Bravo Two Zero

9

They must have been thousand-pounders. We heard several explosions; the area was getting severely hammered. The pressure waves hit us and the car rattled. The guards cursed. The vehicle stopped. I heard all the typical noises of disaster-the screeching of brakes, screams of pain and loss, shouts of panic and anger, a distressed woman crying, a child whimpering, metal scraping on stone. The driver and guards jumped out and cold air rushed over us. This could be our moment. The blokes had gone, the doors were open, but I could hear talking. I couldn’t see what was going on. It was unbelievably frustrating. I had to piece things together purely by sound. Was the road bombed? Was it an obstruction? Had he stopped to help somebody? And more to the point, were they now going to come around and fill us in, purely because we were white eyes and they’d just been bombed? The thoughts raced through my mind, but before I even had time to speak to Dinger, the Iraqis got back in and we started moving again.

We drove for about an hour and a half. My sense of direction had gone to rat shit as soon as we’d come out of the camp and turned left, and I didn’t have a clue where we might be. I was pissed off with myself again.

When we finally stopped, we could have been in Timbuktu for all I knew.

They dragged us out of the vehicle, and I was put back into what I sensed was the same room as before. I had the feeling the guards were still in bed. Somebody pushed me to the floor and handcuffed me to what I assumed was part of a bed. It was actually quite comfortable. I wasn’t crunched up in the back of a vehicle, my knees weren’t up around my ears, and my arm wasn’t chained high up in the air. I sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to sort myself out, trying to tune in. I sensed that I was facing the wall. I tried putting my head right back so I could see past the bridge of my nose. I couldn’t see anything except a bit of the glow from the paraffin heater.

I sat there for an hour, the scenarios rushing around my head. We had definitely been going through a built-up center of population when the bombs fell. Was it Baghdad? Why take us to Baghdad? So that people could see us? To be part of a human shield? Would the Allies bomb a position where prisoners were? Damned right they would. Schwarzkopf would hardly stop the war effort because Dinger and Andy were held in a radar center. Who were we going to get handed over to? Would we make a video? I wouldn’t mind. I wanted people to know that I was still alive.

I could hear two sources of slow, regular breathing. To test if they were asleep I leaned forward and rested my head on the bed. Nothing happened. I slid over onto my right side and got my head down on the carpet. Still nothing. I put pressure on the blindfold against the carpet and managed to slide it down a little. I was indeed back in the same room.

I tried to work out what had happened to the others. Were we the only two survivors? Would they say if people had got across the border? I didn’t come up with any answers, but it was good mental exercise. I might have to be doing a lot of that. I was already pacing myself for a long capture. It would obviously be nice to get released as soon as the war was over, but I couldn’t really see it at this stage. There would most likely be a hostage period to come after this, lasting perhaps a couple of years.

I thought back to the American POW. He had endured years in solitary, and everybody back home assumed he was dead. It was only because an exchange took place that the truth came out. There was a US sailor that the Viet Cong had taken for a bit of a bonehead and used for menial tasks like mopping up. He was released because he was just an able seaman of no consequence who had fallen overboard-the classic gray man. In fact this character had taken it upon himself to remember the names, ranks, and numbers of over 200 prisoners. When he came back he reeled them all off. Our POW was among the names. It was a traumatic discovery for his family. I was trying to relate my experience to his, and there was no comparison. A year or so was bugger all. I’d only start worrying after two.

My hands were agony. I tried to work them out of the cuffs, but it was futile. They were far too swollen. I considered waking the guards up and asking to be released for a while, but they wouldn’t have the keys -and they certainly wouldn’t bother going and getting them.

My thoughts turned to Jilly. I wondered what she was doing.

Two hours later the boys came back with their Tiny lamps. Just as before, they undid my handcuffs and picked me up and dragged me back into the cold. It was a nice feeling on the body; I kidded myself I was about to start a long country walk or ski a good mountain.

Nobody talked. I hoped and prayed that Dinger was coming too, but I couldn’t hear him. I was put in the same position at the back on the right-hand side, behind the seats, legs up around my head. This time I took the precaution of arching my back to make space for my sore hands, so that I wouldn’t have to make the movement later on and earn myself a whack on the head.

“No talk or shoot,” the driver said.

“Okay.”

“Yeah, okay mate,” said Dinger from beside me.

I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was as relieved to hear me as I was to hear him. But the relief was short-lived. Just as we were setting off, somebody leaned into the vehicle and said: “I hope that Allah is with you.”

I didn’t know if it was said to spark me up, but if it was, it succeeded.

We got the same bad driver as before and were soon being flung around all over the place. There was no music this time, just small talk between the blokes in the front. Occasionally a window would go down as one of them snot ted up a grolly and gob bed it, or shouted a greeting at somebody in the darkness. We stopped on one occasion while the driver had a long conversation with somebody in the street. I got the impression he was showing us off. I heard giggles from two or three people outside the car, then hands came in and tugged our mustaches and slapped our faces. I clenched up. It pissed me off more than the kickings. That had been tactical questioning, and I could understand the reasons behind it. But these dickheads were having fun at my expense, pure and simple.

