GULF WAR POW/MIA, KIA/BNR, and Returnees
U.S. Military, Civilians and Foreign Nationals

GALVAN, ARTHUR

GRIFFITH, THOMAS EDWARD JR.

GRIMM, WILLIAM D.

HUNTER, GUY L. JR.

HURLEY, WILLIAM J.

JEFFRIES, LEM

KILKUS, JOHN R.

KORITZ, THOMAS F.

LENNOX, GARY KIRKWOOD STEWART

LOCKETT, DAVID

NICOL, ADRIAN JOHN

NO FURTHER INFORMATION - Reported in 1991:

The soldiers were part of special operations forces that infiltrated Iraq during Operation Desert Storm to locate missile launchers, pinpoint air targets, and steal enemy
equipment, Newsweek reported.

A visitor to Raffa, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he saw the wreckage and was told it was bringing wounded Green Berets back from Iraq when it crashed.

Special Forces operations included about 2,000 members of U.S. Army Special Forces and three U.S. Navy seal teams, and up to 200 members of Britain's Special
Air Service, according to Britain's The Sunday Times. U.S. special forces operating in Iraq targeted crucial radar stations for allied jets using hand-held laser devices.
The action cleared a corridor into Iraqi airspace enabling the thousands of missions to be launched undetected.

UPDATE: June 2, 2002:

My husband Paul G. Buege...killed in Desert Storm... 

Your bio of him is incorrect.  It upsets me greatly that you have been misinformed concerning the remains.  Out of a crew of fourteen, five were identified, 
and the other nine families had to accept apportioned remains. There were no returned bodies as your bio suggests.  I have no idea if the apportioned 
remains I received even contain anything of my husband.  It disturbs me greatly that Mortuary Affairs reports that we received bodies....when they made 
us fight to have our own funerals and gravesites, so we wouldn't have to be deemed to a group funeral and grave.  The Government knows full well that 
they don't believe they had the remains of all 14 crewmembers.  I will be doing my utmost to correct this misnomer. 

Sincerely, 

Theresa L. Buege

The Iraqi bus stops, filling the blindfolded American prisoners sitting in it with dread. Is this the execution spot? Will a bullet be fired into the back of the head? Easy to do. The dozen American prisoners of war in the bus have their hands tied behind their backs. 

The imagined is usually worse than the real. Screams you hear from others while waiting alone in the dark to be tortured are more unnerving than your own. Former prisoners tell you this. 

The American POWs sitting bench-like, their backs against the inside walls of the bus, have already been unnerved by the constant screaming from an Iraqi political prisoner who had been locked up with them in the Iraqi intelligence center in Baghdad. 

He is now lying in the aisle of the bus at their feet. He is still screaming. He can't stop. He obviously has been tortured out of his mind. 

The Americans feel movement in the aisle. Their ears tell them that the screaming Iraqi is being pulled off the bus. They hear a chain rattling against metal outside, at the very back of the bus. 

The bus starts moving again. It regains its speed, holds it briefly, and then stops. The chain rattles again. The 
Americans feel the political prisoner being put back in the aisle. He isn't screaming anymore. 

A decade after the Persian Gulf War ended, the Americans who had been captured by Iraq in 1991 told their attorney about the man on the bus. They think he was dragged to his death, or close to it. 

Lawyer Stephen Fennell of Steptoe & Johnson in Washington believes them. But for the unusual lawsuit he is preparing, he needs firsthand testimony about what happened to the American POWs, not what happened to others. 

Just like the American prisoners who were tortured into making anti-American statements by brutal captors in North Korea and North Vietnam, the former Persian Gulf POWs are reluctant to tell their stories. There is a feeling of shame, as if they should have been iron men immune to the horrible pain inflicted on them by their torturers.

Retired Vice Adm. James Stockdale, for example, felt disgraced because his North Vietnamese torturers had broken him. He told me he had planned to hide in obscurity on the family farm after his release. To his astonishment, his country awarded him the Medal of Honor. 

Conversely, Cmdr. Lloyd Bucher of the USS Pueblo was tortured by North Koreans into making similar anti-American statements and was recommended for court martial. The Pentagon is still clinging to its Code of Conduct, which makes American prisoners feel cowardly for years afterward if they have given a torturer anything more than name, rank, serial number, and date of birth, even though the code's fine print gives a POW more latitude than that. 

Fennell, with assists from other lawyers, coaxes the horror stories out of 17 of the 21 American servicemen and -women captured during the Gulf War. The stories go far beyond what the public saw and read right after the war about former POWs such as Navy fliers Lawrence Randolph Slade, Robert Wetzel, and Jeffrey Zaun. The inescapable conclusion after you read the whole collection of stories in the lawsuit against the Republic of Iraq, the Iraqi Intelligence Service, and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is that American POWs were-and are-fair game. Bedouins, villagers, and Iraqi soldiers-at least once to the tune of the music on their truck radio-all beat on the captives, with none of the restraint displayed by the professional torturers in North Vietnam. 

A major reason the former POWs agreed to sue Saddam, Fennell told National Journal, is to raise the revulsion level about torture, in the hope of deterring its use. Also, if the suit filed on April 4 in U.S. District Court in Washington is successful, the torture that Saddam condones could cost him money. The former POWs seek $25 million each in compensatory damages plus $5 million for each immediate family member who joined the suit, as well as $300 million collectively in punitive damages for the former POWs. If the court rules that such penalties are justified, the lawyers will try to get the money from Iraqi assets frozen here since the war. Failing that, Congress could pass a bill appropriating money for the former POWs and their families. 

