John Nichol - Tornado Down

Upon hearing this I knelt on the floor of my cell, and offered up a prayer of thanks. Prayer had helped sustain me throughout the ordeal. In this I was no exception: everyone had turned to something, to God, or whatever it was they believed in in place of God, many times during those hard days. The others I had talked to nearly all mentioned praying. And the mere fact of our survival, that was almost enough to make me believe in a guiding spirit of some sort, which had seen us through. It was a miracle we had survived the missile, the horrendous fire, a miracle we had survived the hail of bullets during capture, a miracle we had survived the relentless bombing, a miracle we had survived… But we had survived.

John Peters: At the border with Jordan we crossed a wide strip of no-man’s-land. Here, out in the middle of nowhere, pollution covered everything. There were boxes strewn across the sand, aged trucks without tyres, burned-out vehicles – all kinds of rubbish. It was like a scene from a futuristic film: Mad Max or something.

It was very cold. By the time we reached the checkpoint it was pitch dark, and we could only just make out the Jordanian soldiers in the glow of the headlights. This was the moment of maximum tension. This was where it could all go wrong. Were they going to change their minds and take us back? We had been treated like puppets for so long, we were afraid. A twitch on the string could haul us back to Baghdad.

There was a suffocating silence. But all of a sudden we were through, waved across the border into Jordan. A squad of soldiers advanced into the headlights to meet us, to act as our new escort. They told us there were helicopters somewhere, waiting to lift us out. This was extremely good news. They were kids, for the most part, and really jumpy. They had general purpose machine-guns mounted on the backs of their open jeeps, automatic rifles, red-chequered headdresses. Their nervousness was not surprising, given the weeks of phenomenal bombardment that had been going on just across the border. But looking at them, I really felt that I would not be safe, nor properly ‘released’, until I felt the firm and friendly grip of a British hand on my arm. In the interim, it looked like anything might happen. The Jordanians were particularly nervous of our Iraqi guards, eyeing them at once with dislike and fear. Scared themselves, they were frightening. What eventually happened was that the Iraqis, aggressive to the last, handed us over with curt formality, turned their vehicles around, and raced back along the highway the way we had come. It was the most incredible relief to see the back of them.

Once they had gone, our new guards drove us very fast along a very bumpy road. Rounding a corner, we were blinded by bright white lights, as a motorcycle outrider pulled up alongside to escort us. We drove through this wall of light, emerging into a sort of compound on the other side. Inside this space was what looked like the other half of the world’s journalists, the half we had not met in Baghdad. It was their camera lights, blazing in the desert night, that had blinded us temporarily. There was the same huge sweltering crowd of people. We had not expected this, not in Jordan.

The British and American Ambassadors to Jordan, along with several high-ranking US, Jordanian and British military officers came forward to meet us. The media were only about twenty metres away, corralled behind flimsy temporary fencing. With a sudden roar, they broke through it, charging across the intervening space, shoving and elbowing the VIPs out of the way to get at the POWs, fighting for the best camera-angles. I saw the British Ambassador, a man who was the soul of courtesy, elbowed in the face by a cameraman. As he was recovering from that, another cameraman pushed his head to one side, to get a clearer shot at us. The diplomats, used to more delicate negotiations, turned to confront them, to protect us, to hold back the tide. They may as well have tried to hold back the sea. It was complete mayhem.

Finally, we made it into a closed tent. The scene inside was straight out of M.A.S.H ., with olive-green stretcher-beds laid out in neat rows. Processed cheese, bread and cans of Fanta orange drink were set out on a table. The Red Cross had organised a second medical inspection, the standard once-over. A doctor took everybody’s pulse and blood pressure, examined everyone’s eyes. After this, there was the inevitable bureaucracy to satisfy, forms to be filled in in triplicate, before the Jordanians would hand us over to our respective welcoming committees. We were all determined to hang onto our yellow POW overalls for those fancy-dress parties in happier days to come. The last badges of our imprisonment, it was good to get them off. Western business corporations had donated all kinds of things to the PO Ws, including clothes, mostly sweatshirts and the like. The powers that be told us to put these clothes on inside-out, because they did not want us used as free human advertising billboards, with great big logos screaming from our backs. They even told us to wear the baseball caps, courtesy of NBC News, inside-out. With all the seams showing on our clothing, we must have looked like complete half-wits.

We eventually managed to reach the cars that were meant to drive us the short distance to the waiting helicopters. But as soon as we had climbed inside them and shut the doors, the vehicles were engulfed by reporters and cameramen, and we were unable to move a centimetre in any direction. At a conservative estimate there were between one and two hundred news people swarming around the vehicles, sticking lenses up against the windows, shouting incomprehensible questions, banging on the bodywork to attract our attention. Then, when the Jordanians finally did open up a gap, it turned out that in all the excitement our driver had forgotten the ignition keys! At last, we inched ourselves free…

It was a fantastic relief when the helicopter rotors started turning, when we lifted clear of the crowd down below. In the helicopter, we ate chocolate-chip cookies, baked for us personally by the US Ambassador’s wife.

We touched down in Amman. Officials quickly separated off the American POWs, so they could be processed by their own people. I was left on my own. Seeing me shivering in the cold air, one of the British reception team, a Wing Commander, draped his combat jacket round my shoulders. This sort of casual kindness was getting to me. But as we walked inside, although all kinds of conflicting feelings sloshed around inside me, I was still in control, still feeling fine, thinking, ‘Well, here I am released then…’, until I saw a familiar face walking towards me along the corridor. It was Chris Lunt, from our own squadron – part of the crew that had not managed to get airborne on that first fateful attack. Was it only seven weeks ago? He bounded towards me.

‘John!’ he exclaimed. All the pent-up emotions of the past weeks came crashing to the fore. It was like a dam bursting: I fell into his arms, crying like a baby. As I was blubbing, I was desperately annoyed at myself, trying to turn off the waterworks, shouting silently at myself: ‘No! Stop…’ But I could not stop. I was completely overcome. I must have sobbed quietly there for about five minutes, while everybody looked at their toes, or discovered bits of fluff on their clothing. When I had finally regained my composure, I stepped back and shook Lunty by the hand. One of the senior officers nearby remarked, ‘Well, it probably was quite a good idea to have someone he knew come along, then!’, which made us all laugh.

‘Has someone got a handkerchief?’ I asked, my eyes and nose still streaming. The officer who had spoken handed over a large square of white linen, which I filled with the most tremendous blast from my engorged hooter. When I had emptied most of my sinus cavities into it, I offered it back to him.