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A Lot Like Home

Tim Johnson · Saddam Hussein's Boots

Saddam Hussein's Boots, Salt Lake City

This year’s Association of American University Presses conference was held in Salt Lake City. Between the panel discussions on social networking and the new Chicago Manual of Style – 'Q: Can I use the first person? A: Evidently' – I wandered over to the old Fort Douglas military base, which closed in 1991 and is now a museum.

There's a photo exhibition of Utah service personnel in the Middle East entitled Utahns in Iraq: a young woman, who looked about 16, waiting to see a doctor at a forward operating base, dressed in civvies but with an M16 across her lap; a soldier talking to a Basra resident whose very young daughter had been hit by a rifle butt during a raid. 'I guess it’s a lot like home,' one of them wrote, 'a bunch of churches in the middle of the desert.' Also on display, rather more surprisingly, are the boots of Saddam Hussein, retrieved by Utahn soldiers as the former dictator was pulled from his spiderhole in 2004.

iraq utah

Comments

  • 28 July 2010 at 5:46pm
    afsmith says:
    how bizarre. i wonder if the iraqis know they're there?
  • 28 July 2010 at 8:51pm
    Martin says:
    Those boots - as much in their condition as in their unexpectedness - sum up Saddam's appearance at the entrance to his spiderhole.
  • 28 July 2010 at 9:36pm
    steve says:
    hmm, the boots of evil.

    It wasn't just grass they walked all over.
  • 29 July 2010 at 12:45am
    pinhut says:
    Just like the Nazi regalia next to Confederate money down in Alabama that I saw. Americans can't resist the trinkets associated with that thing they're always busily rooting out, apparently - evil.
  • 8 August 2010 at 9:40pm
    GLAZING REPAIRS says:
    can you imagine in those boots once stood a evil military dictator who thought he could rule the world.