“Any attempt to escape or to aggravate us and we’ll shoot, it’s as easy as that,” he said.
“Is there any possibility of emptying our bucket, sir?” I asked. “We have bad stomachs and it is filling up.”
He gob bed off to one of the blokes and said, “Yes, take the bucket.”
Stan picked it up and followed a guard.
The major said, “You will be fed, and you’re lucky to be fed because you’ve come over here to kill our children. There is to be no noise-no talking, no shouting. Do you understand?”
While he was talking, Dinger spotted the outline of a cigarette packet under his shirt.
“Excuse me, sir, is it possible that I can have a cigarette?”
Dinger was smiling away. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. We were trying our hardest to come over as friendly, nice, polite, and courteous. The major unbuttoned his shirt and took the pack from a pocket in a T-shirt underneath. He handed Dinger a cigarette, but he didn’t give him a light, so that was Dinger fucked. He spent the rest of the day looking at it wistfully and holding it under his nose.
Stan had tried to gather as much information as he could. All he could tell us was that there were a number of cells, with the doors sealed with blankets or rice-sack covers that were marked, ironically, FROM THE AMERICAN RICE BOARD TO THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ. At the bottom of the corridor there was a gate, and another corridor that led out into a courtyard, with yet another metal gate beyond that. That was as far as he had been able to see. Everything seemed to be self-contained within the one unit, with only one way in and out.
It appeared that we shared the ablution block with the guards. Their washing was hanging on lines. In one corner was a large oil barrel which was filled with water. There was a long concrete sink with about four or five taps coming off it, and normal Arab toilets which were blocked as usual. According to Stan the whole place stank.
A week passed. Sometimes they would come into our cell three times a day, sometimes twice, sometimes six or seven times. We could hear squad dies continually toing and froing, doing their washing, and just generally mooching about.
We were fed irregularly as well. Sometimes the bucket would come at breakfast time, sometimes in the late afternoon, sometimes at last light. Meals always consisted of rice soup or boiled rice, real dreggy stuff with grit and mud in it. They always told us we were lucky to have it. One time we were given bones that people had been chewing. We tucked in hungrily.
They must have watched one of those prison films where you get indoctrinated by radio, because every morning at first light they turned on a radio that then blasted away outside our window. It was like having a loudspeaker blaring into the cell, aggressive rhetoric punctuated by the occasional English word like “Bush” or “America.” Then there would be prayers, then the rhetoric would start up again. It only stopped at last light, and it drove us all crazy.
We were bombed every night. There had always been sporadic firing around the city from antiaircraft guns, some of which were sited in our compound. We’d feel the shudder of the guns on our roof and hear the sounds of the gun crews arguing and shouting. What they never seemed to realize was that by the time you’ve heard an aircraft it’s out of range anyway.
On the night of the 13th there was a massive amount of small-arms fire in the streets around the prison, which went on for twenty to thirty minutes.
“What the fuck’s going on here?” Dinger said.
He and Stan lifted me up to the slit window, and I just managed to pull my head up high enough to see tracer going horizontal. It was bouncing everywhere.
“Must be some form of revolution or coup going on. That is one major firefight.”
A few nights later we decided that we’d try and make contact with the characters in the other cells. We knew that the bloke next door was called David and was an American. We weren’t sure about Russell. We decided to initiate some form of contact with them. We risked a beating or worse if we were caught, but we decided it was worth it. If they were released or escaped, they could report our names.
Last thing at night, when the guards finished their duty, they would close up the main gate from the corridor and then go out to the courtyard. It was a fair assumption that once we’d heard the final gate close, they would be out of earshot. I got right up to our door, covered by its rice bag, and called for help. If a guard responded, I would just say that one of us was really ill and needed attention.
We heard nothing.
I called out, “David! David!”
We heard rustlings, and then “What? What?”
“How long have you been here?”
“A few days.”
He said that he and another transport driver, a woman, had strayed over the border and been shot. He had received a stomach wound, but had no idea what had happened to the woman.
“Who’s further down?” Dinger asked.
“A Marine aviator called Russell.”
“Russell! Russell!”
He responded and we all swapped names.
“What have you heard?” I asked him.
Russell Sanborn had been shot down by a SAM missile while at 10,000 feet over Kuwait. He’d only been in the prison for a couple of days. We concluded that we were the only prisoners and agreed we would try to talk again.
One morning, on about the 15th or 16th, the guards came in, and we stood up as usual and smiled at them. We’d got a bit of a routine going now. We’d say “Good morning,” and they’d say “Good morning” back, and one of us would then go out and empty the bucket.
There were no smiles this morning. The guards were accompanied by a young officer, who pointed at me and said, “You-you come with me.”
He had a white bandage blindfold that he put around my eyes. My hands were cuffed in front of me, and a blanket was put over my head. Escorted by guards, the officer started leading me away from the prison. He held my arm under the blanket and dragged me along. I looked down through my blindfold and watched the ground. We went through the gate, stopped awhile while he spoke to somebody, then carried on.
We were moving fairly fast when he walked me straight into a lamppost.
The surprise of it knocked me over. My nose started to pour with blood. He thought it was brilliant. We went into a building, up some stairs, and into a room. I was pushed up against a sideboard and told to sit down and cross my legs, facing the wall. The doors closed. I didn’t have a clue what was going to happen next, but assumed the worst. A minute later the blanket and blindfold were ripped off, and I was told to stand up and turn around.
I was in an office. The lighting was strong and harsh. There was a chair against one wall and a video camera set up facing it, with a microphone on a boom. Now I knew why they had stopped hitting my face.
I was facing the prison governor. When he saw the state of my nose, he went ape shit with the young rupert. I was in shit state to look at anyway, so I don’t know what difference a nosebleed made. They took me next door to a sink and told me to wash off the blood. I used the blindfold as a flannel. I was then given a comb and a mirror and told to tidy up my hair. There was nothing I could do to it. It was just too matted with old blood.
It was the first time I’d seen my face since I left the FOB. I looked like Ben Gunn after somebody had taken a shovel to his face. I had a dirty, scruffy beard and the skin was flaky. My mouth was scabby. I couldn’t believe they were going to use me in a video. I cleaned myself up a bit to make them happy, but not too much: I didn’t want to look too healthy for my public.
I sat in front of the video, thinking hard about an appropriate way of showing that I was doing this against my will. I remembered that during the Vietnam War, people were going back to the States and getting persecuted purely because they’d signed something or said something to save their life or that of somebody else. People learned that they should do something that was out of the ordinary while they were exposed to the media, or do their signature with their left hand, so anyone knowing them would recognize that something was wrong.