A true-life adventure sure to shock as well as inspire.
AK47s, masked thugs, and brutal urgency erupt from Roy Hallums' account of his abduction in Iraq, shredding through those frequently sterile cable news reports revealing that another "American contractor is being held hostage . . ."
Hallums was the everyman behind that report?a 56-year-old retired Naval commander working as a food supply contractor in Baghdad's high-end Mansour District.
His abduction was transacted in a matter of minutes, amidst a hail of gunfire and a handful of casualties. For the first few months of his captivity, Hallums endured beatings and psychological torture while being shuffled from one ramshackle safe house to another.
From the four-foot-tall crawlspace where he carried out the bulk of his nearly year-long abduction, Hallums established a surprising degree of normalcy?a system of routines and timekeeping, along with an attention to the particulars that defined his horrific ordeal. His experience is recreated here, rich with harrowing specifics and surprising observations.
BURIED ALIVE
THE TRUE STORY OF KIDNAPPING, CAPTIVITY, AND A DRAMATIC RESCUEBy ROY HALLUMS AUDREY HUDSONThomas Nelson
Copyright © 2009 Roy Hallums
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-59555-170-2Contents
Introduction by Dan O'Shea..................................xi1 Kidnapped!................................................12 Shoot-out at the Compound.................................93 Captive...................................................134 The Family Is Notified....................................195 The Mosque................................................256 Prayers...................................................317 Breakfast and Beatings....................................358 The Kidnapping Business...................................439 Allah Akbar!..............................................4910 Meanwhile, Back at the Mosque ...........................5311 The Critter Shack and Fields of Rock.....................6112 Exercise Bike............................................7113 Underground..............................................8114 Rules of the House.......................................8915 January..................................................9916 Video Release............................................10517 The Family Takes Action..................................11118 America's Funniest Home Videos...........................11719 Carrie's Diary...........................................12320 The Romanians............................................12921 No Smoking...............................................13722 Air-Conditioning.........................................14323 Munaf....................................................15124 Another Ransom Paid......................................15525 Reward for Information...................................16126 Buried Alive.............................................17327 Road Trip................................................17928 Camp Snoopy..............................................18729 The Perfect Storm........................................19330 Rescued..................................................20131 Barbecue, Whiskey, and Cigars............................21132 Family Reunion...........................................21933 Iraqi Justice............................................23134 American Flag............................................237Acknowledgments.............................................243Notes.......................................................245About the Author............................................249
Chapter One
Kidnapped!
The traitor's name was Majid. He was one of several men armed with AK-47s whose job it was to protect my coworkers and me at the Saudi Arabian Trading and Construction Company in the upscale Mansour district of Baghdad during the height of the war in Iraq.
The other guards were grateful that warm November evening when Majid offered to stand watch alone at the gateway to our compound, an office building and a private home directly behind it that was surrounded on all sides by a concrete wall. It was the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, and as the sun was setting, it meant that the guards could escape the dust-filled air and head into the office's kitchen to prepare their first meal of the day. I was attending a dinner party given by the company owner, Malek Antabi, who was hosting the affair at the private home next to the office building.
In hindsight, I really wish I had learned to speak Arabic. I spent a great deal of time in the Middle East after I retired as a Naval commander with twenty years of service; I learned a lot about Arab culture and the religion of Islam, but I just didn't have an ear for the language. At the dinner party, all of the guests were speaking in their native language as we ate dates and drank small cups of Arabic coffee. I didn't know what in the world the men were talking about.
As dinner was a long way off, I told my colleague Zein Hussami that I was going to the office to work on some contracts. I asked him to come over and get me when the food was ready, and I headed to work. The rooftop route was the quickest way to go back and forth between the buildings-upstairs to the house's second floor, down a hallway, and through a door that led to a large rooftop patio used for social occasions. A metal bridge connected the house and office building, with about one foot of space separating the buildings; four steps up the bridge, across a short plank, and four steps down, and I was on the other rooftop patio. Crossing it, I opened the door that led to the second floor, where my office was located.
It may sound like a strange path to take, but in addition to being a shortcut, it was much safer than traveling the streets outside of the guarded compound walls. By taking the rooftop route, I avoided the courtyard in front of the office, where vehicles would enter the compound after being cleared by security through a metal gate. The gate that Majid was supposedly guarding.
As I crossed the rooftop, I didn't see anyone. I didn't hear anything, other than my stomach, which was rumbling as I settled into the chair in front of my desk to catch up on some e-mail and go over food contracts we were negotiating with the American Army. I kept an eye on my office doorway, hoping Zein would appear soon and announce that dinner was finally ready.
But the masked gunmen got to me first-four of them, armed with AK-47s, a silenced Sterling machine pistol, and a Tariq 9mm, the standard-issue pistol for the Iraqi Army. The men rushed into my office with their weapons drawn. A knowledge of Arabic wasn't necessary. "Come with us or we will kill you," one of the men said in clear English.
My instinct was to grab the 9mm pistol within arm's reach on my desk. It had one round in the chamber, ready to fire, and fifteen rounds in the magazine. An MP5 machine gun was in a file cabinet behind me; it was not within arm's reach.
Shoot it out-that's the training I received. If you are ever in a kidnapping situation, shoot it out, don't get caught, and don't get taken alive. Good advice, I suppose. I could have easily killed one of the men but not all of them, and they would have gunned me down within moments.
It was a split-second decision. I decided to live.
I signaled my decision by standing up slowly and allowing the kidnappers to walk me through the door and into the hallway.
I didn't know who these Arab men were or why they were after me. There were several possibilities to consider. Perhaps they were just one of the Mafia-like criminal gangs roaming the war-torn country and kidnapping wealthy Iraqis for ransom. A (much worse) possibility I didn't want to consider was that these men were part of the insurgent terrorist cell led by the ferocious Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. A notorious terrorist known to have links with Al-Qaeda, Zarqawi and his thugs were abducting and beheading their hostages in 2004, then releasing scenes of their gruesome murders on videotapes that were aired on the Internet and Al Jazeera television, an Arab-language news network. My best hope was that these armed-and-masked thugs, who looked to be in their twenties and thirties, were Iraqi "businessmen" who kidnapped for a living.
Hope is not a sound strategy, but it was all I had.
The man holding the Tariq pistol raised it to my head and ordered me to follow him downstairs. We passed by the closed office door of another American employee; then we turned right and...
