John Nichol - Tornado Down

We passed the canopy of the aircraft lying m the sand, blown clear on ejection, then the life-rafts and the parachutes billowing in the wind; one of the respirators had come out of the cockpit. They gave all this to the tribesmen, who slung it into the back of the truck.

It had taken them less than three minutes to drive us from where they had caught us to this scattered wreckage. We had been wandering about for two or three hours in the desert, but we had only moved half a mile or so away from it, even with a compass, so slow had been our progress! The other amazing thing was that they knew exactly where they were, despite the fact that there were no salient features around, just endless flat sand. We drove on a few minutes to where they had left their other vehicles, a white Iraqi military Land Rover and a civilian car, which was evidently the lieutenant’s personal vehicle. The Bedouins went off, victorious, in their flatbed truck.

My abiding image of this episode is the bright young face of the little boy, sitting in the back of the truck with a gun in his hand, eyes gleaming black, repeatedly drawing his finger across his throat at me as he disappeared into the distance. It was very encouraging…

RAF LAARBRUCH, GERMANY. Helen Peters: They were shot down on the Thursday morning. At noon, the Station Commander, Group Captain Neil Buckland, and Maggie Broadbent, the wife of John’s Squadron Boss, came to my door. It could only mean bad news. Very bad news. Seeing them there, I immediately thought: the boys are dead. That’s what the arrival of the Squadron Commander usually means under these circumstances. But while we were standing in the hall, Maggie put her hand on my shoulder. ‘John’s plane has failed to return,’ she said. ‘That’s all we know now.’ For me, it was the worst moment of the entire war.

On Friday afternoon, the Station Commander came back. I had a few friends round for tea at the time, and they all looked at me in horror as he drew me gently into the kitchen. Gravely, he told me the boys had ‘probably’ been captured. He said Intelligence sources from inside Iraq, which he was unable to discuss, had reported sighting two captured British airmen. This being day one of the air war, John and John were the only two airmen missing, so it had to be them.

At first, this seemed like the worst thing that could have happened. I knew deep down that they were both afraid of capture more than dying, and I could understand that. They were prepared for death, for the quick death when the missile hits and the world goes white, then black. We were all as prepared for that to happen as anyone can be. They were paid to take that risk. But capture was different. We all expected the Iraqis to use their prisoners horribly. We had the Kurds as an example. In one way, though, I was relieved. At least they hadn’t carried out that mad, half-formed suicide pact idea. This was probably just as well. John never was much good at DIY.

This was the only time I cried. At least when somebody you love dies, you know what has happened to them; you can mourn them. Now I was faced with the prospect of not knowing what had happened to John for weeks, months, perhaps for years, perhaps even never knowing.

Any fast-jet aircrew wife with two small children has to be realistic about potential disaster, even in peacetime. So during the long-drawn-out build-up to war, I had vaguely thought about it, vaguely made plans that if he should be killed, I would go back to Birmingham, and buy a house near my parents. I would have to hire a nanny, return to work.

I always knew that John could go out of the front door, any day of the week, and not come back. It happens. It had happened, tragically, to a very good friend of ours. But you come to terms with that, it becomes part of your mental furniture. The trick is to keep it safely stored away somewhere. It is impossible to worry about someone all the time.

One of the worst things was not knowing how to react, after the initial shock. The thing I was confronting was so unusual, so much outside the run of everyday experience. What was I supposed to feel? Was I supposed to be desperate? Keep a stiff upper lip? Did I assume the worst, and grieve for them? Or did I carry on as normal?

I was very conscious of other people expecting me to react in certain ways, and very conscious that I was not always living up to expectations. Maybe I was not weepy enough? Then again, part of me rebelled against this kind of pigeonholing. I am not the sort of person who breaks down twice a minute in tears. But for some reason I’d never faced up to the idea of John suffering.

John Peters: They put John Nichol in the front of the Land Rover. I was pushed into the back. One guard had his gun at my head, the other had his gun wedged into Nichol’s back. The driver had his pistol out ready on his lap. The officer had already driven off in his car. If ever we were going to make a break for it, now was the time. With a vehicle, we would stand a chance of making it to a rescue pick-up point.

The guards were determined not to let us look up, to see where we were going – as if this mattered in the desert. They kept on tapping our heads down low with their rifle barrels. By this stage my left eye was completely closed; it had puffed right up. Trying to make a sneaky assessment of the alertness and posture of our captors, I got a sharp crack on the skull. But by moving my head very, very slowly, I was able to see exactly how the one covering me was sitting. ‘What I need to do is grab this guy’s gun, smash my elbow into his nose, shoot the cretin who is threatening John, and at the same time kick the driver in the head.’

My left leg was OK, but there was one small snag: my hands were tied behind my back with rope. Still, they had not done a very good job of it, and as I worked at them the bonds were gradually coming free. While I was having all these wild and wonderful thoughts, another part of my mind was running on a different track: I would be killing a man at very close quarters. This is a much harder thing to do than dropping a bomb on him from far away. If people had to fight their wars hand-to-hand, eyeball-to-eyeball, there would probably be a lot less killing in the world. I thought, ‘Can I do it? Yes, I can.’ But then something else occurred to me: ‘Has the guy got the safety-catch on his gun?’ I spent another five minutes or so surreptitiously trying to find out. If I grabbed the pistol, a make I was not familiar with, and the safety-catch was on, or there was no round up the spout, I was going to look pretty stupid when I squeezed the trigger and nothing happened. There would be no time to cock the weapon, and probably not even enough time to release the safety before someone reacted. It was a racing certainty that the guard covering John would pull his trigger the moment the action started. Furthermore, John could have no idea what I was planning. To sum up: I had one eye working, one leg working, my buddy was unaware of my scheme, and they had three guns on us. I would have to be James Bond to pull that one off. On balance, it was a bit of a non-starter. One other factor in reaching this decision was the fuel gauge: the needle was in the red. Even if we successfully took control, how would we make good an escape without a vehicle? They would surely pick us up again. I decided to forget about it, for the time being. We later discovered that they had a reserve tank in the vehicle, when the driver leaned down and operated a switch hidden from sight underneath the dashboard.

John Nichol: I realised immediately we were being taken back to the airfield our formation had just bombed; you didn’t have to be a great navigator to work that one out.