Going home

Finally, it fell to Sgt. James Riley, 31, and the senior soldier present, to surrender. ‘‘We were like Custer,’’ he recalled on Sunday. ‘‘We had no working weapons. We couldn’t even make a bayonet charge — we would have been mowed down. We didn’t have a choice.’’

The battle lasted about 15 minutes. Nine US soldiers were dead. Those captured by the Iraqis would become the war’s best-known soldiers. One, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, would be rescued from a local hospital on April 2.

Five others — Johnson, Hernandez, Hudson, Riley, and Miller — became prisoners of war until Sunday morning, when they were found, along with two captured crew members of an Apache attack helicopter, by Marines in a house north of Baghdad.

Talking to the media, they described a harrowing journey through the Iraq war. They still can’t understand how they ventured by mistake into Nasiriyah. And then the brunt of the city’s defence was directed at the members of the 507th.

‘‘It wasn’t a small ambush,’’ Riley said. ‘‘It was a whole city. We were getting shot from all different directions. It was like something you’d see in a movie.’’

Iraqi fighters thronged around them, pushing them down, kicking and beating some of them. They were bound and blindfolded. Iraqis ransacked the stricken vehicles, stripping them of bags and equipment.

Johnson, injured in both feet, could not walk and had to be helped. The first Iraqis who reached her began grabbing at her NBC protection garments. ‘‘They opened my NBC suit and noticed I was a female,’’ she said. At that point, she said, they treated her more gently than her colleagues.

Miller held out little hope for mercy. ‘‘I thought they were going to kill me,’’ he said. ‘‘That was the first thing I asked when they captured me: ‘Are you going to kill me?’ They said ‘no’. I still didn’t believe them.’’ The prisoners were taken to Baghdad where they were isolated in separate cells of a prison with concrete walls and a tin roof.

Some of their captors tried to taunt them. They told Johnson that they had seen her mother on television. They told Hudson the same and took pleasure in adding that his mother had denounced Bush.

But with each move, the prisoners said, their conditions eased somewhat. At their final stop, a house near the town of Samarrah north of Baghdad, the lower-level guards were police officers rather than Saddam loyalists and even pooled their own money to buy the Americans food and medicine.

Still, for some of the prisoners, these were among the gloomiest days. ‘‘I was getting to the point,’’ Johnson said, ‘‘where I believed they would have killed us.’’

Deliverance came without warning. ‘‘I was sitting there,’’ Miller recalled later, ‘‘next thing I know the Marines are kicking in the door, saying get down on the floor. They said, ‘If you’re an American, stand up.’ We stood up and they hustled us out of there.’’

‘‘At first,’’ Johnson said, ‘‘they didn’t realise I was American. They said, ‘Get down, get down,’ and one of them said, ‘No, she’s American’,’’ Johnson, mother of a little girl named Janelle who turns 3 next month, was overwhelmed to realize she was saved.‘‘I broke down. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going home!’’’

Senior officers said some of the Iraqi guards approached the Marines; however, one Marine who participated in the raid said they heard of the PoWs from a civilian. The Americans were whisked from the building and into a helicopter within three minutes, without incident.

From Baghdad, they took a C-130 cargo plane to Kuwait. ‘‘We weren’t PoWs very long,’’ Young said. ‘‘I don’t know how the guys in Vietnam made it. I wouldn’t have made it.’’ (LAT-WP)