John Nichol - Tornado Down

In the evening, they returned. I asked for some attention to my eye, the one that had been hit. It was still swollen, still aching, still oozing gunge. I was worried about it. I had demanded to see a doctor about it before, mainly in an effort to relieve the boredom – but they always ignored my shouts. They ignored me again now.

‘Follow me,’ was all the guard would say in reply, as he replaced the blindfold and the handcuffs.

‘This doesn’t feel right,’ I thought. ‘Something funny is going on…’

When they took the blindfold off, I was in what looked like a business conference room. There were Iraqi soldiers everywhere, arranging things. They had set up a television studio, with a couple of easychairs with screens behind them, in a typical chat-show format. There was a pile of assorted Allied flying-suits in the corner. One of the soldiers grabbed me: ‘Are you British or American?’

‘British.’

He told me to get into the appropriate flying-suit. I put it on. Because I had lost so much weight, it was hanging off me in loose folds. This meant that the yellow POW jacket was clearly visible underneath – undesirably so, as far as they were concerned. So they carefully pinned the flying-suit together at the back, to make it look as though it fitted, to disguise my evident lack of flesh. They washed my face and brushed my hair. The cold made me shake so much, they had to rig up a huge radiant fire, powered by bottled gas, about six inches from my legs. They waited for a few minutes, until I stopped shivering. I was dressed, but my feet were bare. Eventually the interview began, conducted by a donnish-looking man, who behaved for all the world like an Iraqi Wogan: courteous and professional, with the odd attempt at wit. It was like the BBC Television chat-show, Wogan , in format, too, except for the huge guard standing just out of camera-shot; there was a nice low table, comfortable leather-backed chairs, a bowl of fruit, a jug of water with two glasses. The questions were much the same as in the previous broadcast – the rigmarole about my being a ‘war criminal’, the nonsense about bombing women and children. Again, I tried not to look at the camera, not to admit to the accusations. But this time an Army Major was there, a blocky pit bull terrier of a man. Whenever I tried to look away, or drop my head, or evade a question, this officer thrust his glaring face into mine, shouted at me, and then slapped me across the face, infuriating, stinging slaps, really maddening, until I did answer it. He was quite effective.

I felt the same sense of horrible shame for having co-operated. My hands were cuffed behind me; I was blindfolded. They took me to another room, which was much smaller. I could sense that it was crammed full with men.

‘Oh, oh,’ I thought, ‘here it comes again. Oh God. Haven’t I been beaten enough?’

They stood me against the wall. Someone came right up to me. I could hear his breathing, then I felt a hand at my waist, loosening the drawstring on my heavy cotton POW trousers. They pulled them down, then my underpants, leaving me exposed from the waist down, my clothes around my ankles. I could sense the eyes all around me, watching intently. I felt extremely vulnerable. I did not mind if these people got off looking at my dick, but the fear of some kind of violence against my parts made me start to shake. Then someone began prodding me. His hands strayed lower. I flinched away.

‘I’m a doctor,’ a voice said. ‘Don’t worry. We are checking because a number of the prisoners have caught sexual diseases.’

‘What?’ I thought. ‘What? How? Not from one another, that’s for sure… sexual diseases!… God, here it comes. They are going to bugger me.’

His hands went to my penis, lifting and turning it, again as if making a study of some sort. He must have had some trouble finding it, since my genitals were trying to climb back up into my pelvic cavity with the fear of what they might do. But having had his feel, the ‘doctor’ eventually let me go. They pulled my clothes back up.

Back in my cell, I was still shaking. It could have been the cold. I was watching my hands shake, willing them with all my strength of mind to be still.

‘John,’ I said to myself, ‘you are only doing that because you were scared in there. You know why you are shaking, so stop. Control it. This is silly.’

I found out then that for all the mental strength you may think you have, the body reacts to stress in ways that are completely beyond the mind’s control.

I had to learn to accept this.

John Nichol: None of us had washed for six weeks by this stage, though I tried sometimes to save enough drinking water to give my groin and armpits a cursory wash. We were wearing the same underwear and socks we had been shot down in. Everything was horribly soiled. None of us had cleaned our teeth. Most people had a digestive disorder. Our breath reeked. It was only when they took you out, and then returned you to your cell, that you realised how appallingly you stank. The smell had built up and up, but you were not aware of it, since it was in your nostrils every minute of every day. What made you aware of it was coming back upstairs to your landing, and the smell hitting you smack in the face, sickening, like an open sewer on a sweltering hot day. They opened your cell door, and you thought, ‘This isn’t mine, this person smells disgusting, they’ve taken me somewhere else.’ But suddenly you realised, ‘This is what I smell like. I stink.’

One time, I heard them bringing Rupert Clark back to his cell.

‘No, no,’ he shouted in his unmistakably English voice, as though he were talking to a hotel porter, ‘this isn’t my cell! I’m in number 10. I want my own cell!’

Bad as it was, your own smell was a lot better than somebody else’s.

One of the worst things about this prison was the noises that did sometimes filter through the steel door. One night I woke up with a start to hear the guards dragging an Arab prisoner along the corridor, just outside my cell. It sounded as though they were trying to kill the man with their bare hands. He was screaming oaths, calling to Allah and various prophets. The guards were swearing, cursing and ranting at him as they bundled him along. Over the next few days, the noises seeping through the door alternated between this prisoner’s incantations to the heavens, in which he appealed for everything from water to George Bush, and the sound of the guards re-arranging the prison structure with his body. It was horrible having to listen to his suffering, but at least it deflected attention away from ourselves.

One night, when the yelling was at its peak, the door of my cell burst open – terrifying in the middle of all the screaming – and I was led out into the corridor blindfolded. Just outside my cell I tripped over a bundle on the floor. It felt like rags. A soft moan escaped from it, and there was the rattling of chains as it moved under my feet. Looking down through the bottom of my blindfold, I caught a glimpse of a body shackled to the water pipes running along the wall. So that was why I could hear him – they had chained him up in the corridor, right outside my box. The guard leading me giggled. Putting his lips next to my ear, he whispered, ‘Don’t worry. Just don’t look.’

Don’t worry. Don’t worry! What did he mean, ‘Don’t worry!’ What did he expect me to do? The guard told me that this prisoner’s name was Salik. I never found out what Salik had done to upset them so much.

John Nichol: The Americans nicknamed this new prison the ‘Built-More’, a pun on the former Biltmore Hotel in New York. Every evening the entertainment was unfailingly provided by the Coalition bombing. It was a man-made thunderstorm, lasting most of the night. There was rarely much of a warning. About five or six minutes after the bombs began exploding, the air-raid sirens would start up, to let people know there was an attack in progress, just in case they had not already been alerted to the fact by having a building fall on their heads. This meant either that the first raids were always delivered by the Stealth bombers, which the Iraqis could not detect, or that Iraq’s air defence network had by now been rendered completely ineffective. Lying in my favourite spot on the cell floor, I could see through the air-vent the Triple-A arcing up into the night sky, burning like a witch’s oils, green, and blue, and white. I came to rely on the bombing. The noise was comforting, the way the noise of a train passing in the night was comforting when I was very young and safely tucked up in bed.