We drove on in silence. We were going further and further from the border, but I was just about past caring. I was too worried about my hands. They were swollen to nearly twice their normal size, and I had no sensation left in the fingers. I could feel nothing beyond the wrists, where the handcuffs had dug in so deeply that I was bleeding. The pain was becoming unbearable. I feared that at this rate I was going to lose the use of my hands for ever.

I tried to think of the positives. At least I wasn’t dead. It was now about twelve hours since my capture, and I was still alive.

I started to think about the patrol as a whole. What would the Iraqis know about us? I had to assume that they’d link us with the contact at the MSR. They would know how many of us there were, because they would have found eight berg ens They would have found the LUP as well, with the cache of water and food.

What would give us away in the berg ens Because of SOPs, I knew there wouldn’t be any written details of codes or our tasking. What about the equipment? How would we get around the explosives, timing devices, and detonators? I’d say they were area protection devices-they would have found the claymores, which would add weight to my story. Perhaps they wouldn’t even know what the timing devices were. And maybe the jundies would have been so busy looting the berg ens that all that kit would have disappeared anyway. I almost giggled when I imagined them rifling through the berg ens in darkness and sticking a finger straight through one of the plastic bags of shit.

One thing I could be sure of was that nothing remained that was compromising to the task. We always refold our maps so that they aren’t on the part we’ve been using, and we never put markings on them. Everything was in our heads.

I was feeling confident-at this stage about the lack of knowledge they’d have on our equipment. If they knew more than I expected, we’d just have to waffle our way through and make excuses. The only problem really was that we didn’t exactly look like your aver age search and rescue team. But by this stage we didn’t exactly look like anything anyway, apart from total and utter bags of shit.

The vehicle stopped, and by the sound of things there was a reception committee waiting. I’d started to feel secure in the car: I’d got adapted to it, and now we were starting all over again.

They were talking in a low mumble, perhaps because it was the early hours of the morning. As the back doors opened there was a rush of cold air. We were pulled out and marched across a courtyard at quick pace. The cobblestones were agony. The cuts reopened, and my feet were soon slippery with blood. I stumbled and started to fall, but they grabbed me and kept on going. We went up a step, turned right along a veranda, and came to a door. I stubbed my foot on the doorframe and cried out. There was no reaction from them at all. They were very professional. It was all well rehearsed.

We went straight in. There was the usual smell of paraffin and the hissing sound of Tiny lamps, and I almost felt at home. They shoved me onto the floor and arranged me so that I was sitting cross legged with my head down and my hands behind my back. I let them do whatever they wanted. It was pointless resisting. I clenched up, fully expecting something to happen. They ripped my blindfold off. The cloth had scabbed to some pressure sores on my cheekbones and the bridge of my nose. I flinched with pain and felt warm blood dribble down my face.

The pain was forgotten the instant I saw Dinger. I hadn’t heard him get out of the car, and I’d had the horrible feeling I was on my own again. They yanked his blindfold off as well, and we got some eye-to-eye. Dinger gave me a little wink. I’d been avoiding eye contact with my interrogators since I’d been captured.

It was fantastic to have human contact again. Just a little wink was enough.

We were in a semidark room that had a medieval feel to it. The walls were bare stone and glistened with damp. It was cold and smelt musty. The windows were bricked up. The concrete floor was pitted and uneven.

I raised my head a little, trying to stretch my neck, and a guard I hadn’t noticed behind me pushed me back down. I saw that his uniform was olive drab, not the commando DPM we’d become accustomed to.

I had managed to see that facing us was a six-foot folding table and a couple of foldaway chairs. Everything looked temporary. The Iraqis drink their coffee and sweet, black tea out of small, fruit juice-size glasses. There were two or three of them on the table, half-full of drinks that must have been old because they weren’t steaming. Two ashtrays were heaped with stubs. Bits of paper were littered around. They’d put their weapons on the table as well.

There was activity by the door, and I lifted my eyes. Two characters came in. One was dressed in a green flying suit with a civilian leather jacket over the top and Chelsea boots with big heels and elasticated sides. He looked like the oldest swinger in town. I looked at the shape of him and had to try hard not to laugh. He was tall, but with a massive pot belly that was straining against the flying suit. He obviously thought he still had a 30-inch waist, the dickhead. He had all this Gucci kit on, and it was obvious he saw himself as a really smart, tasty geezer, but in fact he looked like a bag of bollocks.

The other character was much shorter and smaller framed. He was a skinny; sunken-cheek type, wearing a terrible suit that he must have been issued with and hoped one day he might grow in to.

Guards brought in our belt kit and weapons and dumped them on the table. What did I have in my belt kit that would give me away? Were they going to bring in the berg ens as well?

