by Andy McNab
"Names?" the fat one demanded.
"Dinger. Stan. Andy," Dinger said.
He handed us three small plastic bowls, into which he tipped a small ration of rice and water mixture from the bucket. We were issued with two more mugs and given a brew of cold black tea from a battered old teapot. I thought it was Christmas.
When they left we had our first chance to look around the cell in daylight. There was a nail high up one wall, sticking out a couple of inches from the cement surface. Deciding it might come in handy, I as the lightest was given a leg up and jiggled it until I managed to prize it free. Dinger used it to mark where the light was shining on to the wall, as some sort of check on the passage of time.
We sat down and ate the rice, licking the bowls clean. We took sips of cold tea as we pondered what might happen next. The same three guards returned ten minutes later with the major.
"You're in my prison now," he repeated. "I want no misdemeanors from you. If you cause me trouble, I will return the compliment. You're only together because the officer yesterday decided to put you together.
He says to inform you that we know that you are dangerous men, and that if we have any trouble with you, we are to just shoot you."
It must have been a reference to the COP platoon story, which made us an unknown quantity compared with the airmen they were used to. Either that, or because we looked like wild men of the north with our matted beards, scabs, and bruises.
"Any attempt to escape or to aggravate us and we'll shoot, it's as easy as that," he said.
"Is there any possibility of emptying our bucket, sir?" I asked. "We have bad stomachs and it is filling up."
He gob bed off to one of the blokes and said, "Yes, take the bucket."
Stan picked it up and followed a guard.
The major said, "You will be fed, and you're lucky to be fed because you've come over here to kill our children. There is to be no noise-no talking, no shouting. Do you understand?"
While he was talking, Dinger spotted the outline of a cigarette packet under his shirt.
"Excuse me, sir, is it possible that I can have a cigarette?"
Dinger was smiling away. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. We were trying our hardest to come over as friendly, nice, polite, and courteous. The major unbuttoned his shirt and took the pack from a pocket in a T-shirt underneath. He handed Dinger a cigarette, but he didn't give him a light, so that was Dinger fucked. He spent the rest of the day looking at it wistfully and holding it under his nose.
Stan had tried to gather as much information as he could. All he could tell us was that there were a number of cells, with the doors sealed with blankets or rice-sack covers that were marked, ironically, FROM THE AMERICAN RICE BOARD TO THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ.
At the bottom of the corridor there was a gate, and another corridor that led out into a courtyard, with yet another metal gate beyond that. That was as far as he had been able to see. Everything seemed to be self-contained within the one unit, with only one way in and out.
It appeared that we shared the ablution block with the guards. Their washing was hanging on lines. In one corner was a large oil barrel which was filled with water. There was a long concrete sink with about four or five taps coming off it, and normal Arab toilets which were blocked as usual. According to Stan the whole place stank.
A week passed. Sometimes they would come into our cell three times a day, sometimes twice, sometimes six or seven times. We could hear squad dies continually toing and froing, doing their washing, and just generally mooching about.
We were fed irregularly as well. Sometimes the bucket would come at breakfast time, sometimes in the late afternoon, sometimes at last light. Meals always consisted of rice soup or boiled rice, real dreggy stuff with grit and mud in it. They always told us we were lucky to have it. One time we were given bones that people had been chewing. We tucked in hungrily.
They must have watched one of those prison films where you get indoctrinated by radio, because every morning at first light they turned on a radio that then blasted away outside our window. It was like having a loudspeaker blaring into the cell, aggressive rhetoric punctuated by the occasional English word like "Bush" or "America." Then there would be prayers, then the rhetoric would start up again. It only stopped at last light, and it drove us all crazy.
We were bombed every night. There had always been sporadic firing around the city from antiaircraft guns, some of which were sited in our compound. We'd feel the shudder of the guns on our roof and hear the sounds of the gun crews arguing and shouting. What they never seemed to realize was that by the time you've heard an aircraft it's out of range anyway.
On the night of the 13th there was a massive amount of small-arms fire in the streets around the prison, which went on for twenty to thirty minutes.
"What the fuck's going on here?" Dinger said.
He and Stan lifted me up to the slit window, and I just managed to pull my head up high enough to see tracer going horizontal. It was bouncing everywhere.
"Must be some form of revolution or coup going on. That is one major firefight."
A few nights later we decided that we'd try and make contact with the characters in the other cells. We knew that the bloke next door was called David and was an American. We weren't sure about Russell. We decided to initiate some form of contact with them. We risked a beating or worse if we were caught, but we decided it was worth it. If they were released or escaped, they could report our names.
Last thing at night, when the guards finished their duty, they would close up the main gate from the corridor and then go out to the courtyard. It was a fair assumption that once we'd heard the final gate close, they would be out of earshot. I got right up to our door, covered by its rice bag, and called for help. If a guard responded, I would just say that one of us was really ill and needed attention.
We heard nothing.
I called out, "David! David!"
We heard rustlings, and then "What? What?"
