‘President Bush Sends His Regards’: After Nearly 20 Years, Soldier Speaks Of Saddam Hussein’s Capture

After nearly 20 years in which members of the U.S. Army’s Delta Force had remained silent about the capture of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, retired Army Master Sergeant Kevin Holland spoke publicly of Hussein’s December 13, 2003, arrest.

Speaking Jack Carr, a former Navy SEAL, on his program “Danger Close,” Holland, who served on the U.S. Navy’s elite SEAL Team 6 and the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, countered a claim by an Iraqi interpreter that Hussein had been found in a room praying when he was caught.

“President Bush sends his regards,” Holland spoke out about the soldiers who discovered Hussein’s hideout on a small farm. He delineated how the soldiers received intelligence regarding Hussein’s hideout on a small farm. “We had some human intel that showed us exactly where it was at,” Holland said.

“They had a big Styrofoam plug, you know, that they would put in there and then cover it with leaves and dirt, sand, and it had a pipe for air – we had noticed it when we cleared it. Just dug it away, pulled it up, and sand fell in. … And in goes a banger,” Holland spoke of the grenade that had been thrown in.

“We had lights on our guns, when you looked in it, you could tell – you could see bricks, you know, where they bricked it up,” He was able to recall. “We know it’s something. And the guys says he’s in there.”

Holland stated that Holland failed to convince a scared dog to go underground. “We start hearing somebody talk in Arabic, and the interpreter starts talking back. And it’s like, someone’s coming — the voice is getting closer, you can tell. The sound, it’s getting closer. … hands come out of the hole, and then a big bushy head of hair. ‘We grab him and jerk him out, and it’s like, ‘That’s him.”

Holland stated that Hussein was pulled out of the hole eight feet deep by Holland. The soldiers then saw Hussein’s gun and ordered Holland to take him away. “Big Texan” Hit him in the face and knock him out. “We had to make sure that he couldn’t get to that gun,” Holland added that Holland had noted that the “fully automatic Glock- 15” Former President George W. Bush now owns it

“He just said he was the president of Iraq and that he’s ready to negotiate, and he said that in English. And we’re like, ‘That time’s passed, brother,’” Holland stated.

“You could feel he was just an evil guy,’ Holland said of the Iraqi dictator, who murdered tens of thousands of Iraqis. “He had this presence about him that was very unnerving.”

The New York Times reports that American troops discovered thousands of chemical weapons, shells and bombs in Iraq. reported 2014 The Times noted that many of the chemical weapons found contained potent mustard agents or residual sarin.