said the Kuwaitis were a bunch of dogs, raping Iraqi women," Casey says. And he was absolutely certain that he'd someday return to power. "He still thinks he's the president," says Jesse. "He'd always tell us he was still the president. That's what he thinks. Totally, 100 percent." In fact, Saddam liked to say that "when this was all over," he wanted them to "come back and stay in his palace and see how beautiful Iraq was." He asked them to promise that they'd come back and visit when he was restored to power. "I'll show you all around my country," he said. "You are like sons to me." He also told Sean, "It's not beautiful now, but it will be when I'm back in charge."

"He knew we'd destroyed most of his shit," says Jesse.

From Sean's diary:

Day 255. Right now, he is lying in his bed, reading. Didn't have much contact with him, just said hello, and he asked me how I was doing. Today, [one of the officers] gave me an article on all of the mass graves that were dug up, and after I read it, I realized how evil this guy is. But you wouldn't be able to tell, the way he acts around us.

He told them, from his jail cell, about life in the spider hole, where he was captured—bearded and wild-eyed—on December 13, 2003. He complained that he'd been sold out, that "only one person knew I was down there, and he told on me." Even though he'd paid the guy money to be quiet.

"He was really mad about that," says Jesse.

"One day he said, 'Do you know Judas?' " remembers Sean. "He compared himself to Jesus, how Judas told on Jesus. He was like, 'That's how it was for me.' If his Judas never said anything, nobody ever would have found him, he said."

He claimed that when he was in the hole, he had a book to read, and that he didn't stay down there all day, every day; he also hid in a house nearby. "He would get word that the troops were coming, and then he'd get in the hole," Sean says.

When the bombing started, Saddam told Jesse, he'd tried to flee in a taxicab as the tanks were rolling in. "He told the story," says Paco, "that he knew the bombs were coming and so he was packing up all his stuff and trying to flee to his other palace. Well, America bombed the palace that he was running to, he said, and so some of his bodyguards got hurt. But then he started laughing. He goes, 'America, they dumb. They bomb wrong palace.' "

He had his quirks. He was a clean freak who always scrubbed up after shaking someone's hand (but did it the minute the person left his cell, so as not to appear rude). Mealtime was a study in obsessive-compulsiveness. When his meal trays arrived, he would pull out a box of baby wipes. First he would pick up the tray and wipe the table. Then he would pick up the plate and wipe the tray. Then, methodically, he would wipe each piece of plastic silverware and set it back down. Only then would he eat. "He had germophobia, or whatever you call it," says Jesse.

He liked to share home remedies with them. Once, when Nick had a sore muscle, Saddam advised, "Garlic, water, and hot sauce. Just rub it on there." Nick thought that sounded pretty stupid.

All his drinks, from milk to water to orange juice, had to be room temperature. He wouldn't eat beef but seemed to like fish and chicken. Salads were acceptable, but only if they came with Italian dressing, because he liked to use the dressing to marinate his olives. He pretty much got whatever he wanted, within reason. And his favorite food was…Cheetos. He was nuts about Cheetos. One of the guardsmen turned him on to them, and before long he would get grumpy if they ran out (so they started to order extra from the mess hall). Then one day they gave him Doritos instead, and Saddam never went back. "He kept asking for doris," Jesse says. He'd eat a family-size bag of Doritos in ten minutes. When they'd give him a bag, he'd smile, thank them profusely, and retreat to a corner of his cell. Then he'd sprinkle a few drops of water into the bag and eat. They're still not sure if he thought it would somehow be less messy that way or if he just liked them soggy. The Doritos thing he didn't feel like explaining.

Saddam would try, in his own way, to maintain his dignity. Before going to the bathroom, for instance, he would place his red plastic chair in front of the toilet, drape it with a towel, and do his business. Toilet paper was never used. He wiped with his left hand and had a hose next to the toilet that he used to wash himself off. Sean and the others did their best to give him privacy and treat him with respect. ("It's not like we'd be staring at his junk," says Jesse.)

