“My collateral duties ended up being the major part of my job,” Navy Lieutenant Sean McDougal explained about his work in Baghdad in 2003.
McDougal’s Iraq experience was common. Often collateral or “side jobs” took precedence over designated responsibilities. McDougal described collateral duties this way: “If your main duty is to be a dad, your collateral duty might be taking out garbage.”
“My job was to fix up Uday Hussein’s palaces, mansions,” McDougal noted. However, because he had LIVE weapons training and had set up antiterrorism force protection for the Navy as the director for Schoolhouse training in Hawaii, he took on hefty collateral duties. He provided security for teams that “went out of the wire” and into Baghdad searching for evidence of embargo violations by Saddam Hussein. They were seeking proof that he had misused oil money.
One of McDougal’s collateral duties took him to a site he never imagined he would ever see: mass graves. They were looking for evidence of abuses.
What made these graves so secret was not the style of burying. These weren’t deep holes with mounds of bodies covered by several feet of dirt. Saddam chose distance, not depth, to bury evidence of his dastardly deeds. He picked remote locations in the desert, such as the site that McDougal visited about an hour outside of Bagdad, to hide his evil. Saddam had Iraqi soldiers buried in mass graves to hide the number of casualties in Iraq’s war with Iran. He or his sons also ordered thousands of Iraqis killed.
These graves were very shallow. Sand thinly covers the skulls and bones that remain. From a distance, these graves look like dimpled sand dunes against an otherwise smooth terrain.
Small signs, as crude as a typical handmade yard sale sign in America, mark the graves. With Saddam dead, Iraqis felt free to the mass graves. They hoped to find even just a remnant such as the sole of shoe of their loved one, and carry it home as a reminder of the one lost.
The uncovering of these mass graves revealed that in the end, Saddam’s evil could not be kept a secret. The evidence was obvious to all who visited these remote desert dunes.
Thank you that you are a God of justice who knows all things.
“He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him.” (Daniel 2:22)