This suit comes at a time when "torture" is a worrisome word for the Bush administration. So worrisome that Reuters' veteran Pentagon correspondent, Charlie Aldinger, felt obliged to call it "the 'T' word" when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shrank from using it in his denial of charges that U.S. forces were torturing prisoners captured in Afghanistan and shipped to Cuba. 

Similarly, Rumsfeld and the Afghan war commander, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, at a recent Pentagon briefing, tried to distance themselves from a videotape shot by a Predator drone showing a Navy SEAL being shot in the head by the Taliban. This distancing fit with the Bush administration's attempt to look different from former President Clinton in the way it conducts military operations abroad. As administration officials commit America's sons and daughters to the war on terrorism, they seem to be in constant fear of summoning up in the minds of the American public the old images of U.S. servicemen being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. 

Yet, while recoiling from the very word "torture," the Bush administration has already sent, or is considering sending, American troops into places and circumstances where they face a constant peril of being tortured: Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines, Somalia, and Yemen. Torture is often a byproduct of "asymmetric warfare" - conflicts in which the opponents have no hope of matching the United States gun for gun or tank for tank and thus try to find and exploit chinks in America's armor. 

Americans' revulsion at the thought of their sons and daughters being tortured is one such chink. 

Therefore, it would seem to be in the interest of the Bush administration to support any responsible international attempt to deter the torturers. The White House, however, just spurned the International Criminal Court, which could become a forum for exposing torture. If it is not willing to work through that court, the administration must confront the reality of torture and work on other ways to deter it. A fresh look at the Code of Conduct for service people is in order, too. 

This new lawsuit against Iraq, even if it does nothing else, should fuel a sense of urgency in governments around the world to look torture in the face, as ugly as that face is, and do something about it. What follows are a few of the personal accounts of torture inflicted on American aviators by their Iraqi captors in 1991. Lawyer Fennell, who conducted most of the interviews and then summarized them in the 162-page complaint, called the experience personally "humbling." 

* From Marine Lt. Col. Clifford Acree, commander of VMO-2 squadron, and Chief Warrant Officer Guy Hunter, shot down over Kuwait in their OV-10A Bronco observation plane on January 18, 1991:
 
To make Acree's steel handcuffs tighter, an Iraqi soldier stood on them, "forcing the metal claws into his wrist bone" and cutting off blood circulation. "His hands turned purple and swelled to three times their normal size. 

"After being blindfolded, Acree and Hunter were driven in a large SUV for about eight to 10 hours to Baghdad." Iraqi soldiers seated all around them beat the two Americans with rifle butts and blackjacks the whole way. 

"The next three days in Baghdad were the most brutal for Acree. 

Interrogations [in the Iraqi intelligence center that captives nicknamed 'the Biltmore'] continued around the clock.... Acree's neck, injured during ejection from his plane, was a particular focus of his captors, who attacked it repeatedly.... He remembers hearing a sound indicating something large was about to strike him. He envisioned a 4-by-4 post hitting the front and right side of his head. The blow lifted him up and out of his chair and onto the floor. Before he fell unconscious, he thought this blow had killed him.... 

"Acree was soon forced to endure a starvation diet of one bowl of broth per day, sometimes with a piece of small, thin bread. At times, he ate scabs off his body to reduce his intense hunger and stop his stomach from churning.... 

"During his last interrogation at the Biltmore, he was told that if he did not cooperate with them the next day they would use a new form of torture on him. Specifically, the guard said: 

'Tomorrow there will be 10 questions. If you have 10 good answers, you will have 10 fingers. And if there are 10 bad answers, you will have no fingers. And the torture will continue, and we will send your body home in pieces to your wife. 

"Fortunately for Acree, that night allied forces-not knowing of the presence of the POWs in this lawful military target, dropped four 2,000 pound bombs on the Biltmore. The bombing reduced much of the Biltmore to rubble and the POWs were transferred, in the bus holding the screaming Iraqi, to 'the Joliet,' the POWs' nickname for another prison in Baghdad. 

"In addition to physical and psychological abuse, Hunter's eyes became infected. He often had to pry his eyes open in the morning with his fingers because they had been sealed shut with pus from the infections. While in Iraq, he never received medical attention to correct these problems.... Upon his release, he was in a stupor for three years." 

* From Marine Capt. Craig Berryman, who was shot down in his AV-8B Harrier near Kuwait City on January 28, 1991: 

"The interrogator pointed out to Berryman that his failure to make contact with any military personnel meant that he was presumed dead and that the Iraqis could therefore kill him with impunity. Berryman was extremely concerned that his family would have to go through life never knowing what happened to him. Indeed, Iraq never notified the Red Cross or any other organization of Berryman's status as a POW." 

* From Marine Capt. Russell Sanborn, whose AV-8B was shot down over southern Kuwait on February 9, 1991: 

"The guards also used a rubber hose to hit Sanborn's legs and back.... They also smacked the sides of his head so hard they knocked him off his stool, loosened his teeth and broke his eardrums. After his eardrums had been ruptured, he could not hear or understand their questions. He was taken back to his cell." 

* From Air Force Col. Jeffrey Tice, whose F-16 fighter bomber was shot down over Baghdad on January 19, 1991: 

"Tice's captors beat him so hard they dislocated his jaw twice and burst his left eardrum. They hit him with rubber hoses and with clubs. They also tied a wire from one ear to another to something like a car battery and shocked him to the point that every muscle in his body contracted at once." This forced Tice to clamp his jaws down so hard that he broke several of his teeth. 

"Tice called this contraption 'the Talkman.' " 

Humbling indeed.