I Survived 996 Days As A Hostage (They Killed Everyone Else)

"I said, 'What do I do?' He said, 'Whatever they say!'"

The police/terrorists led Peter and his four guards outside, where "20 or 30" police vehicles waited, "They put myself in the back ... the team leader in the trunk. I thought we were under arrest. Maybe there was something wrong with my ID. For some reason, I had a lot of money in my wallet, around $300. I remember they took my ID out and threw it out the window."

So Peter took his cash and tried to bribe the driver -- which is generally a fine move when being detained by crooked cops in a foreign country -- "And the guy just looked at the $300 and threw it out the window. And I'm like, that's not good."

The average per-capita income in Iraq is around $4,000, meaning Peter's bribe was a solid month's salary. The fact that his captor tossed it out the window no longer qualified as 'a bad sign.' It was a nightmare billboard.

"And then they started taking my clothes off and throwing them out the window, and that's when I realized it was abduction. I remember them throwing my steel-toed boots out the window and thinking, 'I hope that didn't hit anybody.'"

Because, even being kidnapped, Peter's a pretty nice dude.

"We sat in this basement for maybe an hour. We get water poured on our head. Then they walk me to a stretcher, get me to lie down on a stretcher, then they wheel me into a truck -- it's a big army truck." Had Peter been played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, this would be the point where he uses his own enormous schlong to strangle the nearest captor, then kill the rest of the terrorists using nothing but his bare hands and a series of increasingly painful puns. Unfortunately, this was reality, so ...

"I [accidentally fall] on my side and I break a rib, I hear my ribs crack."

Peter and two of his guards were manhandled into a "secret compartment" in the truck. And then, "They bolted the compartment shut. I lifted my blindfold and I could see daylight in the cracks in the weld and [I thought], 'This would never happen to Indiana Jones. He'd be out of there by now.'"

And probably twisting some bearded guy's neck while saying "I've got a crack for you."

But no -- Peter and his fellow captives spent two days crammed into a compartment so tiny, "One British guard had his back on my knees." When the vehicle finally stopped, "We got some cake. And they gave us food, water. And then it went quiet. I got brave and lifted my blindfold ... I could see the stars, and I looked up to the British guard, and I lifted his blindfold and said, 'Look, you can see the stars!' And that was the last time we saw the sky."

Peter's memories of this period are understandably confused, because pants-ruining terror has a way of playing with your memories. But he does remember, "whispering to one of the guards, 'Are we going to make it out alive?' And he said, 'Well, with a bit of luck.'"

Eventually, they were taken to the Iraqi city of Basra, which they knew because one of the guards had fought there during his army days. "The guards were saying, if this is Basra than we're still held by Shia militia."

Which was ... a good thing?

"Over the next ten days, what happens is, our captors get us clothes, they get us medication, they get us food, they tell us they're not going to kill us." Peter says they repeatedly re-iterated, "'We're Shia, we're not Al Qaeda' [a Sunni terrorist group]; they said they were holding us for an exchange."

Eventually a senior militia figure came to visit. They asked him:

"'Are you going to kill us?'

And he said to me, 'I'm not as nice as my friends.' I was like, right, OK, that doesn't make me feel better."

The militia leader wanted them to make a video. You know the type: grainy footage, beards of despondence, second-rate tracksuits, pleas for release.

"So we then did a video, basically saying 'I'm Peter Moore. I'm alive and being treated well.' We had to do a message to Tony Blair -- 'You have to get us released.' We all did that video."

Peter went along with the videos because he wasn't trying to be a hero, nor was he suicidally camera shy. He was just a guy, doing whatever he could to make it out of this alive. But his captors didn't necessarily believe that:

"They always believed I was a military intelligence officer, so they never asked me any questions about IT."

These guys were nicer than ISIS, but that's the high bar at the limbo competition. Six or seven months in, he recalled that one of his captors, "handcuffed me behind my back, blindfolded me, and removed the chain, and then he took me outside and made me kneel down."

The guard put a gun to Peter's head and pulled the trigger.

"I just remember hearing the click ... I started sweating ... and then there was the bang ... I remember hearing the cartridge fall on the floor ... what they'd done is put a gun to my head and fired a gun behind my back. And then I went back into the room where the British guard was. And he said, 'what happened?' And I said, 'I think I got shot in the head.'"

