Hamill: Only one chance

2004-05-03 21:42

Baghdad - Sitting in a mud shack with a bullet wound festering in his arm, American hostage Thomas Hamill heard the rumble of army Humvees and made a break for it, stumbling out into the desert and swinging his shirt over his head to get the attention of passing soldiers.

"He was yelling, 'I'm an American, I'm an American POW,"' recalled Lieutenant Joseph Merrill, a member of a patrolling army platoon that happened on the grizzled Mississippi contract worker north of Baghdad on Sunday morning.

After three weeks in captivity, the 43-year-old truck driver arrived in Germany on Monday for medical checks at the US military's Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre and a reunion with his wife.

Hamill's whereabouts had been unknown since guerrillas captured him during an April 9 ambush on his supply convoy.

Gunmen shot up and set alight the vehicles on a highway on the outskirts of Baghdad. Hamill was shot in his right forearm during the ambush.

Convoy of Humvees

On Sunday morning, his 24th day in captivity, Hamill was taken to a mud farmhouse in the desert near the town of Balad north of Baghdad.

The door to his room was a piece of sheet metal propped up by a board. Hamill told soldiers he believed a single guard was nearby, but out of sight.

Later that morning, about 11:15, soldiers from the New York National Guard's 2nd battalion, 108th Infantry regiment drove their Humvees along a stretch of road alongside a broken oil pipeline that a group of contractors were going to repair.

When Hamill heard the Humvees, he knocked over the sheet metal and ran for them, about 300m away from the shack.

"He said he thought this was the only chance he had, so he made a run for it," said Merrill, of Deposit, New York. "He said he didn't know if the guard was there or not."

As Hamill whooped, soldiers radioed in that an unidentified farmer was approaching them. Hamill tripped and fell a few times as he ran, rising each time.

Soon the soldiers understood he was shouting in English. One National Guardsman recognised Hamill from seeing his picture on TV and in the military's Stars and Stripes newspaper, Merrill said.

Rudimentary medical kit

Merrill, who spent less than two hours with the former hostage, described him as disoriented, but in good health.

The Mississippi man told soldiers he'd been well-treated by his captors, who gave him a rudimentary medical kit, a box of cookies and an oil lamp.

Hamill escorted the platoon back to the mud shack, which was empty. Soldiers found an AK-47, apparently discarded by the fleeing guard. Troops arrested a pair of Iraqi men farming in an adjacent field, Merrill said. The two Iraqis are under interrogation.

A medic cleaned Hamill's bullet wound and dressed it in a clean bandage.

The last Merrill's platoon soldiers saw of Hamill was two hours after the strange incident, when an army Medevac helicopter whisked the injured man to a combat hospital.

- AP