Mister Tasty handed a large brown envelope to the skinny runt. The back was covered with rubber stamps of nine-pointed stars, and there was Arabic writing on the front. This was a definite han dover-either commandos to military intelligence, or military intelligence to civilian police. Whichever, we were going further down the chain, and it was going to be more difficult than ever to escape.

Nobody spoke to us. All this was going on as if we weren’t in the room. There seemed to be no reference to us, no looks or nods in our direction. We stretched our legs out with cramp, and they came and pushed them back up. I looked at their wrists when they bent down to see if I could find out the time. It was irrelevant, but I wanted some sort of grip on reality. But nobody was wearing a watch, which was ominously professional. And yet they let us witness the han dover which seemed strange.

The Top Gun geezer in the flying suit left the room, and soon afterwards I heard transport moving off.

So this was it-we were with our new hosts.

I started to worry. Soldiers don’t wear suits. Who was this guy? With soldiers you know where you stand, and you can understand what’s going on. Now we were getting handed over to somebody in civvies. I’d heard all the horror stories from the Iran-Iraq war. I knew all about electrodes and meat hooks in the ceiling. These boys had been doing this professionally for years; they’d got it well squared away. We were not a novelty: we were ten years down the line; we were just another couple of punters. I was filled with dread. But there was nothing I could do about it; I had to accept the landing. The only hope was that they wouldn’t want to damage us too much; they’d want to keep us looking nice for a video. Perhaps they would be less physical than the last bunch-but I doubted it.

The skinny runt’s shirt was dirty and the collar a good four sizes too big for him. He wore a big kipper tie and trousers that were turned up at the bottoms. He looked as if he’d borrowed his wardrobe from Stan. He gob bed off some orders in a dull monotone to the guards. They picked up Dinger before we could get any eye-to-eye.

They left and I was on my own in the semidarkness with three or four guards. Some were in olive drab uniforms. Iraqi NCOs wear their insignia on their collars, very much like the Americans, and I could see that one of these guys was a warrant officer, class 1 equivalent, with two stars. He spoke fairly good English.

“You-look up,” he growled.

This was great. Now I could have a proper look around. I looked up with an obedient expression on my face, trying hard to appear pitiful. He was in front of me with two cronies in uniform and one who was dressed in traditional Arab dish dash, nothing on his head, and a pair of canvas pumps.

“What is your name?”

“My name is Andy, sir.”

“American?”

“No, I am British.”

“You’re American?”

“No, I’m British.”

“You’re lying! You’re lying!”

He hit me hard across the face. I rolled with it and went down.

“Sit up. You’re British?”

“Yeah. I’m British.”

“You’re lying. You’re Israeli.”

This wasn’t interrogation as such; he was just having his fun.

“Tonight, many people died because your country is bombing our children. Our children are dying in their schools. Your country is killing thousands of people every night, and it is time for you to die.”

I was sure he was right and I was going to be topped. But they were not the ones who would do it. These weren’t the teddies in charge; these were dickhead administrators doing a bit of freelance.

“What do you think about that?”

“Well, I don’t want to die.”

“But you’re killing thousands of people. You’re killing them, not us.

We don’t want this war.”

“I don’t know anything about that; I’m just a soldier. I don’t know why we’re at war. I didn’t want to go to war; I was just working in England, and they made us join the army.”

I spouted off any old bollocks, just to show I was confused and didn’t really know what was going on or why I was there. I was hoping they might take a bit of pity and understand, but obviously not.

“Mitterrand is a pig. Bush is a pig. Thatcher is a pig. She is making the children die of starvation.”

“I don’t know anything about that; I’m only a soldier.”

I got another slap around the head and went down.

The other two came up and had their fun. One was walking up and down. He’d come and put his face up close and shout, then pace up and down and come up again and twat me around the head.

The warrant officer said: “This man wants to kill you. I think I’ll let him kill you now.” I could tell they were just getting rid of their frustrations. With luck they’d eventually get bored. It was no big problem.

I saw that our belt kit had gone. It must have been taken when they took Dinger away. I was concerned. Had we been split up for good? Was I never going to see him again? It was a disheartening thought. It would have been so nice to have seen him one last time before I died.

They were starting to get more confident. They’d had their little slaps and everything, and now they were recycling all the propaganda that they had been fed-all the wonderful things that were going to happen when they finally kicked the imperialist Western powers out of the Middle East.

“The Americans and the Europeans are taking all our oil. It is our country. The Europeans divided our country. The Middle East is for the Arabs: it is our land, it is our oil. You bring your culture in, you spoil everything.”

I said I knew nothing about it: I was just a soldier, sent here against my will.

They started punching me in the head. One came up behind me and kicked me in the back and around the sides of the trunk. I went down and crawled into a ball, my knees right up to my chin. I closed my eyes, clenched my teeth, just waiting for it, but they lifted me up and straightened me out.

“Why are you here, killing our children?” they asked again, and it was sincere stuff. Obviously kids were getting killed in the bombing, and it had got to them. This wasn’t the “You bastards!” and good kicking that I was used to; these guys really had the hump. The kicks were from the heart.

“Why are you killing our children?”

“I was sent here to save life,” I said, glossing over the fact that this statement did not entirely reflect our activities of the past few days. “I’m not here to kill.”

I started to bleed as the old wounds reopened. My nose was pouring blood, and my mouth started to swell up all over again. And yet I got the feeling there was a bit of control here. One of the boys must have said, “That’s enough for. now,” because they stopped. They’d obviously had some instruction not to go overboard. They obviously wanted us to be able to talk. And that could only mean that things were going to get a whole lot worse.

“We’ve been fighting wars for many years, do you know that?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t know anything about that sort of thing. I’m all confused.”

“Yes, my friend, we have been fighting wars for many years, and we know how to get information. We know how to get people to talk. And, Andy, you will talk soon…”

He coughed with a long, loud bronchial rumbling of the chest, and the next thing I knew-whoomph, splat-I got a big green grolly straight in the face. I was really pissed off at that, more than I was at getting filled in. I couldn’t wipe it off, and it was all over my face. I had visions of contracting TH or some other outrageous disease. The way my luck was going, I’d get through all the interrogation and imprisonment shit, get back to the UK and find out I’d got some incurable form of Iraqi syphilis.

The rest of the blokes thought this was a good one, and they started gob bing as well, lifting my face right up so they had a bigger target.

“Pig!” they shouted, pushing me down onto the floor and spitting more.

The kickings you accept, because you can’t do anything about it. But this-this really got to me: the fact that it had been snorted up out of their guts or their nose and was now on my face and trickling into my mouth. It was just so disgusting. They kept it up for about ten minutes, probably the time it took to exhaust their supplies.

They moved me into the corner of the room and made me face the wall, looking down. I was cross legged, my hands still handcuffed behind my back. They blindfolded me again.

I stayed in that position for maybe forty-five minutes with not another word said to me. I could hear low voices and the sounds of people moving around. A Tiny lamp hissed on the other side of the room. It was very cold and I started to shiver. I felt the blood on my wounds begin to clot, and it was a very strange sensation. When you’re bleeding it actually feels nice and warm. Then it starts to go cold and clots, and it’s viscous and unpleasant, especially if your hair and beard are matted with it.

My nose was blocked with solid blood, and I had to start breathing through my mouth. It was total agony as the cold air got in amongst the stumps of enamel and pulp that had once been my back molars. I began to hope for an interrogation, just anything to get lifted out and taken somewhere warm.

I didn’t have too much of a clue about what was going on. All that I knew was that we’d been handed over to a man in a Burton suit that was five times too big for him and he seemed to be in charge. I said as little as I could get away with, just waiting to see what was going to happen. I worried about Dinger. Where had they taken him? And why? The runty bloke had left with him. Were they going to have a go at him first? When he came back, was I going to have to look at Dinger battered and bleeding, and then get dragged away myself? I don’t want that: I’d rather get taken away without seeing Dinger come back kicked to shit.

The door opened and the guards came in again. There was a brief exchange with the lads in the room, and they had a good giggle about the gob all over my face. They picked me up and dragged me outside. We turned right as we came out of the door, then followed a pathway and turned 90 degrees left at the end. I couldn’t walk properly, and they had to prop me up under the armpits and half carry me. It was very cold. We went over more cobblestones, and I was in real trouble. The tops of my toes had been scraped away in the town, and I was frantically trying to get on the balls of my feet and sort of pigeon-toe along so I didn’t scrape the lacerations.

It was only another 20 or 30 feet to where we were going. The heat hit me straight away. It was beautifully warm, and the room was full of aromas-burning paraffin, cigarette smoke, and fresh coffee. I was pushed down to the floor and made to sit with my legs folded. Still blindfolded and handcuffed, I put my head down to protect myself and instinctively clenched my teeth and muscles.

People were shuffling around, and through chinks in the blindfold I could see that the room was brightly lit. It seemed a furnished, used room, not a derelict holding area like the one I had just come from. The carpet was comfortable to sit on, and I could feel the fire really near me. It was all rather pleasant.

I heard papers being shuffled, a glass being put on a hard surface, a chair being moved across the floor. There were no verbal instructions to the guards. I sat there waiting.

After about fifteen seconds the blindfold was pulled off. I was still looking at the floor. A pleasant voice said, “Look up, Andy: it is all right, you can look up.”

I brought my head up slowly and saw that I was indeed in a plush, well-decorated, quite homely room, rectangular and no more than 20 feet long.

I was at one end, near the door. I found myself looking directly ahead at a very large, wooden executive type desk at the other end. This had to be the colonel’s office, without a doubt. The man behind the desk looked quite distinguished, the typical high-ranking officer. He was quite a large-framed person, about 6 foorish, with graying hair and mustache. His desk was littered with lots of odds and bods, an in and out tray, all the normal stuff that you would associate with an office desk, and a glass of what I took to be coffee.

He studied my face. Behind him was the ubiquitous picture of old Uncle Saddam, in full military regalia and looking good. Either side of the desk and coming down the room towards me against the walls was a collection of lounge chairs without arms, the sort that can be put together to make a long settee. They were crazy colors-oranges, yellows, purples. There were three or four of them each side with a coffee table between.

The colonel was in olive drab uniform. On the left hand side from my view, and about halfway up the row, was a major, also in olive drab and immaculately turned out-not boots but shoes, and a crisply pressed shirt. You can tell staff soldiers no matter what army they come from.

The major was paying no attention to me at all, just flicking through what appeared to be papers from the han dover making the odd note in the margin with a fountain pen. He started talking in beautifully modulated, newscaster English.

“How are you Andy? Are you all right?”

He didn’t look at me, just carried on with his paperwork. He was mid-thirties, and he wore half-moon glasses that made him tilt his head back so that he could read. He had the Saddam mustache and immaculately manicured hands.

“I think I need medical attention.”

“Just tell us again, will you, why are you in Iraq?”

“As I said before, we’re members of a search and rescue team. The helicopter came down, we were all told to get off, and it took off and left us; we were abandoned.”

“How many of you were there on the helicopter, can you remember? No problems if you can’t at the moment. Time is one commodity your sanctions have not affected.”

“I don’t know. Alarms were ringing inside the helicopter. We were told to get off, and then everything got very confused. I’m not too sure how many were left on and how many were off.”

“I see. How many of you were there on the helicopter?”

It was the schoolteacher talking down to a kid he knows full well is lying-but he wants the kid to squirm before he confesses.

“I don’t know, because when we got on it was dark. Sometimes there’s only four, sometimes there’s twenty. We’re just told when to get on and when to get off. It always happens so quickly. I didn’t know where we were going or what we were doing. To be honest, I’m not really interested. I never take that much notice. They treat us like shit; we’re just the soldiers who do the work.”

“All right. So what was your mission, Andy? You must know your mission because it’s always repeated twice in your orders.”

It’s standard British army practice to repeat the mission statement twice in orders. It astounded me that he knew. If he understood British military doctrine, he must have had some training in the UK.

“I don’t really know about my mission,” I said. “It’s just a case of: go here, go there, do this, do that. I know we’re supposed to know the mission, but we are not told half the time what’s going on; it’s total and utter confusion.”

My mind was racing, good style, trying to do several things at once. I was listening to this character and I was trying to remember what I’d already said and what I was going to say in the future. The problem was, I was knackered, I was hungry, I was thirsty. This boy was sitting up there all rather comfy and contented, just having a bit of a waffle. He was far more switched on at this stage than I was because I was such a physical wreck.

“Well, what were you going to do once you were on the helicopter?”

“We’re all drawn together from different regiments to form these rescue teams. We haven’t been together long because we’re all from different places. We haven’t formed into teams yet. Look, we’re here to save life, not to take life away. We’re not that sort of people.”

“Hmmm.”

The colonel hadn’t stopped staring at me since the blindfold was removed. Now he sparked up in passable English.

“Where is your officer who commands you?”

I was happy about this question. In the Iraqi system there’s an officer in command even at the lowest level; it was good that they found it incomprehensible for a long-range patrol to be in the field without an officer. I’d been portraying myself as thick and confused, and maybe they’d been taken in. Now they wanted the officer: he was the man in the know. I decided to play on the deserted soldiery bit.

“I don’t know, it was dark. He was there one minute and gone the next. He must have stayed on the helicopter. He wouldn’t bother coming out with us if he knew the helicopter was taking off again. He deserted us.”

“Do you think there could have been eight of you?”

That meant they were aware of the problem at the MSR and were trying to make the connection-if they hadn’t already done so. In my heart I knew it was only a matter of time.

“I don’t know, there were people running around everywhere. We’re not trained for this sort of thing, we’re trained to render first aid-and all of a sudden we’re stuck in the middle of Iraq. There might have been eight, I haven’t got a clue. I was confused and I just ran for it.”

“Where did the helicopter land?”

“I really don’t know. They just put us down. I don’t know where it was. I wasn’t map-reading on the aircraft; it’s the pilots that do everything.”

Could they believe this shit? I felt I was flogging a dead horse, but I had no choice now-I’d gone down that path, and I had to keep going, right or wrong. I didn’t know if they were just fishing or not. I’d just have to play the game out. Anybody else who’d been caught would be doing the same. No need to panic; the conversation was still all very nice.

“Tell me about some of the equipment that you have, Andy. We are somewhat confused about it.”

