‘Master of Their Skies’

Flying 20,000 feet over Baghdad last year, Marine Corps pilot Lt. Col. Russell A.C. Sanborn spotted the landmark he had been imagining for more than 12 years.

Using coordinates he had jotted on a scrap of paper and stored in a flight suit pocket, Sanborn guided his AV-8B Harrier attack jet over the Rashid prison in the heart of the smoldering city. With the help of a high-powered targeting scope, he was able to identify the contours of the compound on a screen in his cockpit.

“There is home, sweet home,” he radioed to his wingman.

In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, as a newly promoted captain, Sanborn had been shot down in his single-seat plane over the Iraqi-occupied Kuwaiti desert. With the uncontrollable jet hurtling inverted toward the sand, he ejected safely but was quickly captured by Iraqi troops. For 26 days, he was held in a small, dank and unsanitary cell and tortured viciously by his captors.

After his liberation, his body withered from dysentery, his eardrums burst from the beatings, Sanborn could have retired to nurse his wounds and accept the gratitude of his country.

Instead, he returned to flying the Harrier -- statistically the military’s most dangerous plane -- six weeks after he walked out of Rashid. He hasn’t stopped since.

When U.S. troops were sent to Iraq last year, Sanborn went without hesitation. He had risen to become the second in command of his squadron, managing 16 planes and 250 Marines. His squadron is scheduled to return to Iraq early next year for a one-year rotation, with Sanborn as commanding officer. “Looks like I’ll get a third try to get it right,” he said.

Before Sanborn left for Iraq last year, his 10-year-old son, Jacob, one of five towheaded children he fathered between wars, offered parting advice: “Dad,” he said, “this time, fly higher, fly faster.”

Sanborn did just that and completed 19 missions without incident, primarily bombing Iraqi tanks and artillery positions. He did not fulfill his quiet wish to destroy the prison where he had been beaten and starved. But just streaking over the site, free from any Iraqi threat, provided a certain satisfaction.

“I was in charge again, flying at will over the country that imprisoned me and thumped me for 26 days,” Sanborn, 41, said in an interview at the Marine Corps Air Station here, his first since the end of the air war. “Now I was the master of their skies, free to come and go as I pleased and return to my ship when I wanted. After that flight, I felt like I had some closure on the whole event.”

That is an interesting observation for Sanborn, because he and those who know him say his imprisonment left remarkably few psychological scars -- a single nightmare, an occasional moment of reflection, but little more. It was only one month of his life, he said, ultimately no more traumatic than a few bad weeks at the office. He said he never once considered early retirement.

“This was just an unfortunate thing that happened to me,” Sanborn said, “but, OK, it happened to me. I get paid to be in the military and fly jets in combat. Other people, their job is to shoot me down, and my job is to not let them shoot me down. But when something like that happens, it’s not going to be the life-changing event that drives the rest of my life.”

Raised in DeLand, Fla., where his father was city manager and his mother a title examiner, Sanborn came from a distinctly nonmilitary family. He showed no interest in either the armed services or aviation until he stunned his parents by joining a Navy ROTC program at the University of Florida, where he was majoring in forest resources.

He found that he liked the discipline and adventure. And he has become, according to relatives and friends, a resourceful, straight-arrow Marine who coaches Little League and attends church regularly.

He is given to exclamations of “Holy mackerel!”

During last year’s conflict, junior pilots used the stories Sanborn told of his captivity to shatter any illusions about the glories of war. And yet they were impressed that he showed so little anxiety about returning to Iraqi airspace.

“It lets you focus on the fact that you’re not invincible,” said Capt. John J. Widener, 33, a pilot in Sanborn’s squadron. “But he never really looked back to Desert Storm up there in the jet. If he had any fear, I didn’t know it.”

Although the terrain and the enemy were familiar, it was a very different war for Sanborn. Because his plane was now equipped with radar, laser targeting devices and night-vision goggles, he was able to fly at higher altitudes, mostly at night, and drop precision-guided bombs without swooping low into the range of antiaircraft artillery.

“Like in Desert Storm, you’d get the close ones, but I just don’t think it was as intense in terms of the amount of triple-A and missiles coming at you,” Sanborn said.

That isn’t to say that Sanborn did not remind himself regularly about the consequences of lowering his guard. “I would lie to you if I said I didn’t think about it, because I did,” he said. “But most of the time it was before the mission. I’d say: ‘All right, Russ, you’re getting ready to go do this again, over the same territory. You know what can happen if you get shot down. They’re not going to be any nicer than they were last time.’ ”

It was Feb. 9, 1991, on his 17th mission of the Gulf War, that Sanborn became one of 21 Americans taken prisoner during the conflict. Flying at only 10,000 feet as he climbed out of a bombing run, he never saw the heat-seeking missile that locked in on his plane’s white-hot exhaust, a feature that made the Harrier unusually vulnerable to enemy fire.

As the missile slammed through a wing, warning lights flashed in Sanborn’s cockpit and the plane began to spin. He pulled the ejection handle and shot through the shattering canopy, losing consciousness for a moment under an orange-and-white parachute that carried him safely to the ground.

It was late afternoon, and Sanborn hoped he might escape detection until nightfall. He tried without success to make radio contact, and chambered one of his 15 rounds in a 9-millimeter handgun. Within minutes, he spotted about a dozen Iraqi troops moving his way on foot, fanning out around him in an ever-tightening horseshoe.

