John Nichol - Tornado Down

On 23 February there had been no bombing during the day, nothing but endless clouds, scudding low and grey across the Baghdad sky. But as evening drew on, the sky began to clear. Placing my shoes under my head as a pillow, I had settled down into my home-sewn sleeping-bag, and was lying waiting for the fun to begin. Exceptionally, an air-raid siren went off before the raid came in. Perhaps they were guessing. I unhooked my head from the blankets.

‘Good,’ I thought, watching my patch of sky, ‘the hottest show in town’s starting…’

What I did not know was that tonight we were centre-stage.

There came a low moaning, a rushing through the air, almost human at first, then swelling to a metallic shriek, until the sound of something screaming filled the universe. There was a blinding flash. I normally counted the interval between flash and bang. There was no interval. The whole building shook to its foundations, tottering. The blast-wave from the bomb lifted me bodily off the floor. It took me so long to come back down, that for one moment of terrifying eternity I thought the whole floor had been blown away from under me, that I was falling down through the building.

The noise came again, the same low whining to begin with, then the rushing noise cutting in on top, louder this time even than before, more like an express train, a heavy locomotive, thundering in with its whistle shrieking. It hit. The pressure-wave from 2,000 pounds of high-explosive ripped through the prison, the massive building quivering in its path. Every bone in my body rattled. The smell of burning filled the air, along with a hissing sound, as though a gas-main had ruptured. I noticed that the floor was covered in dust.

‘That’s two,’ I thought. ‘How many more?’ I scrambled out of the sleeping-bag and into my clothes. I wanted to be ready to run for it if the building came down around my ears. I had carefully saved some water, in a spare bowl I had conned out of the guards, intending the next day to have my first wash in four weeks. Now, I put this next to me, in case a fire broke out. Then I tore a big square of cloth from my blanket, folded it carefully into the larger bowl, and put the whole thing on my head, like a tin helmet, for protection. It was the only thing I could think of doing. I had nothing else to hide under.

Outside, I could hear people banging on their cell doors. Someone was screaming, ‘Let me out, let me out, I’m on fire, the walls are coming in…’

The next bomb came thundering towards the prison. Three. I remembered books about the Second World War, the kind of book in which someone says: ‘It’s the one you don’t hear that kills you.’ It didn’t help. It sounded as though a jet was about to crash on us, the noise of the bomb was deafening, its mass disturbing a gigantic volume of air as it rushed towards the end of its trajectory, its kinetic energy enormous. Now the boot was on the other foot: instead of sitting up there ourselves, watching the radar, clinically ticking off the Initial Point of the bombing run, clearing down the offsets, pickling the bombs onto the target, we were the target. It was a bloody odd feeling.

This time, part of the ceiling came in. Chunks of plaster fell round my head and shoulders. Bits of chocolate-brown boredom came whizzing around my ears, as the tiles pinged off the walls. I could hear rubble falling, and everybody was yelling now, at the tops of their voices, to be let out. The bombing was more and more accurate. I was petrified, waiting for number four to hit the bullseye – me.

I did not have to wait long. An American shouted the obvious and inevitable: ‘Incoming…!’, the grinding roar of the bomb trucking in swallowing the end of the word. The first three explosions had loosened the building’s joints; the fourth blew it apart at the seams.

A moment or two of shocked quiet, then the yelling started again. The Americans were trying to calm everything down, to formulate a plan of action. ‘OK,’ said one of them, ‘OK, it’s all right, it’s all right! Let’s see if we can sort everything out…’

Bizarrely enough, with the walls coming in and the ceilings falling down on top of them, the Brits, as they recognised each other’s voices, began chatting manically. With the gaps that had opened up in the masonry, we could hear one another clearly if we shouted. One of the advantages of having a small air force is that you tend to know one another in captivity.

I heard Rupert Clark’s voice. This was miraculous. Rupert was a pilot from my own Squadron. He was down, but he was alive.

‘Rupert!’ I shouted. ‘Good to hear you, mate!’

‘John Nichol!’ he said. ‘How are you? We thought you were dead!’

‘How’s Steve Hicks?’ I asked – and then wished I hadn’t.

Rupert went quiet. ‘Steve’s dead…’ He explained that their Tornado had been hit by two ground-to-air missiles on its bombing run. There was nothing I could say.

Then I heard JP’s voice. He sounded as though he were chatting over the garden fence.

‘John,’ I shouted, ‘you OK?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I bet you’re not a fat bastard now, then?’

‘No, skinny,’ I called back. ‘I’ve just shit myself – well, not really – and I’m sitting with my plastic bowl over my head.’

There was a ripple of laughter down the corridor. Then I remembered seeing Simon Burgess in one of the other courtyards.

‘Budgie Burgess!’ I yelled. ‘Are you in there?’

‘John Nichol!’ he yelled back. ‘I haven’t seen you since you were pissed at that airshow, running around with a tea-towel on your head.’

‘Oh well,’ I said, ‘I wish I hadn’t done that now.’

John Peters: Next to the exhausting days of the interrogations, shrouded in the fog of occasional unconsciousness, that night, the night of 23 February, is the time to which everyone automatically returns, whenever they meet up. The reason for this is very simple – everybody thought they were going to die. Being bombed like we were then is one of the most terrifying things that can happen to anyone.

After the last thunderous bomb-blast, when it was clear that the raid had ended, all the lights went out. People were yelling and screaming, hammering on their cell doors to be set free. The guards, who had mistakenly scurried downstairs to take shelter when the raid started, had apparently been killed. Some of the upper storeys of the prison had collapsed and buried them. We could hear Arab voices, moaning and screaming from the floors below. But miraculously, none of the prisoners seemed to have been harmed. With the Iraqis dead or injured, there was nobody to stop us calling out to one another. Given the utterly shocking experience we had all just been through, the guards could not have stopped us from yelling even if they had survived.

Some of the prisoners had found themselves blown clear out into the corridor: their cell walls had disintegrated before their very eyes. They were wandering around looking for the door keys. This was partly in order to let everybody else out, and partly as a precaution against the fire we all expected to break out momentarily. A second raid would almost certainly come in at any time, we were such a big target. If any more 2,000-pound blockbusters hit the prison…

We were thankful now for the thickness of the walls, which we had cursed for their part in our isolation. If that prison had not been so solidly built, we would certainly not have survived. Jeff Zaun was one of the people milling around outside in the corridor, we could hear him shouting to us. Since they were unable to find the keys, they decided to open everybody’s food hatches. It was pitch dark, so dark they had to run their fingers along the walls until they could feel the edges of the hatches in our cell doors. Finally they got them open. Now, at least, we could hear one another properly. I could hear Rupert Clark, a neighbour back at Laarbruch, very clearly, he was in the cell opposite me. He told me that Helen was standing up extremely well to the stresses and strains. That was good news all right.