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In the 2003 invasion of Iraq by a United States-led coalition, the U.S.
military developed a set of playing cards to help troops identify the
most-wanted members of President Saddam Hussein's government, mostly
high-ranking Baath Party members or members of the Revolutionary Command
Council. The cards were officially named the "personality identification playing
cards".
Each card contains the wanted person's name, a picture if available, and the job
performed by that individual. The highest-ranking cards, starting with the aces
and kings, were used for the people at the top of the most-wanted list. The ace
of spades is Saddam Hussein, the aces of clubs and hearts are his sons Qusay and
Uday respectively, and the ace of diamonds is Saddam's presidential secretary
Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti. This strict correspondence to the order of the
most-wanted list was not carried through the entire deck, but some time later in
2003, the list itself was renumbered to conform (almost) to the deck of cards.
Such playing cards have been used as far back as the Civil War, Brooks said,
again in World War II ? Army Air Corps decks printed with the silhouettes of
German and Japanese fighter aircraft fetch hundreds of dollars today ? and in
the Korean War. Troops often play cards to pass the time, and seeing the names,
faces and titles of the wanted Iraqis during their games will help soldiers and
Marines in case they run into the wanted individuals in the field, Brooks said.
The deck of cards was first announced publicly in Iraq on April 11th 2003, in a
press conference by Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, deputy director of
operations at U.S. Central Command. On that same evening Max Hodges, a
Houston-based entrepreneur, found and downloaded a high-resolution artwork file
for the deck from a Defense Department web server. Discovering the following day
that the file had vanished from the military web server he became the first eBay
seller to offer the artwork file, in PDF, which could be used to reproduce the
deck. [2] He quickly contracted Gemaco Playing Card Company to print 1,000 decks
for about $4,000 and started selling both the decks, in advance of receiving
them from the printer, on eBay, Amazon.com and his own web site. When some of
his early auctions for a $4 deck of cards quickly rose to over $120, [3] it
didn't take long for other eBayers to jump on the bandwagon and print or order
decks of their own to sell. In just a few days hundreds of sellers materialized
and the price dropped to just a few dollars per deck.
Click to see the whole deck of cards. It's a BIG DECK so wait for it!
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