“I knew that in about 15 minutes I was going to get captured,” Sanborn said. “There was no place to run. I mean, it’s wide-open desert. So I was just trying to work the radio, and they just literally walked right up to me.” It would be four weeks before the Americans knew whether Sanborn had made it out of his plane alive.

Sanborn’s captors, disheveled and jittery after three weeks of allied bombing, walked him to a primitive underground bunker. Soon after, a soldier ripped the nametag off Sanborn’s flight suit and confronted him in broken English. “I’m the guy that shot you down,” the man said, according to Sanborn. “I’ve got two of you now.”

The beatings began that night. Blindfolded, with his hands tied and a blanket draped over his head, Sanborn was run through a gantlet of chanting, screeching Iraqis who kicked him and beat him with rifle butts, he said. They shoved him into a room and propped him on a bench.

“All of a sudden, they opened up the door and there was this crazy man, and I mean he wanted in bad after me,” Sanborn said. “They were keeping him back. And finally one of the guys says, ‘You killed this man’s brother, so we’re going to let him kill you.’ And they just let him loose. He threw me off the bench and just started kicking and wailing.”

Barely lucid, Sanborn would be beaten twice more that night. Two days later, he was moved to Rashid, where his cell was illuminated by a single bulb and equipped with a foam pad, a worn blanket and a bucket.

Sanborn said he was denied medical care and was not allowed to bathe or brush his teeth. He was served a thin gruel, and on one occasion a bowl of fatty water flavored with a bone. “I was vomiting and having diarrhea every night, just living in my own filth,” he said. His weight dropped from 160 pounds to 145.

At night, speaking in a whisper, Sanborn griped to British prisoners who were living in slightly better conditions in a nearby cell. “You colonists are always complaining about something,” one of them responded, “either the taxes or the food.” It made him laugh.

Sanborn said his guards slapped him around regularly. But the most severe abuse came during a series of interrogations. “They wanted to know a lot about tactical stuff -- what can your airplane do, where are you based out of?” he said. “I’d say, ‘I don’t know.’ They’d say, ‘No, no, you’re lying.’ And then the big gorilla behind you would just cold-cock you.”

In survival courses, Sanborn had been trained to devise strategies for frustrating his questioners. “You want the information to be disjointed, incoherent, useless, rabbit holes,” he said. He knew there would be reprisals for unsatisfying answers, but he also learned that if he could absorb three beatings the Iraqis typically would tire of the game and toss him back in his cell.

When the war ended, Sanborn and other prisoners were handed over to the Red Cross and flown to a Navy hospital ship before being transported home aboard Air Force Two, the vice president’s plane. “The first thing I asked for on that hospital ship was a teeth cleaning,” Sanborn said. “My own breath was knocking me down.”

Sanborn’s parents discovered he was alive when they spotted his face during a CNN report about the freed prisoners. His wife, Linda, got the word from a Marine Corps assistance officer who showed up at the factory where she worked. As she took the long walk through the plant to meet the officer, she could feel the stares of co-workers who knew she was about to learn whether her husband was dead or alive.

They spoke on the phone the next day, when she was again at the factory. “I remember him saying, ‘What are you doing at work?’ ” Linda Sanborn said. “And I said, ‘Well, one of us had to make a living and I didn’t know where you were.’ And he laughed, and I remember thinking, ‘That is a good sign.’ ”

After several weeks of rest at home, Sanborn was itching to return to the air and received medical clearance to do so. “You can only mow your grass so many times,” he said.

His wife did not try to persuade him to drop out of the Corps, or to give up flying. And when she and her children stood on the tarmac at Cherry Point last year to watch him fly to a ship bound for Iraq, it gave her a rush. “I just stood there thinking, ‘How many other wives get to send their husbands off to work like this?’ ” she said.

As the executive officer of his squadron, there was never much question that Sanborn would go. “What kind of Marine,” he asked, “would want to say, ‘Hey, look, I’ve already had a bad experience and prefer not to do it again?’ Marines don’t get to pick and choose their missions.”

Sanborn is one of 17 Gulf War POWs who charged in a 2002 lawsuit against the Iraqi government that they had been tortured in violation of the Geneva Convention. A federal district judge ruled last summer that the ex-POWs should receive nearly $1 billion in compensatory and punitive damages, taken from Iraqi assets frozen in U.S. accounts.

The Bush administration so far has blocked the payments, saying the money is needed to help rebuild Iraq. Sanborn said he understood the White House’s position but was disappointed by it.

Sanborn said he worked hard to not make last year’s war a personal one. It was, he told himself, about the U.S. government’s interests in Iraq, not his own interest in evening the score. That said, he admits to taking particular pleasure in watching the footage of Saddam Hussein’s capture and seeing that his living conditions were not far removed from those in Rashid.

Each of the last 13 years, Linda Sanborn has marked Feb. 9 by giving her husband a gift, something to bring joy to an unhappy anniversary. Russell Sanborn usually does not even notice the date until his wife reminds him. But virtually every day since he walked out of prison, he has remembered that life can change in a flash.

“The best thing it’s done for me,” he said, “is just that it’s sharpened my focus on life and given me a great perspective that, hey, every day counts now.”

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Times staff writer Alan C. Miller in Washington and researcher Janet Lundblad in Los Angeles contributed to this story.