SAN ANTONIO — When Thomas Hamill was taken hostage in Iraq, insurgents sat the American civilian contractor before a video camera with list of questions in English.
He answered slowly, telling his name and age. “When I got to the end of the list, I added one more thing,” he says. “I said, ’God bless.’ I just said it … it just came out.”
His captors didn’t take it lightly. One who spoke English asked: “Why did you say that? You have angered these people by saying that.”
For the next several minutes, they replayed the tape and finally taped over the “God bless” before sending the footage to the world.
It was April 2004, when terrorists were regularly releasing videos of Western hostages being beheaded. But by what he says was “God’s will,” Mr. Hamill survived and escaped.
A truck driver for KBR, a major contractor for U.S. forces in Iraq, Mr. Hamill, 44, was held 24 days before escaping his shedlike prison and flagging down a group of passing American soldiers.
He had gone to Iraq to perform a duty bestowed increasingly on contractors rather than soldiers: drive fuel trucks up the supply chain. And like tens of thousands of other contract employees, the job exposed him to the same perils as soldiers.
In an interview here, where he spoke at a conference on contractors, Mr. Hamill said he signed up to work in Iraq to serve his country. “Most contractors have a similar attitude, a lot are ex-soldiers, ex-Vietnam vets,” he said. “The life of contractors is the same as soldiers.”
The Mississippi farmer and trucker has published “Escape in Iraq” (www.escape iniraq.com), which tells the story of how his truck convoy was ambushed on an Iraqi highway, his captivity and his eventual rescue.
After all he went through, Mr. Hamill says he would “go back and do it all over again.”
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