Freed POWs tell harrowing tale

NUMANIYAH, Iraq — The wrong turn happened just after dawn on March 23, a clear Sunday morning. 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 was trying to kill them.

"We got turned around and then lost and we rolled into Nasiriyah before it was secure and when we rolled in there was an ambush waiting for us," recalled Spc. Shoshana Johnson, 30, of El Paso, Texas, one of seven American prisoners of war freed yesterday in central Iraq.

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 shot with 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.

The battle lasted about 15 minutes. Nine U.S. soldiers were dead. Those captured by the Iraqis would become the war's best-known soldiers.

One, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, would be rescued from a local hospital April 2. Five others — Johnson, Hernandez, Hudson, Riley and Miller — became prisoners of war until yesterday morning, when they were found, along with two captured crew members of an Apache attack helicopter, by U.S. Marines in a house north of Baghdad.

The former prisoners yesterday described a harrowing journey through the Iraq war.

The capture

The cooks, 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.

"It wasn't a small ambush," Riley, 31, of Pennsauken, N.J., said yesterday. "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 rounds 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."

Captivity

Soon after they arrived 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. 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.' "

Johnson said her interrogators asked her about the locations of American divisions. "When they finally got that I was only a cook, they started asking me where the food came from," she said.

The captives were stripped of their clothing and belongings and ordered to wear grungy, unwashed blue- or yellow-striped prison pajamas. 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.

Worried that they would be separated, the prisoners came up with a made-up name to help each remember who they had been with: Dr. J. Jeps. The name was a combination of the first letters of their first names.

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."

The pilots

Within a day or two of their imprisonment, two more Americans arrived: Chief Warrant Officers David Williams and Ronald Young, pilots of an Apache shot down and then captured by farmers southeast of Baghdad 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. 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."

Waiting

Guards kept the prisoners in separate cells at the beginning, leaving an empty cell between them to block surreptitious conversations. Some of the guards spoke bits of English, "and they would say, 'No speaking, no speaking,' " said Williams.

Night after night from their cold cells, the prisoners could hear the bombing as their American compatriots pummeled Iraq 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."

In a way, he concluded, it might have been for the best. Had they made it past the reasonably disciplined military men holding them, they would have found themselves unarmed on the hostile streets of Baghdad. "We had a lot of Republican Guard around us. If we had made it outside, we could have been killed."

One night, the prison was rattled by a powerful 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 — six times in the last six nights alone.

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.

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 Samarra 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.

"We were a hot potato," she said. "I was getting to the point where I believed they would have killed us."

Freedom

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

"I was sitting there," Miller recalled. "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, mother of a little girl named Janelle who turns 3 next month, was overwhelmed to realize she was saved and would see her daughter again. "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.

Senior officers said some of the Iraqi guards approached the Marines; however, one Marine who participated in the raid said they heard from a civilian.

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."

Information from Knight Ridder Newspapers is included in this report.