John Nichol - Tornado Down

We were able to pop away for a few days at this time, thanks to the Commander-in-Chief, Germany, who generously allowed us to use Service accommodation in Berlin. The RAF flew us out there with Rupert Clark and his wife Sue for four days of perfect bliss. It was like the war in reverse, suddenly being plunged back into civilisation. But in some ways, the best thing of all was that we were able to escape back into anonymity for a spell, have a rest, and sightsee in Berlin.

John Peters: Helen and I met up with John in London for Wogan . It is hard to describe how strange this all was: the nerves, the build-up. The last time we’d been on TV, we were answering questions with a pistol as prompter.

Terry Wogan, the genial host, proved in some ways a harder interrogator to outwit than the Iraqis. A great deal more charming, his questioning was a lot more difficult to handle. The BBC softened us up a bit first, paying for our overnight accommodation, and providing cars to the studio. We were very nervous, Helen, John and I, when they met us at Television Centre, though they did their best to calm us down, in hospitality, or ‘hostility’ as Wogan calls it, with a drink or two.

Another guest on the show, the American actor and singer David Soul, was in hospitality with us. John Nichol had his brother and sister-in-law with him, I had my brother and sister-in-law, Helen had her brother along… David Soul looked around at all these people and remarked, ‘Hey, you guys got more entourage with you than Sylvester Stallone!’

They escorted us downstairs. We watched from the wings as the warm-up man completed his routine. Then the studio manageress seated us in front of the audience. Wogan was wandering about among the cameramen at the back of the set, with a cup of coffee, chatting. They sat us down in the studio before transmission, to help us get used to the lights and the atmosphere. But the nerves came flooding back as the clock ticked down towards transmission time.

We had a set of fifteen questions, agreed between ourselves and the researcher, that Wogan had been briefed to ask us. The authorities had told us we were not to say anything about our time in the Gulf, from the moment our feet touched the ground after we were shot down in Iraq, till the moment they touched the ground in Cyprus after we were released from Iraq. There were, they said, various legal and security reasons for this. So Wogan was supposed to stick to his list of questions. He didn’t.

At the start of the interview, he told the viewers, ‘For diplomatic reasons, we’ve been asked not to talk about the circumstances of their capture, or their treatment in captivity.’

He began by asking a few basic questions: ‘What is it like to be home?’ and so forth. But, like everybody else, he wanted to know what had happened to us in captivity, what had the Iraqis done to us?

He turned to Helen: ‘It must have been horrific for you to see John’s picture, of course, the pictures that were put up for propaganda purposes?’

‘It was a relief, though,’ she replied, ‘because until then, I had no idea whether they were alive or not. So although it was obviously very upsetting and very frightening to see they were being held by the Iraqis, it was also a great relief.’

‘Yes, but they looked so terrible…’ He paused. ‘It looked as if they had been beaten up.’

We did not want to say, ‘No, we weren’t’, because we did not want people to think we had gone down without a fight. On the other hand, we had been instructed to say nothing…

John Nichol jumped in to the rescue: ‘He looks like that all the time.’

‘Especially on Friday night,’ I replied.

‘Well, Saturday morning,’ chipped in Helen.

‘Were you instructed to say anything on Iraqi television?’ Wogan went on, never one to give in easily.

‘That’s getting into an area that we haven’t finished being debriefed from by our own people,’ answered John quickly.

We were on live television. The RAF had not given us any public relations training, or advice on how to handle a professional like Terry Wogan. It would have come in useful. We were and are professional aviators, not media performers.

The only interesting thing about John Peters and John Nichol was what had happened to them during the seven weeks they were held in Iraq. Unfortunately, that was the one thing we could not discuss.

When we had been grilled by Wogan, his researchers and producer took us all out to dinner, about eighteen of us. It was a good night.

John Nichol: Everyone asked us if our experiences in the Gulf had changed us in any way, and the answer, on the whole, was probably yes, although not in the way we, or other people, had quite expected. People thought that when we came home, our basic characters would be changed, that we might, for example, be ‘broken’. But it was not like that, not as banal as that; it was more that we viewed life from a slightly different angle. Speaking for myself, I was more impatient, less ready to accept delay. At the same time, I was less argumentative than before. Now I will tend to let a point go rather than worry it to death, as I would have done in the past. The big thing is that I feel I haven’t got time to waste. I live life to the full, even more fully than before. I no longer worry about money. I live my life as if it might end any day.

Sometimes, it lived itself for me. The first time I noticed it, I was driving on the Al, travelling to meet a girlfriend in London. I suddenly found myself back in Baghdad. I realised that these flashbacks had been happening for some time: I had regularly been reliving the fear without really acknowledging it. I found it very difficult to reconcile the fact that I was back in civilisation, leading a normal life, when a few weeks earlier I had been waiting for that step outside my cell door. Who was lying on that cell floor now, waiting for that footstep?

RAF FAIRFORD, GLOUCESTERSHIRE. John Peters: The main thing for me was that I had had seven weeks taken out of my life. That does not sound like a long time, and it isn’t, when you consider that some of the US POWs in Vietnam spent seven years and more in the cage. But the point was that for those weeks I had absolutely no control over my life: they could give me food and blankets, or they could come in and kick me half to death. That is why I now wanted to get on with my life, to live it exactly the way I wanted. Other people had wasted enough of my time.

I can remember sitting in my cell, and thinking, ‘I made a little money selling my house before I came out – that was a waste of time, wasn’t it? Why on earth didn’t we spend some of it?’ Now, like John Nichol, I rarely hesitate when it comes to spending money. I am not sure if this is a good thing, or if it will last, but it is certainly a reaction to the time wasted in captivity.

One way in which the experience has changed me for the better, I hope, is by making me more attentive to my family. In prison, I became very strongly aware of how your family is a great source of strength. Sitting in solitary, one of my most bitter regrets was that I had failed to buy Guy a birthday present, before going out to the Gulf. With all the build-up to war, I got caught up in a big exercise out of RAF Leeming, and I was away for the actual birthday. That was fair enough. What was bad, though, was that I put absolutely no effort into buying his present, leaving the whole responsibility for it to Helen. It is easy, in the general run of things, to let these matters slide; there is always another birthday to celebrate… Well, sometimes there isn’t. That was my lesson from the Gulf War, or one of them: I had to put in more time with my family. Sometimes there is no tomorrow.