Document Page: First | Prev | Next | All | Image | This Release | Search

		 9
 found out there was a guard on top of the building He
 either saw us or heard us or both. He started yelling
 in Arabic and firing off his AK-47, at which time a lot
 of other guys came out of the building and we were
 surrounded and captured.

 Q: Can you give us a detailed account of what transpired
 after that?
 A: Sure. At that point, they took us inside the building
 and stripped off all our gear They weren't physically
 abusive at that point, I guess because they hadn't been
 bombed, which makes people a little more angry. They
 treated us roughly, but they weren't beating us up just
 for the sake of beating us up. Anyway, they took all our
 belongings and asked some questions about the survival
 gear. But they didn't know very much English, so it was
 kind of easy not to tell them anything. Then they hand-
 cuffed us, put us into the back of a truck, took us to
 another post, and kind of showed us off there. Then they
 took us to one more post where we talked to the first guy
 who spoke English pretty well. He said he was the camp
 doctor. I don't know whether he was or not, but later
 on it became apparent that a lot of the people who spoke
 English were doctors...so he may well have been. He
 looked at Colonel Eberly's neck and bandaged that up a
 little bit better. And at that point, they didn't really
 ask us that many questions; they seemed to be waiting for
 somebody. A guy showed up later on. He was a captain
 and he took us into, I believe, the city of Al Qaim. It
 was a city, or a town, and it supposedly had a general's
 house; what they called a general's house. This guy was
 apparently the military district commander or something.
 We got there about sunrise. He asked us if we wanted
 anything and we said we'd like to go to sleep. He said
 okay, so we went to sleep for a couple of hours. Then
 they brought in some of the, I believe, air defense
 people from that region to ask questions. They were not
 very professional, they were more asking questions than
 interrogating. We didn't have blindfolds on, we weren't
 handcuffed, and they didn't know much about our airplanes
 because they were so new. It was easy to mislead them
 in a lot of things. Also during that day, about the 
 middle of the day, they did blindfold us, handcuff us,
 and take us out and put us in a jeep. They had gathered
 a lot of the people in the town out in the streets to
 have a little parade for us because these people had been
 bombed (laughter). They drove us in this jeep down one
 side of the street and people were all yelling: "Saddam,
 Saddam, Saddam." Then they turned around and we drove
 down the other side of the street and as we were coming
 down the other side of the street, this little kid picked
 up a big rock and proceeded to throw it through the 

Document Page: First | Prev | Next | All | Image | This Release | Search