I didn’t know if he was trying to get me to talk about the berg ens which had been dropped or our belt kit. He was talking as if we were the eight-man patrol that had got bumped, and I was talking as if we were the search and rescue team.

“It’s just standard sort of issue-water, ammunition, and a bit of extra first aid kit and our own personal stuff.”

“No. Tell me about the explosives that you had in your packs.”

Hang about, I thought-it hasn’t been confirmed yet that I was in this patrol.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Come on, Andy, let’s sort this out. There is no big problem. Just sit there, take your time, and it will all be done tonight. You were carrying explosives, Andy. We’ve followed you all the way since you were first found. We know it was you and your friends. We’ve been following your exploits.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, you do really, don’t you, Andy? Such a large quantity of plastic explosive. Did you intend to blow something up?”

His tone was still very pleasant and gentle, the GP enquiring about my general well-being. I knew it wouldn’t last. In training, you are taught to try and take advantage of whatever you can whenever you can, because you don’t know if it’s ever going to come your way again. A golden rule is that if you can get something to eat, take it every time. They were trying to be the nice guys and help me as much as they could, so I felt it was time to try and take advantage of the situation.

“Would it be possible to have anything to eat, please, because I haven’t eaten for days and days,” I said. “I’ve got stomach pains from hunger. It would be nice to have something to eat.”

“Of course you can have something to eat, Andy. It might be difficult to find, of course, because the sanctions mean that we have children starving in the streets. However, we will try to find you something. We are a good and generous people. We will look after you. If you help us, who knows what else you can get? You might be home soon. Think about that, Andy-home.”

The rice was hot and so was the bowl of delicious stewed tomatoes and two chap atis The water was refreshingly cool and served in a clean glass.

At first one of the guards picked up the spoon and started to feed me.

I said, “Would it be possible to undo one of my hands so I can feed myself?”

The major said No, but the colonel Okayed it with a wave of his hand. One of my handcuffs was undone, and the release of pressure was absolutely splendid. The only problem was that I couldn’t hold the spoon properly because of the numbness in my hand. I balanced it between my little finger and the finger next to it and then rested it above the web of the thumb as a sort of lever.

The colonel pointed at -the picture of Saddam.

“Do you know who this is?”

I hesitated, as if trying to put a name to a face at a party, and said, “Yes, that’s Saddam Hussein. President Hussein.”

“Yes it is. What have you heard about him?”

What was I supposed to say? “I’ve heard about him all right. I’ve heard he’s pretty good at gassing kids in Iran?”

“I know that he’s a man of power, a strong leader.”

“This is correct. Under his leadership we shall soon be rid of all you Westerners. We have no time for you. We don’t need you.”

It wasn’t rhetoric; his tone was still conversational.

I finished the rice and got stuck into the tomatoes. I had great trouble eating them because my mouth was so swollen and numb. It was like coming back from the dentist after an injection and thinking you’ll have a cup of tea, but it dribbles down your chin because you have no control. I was noisy and uncouth as I slobbered away, tomato juice trickling down my chin. The tomatoes tasted lovely, and I was just sorry that the sores in my mouth stopped me from chewing them properly and extracting all the flavor. The bread was a problem, too. I just gulped down big hunks without chewing. No matter: I wanted to get it all down my neck as fast as I could in case they started playing games and took it away from me halfway through.

The colonel peeled an orange as he watched me. In contrast with the chimpanzee’s tea party down on the carpet, he did it with studied elegance. With the aid of a small knife he made four careful cuts down the skin, then peeled off each quarter in turn. He opened out the orange segment by segment.

The fruit had been presented to him on an ornate china plate on a tray, with a silver knife and fork. There was a definite class system in operation, the jundies running around with a teapot pouring tea for these two lads, while they just sat there.

Now and again the colonel would pick up a piece of orange and put it in his mouth. Down on the carpet his prisoner slobbered and slurped. Talk about Beauty and the Beast.

My stomach was feeling really good, but it wasn’t just the food that was making me happy: while I was eating they weren’t asking me questions. It gave me time to think.

Sure enough, as soon as I’d finished I was handcuffed again, and we carried on the conversation from where we’d left off. He was still talking as if we’d already agreed that the equipment found after the initial contact on the MSR was ours.

“So, Andy, explain to me some more about the equipment. What else did you have? Come on, we need your help. After all, we have helped you.”

“I’m sorry, I’m getting all mixed up. I don’t understand.”

“What were you doing with explosives?”

The tone still wasn’t aggressive.

“We didn’t have any explosives. I don’t really know what you’re on about.”

“Andy, you were obviously going to destroy something because you were carrying PE4, which is a high explosive that is designed to destroy things. You appreciate why I cannot really believe the story you are telling me?”

His mention of PE4 was another indication that he was UK-trained, but I ignored it. “I really don’t know what you’re on about.”

“We have some of your men in hospital, you know.”

That one got me. I tried not to show any shock or surprise; I wasn’t supposed to be connected with any villains from the MSR.

