For POWs, it was surrender or die

By Peter Baker
Washington Post

NUMANIYAH, Iraq — They took the wrong turn just after dawn on a clear Sunday morning, March 23. The convoy from the Army's 507th Maintenance Company wandered by mistake into the riverfront city of Nasiriyah and suddenly it seemed to the soldiers that every Iraqi in town was trying to kill them.

Anthony Hudson, 19, brother of Spc. Joseph Hudson, celebrates as his mother, Anecita, watches news of her son's rescue. Sgt. 1st Class Ramon Montano, left, was the first to deliver the good news. Associated Press

The bullets and explosions came from all sides. Some of the Humvees flipped over. Other drivers hit the gas hoping to outrun the danger, but ran into even heavier fire. In the swirling dust, soldiers' rifles jammed. Pfc. Patrick Miller, 23, began shoving rounds into his rifle one at a time, firing a single shot at enemies swarming all around.

Some Americans died where they fell. Johnson was hit by a single bullet that sliced through both feet. Spc. Edgar Hernandez, 21, of Mission, Texas, was hit in the bicep of his right arm. Spc. Joseph Hudson, 23, of Alamogordo, N.M., was shot three times, twice in the ribs and once in the upper left buttocks.

Finally, it fell to Sgt. James Riley, a 31-year-old bachelor from Pennsauken, N.J., and the senior soldier present, to surrender. "We were like Custer," he recalled yesterday, still sounding shocked. "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, sir."

The battle lasted about 15 minutes. Nine U.S. soldiers were dead; four were rescued by U.S. forces that same day; six were captured by the Iraqis. One, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, would be rescued from a hospital April 2. Five others — Johnson, Hernandez, Hudson, Riley, and Miller — became prisoners of war until yesterday, when they were found, along with two captured crew members of an Apache Longbow attack helicopter, by U.S. Marines in a house north of Baghdad.

In their first interviews after being freed, the former prisoners described a harrowing journey through the Iraq war — from their ill-fated missions and capture through an arduous imprisonment where death often seemed around the corner. Speaking to reporters aboard a C-130 transport plane evacuating them from Iraq, they alternated between tears and smiles and hollow gazes as they told their stories.

The capture of the Americans came within a 24-hour period that was the darkest of the war so far for American commanders. Even as U.S. forces toppled the government of Saddam Hussein and seized Baghdad, the search for the prisoners consumed top U.S. officers. Their fates were a mystery until yesterday morning.

Outgunned and surrounded

The cooks and supply clerks and mechanics of the 507th Maintenance Company were unlikely early casualties of the war. Their overnight trip into Iraq was supposed to be a support mission to help troops who were doing the actual fighting.

The 507th convoy snaked its way from Kuwait across the southern edge of Iraq and up the road toward Baghdad three days after the Marines had stormed across the border. The young war seemed to be going better than expected and few thought the trip through the desert could turn into such a high-risk venture.

Members of the convoy still can't understand how they ventured by mistake into Nasiriyah. Marine combat units were trying to seize two bridges on the eastern side of the city about 100 miles north of Kuwait to secure a crucial crossing of the Euphrates River but they had not cleaned out the city and would run into their own bloody firefights that day.

The brunt of the city's defense was directed at the members of the 507th.

"It wasn't a small ambush," Riley said Sunday. "It was a whole city. And we were getting shot from all different directions as we were going down the road — front, rear, left, right."

At one point, Riley called out to a wounded comrade but got no reply and could not help as bullets rained past. "There was nowhere to go," he said.

"It was like something you'd see in a movie," said Miller, the private first class who tried to place bullets one by one into the chamber of his rifle after it jammed.

Outgunned and surrounded, the surviving soldiers threw down their weapons and raised their hands. Iraqi fighters thronged around them, pushing them down, kicking and beating some of them. Miller recalled being hit in the back with sticks. They were bound and blindfolded. Iraqis ransacked the stricken vehicles, stripping them of bags and equipment.

Johnson, injured in both feet, could not walk and had to be helped. The first Iraqis who reached her began grabbing at her nuclear, biological and chemical protection garments. "They opened my NBC suit and noticed I was a female," she said. At that point, she said, they treated her more gently than her colleagues.

Miller held out little hope for mercy. "I thought they were going to kill me," he said. "That was the first thing I asked when they captured me: 'Are you going to kill me?' They said no. ... I still didn't believe them."

The prisoners were taken to Baghdad where they were isolated in separate cells of a drab prison with concrete walls and a tin roof. They did not know what had happened to the rest of their unit, including Lynch, who for some reason was separated from the others and taken to a hospital in Nasiriyah. Lynch's captured comrades learned only yesterday that she had survived.

Soon after arriving in the capital, the interrogations began. Sometimes they were blindfolded during the questioning, other times when the video camera was on, they were not. Hudson remembered being surprised that the inquisitors feigned friendliness, sitting back and smoking cigarettes and sipping bottled water instead of shining bright lights in their eyes and shouting. The questions ranged from the disposition of U.S. military units to political diatribes.

"Why did you come to Iraq?" Hudson recalled the interrogators asking. "Why are you killing women and children?" They quickly tired of his responses, he said. "Most of the answers were, 'Following orders,' and 'I don't know.' "

The captives were stripped of their clothing and belongings and ordered to wear grungy, unwashed blue or yellow striped prison pajamas. Hernandez had his girlfriend's headband taken from his wrist. Two or three times a day they were given water or tea and bowls of rice, some pita bread and sometimes chicken. They slept on concrete floors with wool blankets and were not allowed outside to exercise or shower. The first guards were cruel and menacing, but the physical abuse largely subsided, the prisoners recalled.

