COLUMN ONE : Ex-POW’s Tale of a Nightmare : Marine flier Guy Hunter endured 46 days of physical and psychological torture in Iraqi hands. He finally made a videotape denouncing the war, believing he might not live.

CAMP PENDLETON — On his 35th day as a prisoner of war in Iraq, Marine Chief Warrant Officer Guy L. Hunter Jr. was told by an interrogator that he had not been very helpful.

“Tomorrow, there will be 10 questions--if you have 10 good answers you will have 10 fingers,” the interrogator said. “And if there are 10 bad answers, you will have no fingers.”

That night, Hunter dreamed that he was driving a car with his palms and turning the pages of a book with the nubs that remained on his hands. “Oh, I can do this,” he told himself in the dream. But the questions were never asked because, later that night, allied bombing destroyed parts of the prison, and he and other POWs had to be evacuated.

In a series of interviews with The Times since his return to his Camp Pendleton home two weeks ago, Hunter has described his 46 days of torment as a POW. He recalled being blindfolded and beaten for three days until he agreed to make a videotape denouncing the war, being so cold that he could sleep no more than half an hour at a time, and being so weakened by a diet of vegetable broth that he could not rise from the stone cell floor. He remembered smelling explosives as bombs struck the prison where he was being held and the uncertainty of never knowing when he would be interrogated and beaten.

A tall, blue-eyed man with a soft southern accent, he speaks in a steady, matter-of-fact tone about those experiences, which still bring him nightmares.

“I knew that guys get shot down, some guys get killed. I’m just one of the ones who got shot down and captured,” said Hunter, at 46 the oldest American POW.

Hunter and his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Clifford M. Acree, were the first U.S. prisoners of war taken by the Iraqis, captured the day their plane was downed, Jan. 18. The two men--both Camp Pendleton Marines--were also among the last to be released when they were freed March 5.

By scratching marks in the walls of his various cells, Hunter kept track of the days of his captivity. Some episodes blurred into others as he was blindfolded and taken from post to post, eventually to Baghdad. But others stood out with startling clarity. He remembers precisely the dates of his six interrogations--Jan. 18 and 31, Feb. 9, 11, 13 and 23.

Eventually, he began to doubt that he would ever see his family again. “You think you will leave here?” an Iraqi general called to him one day. “You will stay forever! Even when the war is over, you will never leave.”

On Feb. 10, believing he might not survive, Hunter used a faucet handle to carve a tribute to his wife into the tile prison wall: “GUY HUNTER LOVES MARY 1991.”

“I was scared I wouldn’t get to see Mary and the children again,” Hunter said. “I had images of the kids in my mind; each saying ‘Hi Dad.’ ”

On the first morning of the Persian Gulf War, Hunter and Acree flew north into Kuwait aboard a Marine OV-10 Bronco. Acree piloted the small turboprop; Hunter sat in the observer’s seat, radioing locations of targets. The mission was exhilarating and successful. Hunter had served four tours in Vietnam, and he knew his job.

On the second day, after four hours of sleep, Hunter was tired when he and Acree took off at 6:15 a.m. and flew toward northern Kuwait. There, using binoculars, Hunter located some Iraqi rocket launchers and began to discuss with Acree whether to summon fighter jets.

Neither man saw what hit them.

The surface-to-air missile tore the canopy off the plane, ripping Hunter’s left eyelid into two bloody flaps and knocking him unconscious. When he came to, he heard a loud noise, smelled smoke and felt the air pounding at his face. The plane was plunging. He grabbed his control stick in a vain attempt to pull up the plane’s nose, and fainted as he reached for the lever to eject.

When Hunter regained consciousness, he was floating in his parachute--about to land in the area he had targeted for destruction, an area thick with Iraqi soldiers and artillery. Acree had ejected him. Hunter wiped his face; his hand was covered with blood. “I knew we were in for it,” he said.

“Blood was all over my eyes and I wiped it off so I could see a little bit. Then I started looking around so I could see where I was going to land. I couldn’t see the colonel; I couldn’t see anything.”

