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		 13
 A: It's hard to say, but I'd say most of them lasted about
 a half hour to forty-five minutes. Some of them were
 shorter, but I don't think they were rarely any longer
 than that.
 
 Q: What did you personally do to while the time away?

 A: Actually, I remembered a lot of the stuff I had learned
 as a military historian at the Academy from reading
 stories about the other POWs in Vietnam. In the cells
 we were in, we had no beds or chairs or anything. We had
 to sleep on the floor with only a couple of blankets so
 it was pretty cold at night. But I tried to stay in my
 "bed" as long as possible, until I could see some sun
 light on a certain brick and then say: "I have to get up
 now " And then I figured out how many paces it was, how
 many feet it was, going back and forth across the room,
 diagonally. I used that to compute how many times I'd
 have to walk back and forth to make a mile, which is
 about the distance around the block where I live. So I
 would just start walking back and forth and try and walk
 that mile and at certain points, say: "Okay, I should
 be by their house, this is what it looks like." Just
 another imaginary walk around the block. I also planned
 out some family vacations and driving trips, saying,
 "Okay, I'd drive down here"...and also try to remember
 some driving trips I'd taken with my family. I remem-
 bered places we had seen, places we had stopped, people
 we had visited, and stuff like that. Basically, I tried
 to do some constructive daydreaming to while away the 
 time.

 Q: What about Red Cross contacts?
 
 A: We always asked whenever we were interrogated. They
 would usually say: "Do you want anything?" We always
 asked to talk to the Red Cross. It never happened, and
 apparently was never going to happen. When released, we
 were turned over to the International Committee of the
 Red Cross in Baghdad. The representatives there said
 they had been trying to contact us, but the Iraqi's
 wouldn't let them. Even though Iraq is a signatory of
 the Geneva Convention, and they were well acquainted with
 it because they had tried to use it to get some of their
 prisoners back during their war with Iran, it didn't suit
 their purposes to abide by it...so they weren't going to.
 
 Q: Were you, in any way, aware of how the war was progress-
 ing while you were in the prison?

 A: No. I knew there was bombing every night because there
 were a lot of targets near the prison we were in, and we
 could hear the air raid sirens going off. Normally we 

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