“Chris and Vince?” I asked.
“Vince is dead,” Stan said. “Exposure. I got split from Chris; I don’t know what happened to him. What about the other three?”
I said that Mark was dead, and probably also Legs and Bob-despite what the Iraqis had told me.
We fell into silence and started eating. We heard the sound of footsteps and keys in the corridor and stood up again. The door opened and a major entered. He introduced himself as the prison governor.
“What happened where you were, I was not responsible for,” he said in better English than mine. “I am only responsible for you now. We will feed you and we will look after you. If you are good, we will be good to you. If there is trouble, you will be punished.”
Just 5’6” tall and small-framed, he was smartly dressed, well groomed, and fresh smelling. He seemed genuine. If we played the game, we should be Okay. As he spoke, however, I couldn’t help noticing that the guards behind him didn’t seem to have the same benign smile on their faces. They looked every bit as brutish as the people we were used to. They were very young, and they would have things to prove to us-and to each other. I didn’t doubt that when the cat was away, the guards would play.
Once the major had gone, we came to certain decisions based on experience, training, and the advice of the Marine POW.
We would remain always the gray man, never allowing ourselves to show a reaction or become overconfident. We weren’t out of the woods yet, not by a long way.
We would show respect to the guards. Being young bastards, they were almost certain to tear the arse out of the situation if we were abusive or truculent. By being respectful we might also be able to get information or take some advantage, which would take us halfway towards another aim, which was to get some form of relationship going. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but you don’t know until you try. We didn’t know how long we were going to be there for-it could be days, weeks, or years. We would try to get some sort of fraternal thing going, based on us all being soldiers together, which might bring us medicine, food, and little goodies.
We’d use this time as best we could to sort ourselves out and prepare ourselves for escape, adjusting both physically and mentally. I still had my escape map and compass, and so did Dinger. Physically we’d sort ourselves out, hopefully helped by more reasonable supplies of food, and mentally we’d spend as much time as we could doing map studies. We knew we were in Baghdad, so if we learnt the surrounding area we’d have some form of chance if we managed to escape. The escape maps were not detailed enough to show the city in street form, but they indicated the main features on the ground like rivers, salt lakes, and high ground. All we had to do was get out of Baghdad.
The first thing to do, as ever, was just to tune in to the new environment, hoping that there was going to be some sort of routine. We didn’t want to screw up the fact that we were all together. We would use the system, rather than fight against it.
During the course of the first day and night, guards were coming and going nonstop. Each time we’d stand up and face them. They were still in their teens, most of them, which made them more authoritative and overbearing. They never appeared in groups of less than three, and they always carried pistols. They were clearly very wary of us. On one of the visits our boots were taken away from us and replaced with white pumps without laces.
I asked for water. They came back with a pitcher and a cup. We drank some, and then put the pitcher back down on the floor as if it was going to stay there. They didn’t question it.
“How do we go to the toilet?” Stan asked.
“You go when we say you go.”
“We’re suffering from diarrhea and stomachaches, and we’re being sick.
We need a bucket or something so we can go.”
A bucket turned up. They were small victories, but encouraging signs that we could manipulate our circumstances. That first night was a happy, giggly, taking the piss sort of time. We heard mumbling in the near distance and guessed that there were other prisoners. We eventually worked out that they were right next door to us. How many of them, we couldn’t tell.
There was a door right at the end of the corridor, and once the guards had slammed that shut they seemed to be out of earshot. Nobody had told us that there was a no talking rule, but it was safer to assume that there was.
Tapping on the wall with our tin mug, we knocked out a simple identification code to see if the person in the next cell was an ally. Only a Westerner would recognize the friendly pattern of knocks you would do on the front door of a friend’s house: tap, tapetty, tap tap -to which the reply, of course, is: tap tap. We got the answer we were hoping for. The contact was good for our morale, and probably theirs. It was a good feeling to have got something going on the very first night.
We started to speculate about our situation. Were the other members of the patrol here? Was this a staging post? Would we be here for the duration?
“We didn’t know where the hell you guys had got to,” Stan said. “Vince was babbling about aircraft and TACBE, and Chris and I remembered hearing jets. We worked out that Vince was telling us that you’d stopped and tried to make contact with them. We sat on high ground looking through the night sight, but there was no sign of you. We tried to raise you on TACBE, but no answer. In the end we decided to press on, hoping you’d keep on the bearing and we’d meet up.”
They carried on for about four hours, and then it was coming to first light. Chris and Stan were worried about being caught in the open. Vince was out of the decision making; he stood swaying in the wind and rain as the others ran around looking for somewhere to hide.
Stan found a tank berm about 6 feet deep, with tank tracks leading away from it that were about knee deep. They led Vince into one of the tracks and lay down either side of him. Throughout the night Chris and Stan took it in turns to sleep. The man who was awake kept a watchful eye on Vince.
First light came and Stan had a auick look around. To his horror, he found that the tank berm was only about 600 meters from some sort of enemy position-either a hut or a box vehicle with aerials, it was hard to tell. They were stuck there now until last light.
It started to snow. Soon the snow turned to sleet, and the tank track filled with slush. They were soaking wet. The temperature dropped.
They had very little food left, just a couple of packets of biscuits between them. Everything else had gone in the berg ens
As it started to come to last light, they crawled into the berm and stood up. They’d been lying in freezing water for twelve hours. Stan had lost all feeling in his hands and feet; Chris’s joints were frozen. They moved around in circles, frog-marching Vince between them. When darkness had fallen and it was time to leave, they were so cold that the only way they could pick up their weapons was by cradling them in their arms.
Vince was soon lagging behind. He stopped in his tracks at one point and called the other two back. He complained about his hands, muttering that they had turned black. Chris looked at them and saw that he was wearing black leather gloves. “They’ll soon get better if you put them in your pockets, mate,” he said.
The next time they stopped, Vince was totally incoherent. Stan and Chris huddled around him, but it wasn’t much use. They had to keep going or they’d freeze. They were on high ground, crossing bare rock and large patches of snow. Chris was in front with the compass, but the cold was getting to him. He was doing everything in slow motion.