4th Infantry gets a front-row seat to Hussein’s arrest

TIKRIT, Iraq — Soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division, who all but missed the invasion of Iraq but have been at the front line of postwar hostilities, spent Sunday afternoon smoking cigars after scoring the allies’ biggest triumph since the fall of Baghdad.

"It almost seems too easy," Sgt. Ebony Jones of Kansas City, Mo., said after his comrades captured Saddam Hussein. "This is the best thing that ever happened to us here."

Soldiers of the 4th Infantry’s 1st Brigade Combat team found Hussein hiding in a coffin-sized underground bunker on a farm.

Some smaller elements fought in the Vietnam War, but the 4th Infantry Division as a whole has missed out on every war since World War II, and didn’t make it into Iraq until after Baghdad had fallen. Even among its soldiers, it was known as the "no-war 4th."

"This is the 4th, man. I’m more likely to get shot by my sergeant than the Iraqis," said a 22-year-old soldier in Kuwait during the spring.

This is the 17,000-member division’s finest hour in generations.

In Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, two dozen soldiers gathered in front of a television, cheering as their unit’s accomplishment began to ripple across the airwaves.

"His capture will show others that they cannot run and hide," said Sgt. Don Williams of Houston. "Attacks will not stop, but this will have significant impact."

In nearby Adwar, where Hussein was captured Saturday night, Capt. Joe Munger of the 4th Infantry Division called the development a Christmas present. "I think it should put a swagger in people’s step," he said. "Morale here is really good."

The 4th Infantry Division arrived to occupy Tikrit and the surrounding area in April, after the war had already wound down. The division’s entrance into the war was delayed when Turkey denied permission for the United States to use its territory as a staging area for a thrust from the north.

Consequently, the division — based at Fort Hood, Texas, with one of its brigades stationed at Fort Carson, Colo. — saw almost no action during the invasion, but found itself in the center of postwar action.

After sunset Sunday, the streets of Tikrit plunged into darkness and an eery silence. Soldiers on patrol in the city recalled the increased insurgency after Hussein’s sons Odai and Qusai were killed in a gunbattle last August.

The soldiers also were waging another war against former regime’s diehards — a graffiti war.

After Hussein’s supporters sprayed dozens of walls and suitable surfaces with slogans "Long live Saddam," one U.S. patrol added Sunday: "In jail forever."