In his cell, he had a bed, a toilet, a chair, a towel, a few books, and his prayer rug. He also had his Koran, which he read every day and proudly showed the boys because it was burned around the edges and had a bullet hole in it. He said he'd retrieved it from some rubble near the hole where he'd been hiding. He prayed five times a day but was sometimes too frail to kneel. "He was a very bad man," says Jesse, "but when we had him, he was also a broken man."

There were days he wouldn't talk at all—days when he'd go silent and pace his cell. Other times, they observed him "singing and dancing a jig, clapping his hands, stomping his feet." But usually he just wanted to talk. His English kept improving, and he liked to tell jokes. There was one about a sheep and three men. "You couldn't always understand him," says Jesse, "but he was laughing, so you'd start laughing, too."

He wrote constantly, on yellow legal pads, in Arabic. All day long, writing. Sometimes it was poetry, which he'd read aloud, translating into English as best he could. "It was always something like, 'The sun and the sky and the stars…,' " says Jesse. "And then he'd just sit there, all smiles, and you're going, 'Yeah! That's…great!' "

"Sometimes, when he translated from the Arabic," says Paco, "it made no sense to us at all. It would be like, 'There's a blender in the street.' And we'd be like, 'Beautiful!' "

He informed them that he was writing his memoirs and asked their permission to use their names. "As long as you say something nice," said Sean. He also told them to go home and tell their stories. "And get some money for it," he advised.

It was all Saddam, all the time. And sometimes it was a bit too much. Sean and his friends loved the hours when all of them were off duty at the same time, when they could take a break from the oddly endearing crazy man down the hall and just be normal guys again. Late at night, usually when he was sleeping, they found other ways to amuse themselves. They got tattooed together, everyone but Paco. A guy in the platoon turned out to be a tattoo artist, and his wife mailed him all his tools and ink. Sean got two: the O'Shea coat of arms and, on the top of his spine, the Irish Cladagh symbol, which hurt like a bitch. They pulled pranks on one another's birthdays—who got duct-taped to the chair, who had to wear the thong. They consoled each other when a girlfriend found another guy in Berwick. But a lot of the time, they would sit around and try not to talk about what's-his-name. Some nights they'd get mortared, but the sounds of mortars, rockets, and AK-47 rounds were nothing to them anymore. They learned to sleep right through it.

Saddam was so unafraid that when the shit started raining down and they'd ask him if he wanted to put on his bulletproof vest, he'd just laugh. "I guess he was a lot more used to it than we were," says Sean.

Sometimes they would just lie in their bunks, relieved that they were no longer in their old facility, where rats crawled into their beds at night. But mostly they dreamed of Daytona. They hatched a plan during those long nights: When they got out of here, they'd drive from Pennsylvania to Florida in two pickup trucks with their motorcycles in tow. There would be life after Saddam.

He tried to give them presents—whatever he'd gotten in packages from his daughters who had been granted asylum in Jordan and who sent things to him through the Red Cross. ("He hated the Red Cross," says Jesse.) Mainly, they'd send him Cuban cigars and sweets. Once, they sent a watch, which he tried to give the guys. They couldn't keep it, but out of curiosity, they looked it up on the Internet that night and were shocked to find that it was worth about $1,000. "Anything he had, he would try to share with us," says Sean.

He told them he had "no family left, no houses left," and that they were like his family now. "He used to call us his sons, his brothers, his friends," Sean says.

Except for the gifts, he rarely talked about his daughters. But he did talk about his sons. Once, he regaled Casey and an FBI agent about the time he got Uday three hookers for the three nights before his wedding. "He said the first night, this girl came and gave it to Uday pretty good," Casey recalls. "So Saddam asked his son if he was ready for the next one. 'No,' Uday told Saddam. 'This one was enough.' Saddam thought this was hilarious."

He was not supposed to know anything about current events. One of the interpreters' jobs was to cut all the news items out of the papers before giving them to Saddam each morning, which didn't leave much to read. He was not given any information on the U.S. presidential election, and the boys aren't even sure if he knew that John Kerry was running against Bush, because Saddam never mentioned him. (At the time he was captured, Dean was the front-runner.)

