Welcome podcast listeners. I'm Captain Jake Moraldi. This is the Modern War Institute podcast.

Today we'll be speaking to Eric Maddox, former U.S. Army interrogator and intelligence analysts who

helped determine where Saddam Hussein was and significantly contributing to his eventual capture.

As always, the opinions expressed in this podcast are those of respective participants and does

not constitute the position of the United States government. If you're listening to this podcast on iTunes or Stitcher,

I'd encourage you to go check out the new MWI website, still at mwI.usma.edu. We've recently

upgraded the look and searchability of the website, so it's easier to find the content you're looking

for. So check it out.

So, Ms. Maddox, thank you for taking the time to come talk to us.

I want to start out our conversation here, giving a little sort of context about your background

and what you ended up doing with your interrogations in Iraq, as well as how you got to that point that you were doing interrogations in Iraq.

So if you could provide us a little bit of background about your experience, that would be very helpful, I think, for the rest of the interview.

Thanks, Jake. Thanks for having me. My name is Eric Maddox. I enlisted in the Army in 1994. I was an infantryman for the 82nd Airborne Division for three years. Following that, I found out about the military's language program, took the test, qualified for Chinese Mandarin.

I really re-enlisted because I wanted to be a Chinese Mandarin linguist.

And at the time, they said, well, you know, you're MOS.

You've got to be specific.

And they said one of those options is as an interrogator.

So I spent a year and a half learning Chinese Mandarin. It's been

eight weeks going through the basic interrogation course. But following that, I spent most of my

duties were as the Chinese Mandarin linguist. And 9-11 happened in the United States, military. We

went to war. By 2003, we had gone to war in Iraq, and the military had drawn most of their interrogators,

language-specific.

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