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"I Punched Saddam in the Mouth"

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Samir didn't sleep a wink the night he unearthed Saddam. Long after the party, he lay in bed replaying the unforgettable mission over and over in his mind. He pulled his laptop to the corner of the bed and once again viewed the image of him posed behind the handcuffed despot. At 6 a.m. he placed a call to St. Louis.

Mohammad Al-Baaj took the call in his south St. Louis home. Mohammed and Samir's fathers are best friends in Iraq, and their children have known each other all their lives.

"He told me to turn on CNN," recounts Mohammad, a brawny and jovial man. Weeks after casting his ballot in the January Iraqi national election, Mohammad still wears the purple dye on his index finger that marks him as a voter.

"He said he did something amazing but couldn't tell me. I didn't know what to think. I watched CNN from nine o'clock till four in the morning -- nothing. Finally I'm going to bed around four a.m., and they say that Saddam Hussein had been captured.

"A few hours later, Samir called me back. I said, 'You my man! Tonight I'm going to throw a party for you even if you can't be here. I'm going to throw a party.'"

There were no parties for Samir when he first arrived in America in the spring of 1994. He landed in St. Louis with just six dollars in his pocket, and he could barely speak English. Since then he's gained a vast network of Iraqi and American friends, and parlayed his love of automobiles toward making a comfortable living.

"He is a darn good mechanic," enthuses Nadir Malik, general manager of the airport shuttle service TransExpress, who hired Samir as a driver in 2001, only to learn later on that he was also talented under the hood. "Samir could dissect a military tank and put it back together in the same day. He's that good."

While working for TransExpress in the first few months of 2003, Samir again became swept up in efforts to topple Saddam's regime. At the time, President George W. Bush delivered an ultimatum threatening war if the Iraqi government did not allow United Nations weapons inspectors access to the country.

It took but a few hours for Samir to ace a screening exam qualifying him as an Arabic/English interpreter for the U.S. military. Days later he received his first assignment: He was to report immediately to Kuwait.

On May 2, 2003, Bush landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln -- its tower adorned with a huge sign that read "Mission Accomplished" -- to announce an end to combat operations in Iraq.

Arriving in Kuwait, Samir worried he'd missed all the action and was told there would be little use for him now. Demanding to be reassigned, he was dispatched to Tallil Airbase in Iraq and given the job of interviewing civilians and interrogating prisoners.

After his plane touched down in the dead of night in the second week of May 2003, Samir learned that the airbase was just outside his hometown of Nasiriyah.

"The first thing I told my boss was that I was from Nasiriyah and hadn't been back since 1991," says Samir. "She freaked out. She could not believe it. She said, 'Tomorrow we will take you to find your family.'"

The next morning Samir hopped on a Humvee for the half-hour drive to his parents' home. The entire neighborhood, some 700 residents, poured into the streets to greet him.

"It was an awesome feeling," he says. "I felt like I was coming with the U.S. forces to free my family. It was the best feeling of my life."

Samir saw his parents often over the course of his six-month deployment in Nasiriyah, many times bringing with him soldiers from the airbase to share in meals and family celebrations. When his contract lapsed in October 2003, Samir returned to the States and immediately signed up for a second tour.

Within a few weeks he was again in Iraq, but this time, instead of being stationed in the relatively docile south, Samir was assigned to the northern city of Tikrit, where elite U.S. forces were engaged in a massive manhunt to find Saddam Hussein.

Ten days after Saddam's capture, an Army officer burst into Samir's room, demanding his photos.

"He said officials at the Pentagon saw the photo with Saddam on the Internet and were pissed," recalls Samir.

It was months before the scandal of Abu Ghraib would break, but in hindsight Samir believes the military was doing some pre-emptive damage control. The picture of Samir gloating over Saddam could be seen as degrading, perhaps incriminating. A close inspection of the photo reveals blood on Saddam's lips where Samir's fists landed their mark.

"I begged him not to take the photos. I made a huge scene," recounts Samir. "But he took my laptop and erased everything. Even things that were in the trash can."

In reality, Samir's protests were merely illusory, for he had hidden away scores of copies of the photos, even going so far as to pass some along to fellow interpreters for safekeeping.

Today, military officials maintain they know of Samir's pictures but are unaware of any efforts to destroy the images.

"That may have happened to a certain extent on a local level, but it wasn't an objective here at Central Command," says Captain Alison Salerno, a public-affairs officer with the military's Tampa-based Central Command. "In a lot of situations the military frowns on so-called souvenir photos, and in this case the interpreter should've been instructed that private photos of a detainee that show their faces are not appropriate."

For his part, Samir is unapologetic.

"What were they going to do? Fire me? Send me home? Fine."

Samir remains adamant that he never released the pictures onto the Internet and speculates the leak might have come from Special Forces.

Within days of finding its way online, Samir's photo with Saddam was splashed across newspapers and televisions around the world. In Iraq, the news that the man who captured Saddam was an Iraqi made Samir's face -- if not his name -- a well-known image.

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