Happy to Steal Back One of Their Own

He came running, in his stocking feet, busting out of the mud-brick shed like a gimpy-legged steer sensing freedom. He waved his T-shirt in the air wildly. He stumbled a few times. He focused on his goal -- a platoon of U.S. soldiers in the Iraqi desert.

“I’m an American!” he shouted. “I’m an American POW!”

No one in the Army patrol knew quite what to make of this improbable vision in the midst of a war zone. Then one sergeant recognized the face behind the scruffy beard.

“You’re the KBR guy,” he said.

And that was the fortuitous conclusion of the 23-day hostage ordeal endured by Thomas Hamill, a contract worker for the company formerly known as Kellogg, Brown & Root who ventured to Iraq to earn a living as a truck driver after selling his failing dairy farm in Mississippi. He was taken hostage April 9 when his supply convoy was attacked outside Baghdad.

“We stole one of our own back,” said Sgt. 1st Class Mark Forbes, part of the New York-based National Guard unit that Hamill flagged down. Forbes was one of a handful of guardsmen who described the escape to reporters in Baghdad on Monday.

Hamill, 43, who broke free from his captors Sunday, was flown to a U.S. medical facility in Germany on Monday. He had a bullet wound in his right arm, apparently from the initial ambush of his convoy. At least five other Americans died in the attack.

At the time of his abduction, Hamill’s captors menaced him with a rifle, but they eventually fed him, gave him medicine for his wound and generally treated him well, Hamill said. His final cell -- it is unclear how often he was moved around -- was a one-room adobe shed outside Balad, about 50 miles northwest of the capital.

Sunday’s rescue was happenstance, but it has changed the men of Charlie Company, part of the 108th Infantry Regiment attached to the Army’s 1st Infantry Division. The soldiers who spoke Monday said it had helped make up for a lot of hardship and loss, including the death of a comrade killed in an ambush on Easter Sunday.

“What we do is an ugly business at times,” said Lt. Joseph Merrill, 28, who guarded a nuclear power plant back in the United States. “But this was a great day to be out there. It was a great day to be a soldier.”

A platoon of about 35 troops was on foot, assigned to provide security for a team of civilians brought in to repair a ruptured fuel pipeline. At one point, the soldiers walked right through the yard of the house in front of the shed where Hamill was being held.

Hamill apparently heard the Humvees accompanying the platoon and may have seen them through the cracks in the door. It was the moment he had been waiting for, he told the soldiers later. Hamill pried the door open and emerged in the late-morning sunlight. There was no guard. So he ran.

The soldiers first thought Hamill was one of the area’s tomato farmers. Troops in Iraq are inclined to open fire at people who run up to them, as some approaching Iraqis have been known to attack. But no gun was spotted on Hamill, defusing the tension.

“It was obvious that he was unarmed, so we did not have our weapons trained on him,” said Capt. George Rodriguez, a Vermont state policeman back home. “He was yelling, ‘I’m an American!’ ”

Then one of the soldiers recognized Hamill from the videotape of his capture, which showed the Mississippian in the back seat of a sedan with a Kalashnikov-toting insurgent wearing a black mask.

“You didn’t have a beard in the picture,” the sergeant at the scene said as the shirtless and shoeless Hamill reached him.

Replied Hamill: “No, I been out there for twentysomething days.”

Hamill didn’t want food or most anything else -- just company, the soldiers said. They provided medical assistance and called for a medevac helicopter. Hamill stayed close to them, they said, savoring the sense of security after more than three weeks of fearing he would be shot. At one point, insurgents had threatened to kill Hamill if Marines did not halt their counteroffensive in Fallouja.

Hamill’s captivity, it turned out, was not exactly maximum security. The door to the mud-brick shack in an isolated farming community had no lock; it was jammed shut with a piece of sheet metal and a wooden stick. Most times, though, an armed guard was outside.

“I could have escaped a bunch of times,” Hamill later told Sgt. Forbes. “But where am I gonna go? I got one bottle of water. Where am I going? No map, nothing.”

Hamill normally slept during the day, when the bugs weren’t biting as much. The patrol seemed to catch him during a nap, soldiers said.

Once Hamill was safe, troops sealed off the area and arrested two farmers as potential suspects in the kidnapping. But the guard who had been watching Hamill had already left the shed; he left his Kalashnikov behind.

The experience, the troops said afterward, was something special, a break in the grinding routine of war. At least one admitted to teary eyes when Hamill was evacuated in the Black Hawk helicopter.

“If this is the only thing we do here in Iraq,” Capt. Rodriguez said, “this makes it worthwhile leaving home.” Still, the soldiers tended to downplay their role in Hamill’s escape. This was no high-risk “extraction” operation. Rather, it was Hamill who found his way to the passing patrol.

“All we did is find this man and get him out,” Forbes said. “This was no Delta Force raid. We did our job. That’s all we did.”

It doesn’t make any difference to Hamill. The former hostage is safe and about to be reunited with his wife and two teenage children.

The soldiers of Charlie Company have about 10 months to go in Iraq before they get home to their families. They wish Tommy Hamill the best.