I decided that I would try for as long as I could to keep my right index finger straight and constantly bring it up to stroke my left eye, under the pretext that my eye was hurting after walking into the lamppost.
I sat and waited. A jundie appeared with three glasses of tea and offered me one.
“We’re going to ask you some questions, Andy,” the major said. “I want you to answer them truthfully for the camera. Then, who knows, maybe you might go home soon.”
“Oh, thank you very much.”
He asked all the questions they’d asked before. Name, number, rank, date of birth, religion. Details of the helicopter and COP platoons, and what we were doing in Iraq. There was a bloke wearing dark glasses behind the camera, behind the lights, whose face I couldn’t see properly. He would talk in Arabic into the speaker system on the video, then ask the question in English. I would answer, and he would translate. I kept rubbing my eye with my finger and never looked directly to camera. I tried all the time to make myself appear drowsy and incoherent. It was worth a go. Either I’d get away with it or they’d give me a bit of a slapping. In fact they didn’t react to it at all.
“That’s it,” the major said after about twenty minutes. “You’re going back now.”
As I got up to leave, the fellow with dark glasses said, “You know your side will never win, don’t you, Andy?”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you’re far too technical.”
I was blindfolded and taken back to the prison and put into another cell on my own. I was depressed. I thought that now they’d done the film I was going to spend the rest of my time in solitary.
The guards went into the cell with the blindfold in their hands and said to Dinger, “You’re next.”
Dinger took one look at the blood on the bandage and roared: “Fucking hell!” He thought that either I had been slotted, or it was all going to happen again. Either way, if they were going to do it, they’d have to do it to him in the cell right there and then. There was what Stan later called a “bit of a scuffle” until other guards rushed in and put guns to their heads. They led him away, and Stan thought: And then it’s me.
In front of the camera Dinger was given a cigarette. When it came to smoking, Dinger was very much a man of the thumb and forefinger school, but in front of the camera he smoked elegantly with the middle fingers of his left hand, like some character out of a Noel Coward play.
Stan decided that he would stroke his hair continuously with both hands and look down at the ground. While he was being interviewed, I got moved back in with Dinger. We tried to work out why we’d done these videos. We prayed that they were going to be shown to the media, so people back home would know we were alive.
We talked to the guards as often as we could about their families.
“How many children do you have? Do you miss them? Do you see them?”
I landed up scoring with Jeral. He was really skinny and young, in his early twenties. His English was very good; he spoke as if he was apologizing, with his shoulders shrugged up.
“I’m a drummer really,” he said. “I play for a group called Queen at the Meridien Hotel in Baghdad.”
His favorite groups were Boney M and Michael Jackson, and every time he saw me he’d start singing, “He’s crazy like…”
“Oh Andy, I want to come to London,” he said to me one day. “When I come, will you show me London? I want to play in a hotel there.”
“Yeah, sure,” I shrugged, “once the war is over we can be friends. You can come to London.”
“Yes Andy, I love you.” He stared longingly into my eyes. “I love you.
Do you love me?”
“Yes, I love you too, Jeral.”
I got a fearsome slagging from the other two the moment he left.
“I’ll give you a month’s pay if you let me watch,” Dinger said.
“Give me a year’s money, and I won’t tell the squadron,” said Stan.
Jeral was a nuisance, but we did get extra bread and little tit bits of information from him. At some stage there was an initiative by the Kremlin, and Jeral said, “The war’s going to be over soon. Gorbachev’s going to organize everything.”
There was indeed some sort of peace initiative, because we heard lots of chanting in the streets and small-arms fire. Some guards burst in, and Jeral said, “The war’s over!”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Saddam Hussein has signed a treaty. He has explained to the nation that he cannot let so many of the enemy die. He is a very compassionate man.”
Our gauge of whether he was bullshitting or not was whether there was any bombing that night. In fact there was. Jeral wasn’t correct that time, but he did tell us when the ground war started.
Stan got on quite well with a sergeant major who couldn’t speak a word of English. There was some sort of affinity between the two of them, and Stan would speak to him through another of the guards. He would ask how many children he had. It turned out he had two wives and five children. Stan said: “Oh, very strong man,” and the man loved it.
We did have some slight problems with the guards. We’d get filled in now and again while we were taking the bucket down. They’d make sure you were on your own, then come and pick on you. On one occasion they made Dinger do a Michael Jackson moon dance We just let them get on with it. It was just a kicking and a few punches. You’d go down, they’d have their little laugh, and that was that.
Another time, the toilets were blocked with their shit. They marched me down there and made me pull it out with my hands. Afterwards, they made me lick my fingers clean. They thought this one was a cracker.
Stan went to the ablution block one morning with the bucket, and when it was clean, they offered to let him fill it up with water from the oil barrel. Thankingthem for their kindness, he dropped the bucket into the barrel and received a massive electric shock that threw him against the wall. We heard his screams and their hoots of hysterical laughter. The generator was running, and they’d wired up the barrel to the mains.
Baghdad was still getting attacked every night. If a bomb fell too close or somebody lost a friend or family member, the guards would come in and make sure we knew about it. They began dishing out many more serious kickings in the toilets. The three of us made a pact that if they went for it when we were together, we weren’t going to stand for it.
One night during the bombing we took a hit near the compound. From the beginning we had maintained that if ever there was a crack in the structure big enough for us to get through, we would go for it. If bombs were falling that close and you didn’t start moving, you’d probably end up being killed by your own ordnance anyway.
They took casualties that night. We could hear the screaming and shouting, the pressure waves, all the windows in the area shattering. The town of Ali Baba was really getting the good news. There was shouting by the gate to the outer courtyard, and then the sound of the gate being pushed open. We could guess what was going to happen. Sure enough the guards came in, and they gave it to Russell and David.
Then they came to our cell, two lads waving their Tiny lamps and hollering. They had their helmets and webbing on. Their weapons were slung, and they carried batons.
We stood up as they charged into the cell. They could kill us with those batons: it only takes a good twat around the head to do the business. In the films the hero gets beaten unconscious, then comes to a few minutes later and goes off to save the world; but in real life if you put your arm up to defend yourself, it will be broken. Something in our eyes must have told them that we were prepared to fight. They stopped in their tracks and stared at us. We stared them out, and they edged towards the door. They stood in the doorway, shouting and pretending to cock their weapons, but they backed off and slammed the door behind them. We couldn’t believe it. We might have laughed if we hadn’t had to listen to the moans and groans from the other lads further down.