John Nichol - Tornado Down

‘We’re still here,’ I thought. ‘Still alive…’

The Iraqis were not, as it turned out, moving us to another prison, but to a different wing of the same one, where they could lock us up individually again.

Because they did not let us out to the toilets very often, disposing of excrement became a recurring problem. Other cells had the same difficulty, I realised. I knew this because every so often a sprinkling of urine hit me as another prisoner on an upper floor emptied a bootful out through the mesh of his air-grille, to prevent the shitpool in his own room from growing bigger. The splashes hit me if I happened to be sitting near the tiny metal grille in my own cell.

Salik had been locked up somewhere near us in this new wing, seemingly attached to our group, though he was definitely a civilian prisoner. We decided he must have spoken out against Saddam, or done whatever is the greatest crime under that obscene regime. The Iraqis still had it in for him. All night long, which meant for eight solid hours at a stretch, his screams echoed and rolled around the prison. It sounded as though they had either driven him mad with the constant beatings, or he was mad to begin with. The cries were unearthly, lingering agonised banshee waitings, interspersed by sharp yaps of pain. At first, I lay there feeling extremely sorry for him – no one could deserve that much beating. But after an hour or two, I was surprised to find myself feeling selfishly venomous towards him, because the noise was rasping continually on the edges of the nerves. It was impossible to sleep.

The next day, the screams continued, intermittently, only this time they came spiralling up from the prison courtyard, ringing around its harsh exterior walls. Levering myself up to the air-grille in my cell wall, I could just make out what they were doing to him. The Iraqis had invented a new and very unpleasant form of volleyball. There was no ball, and the sides were what you could only call uneven. There were six or seven men on one team, but only one on the other: Salik. They had handcuffed him to the volleyball net that stood in the middle of the yard, so that he was spread-eagled against it. The Ba’ath Party guards were standing around him clutching short lengths of their favourite instrument of torture, the thick, whippy rubber hose. They were taking it in turns to beat him, really swinging their arms back, laying into him, whipping him as hard as they could. Dressed in nothing more than a raggedy pair of thin old pyjama bottoms, the man’s skin was blistered all over with thick red welts, the contusions visible even through the sickening crusting of vomit, food and excrement that coated him. His whole body was swelling as the unending blows rained down on him. Unbearable.

At about mid-day, the rubber-hose squad went off for lunch, leaving Salik sagging on the net. I was still watching him, transfixed and appalled. Next to him were a couple of huge metal containers, holding the drinking-water for the prison. The water-mains had long since been bombed. Then Salik started wriggling his pyjama bottoms down. This did not seem like a wise move. He really must be mad. Eventually, he stood naked in the sun, pyjamas round his ankles. Twisting his body towards the vats of water, he urinated carefully onto the sandy ground, until there was a substantial puddle of his own piss in front of him. Then, with great deliberation, he stepped free of his pyjamas and paddled his right foot thoroughly around in the resulting mixture of urine and dirt, until he had gathered a good load of it up around his toes and on the sole of his foot. Cocking his leg high into the air, like a dog at a lamp-post, he dunked the contaminated foot into the water, swilling it carefully to and fro. This process he repeated several times.

As an example of human defiance and the will to revenge, it was hard to beat. Especially after what he had been through.

‘Go on, mate,’ I muttered, ‘give them some!’ Shortly after this, the guards returned. One of them took up a ladle and dipped it into the urn. They all began drinking eagerly…

After a few days in solitary confinement, they moved us out of the single cells, putting one British POW in with one American. The cells were slightly larger, with barred windows. I was paired up with Larry Slade, a US Navy Lieutenant, a Tomcat backseater from the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga . He has since become a good friend. We were chatting away, when we made a big mistake: we looked out of the window. Over on the other side of the prison, but down a floor, there were three Arab inmates. They waved up at us, so naturally we waved back. One of them began miming, counting on his fingers. He meant, ‘How many of you are there?’

‘Twenty-eight,’ we mimed back. We had counted one another in the courtyard. Then they made signs to indicate an aircraft dropping its bombs.

‘Yes,’ we nodded back.

At this, the three of them began cheering, though we could not hear the cheers, and gleefully waving victory signs. Then they did something incomprehensible, pointing at us, then pointing at the side of the building we were in, but lower down. They were trying to indicate that there were more captured aircrew, or at least more Caucasian faces, maybe even the British civilian captives, Douglas Brand and Ian Richter, in that section of the prison.

A yell rang up from the courtyard below. Looking down, we saw a dozen or so of the Ba’ath Party guards gesticulating furiously in our direction. We immediately dived back down out of sight. Inside a minute, we could hear the guards banging furiously on the main door to be let into our wing.

‘Shit,’ said Larry, ‘they’re coming to get us…’

In order to see out of the cell, we had removed the sheet of opaque plastic that normally covered its barred window. Feverishly, we struggled to replace this polythene. Now we could hear the awful clatter of boots on the stairs as the guards pounded along the corridor. They flung open the cell door, seven of them pouring into the small space. They stared up at the window. We had just managed to replace the covering in time.

‘Were you looking out of the window?’ one of them shouted.

‘No, no. Not us,’ we chimed in unison.

They ran out, burst into the neighbouring cell, where Rupert Clark was being held. We could hear them shouting out of his window. Someone must have signalled up to them that it was in fact the next cell, our cell, that held the guilty parties, because they came thundering back again. It would have been funny if it had not been so bloody frightening. They were really beside themselves now. They advanced slowly towards us, their eyes fixed on ours.

They started on Larry first, punching him to the ground. It was as bad, if not worse, than anything in the interrogation. They almost literally kicked the shit out of him. I was watching from the corner, frozen with horror. It was a concerted, merciless avalanche of furious blows and thudding kicks. There was no escape. When he stopped moving, they kicked him viciously hard a few more times for good measure, and then it was my turn. They punched and kicked me until I fell, then started kicking me in the face. I could feel the blood streaming down over my cheeks and mouth in a hot torrent, could dimly see it dripping onto the floor of the cell. I remember lying there as the kicks came in, watching the bright red drops spattering down onto the dull grey concrete. They hauled me upright. I was staggering, close to losing consciousness, reeling drunkenly. The walls and floor seemed to be heaving, it was like being at sea in a heavy swell. I was falling, falling… They punched and kicked me horizontal, then somebody dragged me up again; this went on and on. I was trying to cover my face with my hands.

‘Keep your hands down!’ one of them screamed. ‘I’m going to break your face!’