minutes later, the general, in his bathrobe, greeted them. Like their previous captors, he treated them civilly; when they asked if they could get some sleep, he had them taken to a room with two cots. There they were allowed to rest for the next four or five hours.
Now that they were alone, they took the opportunity to put a story together for serious interrogations. In order to keep the Iraqis from probing the defensive strengths and weaknesses of the F-15E, they decided to deny they’d been shot down; it would be easy to claim an electrical fire was the culprit. In any case, they were far from certain about what had actually bagged them (though it was likely a surface-to-air missile).
As they waited in the general’s home, they were visited by a number of curious and not unfriendly guards. One who was especially friendly had studied petroleum engineering and spoke good English. “This is a terrible war,” he confided earnestly. “Don’t you agree?” And, “What do you think is going to happen? Something bad, no?”
But then a heavyset guard appeared, with a far more hostile attitude. “We are going to ask you a lot of questions,” he announced, “and you must cooperate,” implying by his tone serious penalties for noncooperation. As he warmed to his task, his comments grew more and more argumentative: “Why did you start the war?” Or, “You are all going to perish.” Or, “You are all helping Israel.”
Later that day, they were handcuffed and blindfolded, led outside, and loaded into the backseat of a six- passenger pickup truck. When the truck started up, their blindfolds were removed and they were taken into town. There the streets were lined with civilians chanting Arabic curses. They both bore up well under this
Somehow that demonstration ended without serious consequences, and they were taken back to the general’s house for phase one of their interrogation.
In the beginning, the questions were simple: “Are you able to evade a missile?” And they answered in kind, “Well, that depends.”
But the easy part of their captivity soon proved to be over. They were cuffed, blindfolded, loaded back into a truck, and driven off. The setting sun behind them told them they were headed east, toward Baghdad. They traveled all night, were handed off from one military unit to another. Near morning, Tom Griffith was able to sneak a peek: a road announced in English, “Baghdad 20 km.”
When they reached their first place of confinement in the capital (where it was, they never learned), they were split up. From then on, the interrogation was conducted by professionals.
The next days were not pleasant. Though the questioners were well-versed in technical details—“What was the dispense rate you had set in your ALE-40 chaff dispenser?”—they hadn’t the faintest notion of how American culture worked or how Americans looked at life. One day, the interrogator sat down and announced smugly that George Bush had died, expecting Griffith to break down in tears. Instead, he feigned anguish: “Oh, Christ, that means Dan Quayle is president!”
As the days passed, Griffith was moved from cell to cell and from jail to jail. He quickly lost track of where he was and where he’d been, until one day he was moved to Baath Party headquarters and confined in the cell next to CBS News reporter Bob Simon, who had been picked up on the Iraqi side of the lines, where he’d been trying to scoop the press pool. This had not been a smart place to get caught, since the Iraqis were now convinced that he was a spy and were preparing to execute him — a fact that did not thrill Tom Griffith. Could it mean he was on “death row”?
Meanwhile, by February 25 the Black Hole had picked the last targets in Baghdad, and the Baath Party headquarters became one of the few that were acceptable to Schwarzkopf after the Al-Firdus bunker tragedy. During this strike, a bomb fell short of its aim point and blew in the walls of the prisoners’ cells.
“Oh Christ, I’m going to die in prison!” Griffith cried out to himself, certain that the bombs would set the building on fire.
Three other bombs struck farther away, on the other end of the building, destroying nearby cells (which, fortunately, were empty). Doors were also blown open, temporarily freeing a few POWs, who immediately — and unsuccessfully — went combing the rubble for cell keys that would let them free the others.
Since the building was now a total loss, the inmates were rounded up and sent to military facilities, where they were housed in groups instead of single cells. Tom Griffith was locked up with Jeff “Sly” Fox, who had been captured on February 18.
“How’s the ground war going?” Griffith asked.
“It hasn’t started yet,” Fox answered.
“Ohhhhhh!” Griffith groaned, with a despairing look.
“Hey,” Fox replied, “don’t worry. The air war is going great. It’s not going to be much longer until we get out of here!”
Welcome words indeed. Griffith had by now lost twenty-five pounds. All the old heads in prison were suffering from dysentery, and there was no way to keep clean.
Two days later, it was strangely quiet outside the cells. They could hear no bombers flying overhead. No AAA guns were popping off at F-117s. At first, the POWs thought this was because of weather aborts; but in the morning, the blue sky and warm sunshine made it clear that the bombing had stopped for some other reason. Each POW prayed it was for the right reason: that the war was over.
Very shortly after that, the prisoners were given soap and wash water, there was more and better food, and a barber came around to give them a shave — an Iraqi shave, dry with a rusty razor. (
“I think you will be going home soon,” an Iraqi officer announced on the fourth of March.
But later that day, a bus arrived for Griffith and his fellow prisoners — two special forces troopers, the Army drivers, Specialists Melissa Rathburn-Healy and David Locket, who’d been captured during the battle of Al-Khafji, and two other aircrews. Soon afterward, a representative of the International Red Cross conducted them to the Nova Hotel, where the international press was waiting. After politely thanking them for bringing the captives to safety, the Red Cross representative firmly sent the Iraqis packing (thereby making himself an instant hero in the eyes of the now-former POWs), and the Americans were asked to identify by name any others in captivity (the sins of Vietnam were not going to be repeated).
Then for Tom Griffith it was a bus trip to Jordan, a flight to Oman, and the hospital ship
On the
? Meanwhile, the failure to rescue Eberly and Griffith did not improve the already strained relations between aircrews and the Special Operations force units tasked to rescue them. The memory still burned after the war, as is evident from this comment about the Griffith and Eberly tale from a 4th Wing F-15E pilot: “Our DO and his backseater were on the ground for three and one-half days in western Iraq. Nobody’d go in and pick them up, and they eventually became prisoners of war. Before the war, the Special Operations guys came down to talk to us. ‘No sweat,’ they said, ‘we’ll come get you anywhere you are.’ That, from my perspective, was a big lie. After my guys were on the ground for three and one-half days, and they didn’t go pick them up, we basically decided that if anybody went down, they were on their own. Nobody was going to come and get you.”
Chuck Horner concludes:
