In the spring of 2001 the National Guild of Hypnotists, an organization based in New Hampshire, got an e-mail from government officials in Iraq who were looking for someone to treat an unnamed patient in Baghdad. Dwight Damon, the guild president, immediately thought of Larry Garrett, a practitioner in Chicago. “I didn’t think the average person would be interested in this,” says Damon, “but Larry’s adventurous. He’d like the challenge.”
Guards detained them at the Iraqi border, where Garrett learned that the businessman he was going to see was actually Uday Hussein, Saddam’s older son. “I felt a spark of energy in my heart,” he says. “Iraq is a place where they stand on your toes and they beat you. I knew I had better do a good job or I wasn’t coming home.”
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He uses a technique that involves him sitting in one room and using his voice, soothing music, and natural sounds to relax a client who’s sitting in another room and listening through headphones. “This way,” he says, “noises and odors–like my bad breath–don’t detract from what we’re doing.” He treats everything from nail biting and sleep disorders to general anxiety, but most of his clients come to him because they want to stop smoking. After he helped WGN radio host Bob Collins quit, Collins talked him up on the air, sending hundreds of customers his way.
At 1 AM the second day Garrett got a call in his hotel room. “The patient awaits you,” said Kamal, the bodyguard assigned to him. A Mercedes limousine carried him to a hospital, where he was shown into an examining room. At 4 AM Uday, tall and dressed in a silk shirt and expensive slacks, walked in accompanied by several guards. Garrett says Uday said in clear English, “Mr. Larry, I am honored that you came. I thank you very much.”
Late the next night the phone rang again in Garrett’s hotel room. “The patient awaits you,” said Kamal.
Uday also arranged for Garrett to see some local sights. He visited a Sufi mosque, where he says he saw people swallow razor blades and put skewers in their eyes and through their cheeks without drawing blood. He went to the Al Amariyah bomb shelter, where several hundred Iraqis had died during the gulf war, and says he was shown carbonized body parts on the ceiling. “I was in tears,” he says. He toured the ruins of Babylon, saw antiquities in museums, and took pictures.
Uday had been using the self-hypnosis tapes Garrett had made for him and was now able to run using a contraption that resembled a giant walker with bicycle wheels. Garrett heard from hotel staff and store clerks that Uday had been rumored to be impotent–something neither Uday nor his doctors had mentioned–but no longer was. “There was excitement about that,” he says.
