Scarcely two hundred soldiers are cobbled together in a remote post between Baghdad and Fallujah after months of exhausting heat, squalor, and privation. They are isolated inside the Sunni Triangle near an insignificant town called Abu Ghraib. They are both protected and trapped by the walls of a prison that had once been a monolith of Saddam’s ruthless regime, a compound that had for decades been a factory of brutal torture and barbaric executions. But soon after Saddam’s overthrow, sadism revisited those haunted confines.