Seven American soldiers seized by the Iraqis and paraded on television described in vivid detail yesterday how they were captured and held in harrowing conditions for three weeks before being rescued by marines.
Five of them, members of the 507th Maintenance Company, said they surrendered after being ambushed in Nassiriya.
The other two, the crew of an Apache helicopter, recalled how they tried to evade capture after their aircraft was shot down by jumping into a canal and swimming for a quarter of a mile.
The members of the 507th Maintenance Company ran into trouble when their convoy took a wrong turn on March 23, three days after the war began. During a 15-minute battle they came under heavy attack.
Sergeant James Riley (31) told the Washington Post: ”It wasn’t a small ambush. It was a whole city. We were getting shot from all directions as we were going down the road — front, rear, left, right. There was nowhere to go.”
In the swirling dust many of the soldiers’ rifles jammed. Private Patrick Miller (23) began shoving rounds into the chamber of his rifle one at a time. ”It was like something you’d see in a movie,” he said.
Nine US soldiers were killed. It fell to Sgt Riley, as the senior soldier present, to surrender.
”We were like Custer,” he said. ”We were surrounded. We had no working weapons. We couldn’t even make a bayonet charge. We would have been mowed down. We didn’t have a choice.”
The survivors — including Private Jessica Lynch and a second woman, Shoshana Johnson — threw down their weapons.
Iraqi fighters thronged around them, pushing them down, kicking and beating some of them. They were bound and blindfolded.
Pte Miller said: ”I thought they were going to kill me. That was the first thing I asked when they captured me: ‘Are you going to kill me?’ They said no, but I didn’t believe them.”
Shoshana Johnson (30) who was hit by a bullet which sliced through both feet, was helped up by her captors. She said: ”They opened my NBC [nuclear, biological and chemical] suit and noticed I was female.”
They treated her more gently than her colleagues.
For some reason Pte Lynch was taken to a local hospital, where she was rescued by US special forces, but the rest were moved to Baghdad.
They were kept in separate cells in a drab prison with concrete walls and a tin roof. They were interrogated, sometimes blindfolded.
Joseph Hudson (23) who was shot three times during the battle, said they asked him: ”Why did you come to Iraq? Why are you killing women and children?”
They were stripped of their clothing and belongings and had to wear dirty prison pyjamas. They slept on concrete floors with wool blankets and were not allowed outside for fresh air and exercise, or to shower.
Within a day or two, Chief Warrant Officers David Williams (31) and Ronald Young (26) pilots of an Apache attack helicopter shot down in central Iraq, joined them.
They had tried to escape as armed Iraqis ran towards the stricken helicopter. They jumped into a canal and swam for a quarter of a mile.
Afraid of hypothermia, they made a break for a line of trees. But in the moonlight farmers armed with rifles spotted them. The pilots surrendered.
”They beat us a little,” CWO Williams said. ”One of them had a stick. They took a knife and put it to my throat.”
During the nights at their prison the captives listened as the bombs fell on Baghdad. At times shell casings landed on the roof of their prison. They were even more afraid when the Iraqis began moving an artillery gun inside the prison at night, making the building a target for the coalition.
The morning after an explosion a few metres away the Americans were moved. For the rest of their captivity they were moved every few nights.
Some of the captors taunted them. They told Shoshana Johnson and Joseph Hudson that they had seen their mothers on television.
The rescue came without warning. ”I was sitting there,” Pte Miller said. ”Next thing I know the marines are kicking in the door, saying get down on the floor. They said, ‘If you’re an American, stand up.’ We stood up and they hustled us out of there.”
The marines, who were on their way to Tikrit, had been tipped off that the prisoners were being held in a private house. It was mistakenly reported earlier that they had been dumped by their captors at the side of a road.
When the marines burst in they had trouble recognising some of the prisoners as American. Shoshana Johnson said: ”They said, ‘Get down, get down,’ and one of them said, ‘No, she’s American’.”
She was overwhelmed when she realised that she would see her two-year-old daughter Janelle again. ”I broke down. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going home’!”
Three minutes after the marines arrived, the prisoners were whisked into a helicopter, meeting no resistance. They were flown to an airfield south-east of Baghdad and put on a plane to Kuwait, still unable to believe they were free.
”We weren’t PoWs very long,” Ronald Young said. ”I don’t know how the guys in Vietnam made it. I wouldn’t have made it.” – Guardian Unlimited Â