Hunter lay in the sand before unfastening his gear. Even with his eye closed, he could see through the torn eyelid, and dimly made out a group of figures walking toward him. He quickly scooped out a hole in the mud flat and buried his wallet because he did not want Iraqi soldiers to have photographs of his family. Slowly, he walked away from the approaching figures.

“Hey, gunner!” Acree called.

“Cliff? Is that you?” said Hunter, realizing that he had mistaken his commander for a group of Iraqis. “I can’t see too well.”

Both men pulled out their radios and started calling for help, but they were mistakenly using a jammed frequency. Blood dripped from the left side of Acree’s neck and it poured down Hunter’s face.

Within minutes, four Iraqi soldiers sprang from a pickup truck and yelled for them to put their hands up.

“You really don’t let yourself feel. I just kept praying,” Hunter said. “I felt real scared coming down in the chute, but when we landed we just took it minute by minute.”

They were marched to a house where Iraqi soldiers took their equipment. Unsure how to remove the flight suits and torso harnesses, a soldier used his knife and cut off the gear. Hands bound behind their backs, the Americans were loaded into a pickup truck and taken to a battalion headquarters where a man was chattering on a field telephone. Another bandaged Acree’s neck and wrapped Hunter’s eye. They were soon driven to division headquarters, where a green carpet led down the steps into the underground bunker. Several Iraqi officers sat around huge conference tables.

“They were just looking at us. They offered me some real hot, pungent, sugary tea, which hit the spot,” Hunter said.

One officer asked which airfield they had come from. Hunter said they were not allowed to answer. The officer let it go.

“They just seemed pleasant fellows,” Hunter said.

One officer played with the coins from the men’s flight suits. Another asked Hunter about the gum packet in his pocket. “Chew gum,” Hunter said. The officer nodded, returning it.

“One guy said what do Americans think of the Iraqi army? I said, ‘Americans admire the Iraqi army.’ So he said, ‘Have some more tea,’ ” Hunter recalled.

Afterward, Acree and Hunter were blindfolded, handcuffed, and driven off in a pickup truck. One officer said they were going to Baghdad.

“We were at the southern area of Kuwait. I thought it’s going to be a pretty long haul. Then we started driving and I was really concerned about the Harriers (U.S. jets) finding us moving on the ground and blowing us away. But nothing like that occurred. We got to corps headquarters and they snatched us out of the truck and turned us over to these fellows.

“That’s when the rough treatment began. They marched us around to various places as though they were showing us off to all their various staff members. We were still blindfolded. They put another set of blindfolds over the ones we had and bound it extremely tight.

“From that point on, for an extremely long time I couldn’t tell whether it was daylight or dark. It was just pitch black to me. We stayed there for some time--about a half-hour to an hour, I don’t know. Then they loaded us into a vehicle and we proceeded heading north into Iraq, I assume. We received their ‘welcome aboard’ treatment several times all the way up. It was some good beatings.

“We could feel the blows, and it was getting worse. The beatings were all over. I wasn’t thinking a whole lot, but I started praying for God to help me.”

Neither Hunter nor Acree were willing to discuss some of the details of the beatings and questioning--for fear they might give the Iraqis useful information should the current cease-fire fail. Both say that their treatment was not nearly as harsh as what Vietnam POWs endured.

At the Iraq border, a guard spoke to them in broken English, saying: “George Boosh. Washington, D.C. You know Washington, D.C. You Iraq.”

One guard “emphasized it a little more with some heavy duty thumpings. They seemed to be an excitable bunch of people. They were playing martial music on the radio and they would start singing along and they would seem to lose control, singing and yelling.

“Every so often we would stop off on the side of the road and you would hear people yelling and screaming at each other in their language and they would lose control and the extra guys would join in (the beatings) too.

“My impression was they were hitting us with their fists, rifle butts and batons. You really don’t let yourself feel anything. . . . I thought sure the colonel had lost consciousness a couple of times. I could feel the colonel slump against me.”

Hunter figured that they drove for six hours and then stopped for more questioning.

“These guys were getting their kicks in because we were the first Americans they had captured after they had been bombed heavy day and night. I guess they were happy to get their hands on somebody.”