"I told him Jesse Jackson was president, just to screw around," says Jesse. "And he cracked up."

But he had plenty to say about Bush.

Both Bushes, actually.

"He'd always be like, 'Bush is no good,' " says Jesse. "And then he'd be like, 'Reagan? Reagan and me, good.' "

Paco: "And Clinton was all right. He'd always say, 'The Cleeenton, he's okay. The Bush father, son, no good.' "

Sean: "But he wanted to be friends with them. Towards the end, he was saying that he doesn't hold any hard feelings and he just wanted to talk to Bush, to make peace with him."

Jesse: "He thought that Bush could forgive and forget about what has happened. 'He knows I have nothing, no mass weapons. He knows he'll never find them.' "

He weighed in on everyone from Dan Rather ("a good guy") to Osama bin Laden ("He said he never had relations with him," according to Jesse). But Reagan was his favorite.

"He talked about how Reagan sold him planes and helicopters and stuff," says Jesse.

"And basically funded his war against Iran," says Sean. "He said, 'I wish things were like when Ronald Reagan was still president, and I said, 'Yeah, I wish they were, too, because then I wouldn't be here.' "

When Sean told him that Reagan had recently died after a long battle with Alzheimer's, Saddam got quiet for a minute, then said, "Yes. This happens."

One afternoon, Saddam had a meeting with two officials from the new Iraqi government. Before he went in, Sean asked him if he wanted to wear his bulletproof vest. The Americans weren't allowed to search the Iraqi officials, because Saddam was technically an Iraqi prisoner. For all Sean knew, they could be packing. Saddam just snorted. "I don't need one for them," he said.

This is how Sean remembers the meeting:

"[The officials] said something like, 'We're here to charge you for the crimes against your country.' " They were talking in Arabic, but there was a translator. "And [Saddam] goes, 'Change the subject or I'm walking out.' And the other guy goes, 'You stole all the money from your country.' And he just got up, walked out. That was the end of the meeting.

"When he got back to his cell, he was pacing back and forth. He took his suit off, gave it back, kept pacing back and forth. And he said, 'Ministers? Ministers of what? It's my country! I'm still the president of this country!' "

Jesse helped dress him the morning of his arraignment last July. Saddam wanted to look nice, wanted to wear the one suit he'd been given. It was a gray suit, and he wore it with a pressed white shirt. "Oh yeah, beautiful suit," remembers Jesse. "Not sure what brand it was." He got a haircut and trimmed his own beard—which was getting grayer every day—with the razor they would give him for mere minutes at a time. When he was done, he looked at Jesse and tugged on his lapels, as if to say, "How do I look?" Jesse gave him the thumbs-up and led him down the hall.

From Sean's diary:

Day 270. [Saddam] asked me if I could get him some hot water so he could make himself some coffee. And he told me to get some for myself because he would like to make me some coffee, too. … So I went and got two cups of hot water and he pulled out a bag of instant coffee and put a scoop in my cup. Then he stirred it and told me to try it. I really didn't want to, because he put a real lot of coffee in there, but I did and it was awful. Then he looked at me and said, "Good?" I said, "Oh, yeah. This is great." And he went on about how he makes really good coffee.

Saddam's favorite time was rec time, when he got to go outside and tend to his garden. He grew flowers and saplings and watered them with his hose. He told the guys stories about how his father was a farmer and how he learned to be one, too, before he ran away from home near Tikrit, so he knew a lot about this stuff. He loved his little date tree and would peel petals off flowers and eat them. And he was always concerned about the birds. "He saved bread and cereal from his meals to feed them," says Sean. (But no Froot Loops for the birds, either.)

"A little baby bird fell out of the bird's nest he had," remembers Jesse. Saddam picked it up and threw it straight in the air. The guys all thought it was going to fall back down and go splat. But it spread its wings. "That was kinda neat."

