John Nichol - Tornado Down

After a few of these questionings, they drove me somewhere in a vehicle, parked me on a stool in a busy corridor, still handcuffed, still blindfolded. There was a lot of human traffic going up and down. As they walked by, everybody, but everybody, would kick, punch or otherwise knock me about as they drew level. It was almost laughable, like some mad sort of game, Land the Punch on the Airman, like Pin the Tail on the Donkey. Some of them, the bullies and the vindictive ones, were looking to enjoy themselves, to have a little warped fun. One sadistic charmer with time on his hands and a very small brain indeed stood directly behind me. With deliberate slowness he began ripping chunks of my hair out with his ringers, grabbing nice curly tufts and tearing them slowly away from the scalp. Another time, someone walking past casually stubbed his cigarette out on my ear.

To justify this kind of pathetic nastiness, one of the people who had stopped to torment the infidel foreign airman said: ‘Your aircraft have just attacked my airfield with JP-233 weapons, which landed on our married quarters. Many of our wives and children have been killed. How do you feel about that?’

I suspected this was untrue, and ignored the question. But there was still some unburned tissue-paper bundled at the back of my neck, so this guy struck a match and set it alight again. Once it was going, he sauntered away. I blundered about like a stuck pig until I had shaken it off.

Helen Peters: There was the odd lighter moment. I decided that while John was missing, I would get Guy potty-trained. If nothing else, at least John could come back home to one of life’s minor triumphs, a potty-trained child. But Guy had his own ideas about the process.

Every morning the Station Commander gave a briefing, from about 0945 until 1030, in which he went over as much as he could of what had happened to the squadrons in the course of the previous twenty-four hours. This was very useful, because it brought home to us very sharply how much of what the television and the press were telling us was total guesswork, how much was inspired guesswork, and how much was factual. By comparing the two sources, official and otherwise, we had a much better idea of how the war was really going. The briefings became a ritual for the wives, a very important lifeline: we would have coffee and biscuits, and a bit of a chat afterwards.

The Station Commander had stood up one day, and was just getting into the important bit of the brief, when Guy ran up to him at the lectern. Gazing sweetly up at the speaker, he said, ‘Mummy…’, and made a nice big puddle on the floor, just missing the Station Commander’s foot.

John Peters: A man was shrieking in the next cell. It was horrible, almost as bad as being beaten yourself, this extreme noise of another human in violent pain, this fellow prisoner screaming his guts out. It preys on the imagination, works its horror. Whoever it was, he was refusing to speak. The noise went on and on, for what felt like hours. He was an English speaker. Occasionally the screams would flatten out and then rise into an extended repeated wailing ‘No-o-o…’ of punctuated agony. Thinking at first that it was John Nichol, I sent a thoughtwave to him: ‘Hang on in there, mate.’

There was another noise underneath the screaming, the sound of a carpet being beaten, exactly that, a dull resounding thudding with a sharper thwack on top.

‘Shit,’ I thought, ‘they must be beating his feet.’

A light came on in my cell, and the dread of that man’s agony coming my way next poured adrenalin through my veins. But they put me in a vehicle, and I found myself next to John for a minute or two in a long corridor; so it hadn’t been him with the carpetbeaters. Then who? Had somebody else been shot down? As we lay there on the concrete, we pressed our knees together for a fleeting moment, for the comfort that it gave; then I was taken into the little room again for another session.

‘Why didn’t you tell us about air-to-air refuelling?’

This showed their ignorance, I thought; they knew we had flown from Bahrain, there was no way we could have got there without tanking en route. So I replied, ‘You didn’t ask me.’

This is where you learn. Under interrogation, you never, ever, get cocky: you never, ever, show open defiance of the interrogator, or show him that you think he is even the slightest bit stupid. This is an obvious piece of commonsense, and there could only have been a tiny hint of contempt in my voice, but it was enough; it was a big mistake. They really let rip. They didn’t ask me anything for a good ten or fifteen minutes, concentrating instead on renewing my respect for them by demonstrating their unrivalled prowess at inflicting physical violence. It was mostly the rubber truncheon round the head, the stick across the legs. It was one way of learning a lesson.

After this, they stuck me back in the corridor again, but on my own this time. Someone sidled up to me, I could hear soft footfalls. A match flared, there was the reek of cheap tobacco in my nostrils. Then came a point of burrowing agony in my right wrist, then another; then the same piercing, intense sensation of burning in the other wrist. I wriggled and twisted, wincing with the pain. The Iraqi – I could smell his sweat – was dragging on his cigarette, carefully applying the glowing end of it to my skin, wherever his fancy took him. He wasn’t actually stubbing the cigarette out and re-lighting it, just touching the glowing end to the skin and then removing it for another drag, carefully touching it down again. When he got bored of doing this to my wrists, he moved on to the back of my neck.

For the first time, I got really angry. The other stuff, the interrogation beatings, that was different. I was annoyed because this was not an interrogation. This was some sad, sadistic little shit who was taking advantage of my complete helplessness for his own amusement. If I had been free then, I would have killed that bastard – bitten his throat out and made his spine go click.

John Nichol: I must have been unconscious some of the time. The next thing I can remember, I awoke in the dormitory, chained to the bed again. Ahmed the friendly guard materialised suddenly.

‘Mr John, are you O K? Do you want something to eat?’

‘Yes.’

He brought me some rice, with peas in it, and some bread. It was clear I could trust him. He uncuffed my right arm from the bedframe, removed my blindfold. He disappeared for a minute, and, to my intense surprise, returned leading JP, whose blindfold he also removed. I blew my nose, and a gush of blood poured out. JP said, ‘I know what that feels like.’

‘Don’t talk!’ said Ahmed, his eyes growing wide with alarm. ‘Don’t talk!’

Although we could not talk, just sitting and looking at one another, as we ate the rice, meant that we gained a lot of strength. OK, neither of us looked pretty: we were grubby, ripped, knackered, swollen, and lumpy-faced, escarpments of dried blood were sticking to our battered flesh, but we were both thinking, ‘He’s not gaga, he’s still there.’

There was fight left in the eyes.

Two more guards came in; we realised that this dormitory we were in was their quarters when they were off duty. Like Ahmed, they were both armed with Kalashnikovs; unlike him, they were playing with them, cocking them and pointing them at one another, for all the world like small boys playing Cops and Robbers. Against all the basic rules of military training, this clowning about was not in the least bit enjoyable to watch. Not when we were in the same room as these idiots. People get killed fooling around with guns they think are unloaded. Having convinced us what big macho men they were, the guards stopped showing off, grabbed hold of us, took us to a small side cell, and threw us into it together.