Two days later, it was strangely quiet outside the cells. They could hear no bombers flying overhead. No AAA guns were popping off at F-117s. At first, the POWs thought this was because of weather aborts; but in the morning, the blue sky and warm sunshine made it clear that the bombing had stopped for some other reason. Each POW prayed it was for the right reason: that the war was over.

Very shortly after that, the prisoners were given soap and wash water, there was more and better food, and a barber came around to give them a shave—an Iraqi shave, dry with a rusty razor. (No wonder so many Iraqis wear beards, Tom Griffith told himself.)

“I think you will be going home soon,” an Iraqi officer announced on the fourth of March.

Is this a trick to get our hopes up? Griffith wondered.

But later that day, a bus arrived for Griffith and his fellow prisoners—two special forces troopers, the Army drivers, Specialists Melissa Rathburn-Healy and David Locket, who’d been captured during the battle of Al-Khafji, and two other aircrews. Soon afterward, a representative of the International Red Cross conducted them to the Nova Hotel, where the international press was waiting. After politely thanking them for bringing the captives to safety, the Red Cross representative firmly sent the Iraqis packing (thereby making himself an instant hero in the eyes of the now-former POWs), and the Americans were asked to identify by name any others in captivity (the sins of Vietnam were not going to be repeated).

Then for Tom Griffith it was a bus trip to Jordan, a flight to Oman, and the hospital ship Mercy off the coast of Bahrain. Dave Eberly went from Baghdad to Riyadh, and then to the Mercy for a longer stay.

On the Mercy, Griffith’s first priority was a phone call to his wife in North Carolina. Though he woke her up at 4:00 A.M., she didn’t seem to mind. Tom was safe and coming home!

★ Meanwhile, the failure to rescue Eberly and Griffith did not improve the already strained relations between aircrews and the Special Operations force units tasked to rescue them. The memory still burned after the war, as is evident from this comment about the Griffith and Eberly tale from a 4th Wing F-15E pilot: “Our DO and his backseater were on the ground for three and one-half days in western Iraq. Nobody’d go in and pick them up, and they eventually became prisoners of war. Before the war, the Special Operations guys came down to talk to us. ‘No sweat,’ they said, ‘we’ll come get you anywhere you are.’ That, from my perspective, was a big lie. After my guys were on the ground for three and one-half days, and they didn’t go pick them up, we basically decided that if anybody went down, they were on their own. Nobody was going to come and get you.”