Mock executions are a popular torture tactic, used by everyone from ISIS to the CIA, in order to break a captive's will. Peter suggested that it might also be an effective way to ensure a prisoner remains well-behaved immediately prior to an execution: "With ISIL videos people ask me, why didn't they run? Well, they probably didn't know they were going to die at that point."

Standard poker tactics, really. You bluff a guy once, then hit him with the real thing soon after, when he's expecting another bluff. But you don't decapitate him. That is frowned upon in poker.

Yes, of course "Mom lets me do it" is always a lie -- but his captors didn't exactly have a Slack channel set up to compare notes. Peter's plan worked. Sort of.

"I'll be honest with you, actually I got an Xbox."

Well, at least it wasn't a Wii U.

If you, too, plan on using an impending kidnapping to catch up on game time, Peter's got some advice: "Ultimately your survival depends on the people around you. You may not like them ... but build a rapport. Talk about food; I'd say, what food do you eat in Iraq? He'd say, he likes fish. I'd say, your wife cooks for you? He'd say yes. I'd say, oh fish is easy to get in Iraq? [He'd say] 'Yes.'"

And then Peter would spring his trap: "That sounds great. Say, could I get some fish?"

Then slowly replace "fish" with other demands, subtly working your way up to "Hey, do you like freedom? Me too! Say, could I get ..."

How honest should you be with your kidnappers? That's probably not a question most folks ever ask themselves. But maybe you should, because when Peter got kidnapped, he immediately started lying, out of the assumption that in "six months, dead or alive, this thing's going to be over."

"Right at the start, we were all asked, 'Are you married?' well the British guards all said yes, even though it turns out only one of them was. So I said yes ... over time, they start asking me questions about my wife. Over two-and-a-half years I had to build this whole story about my wife because, y'know, 'Don't change your story.'"

So he claimed he'd met a woman while working in Guyana. Peter had worked in Guyana for some time before going to Iraq. But everything else in this story is a bald-faced lie:

"In Guyana, my wife is called Emma Desousa. She's a Brazilian Amerindian person. The way we met, was that because of the lack of tech skill in the area, there's a tech agreement between Guyana, Brazil, Columbia, and Suriname, so I would cross over into Brazil and install computer equipment for the ministry responsible for gold mining. Emma was a malaria doctor, doing a malaria program in Brazil while I was installing the computer system."

Again, all of this -- including the supposed international agreement -- was made up by Peter on the spot. Apparently, Peter is a hell of a liar. Even our best lies don't include intricate political relationships. Also apparently, Wikipedia wasn't huge in Iraq at the time.

"I was a little bit worried someone from the British government would go running around looking for Emma Desousa." So he actually made up a new lie, just to protect himself in this eventuality. "The reason you can't find her is Desousa isn't the name she was born with. People in Brazil don't use their indigenous names to apply for jobs."

Again, that's a lie -- Peter is now inventing socio-economic employment strategies in his fibs. Truly, the man should teach a master class.

It goes on: "We were asked, what is your religion? I said Protestant. They said, is that [a type of Catholic]. I said yes. Over time I'm thinking, I'm going to have to do some Catholic stuff ... so before I went to sleep I started to pretend to pray, but I didn't do anything. I just put up my hands and closed my eyes. And I thought, I might as well make it consistent, so I started counting ..."

Some of Peter's captors were surprisingly respectful of his fake religion:

"They brought me Islamic prayer beads" since they couldn't find any rosaries, "... so everyday I used to flip through these -- like a thousand times a day, one banana two banana three banana four -- it was really relaxing."

This worked for a while, until one of his captors finally asked: 'As a Catholic person, with the prayer beads, what do you say?'

"So in my mind I'm thinking, Oh shit. And I remember, as a kid, hearing Catholic people say their Hail Mary's ..." so he just told the man "Hail Mary." But his unusually curious guard looked the actual prayer up, and it turned out to be much longer than Peter expected.

"And I'm like, this has gotten way out of hand. I said, 'I'm really sorry. I've got to be honest. Catholic children learn it as a baby, and I haven't gone over it in years, and I'm saying the wrong thing.'"

His guard who, remember, was a bonafide Muslim terrorist, said, 'It's OK. It's not what you say that God recognizes. But God recognizes what you do.' And I'm like, whoa."

We're really not sure what the lesson is here, other than that this particular Shia militiaman might have a solid career in writing cheesy inspirational self-help books.