"How long have you been here?"
"A few days."
He said that he and another transport driver, a woman, had strayed over the border and been shot. He had received a stomach wound, but had no idea what had happened to the woman.
"Who's further down?" Dinger asked.
"A Marine aviator called Russell."
"Russell! Russell!"
He responded and we all swapped names.
"What have you heard?" I asked him.
Russell Sanborn had been shot down by a SAM missile while at 10,000 feet over Kuwait. He'd only been in the prison for a couple of days. We concluded that we were the only prisoners and agreed we would try to talk again.
One morning, on about the 15th or 16th, the guards came in, and we stood up as usual and smiled at them. We'd got a bit of a routine going now.
We'd say "Good morning," and they'd say "Good morning" back, and one of us would then go out and empty the bucket.
There were no smiles this morning. The guards were accompanied by a young officer, who pointed at me and said, "You-you come with me."
He had a white bandage blindfold that he put around my eyes. My hands were cuffed in front of me, and a blanket was put over my head. Escorted by guards, the officer started leading me away from the prison. He held my arm under the blanket and dragged me along. I looked down through my blindfold and watched the ground. We went through the gate, stopped awhile while he spoke to somebody, then carried on.
We were moving fairly fast when he walked me straight into a lamppost.
The surprise of it knocked me over. My nose started to pour with blood.
He thought it was brilliant. We went into a building, up some stairs, and into a room. I was pushed up against a sideboard and told to sit down and cross my legs, facing the wall. The doors closed. I didn't have a clue what was going to happen next, but assumed the worst. A minute later the blanket and blindfold were ripped off, and I was told to stand up and turn around.
I was i
n an office. The lighting was strong and harsh. There was a chair against one wall and a video camera set up facing it, with a microphone on a boom. Now I knew why they had stopped hitting my face.
I was facing the prison governor. When he saw the state of my nose, he went ape shit with the young rupert. I was in shit state to look at anyway, so I don't know what difference a nosebleed made. They took me next door to a sink and told me to wash off the blood. I used the blindfold as a flannel. I was then given a comb and a mirror and told to tidy up my hair. There was nothing I could do to it. It was just too matted with old blood.
It was the first time I'd seen my face since I left the FOB. I looked like Ben Gunn after somebody had taken a shovel to his face. I had a dirty, scruffy beard and the skin was flaky. My mouth was scabby. I couldn't believe they were going to use me in a video. I cleaned myself up a bit to make them happy, but not too much: I didn't want to look too healthy for my public.
I sat in front of the video, thinking hard about an appropriate way of showing that I was doing this against my will. I remembered that during the Vietnam War, people were going back to the States and getting persecuted purely because they'd signed something or said something to save their life or that of somebody else. People learned that they should do something that was out of the ordinary while they were exposed to the media, or do their signature with their left hand, so anyone knowing them would recognize that something was wrong.
I decided that I would try for as long as I could to keep my right index finger straight and constantly bring it up to stroke my left eye, under the pretext that my eye was hurting after walking into the lamppost.
I sat and waited. A jundie appeared with three glasses of tea and offered me one.
"We're going to ask you some questions, Andy," the major said. "I want you to answer them truthfully for the camera. Then, who knows, maybe you might go home soon."
"Oh, thank you very much."
He asked all the questions they'd asked before. Name, number, rank, date of birth, religion. Details of the helicopter and COP platoons, and what we were doing in Iraq. There was a bloke wearing dark glasses behind the camera, behind the lights, whose face I couldn't see properly. He would talk in Arabic into the speaker system on the video, then ask the question in English. I would answer, and he would translate. I kept rubbing my eye with my finger and never looked directly to camera. I tried all the time to make myself appear drowsy and incoherent. It was worth a go. Either I'd get away with it or they'd give me a bit of a slapping. In fact they didn't react to it at all.
"That's it," the major said after about twenty minutes. "You're going back now."
As I got up to leave, the fellow with dark glasses said, "You know your side will never win, don't you, Andy?"
"Why's that?"
"Because you're far too technical."
I was blindfolded and taken back to the prison and put into another cell on my own. I was depressed. I thought that now they'd done the film I was going to spend the rest of my time in solitary.
The guards went into the cell with the blindfold in their hands and said to Dinger, "You're next."
Dinger took one look at the blood on the bandage and roared: "Fucking hell!" He thought that either I had been slotted, or it was all going to happen again. Either way, if they were going to do it, they'd have to do it to him in the cell right there and then. There was what Stan later called a "bit of a scuffle" until other guards rushed in and put guns to their heads. They led him away, and Stan thought: And then it's me.
In front of the camera Dinger was given a cigarette. When it came to smoking, Dinger was very much a man of the thumb and forefinger school, but in front of the camera he smoked elegantly with the middle fingers of his left hand, like some character out of a Noel Coward play.
Stan decided that he would stroke his hair continuously with both hands and look down at the ground. While he was being interviewed, I got moved back in with Dinger. We tried to work out why we'd done these videos. We prayed that they were going to be shown to the media, so people back home would know we were alive.
