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The crippled Warthog lurched through the skies over Iraq. A "golden BB" from an Iraqi antiaircraft battery had pierced the skin of the A-10 attack plane, ripping into the exposed belly under the cockpit seat of Capt. Richard Dale Storr. Titanium armor saved his life. Fumbling for the manual backup controls, he struggled to keep the plane aloft. He didn't want to be taken prisoner. He fought until the battlefield below came looming up toward him. When he finally bailed out, the Warthog was so close to the ground that his wingman didn't see him get out alive. On returning to base, he reported that Captain Storr had gone down with his plane. The U.S. Air Force listed him as killed in action. His unit held a memorial service - and sent his gear back home.
Badly shaken but alive, Storr and 20 other American POWs were home safe last week, coping with waves of good wishes and bad memories. For the wounded, the military supplied Purple Hearts and corrective surgery; for other kinds of trauma, batteries of doctors and psychiatrists. Lt. Jeffrey Zaun, the POW whose swollen face on NEWSWEEK'S Feb. 4 cover and thick-tongued sound bites on TV had outraged Americans against Saddam Hussein, said he had feared for his life 90 percent of the time, though 90 percent of his cuts and bruises had been "flail injuries" from ejecting at 500 miles per hour. Maj. Jeffrey Tice wasn't so fortunate. He said his interrogators had wrapped wires around his ears and under his chin and delivered "a little bit of electrical shock therapy" trying to force him to make a propaganda videotape. He called the prompting device a "talk man."
To register at the "Baghdad Biltmore," you had to survive flak and missiles in the air and furious Iraqis on the ground. Alerted by a thin wisp of smoke, Lt. Col. Clifford Acree saw a white-hot missile burning toward his OV-10 Bronco reconnaissance craft; he had one second to hit the silk. Down, down drifted Lt. Robert Sweet, right onto the tanks he had just been strafing ("the soldiers who captured me weren't too happy, but the officers kind of rescued me"). Only a mile separated Lt. Lawrence Slade and Lt. Devon Jones, his partner, after their F-14 Tomcat bought it. Jones floated down near a riverbed, dug a hole and hid. He was rescued. Slade scratched at a pile of rocks while a white Datsun pickup bore down on him, and a bleak thought raced through his mind: "The game is up".
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Captain Storr fell to earth five miles short of the Kuwait border and the possibility of escape. The Iraqis shaved his head, blindfolded him and shuttled him from bunker to bunker for three days as they shipped him north. On the trip to Baghdad he thought they were going to shoot him: "They would get real angry and aim their guns at my head, and I would think, 'Well, this is it. It's over'." Storr and other POWs wound up in a dark jail whose thick masonry walls oozed a damp chill that sank into their bruised bodies. The cells were the size of dog kennels. In one corner a reeking hole served for a toilet; in another there was a grubby depression for washing. Chow was a porridge of rice and wet beans with a pitcher of water to wash it down. At night, Chief Warrant Officer Guy Hunter, 46, lay in his cell thinking, "You are getting too old for this stuff."
All of the POWs were kept in solitary confinement. Waiting in their cells, they could hear the thud of approaching footsteps when the interrogators came. Guards blindfolded Storr and moved him to a room beyond the cellblock. When looking for information on troop movements or military plans, the third-degree teams would hit him on the face, knees and shoulders with something that felt like a bunch of tied sticks. Over time, they broke his nose and injured his knee and shoulder so badly he went lame. Then they punctured his right eardrum. The beatings made him numb; he didn't know how badly he was hurt for a while. Then he tried to clear his ringing ears by holding his nose and blowing: "The left ear cleared," he remembers. "But the air just whistled through my right ear."
On the night of Feb. 23, allied bombers hit the Baghdad Biltmore. A thunderous explosion knocked out an iron grille that barred the window in Storr's cell, burying him under rubble. "That was the scariest part - of the war, in my whole life," he recalls. "I thought for sure I was going to die that night." For a while Storr lay trapped. Then he heard an American voice calling, "Storr - is that you?" Other prisoners, the first Americans he had seen in 21 days, dug him out. Through the dust, he recognized CBS correspondent Bob Simon. He asked the newsman to get word out that he was alive; but Simon was a prisoner, too. Guards swarmed back and herded the POWs away to new quarters. Thrown together after lonely stretches of solitary confinement, they stayed up all night exchanging war stories. They named the new prison "Joliet" after the jug that John Belushi got out of in "The Blues Brothers."
After the Iraqis released Storr and the other POWs on March 6, a Red Cross plane evacuated them from Baghdad. They made a stop aboard The Mercy, a hospital ship off Bahrain. Then they returned to cheering crowds in the United States. "I learned a couple of things over there," Storr reflected. "You can only get so scared, you can only get so hungry, you can only get so dirty." When he arrived at Andrews Air Force Base last week, he still had "a Frankenstein scar" on his forehead - but the top-gun grin on his face was strictly Tom Cruise.
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