One day the higher-ups decided to put a treadmill in Saddam's rec area. They thought it would be good for him to ercise more. Saddam took one look at the treadmill—and the sneakers that came with it—and laughed. "You get on it," he told one of the soldiers. And sneakers? Please. "It's like putting new tires on a used car," he said. A few days later, Saddam told Sean what he'd really like: a Ping-Pong table. (Request denied.)

Rec time was always eventful. One night, when Saddam was on a break, all the lights went out. "I wish I had a candle and a fine woman," sighed Saddam, who then proceeded to tell Jesse that he had "only been in love twice"—once with his first wife and once with his second.

Outside, Saddam was allowed to smoke all the cigars he wanted. But the soldiers needed permission to light up in the rec yard. One time, Sean snuck a cigarette anyway and got caught and reprimanded. Saddam couldn't believe it. "How you not let soldiers smoke?" Next time, he told Sean, "blame me."

Saddam also used the hose in the rec yard to water the ground because, in between the cracks of the pavement, little plants would grow. That, and he liked everything to be clean. ("Clean, clean, clean," Sean says.) So it was usually pretty wet out there.

One day a black electrical cable that ran along the ground outside started to smoke and short-circuit. Apparently, the tube had cracked and the water from Saddam's hose had flowed into it. Sean didn't see this and almost stepped on it. Suddenly, Saddam grabbed him. Sean was alarmed—not realizing he was a step away from being electrocuted—and responded by cocking his fist. He thought Saddam was attacking him.

"No, no, no! Look!" Saddam yelled. "I saved your life! I saved your life!"

For weeks after, no matter who came by—medics, Red Cross workers, other officers— Saddam would tell them, "I saved O'Shea's life!"

Sean's final diary entry:

Yesterday [Saddam] gave me another cigar. This time I kept it. It is a Montecristo, from Cuba. I am going to find a way to send it home. Today when we were out to rec, [Saddam] asked if it was okay for me to smoke, so I asked the S.O.G. and he said yes. So [Saddam] gave me a cigar and asked me to sit with him. While we were sitting and smoking, we had a conversation. At first he was just saying that it was a lot better to have someone else to smoke and talk with. Then we started talking about the war a little bit which led him to telling me about his sons. As he was telling me about them and how they died, he said, My 3 sons [he included his grandson] died in this war while I was underground. He said when someone came to tell him about it, he was proud that they died for their country. As he was talking more about everything he lost, tears were in his eyes. I didn't know what to say so I just said, Sorry for your losses. He then told me about this dream he was having about a snake and he tried to kill it but he couldn't. Then an American came and killed it for him. … He also told me about the three other times he was in prison and how he tried to assassinate the president that was before him and he got shot in the knee. He was saying something about how the first time he smoked a cigar was with the president of Algeria and he got dizzy and he was laughing.

We talked loosely for a while. Well, he talked and I pretty much just nodded along and tried to put his English together. The way that this guy acts around and toward us makes it hard to picture him doing the things he did. But we just have to keep reminding ourselves of that when we start to get too close.

In late February, Sean, Jesse, Paco, Nick, Casey, and the rest of the platoon began the journey back to Pennsylvania. In his backpack, Sean had his diary, the Cuban cigar Saddam gave him, and his commendations from the military. "SPC O'Shea, you have displayed the highest levels of professional competence. … [You] handled detainee operations of Saddam Hussein with ease. [You] enabled Iraq to take a step toward democracy and gave the people of Iraq the freedom to vote for the first time in fifty years."

When Sean got home to Minooka, there was a parade, with crowds lining the sidewalks and banner coverage in the local papers. The next night, he was up till the wee hours, backslapping his old high school buddies, flirting with the Minooka girls, and drinking Jäeger Bomb shots all down the strip, from Joyce's to Diskins Saloon. "Did you shoot anybody?" they all wanted to know.

"It's a long story," said Sean. He was 20 now, about to start classes at Bloomsburg University, but he'd never be a regular guy again.

The last he heard of Saddam was from the troops that replaced him: Saddam was really hurt that Sean never said good-bye.