The soldiers with gunshot wounds underwent surgery. "More than once, a doctor said that they wanted to take good care of me to show that the Iraqi people had humanity," Johnson said. Asked what she thought of that now, she said, "I appreciate the care that I was given. But I also know that there was a reason behind it. They didn't give me care just for the humanity of it."

Capture of two Apache pilots

Within a day or two of their imprisonment, two more American soldiers arrived, Chief Warrant Officers David Williams and Ronald Young, pilots of an Apache shot down and then captured by farmers early in the morning of March 24. The prisoners from the convoy did not know who the newcomers were at first but could tell by the voices coming from the other cells that they were Americans.

Williams and Young had been part of the first deep-strike attack by the Apaches during the war, which saw not only their chopper knocked out of the sky but another 33 riddled with bullets and forced to limp back to base for repairs. The two pilots survived the crash and ambled out of the wrecked gunship, hoping to radio for pickup by some of their compatriots. But armed Iraqis quickly rushed toward the crash site and they ran off.

"I looked back at the aircraft and I saw flashlights all over it," said Williams, 31, father of two babies back in Fort Hood, Texas. He and Young, 26, an Atlanta native with his own 9-month-old son, jumped into a canal and swam a quarter mile, trying to glide along quietly with just their heads above the surface. As they moved downstream, they saw another Apache overhead and tried to radio for help, but the helicopter's belly was on fire and it did not stop.

Afraid of hypothermia, they emerged from the water at an open plain and made a break for a line of trees about 1,000 yards in the distance. But the moon had appeared and farmers armed with rifles spotted them. After warning shots were fired, the two pilots surrendered. "They beat us a little," Williams said. "One of them had a stick. Ron they kicked and beat. They took a knife and put it to my throat."

The farmers tied their hands and blindfolded them, dumped them into a truck and set off for the nearest police station or army base almost as if on parade. Every once in a while, they threw open the door of the truck to display their prize, Williams said. "They would stop and show all these people they had caught Americans."

'Bastard children of Iraq'

Night after night from their cold cells, the prisoners could hear the bombing as their American compatriots pummeled Saddam and his government from above. The prisoners found themselves wishing the Americans would come and worrying about what would happen when they did.

To make matters worse, they said, the Iraqis moved an artillery gun inside the prison into a nearby room, in effect making it a target for American bombs. As the senior soldier in the group, Williams demanded they be moved to a safer location but was rebuffed. The bombs kept seeming to get closer.

"It busted open my door one night," Young said of the bombing. "I put my hand out and started to open the door but before we could get out the guards came in."

One night, the prison was rattled by an explosion about 50 yards from the building. The next morning, after 12 to 15 days at the prison, the Americans were bound up and moved to another location, the first of what would be many moves.

For the rest of their captivity, as U.S. forces advanced on Baghdad, the prisoners were moved every few nights. Each jailer seemed desperate to pass off the captives to someone else for fear of the consequences of being discovered by the approaching American troops. The former prisoners said that all told, they stayed at seven or eight places, sometimes government buildings, sometimes private residences.

"We could feel that the whole thing was collapsing," said Young. "We were the bastard children of Iraq. Nobody wanted to hold us."

Some of their captors tried to taunt them. They told Johnson that they had seen her mother on television. They told Hudson the same and took pleasure in adding that his mother had denounced Bush.

But with each move, the prisoners said, their conditions eased somewhat. They had more opportunities to be together. Their guards seemed less beholden to the Saddam regime and more sympathetic to their plight. At their final stop, a house near the town of Samarrah north of Baghdad, the lower-level guards were police officers rather than Saddam loyalists and even pooled their own money to buy the Americans food and medicine.

Still, for some of the prisoners, these were among the gloomiest days. As they heard less fighting, Johnson worried they would never be found by the Americans and that their Iraqi captors would decide to dispose of them.

"I was getting to the point," she said, "where I believed they would have killed us."

'Oh my God, I'm going home!'

Deliverance came loudly and without warning. Suddenly yesterday at the house in Samarrah the prisoners heard someone kicking in the doors and shouting, "Get down! Get down!"

"I was sitting there," Miller recalled a few hours later. "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."

By this time, the male prisoners had grown light beards and their shoulders had sagged; in their Iraqi prison pajamas, they could be mistaken for the other side. The Marines had trouble distinguishing Johnson as an American. "At first," she said, "they didn't realize I was American. They said, 'Get down, get down,' and one of them said, 'No, she's American.' "

Johnson, whose daughter turns 3 next month, was overwhelmed to realize she was saved. "I broke down. I was like, 'Oh my God, I'm going home!' "

The Marines, from the 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance unit, had been powering up the road toward Tikrit, Saddam's hometown when they were tipped off to the presence of the prisoners.

The Americans were whisked from the building and into a helicopter within three minutes, without incident. They were flown to an airfield southeast of Baghdad and then put on a C-130 to Kuwait. Just hours after their release, they seemed in a state of shock, still absorbing the fact that their 21-day ordeal had ended.

"We weren't POWs very long," Young noted. "I don't know how the guys in Vietnam made it. I wouldn't have made it."