We talked to the guards as often as we could about their families.
"How many children do you have? Do you miss them? Do you see them?"
I landed up scoring with Jeral. He was really skinny and young, in his early twenties. His English was very good; he spoke as if he was apologizing, with his shoulders shrugged up.
"I'm a drummer really," he said. "I play for a group called Queen at the Meridien Hotel in Baghdad."
His favorite groups were Boney M and Michael Jackson, and every time he saw me he'd start singing, "He's crazy like "
"Oh Andy, I want to come to London," he said to me one day. "When I come, will you show me London? I want to play in a hotel there."
"Yeah, sure," I shrugged, "once the war is over we can be friends. You can come to London."
"Yes Andy, I love you." He stared longingly into my eyes. "I love you.
Do you love me?"
"Yes, I love you too, Jeral."
I got a fearsome slagging from the other two the moment he left.
"I'll give you a month's pay if you let me watch," Dinger said.
"Give me a year's money, and I won't tell the squadron," said Stan.
Jeral was a nuisance, but we did get extra bread and little tit bits of information from him. At some stage there was an initiative by the Kremlin, and Jeral said, "The war's going to be over soon. Gorbachev's going to organize everything."
There was indeed some sort of peace initiative, because we heard lots of chanting in the streets and small-arms fire. Some guards burst in, and Jeral said, "The war's over!"
"How do you know?" I asked.
"Saddam Hussein has signed a treaty. He has explained to the nation that he cannot let so many of the enemy die. He is a very compassionate man."
Our gauge of whether he was bullshitting or not was whether there was any bombing that night. In fact there was. Jeral wasn't correct that time, but he did tell us when the ground war started.
Stan got on quite well with a sergeant major who couldn't speak a word of English. There was some sort of affinity between the two of them, and Stan would speak to him through another of the guards. He would ask how many children he had. It turned out he had two wives and five children. Stan said: "Oh, very strong man," and the man loved it.
We did have some slight problems with the guards. We'd get filled in now and again while we were taking the bucket down. They'd make sure you were on your own, then come and pick on you. On one occasion they made Dinger do a Michael Jackson moon dance We just let them get on with it. It was just a kicking and a few punches. You'd go down, they'd have their little laugh, and that was that.
Another time, the toilets were blocked with their shit. They marched me down there and made me pull it out with my hands. Afterwards, they made me lick my fingers clean. They thought this one was a cracker.
Stan went to the ablution block one morning with the bucket, and when it was clean, they offered to let him fill it up with water from the oil barrel. Thankingthem for their kindness, he dropped the bucket into the barrel and received a massive electric shock that threw him against the wall. We heard his screams and their hoots of hysterical laughter. The generator was running, and they'd wired up the barrel to the mains.
Baghdad was still getting attacked every night. If a bomb fell too close or somebody lost a friend or family member, the guards would come in and make sure we knew about it. They began dishing out many more serious kickings in the toilets. The three of us made a pact that if they went for it when we were together, we weren't going to stand for it.
One night during the bombing we took a hit near the compound. From the beginning we had maintained that if ever there was a crack in the structure big enough for us to get through, we would go for it. If bombs were falling that close and you didn't start moving, you'd probably end up being killed by your own ordnance anyway.
They took ca
sualties that night. We could hear the screaming and shouting, the pressure waves, all the windows in the area shattering.
The town of Ali Baba was really getting the good news. There was shouting by the gate to the outer courtyard, and then the sound of the gate being pushed open. We could guess what was going to happen. Sure enough the guards came in, and they gave it to Russell and David.
Then they came to our cell, two lads waving their Tiny lamps and hollering. They had their helmets and webbing on. Their weapons were slung, and they carried batons.
We stood up as they charged into the cell. They could kill us with those batons: it only takes a good twat around the head to do the business. In the films the hero gets beaten unconscious, then comes to a few minutes later and goes off to save the world; but in real life if you put your arm up to defend yourself, it will be broken. Something in our eyes must have told them that we were prepared to fight. They stopped in their tracks and stared at us. We stared them out, and they edged towards the door. They stood in the doorway, shouting and pretending to cock their weapons, but they backed off and slammed the door behind them. We couldn't believe it. We might have laughed if we hadn't had to listen to the moans and groans from the other lads further down.
We went through the same scenario one other time, but this time it wasn't a bomb that sparked it off but an American. They seemed to have an irresistible urge to communicate with their fellow countrymen, even if to do so resulted in a good hiding. The Americans in our block knew now that there were others around, and that set them off.
David called out: "I'd kill for a Burger King."
A guard who happened to be in the washroom overheard him, and minutes later the blokes tore in. But it was Russell, not David, who carried the can. His cell was nearer to the washroom, and they must have come to the wrong conclusion. He got a severe going over and was dragged off to a punishment cell. They came back and gave David a few slaps as well, and then they came to us.
