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		 11
 offensive had started and shortly after that the condi-
 tions got better and they started giving us more food.
 It wasn't a lot, it was basically back up to the initial
 situation where you got about three meals a day of rice.

 Q: When did the interrogations start getting a little more
 stringent?

 A: When we arrived in Baghdad. Once we got there, those
 guys had apparently done it before. For interrogations
 after that, we were always blindfolded, and normally
 always handcuffed. The first interrogation, and a lot
 of them, seemed to be administrative. They would ask a
 lot of the same questions. I know that sometimes they
 do that to get you talking, but it seemed like a lot of
 time they were filling out paperwork rather than trying
 to get information. The first interrogations were scary
 in that you didn't know exactly what to expect, You
 didn't know how far they would go. We're pretty used to
 answering questions, but it's not very often, if you think
 about it, in your life where somebody asks you a ques-
 tion, and you say: "No, I'm not going to answer that ."
 We're kind of conditioned to answering questions. When
 you start saying no, and they start insisting, then you
 start wondering how long it is going to go on. Once you
 kind of got into the swing of them and could find out
 what this particular guy would tolerate, they became, at
 least for me, a little less scary. In reference to how
 they were compared to the Vietnamese situation, I don't
 think there is any comparison. Whether it was because
 of the duration of the war, or whether it was the atten-
 tion and support the American people gave it or what.
 I don't know, or maybe just culturally, they didn't seem
 to be as much into torture as the Vietnamese were. They
 would hit mainly on the legs, for me anyway, on the legs.
 Obviously they wanted the information, but they never
 resorted, for the time I was there, to any real torture
 or anything like that.

 Q. What about contact with your fellow POWs?

 A: Again, that varied from prison to prison. In the first
 prison we were in it was very easy to talk between the 
 cells at night. During the day, of course, they would
 tell you to sit down and no talking, but at night it was
 fairly easy to do it because they couldn't see you. But
 once we got to the second prison, where there was no
 food, it was very much a real prison. It was designed,
 I think, by somebody European because each cell had a
 normal toilet; and it wasn't a "bomb site" like they
 usually bad. It was a regular Western toilet. Of course
 it didn't flush, but it looked like a Western toilet.
 But anyway, in the cell, the walls were about four feet

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