“Who are they?” I asked. “What condition are they in?”

My mind was racing. Who could it be? What might they have said? Was he just bluffing?

“They’re Okay, they’re Okay.”

“Thank you very much for looking after them. Our army would be doing the same for your injured.”

If they had anybody in hospital, it must mean they were interested in keeping them alive.

“Yes,” he said casually, “we know everything. A few members of your group are in hospital. But they are fine. We are not savages; we look after our prisoners.”

Yes, I know, I thought-I’ve seen the footage of the Iran-Iraq war; I’ve seen how you look after your prisoners.

There was nothing I could do about it, but I had to respond the way I thought they wanted me to. It’s all a big game, one that you start training for as a kid. You learn how to lie to your mother or teacher, and turn on the tears whenever you want.

“Thank you for helping them,” I said, “but I don’t know anything that I can tell you.”

“Well, we agree that you were with the group that abandoned its packs, and that we followed you all the way along.”

“No-you’re confusing me. I don’t understand what you mean about abandoned packs. We don’t use packs. We were deserted; we were stuck in the middle of your country. I’m just a soldier; I go where I’m told and I do what I’m told to do.”

“But, Andy, you have not explained to me what you were told to do. You must have had a mission.”

“Look, I’m on the lower echelon of the military system. As you know yourself, we work on a need-to know basis. We are only told what we need to know, and because I’m so low down on the chain I get told nothing.”

Bingo-this seemed to strike a chord. At the top of the card which gives the sequence for an orders group it says: Remember Need To Know. He had obviously had some sort of teaching from the Brits, probably at Sandhurst or Staff College: the Iraqis had been in the Western powers’ Good Lads Club for a number of years.

The colonel looked puzzled and asked the major something in Arabic. The junior officer gave a lengthy explanation. I felt good about this. I’d actually come back at him with something that they seemed to accept. Maybe they thought I really did know jack shit. Maybe they could equate my situation with their own. We were all soldiers. Obviously he was a major and the other one was a colonel, but they would still receive orders from brigadiers and generals. The long shot was that they’d take a certain amount of pity on us, or think that we were really not worth the trouble of trying to get any more information out of because we were just a bunch of bonehead squad dies who’d screwed up.

“That is fine, Andy. We will see you later on. It is time for you to go now.”

He sounded like a therapist winding up a session.

“Thanks very much for the food. I am trying to help, really I am, but I just don’t know what’s required of me.”

They put the blindfold back on and, rather surprisingly, took the handcuffs off. I felt the blood rush back into my hands. They lifted me and took me outside. The cold hit me. It had been so warm in the office, scoffing tomatoes, bread, and rice.

I was quite happy that this was another major hurdle over with, and that I’d got some food out of them. Chances were they’d been going to give me some anyway as part of the good-guy routine, but it just made me feel better to have asked for and received it. I was fairly confident at this time that my story was holding up, even though I wasn’t entirely happy with the performance I’d given. At the end of the day, whether they believed it or not, as. long as they had me down as thick and ignorant, it didn’t really matter to me. Hopefully I’d just be pigeonholed as totally irrelevant and too thick to get any creditable information out of.

I still hadn’t got my boots, and I couldn’t walk properly on my raw feet. But I was mentally fit, and that was all that mattered. They can break any bone in your body that they choose, but it’s up to you whether or not they break your mind.

I hobbled down a long, cold, damp corridor with lino floors, and they sat me down at the end. It was completely dark-not a flicker of light came through my blindfold. From time to time I could hear the echo of footsteps moving along other corridors and crossing this one. Perhaps it was an office complex.

After an hour or so there was again the sound of footsteps, but they were more irregular and shuffling than usual. Shortly I heard the sound of labored breathing. A guard took my blindfold off, and I watched him walk away. The corridor was about 8 foot wide, with tiled walls and doors every 15 feet or so. Down to the right there were two other intersections with corridors coming off, and that went down maybe 100 or 125 feet. It was dark. There was a Tiny lamp right at the other end of the building, glowing at the junction.

I looked to my left and saw Dinger. He had a huge grin on his face.

“Come here often, wanker?” he said.

The guard came back with our boots and went out and joined his mates who were sitting a few feet away, keeping an eye on us.

“Muslim or Christian or Jew?” one of them said.

“Christians,” I said. “English. Christians.”

“Not Jew?”

“No. Christians. Christians.”

“Not Tel Aviv?”

“No, not Tel Aviv. English. Great Britain.”

He nodded, and gob bed off to his mates.

“My friend here,” he said, “he’s a Christian. Muslims and Christians are Okay in Iraq. We live together. No Jews. Jews are bad. You are a Jew.”

“No, I’m a Christian.”

“No, you are a Jew. Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv no good. We don’t want Jews. We kill Jews. Why you come in our country? We don’t want war. War is your problem.”

He was just talking, rather matter-of-factly, and seemed quite sensible. Iraq has a large Christian population, especially around the port of Basra.

“We are not Jews, we are Christian,” I said again.

“Aircrew?”

“Not aircrew. Rescue.”

If he’d wanted us to be Muslims or members of the Church of the Third Moon on the Right, that’s what we would have been. I was just nodding and agreeing with everything, apart from the Jew bit. It was the early hours of the morning and we could sense the guards’ attitude: “We’re bollocksed, you’re bollocksed, we have to look after you, let’s just do it without any problems.” Dinger was rubbing his feet. “Is it all right if I help him?” I said. They gave a wave that said: Yeah, do what you want. Dinger and I leant forwards to examine his feet. “Bob?” I whispered in his ear. “Don’t know.” “Legs?” “Probably dead. What about Mark?” “Dead. When did you get caught?” “Mid-morning. I heard you being brought in in the afternoon.” “Are you all right?” I said. I couldn’t believe I’d asked such a bone question. What a dickhead statement. He eyed me with a look that said: You knobber! The guards suspected that we were communicating, and one of them came over to stop it. Dinger asked him for a cigarette. The guard spoke pretty good English, but Dinger said, “Cig-ar-ette?” as if he was talking to a lunatic, and made the motions of smoking. It didn’t get him anywhere. We both had a slightly better idea now of what was going on. I knew that Legs was probably dead. I still didn’t know about Bob. We sat there for about an hour, but couldn’t communicate any more… My body was aching all over, and I was falling asleep. Your body gets so psyched up when you are being filled in, but when there is a period of calm, all the little aches and pains get magnified because you have nothing else to worry about. The feeling reminded me of school. When you have a fight as a kid, you’re all sparked up, and it doesn’t hurt so much initially. It’s a couple of hours later that the pain comes out. My lips were still bleeding. My mouth had been split in several places during the beatings, and the wounds kept trying to congeal. But even the slightest movement made them reopen. My arse and lower back were sore from sitting all day on the hard concrete. The injuries made me feel even more exhausted, and I wanted to get my head down. I nodded off, my head lolling on my chest, then jerked awake a minute or two later. This went on for about half an hour. Then Dinger and I leant against each other and dozed.

We were woken by the slamming of doors and the sound of talking. The glow of a Tiny lamp appeared at the bottom of the corridor and got bigger and bigger. Finally the lamp appeared, with lots of bodies behind it. We knew we were off again.

We were handcuffed and blindfolded-not aggressively, rather nonchalantly. We stood up and shuffled together along the corridor and out into the open air. A Land Cruiser was waiting with its engine running.

Our blindfolds were taken off again as we got in, though I had no idea why-perhaps there was just a breakdown in communications. Off we went, two guards in the front and one in the back.

“Baghdad? Baghdad?” Dinger sparked up, nice and friendly.

“Yes, Baghdad,” the driver replied, as if he was stating the obvious.

The driver knew all the back doubles. We drove for ten minutes through busy back streets. The vehicle had its headlights blazing. The guards didn’t seem particularly bothered when I strained to see road signs and street names. I didn’t see a single written word. There were no large magnificent buildings to be remembered and identified later. All the houses had flat roofs. By the look of it this was the slum area of the city. It must have been a residential area because there were no signs of bombing. It didn’t even look as if there was a war on. The roads were tarmacked but full of potholes, and the sidewalk areas were just dust. Old cars were abandoned at the roadside, being pissed on by dogs.

We stopped outside a pair of large, slatted wooden gates. They opened inwards as soon as the vehicle arrived, and we drove into a small courtyard not much bigger than the Land Cruiser’s turning circle. Squaddies were waiting for us, and I felt the familiar knot of apprehension tighten in the pit of my stomach. Dinger and I looked at each other blankly.

I wanted to look up as we were hustled out of the vehicle but made sure my head was down so I didn’t antagonize anybody. It was pitch-black, and at every moment I expected the filling in to start. We were dragged into a block and along a corridor that was hardly wider than my shoulders. It was totally dark, and the jundie in front of me had to use his torch. We got to an area where there was a row of about a dozen doors, all very close together. The jundie opened one, pushed me inside, took off my handcuffs, and closed the door. I heard a bolt sliding and a padlock being applied.

There was no ambient light whatsoever. It was so dark in the room that I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face. There was a gagging stench of shit. I got down on my hands and knees and felt my way around. There wasn’t much to feel. The room was tiny, and it didn’t take me long to discover the two porcelain footpads either side of a hole about eight inches in diameter. No wonder my new bedroom stank. I was in a minging Arab shithouse.

You have to take advantage of every situation, and here was an opportunity to get the sleep I desperately needed. I wasn’t going to waste time thinking about anything. There wasn’t room to stretch out so I maneuvered my body so that I was bent around the pan.

There was no ventilation and the smell was overpowering, but there you go. It was just a relief not to have been beaten up. I fell asleep immediately.