The men who captured Peter and his guards wanted to exchange prisoners for some of their compatriots who'd been arrested by Coalition forces:

"My sense was they wanted an exchange, and I said 'look, you'll get money for us, but you're not going to get an exchange.'"

But the militia kept trying to work out a personnel exchange, and the British government kept making that "yap yap" motion with their hands while the terrorists talked. Negotiations dragged on for months, and Peter wasn't exactly kept in the loop about the process. Eventually he became aware that a captured former marine and current private security employee, Michael Chand, was being given "first aid" by the same militia that had captured Peter. They'd apparently orchestrated a roadside bombing that wounded the man, and then carried him off. Chand didn't survive.

"They'd also captured an American soldier, Sergeant al-Taie -- he was an Iraqi who came to America and joined the army -- and they really gave him a hard time. I used to hear him being beaten with what sounded like a brick in the room next door. He was the only American to be classified as missing in action. But they killed him also."

Peter wound up being the only person to survive out of his group. His four guards, hardened military veterans all, were each killed during their captivity.

"The militia told me that everyone had been killed, either because they'd tried to escape, or the Americans were raiding next door ... I think two of my British guards, and one of the Americans, were in a house and tried to escape. And the other two, and Sergeant al-Taie, were in a house the Americans got near ..."

Their kidnappers executed them rather than risk letting them go.

To this day, Peter still feels guilty about being the sole survivor, even though it was all obviously entirely out of his hands. And that's fickle, stupid reality for you: military training and combat experience count for about as much as an IT degree when shit truly starts to roll downhill.

"I'd been told I was going to be released all the time. In the last year, toward the end of 2009, I did a number of release interviews. In May of 2009, two British bodies were released in exchange for seven people, one of whom was a commander of the militia. And in September, they released 100 live militia for one body."

The British were pulling out of Iraq by 2009, and they were eager to tie up any loose ends they could. Peter wound up being one of the last of those loose ends:

"At 5 a.m. on the 30th of December, this Iraqi comes in and says 'Get up.' I said 'Go where? It's 5 in the morning.' He said 'You're being released.' I said 'Why am I being released?'"

The guard claimed it was because the British had agreed to a prisoner swap, "I said ... 'Whatever, what do you want me to do? It's 5 a.m., leave me alone.'"

Now. Now is the point where you relate to Peter the hardest.

But still the heartless guard insisted Peter get up at such an ungodly hour, to shower for his 'exit interview' with the captors.

"They question me again on being a military intelligence officer. I said, 'I'm not'. He says, 'You're right, you're not a military intelligence officer. You're a very good military intelligence officer.'"

Again, he wasn't. But everything we've learned about him from this interview makes us think he'd actually be pretty damn solid at the job. The next thing Peter knew, his captors had driven him to the middle of Baghdad, and taken off his blindfold:

"There's people everywhere, and then I'm put into the backseat of this other van, and we drive off ... and then we drive about five minutes down the road, we turn to this driveway in our house. We get out, and there's a man with a normal camera filming me. And we enter this room ... filled with people. Half in normal clothes, half in military uniforms ... a man in a suit gets up, says 'Peter Moore? ... I'm with the Iraqi government. You're a free man.'

"With that, he sits on the sofa, I sit next to him. He makes a statement to the camera."

It became clear that Peter was expected to make a statement. At this point, possibly because he got up at 5 a.m., he still felt like a prisoner, and was more-or-less convinced this was all a cruel trick. And so he lapsed into your standard, kidnapped-by-terrorists-and-put-in-front-of-a-camera behavior.

"I say how bad America is, how much I like the militia, how I'll give them five stars on TripAdvisor."

Soon after, Peter was taken to the embassy. He really was a free man.

"In my mind, when I got released, I was going to have this great statement ... it was going to be the title of this book, or the movie. But all I wanted was to be alone. And the first place I could think of to be alone was the toilet. So I say, 'I need to pee.' ... I put my hands on the wall, I start banging my head on the wall and I say, 'Stop that, you're going to hurt yourself.' There was this huge bank of mirrors, and I looked at myself. And I said, 'You've done it, you've beaten the odds.' And then I just started crying."

In all, Peter Moore survived 996 days as the prisoner of violent terrorists, while all of the trained military personnel around him died. We don't know -- we kind of think "Stop That, You're Going To Hurt Yourself" is a pretty good book title.

Robert Evans's new book A Brief History of Vice is about how partying, bad behavior and weird, ancient drugs built civilization. You can buy it now!

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