For U.S. Hostage, the Timing Was Everything

By Sewell Chan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 4, 2004; Page A20

BAGHDAD, May 3 -- Stumbling across a field, a disheveled man approached a U.S. Army patrol Sunday, shouting and waving a white T-shirt as if to surrender. For a moment, the soldiers thought he was a local farmer, before his speech and face identified him as Thomas Hamill, a Mississippi dairyman who had been held hostage in Iraq for more than three weeks.


On Monday, three soldiers from the unit that helped Hamill to safety described his rescue. Hamill, meanwhile, was flown to a U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, for evaluation before returning home to Macon, Miss.

Hamill, employed as a truck driver by the U.S. contracting firm Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., was kidnapped April 9 during an attack on an Army fuel-truck convoy. Dozens of masked men armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers ambushed the convoy along a highway near the Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad.

One U.S. soldier and an Iraqi driver were killed instantly. Four American Kellogg Brown & Root employees and an Army sergeant were later found dead; two other company employees and an Army reservist, Pfc. Keith M. Maupin, 20, of Batavia, Ohio, remain missing.

Videotape shot by an Australian news crew that happened to be on the highway that day, filming the burning wreckage of the convoy, showed Hamill sitting in the back of a gray sedan between hooded gunmen. He gave his name before he was driven away.

Hamill was not seen again until about 10:30 a.m. Sunday when, unkempt and wearing an open sleeveless vest, he approached a group of soldiers on a routine patrol, looking for a break in an oil pipeline in a remote area near Balad, about 40 miles north of Baghdad.

The soldiers, from Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 108th Infantry Regiment, said they were puzzled when Hamill ran toward them from a windowless stone shack about 300 yards away.

"At first, at a distance, we thought he was an Iraqi farmer who was coming up to the trucks," said Lt. Joseph Merrill, 28. "As he got closer, we heard that he was speaking English. And the first man who walked up to him realized immediately that it was Mr. Hamill."

Hamill apparently had no idea where he was or what day it was. "He was obviously very glad to see us," Merrill said. "And once we found out -- we recognized -- who he was, we knew we had gotten somebody good."

Hamill had a gunshot wound in his right forearm but no other visible injuries, said Col. Randall Dragon, commander of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division, a New York Army National Guard unit based in Gloversville.

The soldiers of Charlie Company put Hamill in a Humvee, gave him water and offered him food, which he declined.

Soon afterward, they accompanied Hamill back to the shack where he had been held. They surrounded the house and found only a bed and some water and food inside.

The soldiers found an AK-47 assault rifle in a grassy area outside the shack and detained two Iraqi men walking nearby, but a military spokesman said the men may not have been involved in Hamill's abduction. The soldiers said they believed that one of Hamill's captors fled, leaving the weapon, after seeing that Hamill had escaped and made contact with the soldiers.

At noon, the patrol called for a medical evacuation, and a helicopter took Hamill to a military medical facility north of Tikrit.

"When he got on that bird to leave, I had tears in my eyes," said Sgt. 1st Class Mark Forbes, 43.

"Due to the efforts of these great soldiers here, an American will return home to his family. Freedom is priceless," Dragon said during a brief news conference in Baghdad, noting that the soldiers' unit was mobilized eight months ago. He praised the contributions of National Guardsmen and reservists who make up more than one-third of the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

It was not clear how Hamill was taken dozens of miles from Abu Ghraib to the shack near Samarra. Before leaving for Germany, he declined requests for an interview.

The soldiers did say that they asked Hamill why he had not escaped earlier.

Forbes said Hamill told them he " 'could have escaped a bunch of times, but where am I going to go? One bottle of water, where am I going?' No map, nothing. He stayed there and hoped that somebody would come by. That was his plan."