The interrogators asked Acree to say that President Bush was “a donkey.” Acree refused. Hunter--still blindfolded and handcuffed--was loaded again into a car and driven for several hours to another jail.

“They put us in a holding cell where we sat and we shivered all night long. I heard one of the Italians, as I discovered later on. . . . He kept begging them to loosen his handcuffs because he couldn’t feel his fingers at all or his hands.

“Sometime later that morning, I heard footsteps . . . and I felt something press against my lips. I recoiled backwards and I heard the guy say ‘bread, bread.’ So I opened my mouth and they shoved chunks of bread in there for a while and I chewed on those. . . .

“They’d come by once in a while and feed us. We couldn’t do it for ourselves. They would squat in front of us and I could hear the buckets moving down the line of prisoners. He’d say, ‘food, food’ and stick a spoon up to our mouth and we’d start eating away. Then he would say ‘tea’ and hold some tea up to our mouth and we’d drink that or water. I’d nod my head when I’d had enough to drink.”

After Hunter was fed, an Iraqi army doctor examined his eye. When the doctor removed the blindfold, Hunter could see Acree and the Italian slumped on the stone floor. But after cleaning the wound, the doctor replaced the blindfold.

Hunter lost track of time. He remembered a guard putting a chunk of bread into his pocket before loading him into a truck. When one soldier said they were going to a hospital, he was relieved.

“ ‘This is great. They are going to take us to a hospital and treat our wounds,’ ” he recalled thinking. Instead, they drove several hours to another interrogation center, where the Iraqis eventually forced him and several other POWs to make the videotape denouncing the war.

Hunter believes the POWs stayed about three days at this center, blindfolded and handcuffed the entire time. During sessions that lasted up to half an hour, Hunter was beaten on his limbs, back and head.

“I felt pure terror. I knew it was interrogation time because I could hear the other guys being interrogated, sometimes a word or two and then mostly just the sounds of it. It just sent spasms through my body, I’d just twitch. . . . I was just drifting in and out of consciousness here.”

The questions were posed in English: How many planes were at the air bases? How many observation planes and fighter jets? Where are you from? What should Iraq do to win the war? Why are you here?

“Sometimes I’d try to beat around a subject and they’d reinforce their questioning a bit by beating me. Sometime there’d be no rhyme or reason to it. I’d be sitting blindfolded in a chair sometimes or on the floor and all of a sudden I’d see sparkles in front of my eyes where somebody would just slam me.”

At one point during the beating, Hunter blacked out and dreamed he was in North Carolina, where he had lived before moving to Camp Pendleton. He couldn’t understand why he was so entangled in the bed clothes. He came to and realized he was handcuffed.

Hunter began a silent chant--a phrase he repeated over and over during his imprisonment. “Oh God, please help me, save me and protect me. Oh God, please help me, save me and protect me. . . .

“The waiting, the apprehension was horrible--it’s utter fear.”

Believing he might not survive, Hunter finally agreed to make the videotape. He consoled himself by thinking that at least it would inform his wife and their three children that he was alive.

“I felt terrible,” he said. “You have a sense of surrender. You’ve given up your inner self--a little bit. But at one point, I didn’t know if I could last any longer.”

In a taped statement, later shown on Iraqi television and broadcast by Cable News Network around the world, Hunter told his wife and children he missed them, asking the kids to study hard in school. In a stilted voice, he also said: “This war is crazy and should never have happened. It is an aggression against peaceful Iraq.”

He used that voice, he later said, because he was trying to mimic his captors. Afterward, he thought up speeches that he would give to the other POWs, explaining why he cooperated. He didn’t realize that the others had made similar tapes.

When the taping was finished, he was shoved into a car, and a blanket that smelled of urine was placed over his head. He was taken next to an aging prison that he and the other POWs called Army Camp, where he stayed for 11 days, beginning Jan. 21.

Hunter was placed in a cell by himself. In a corner, there was a thin foam mattress with a cloth pillow and blankets. His captors removed his blindfold and handcuffs. He took off his boots, collapsed on the mattress, and slept.

The next day, guards exchanged his flight suit for a yellow POW uniform that soon became crusted with dirt. Through the steel door of his cell, he could see other prisoners.

When he asked if he could go to a doctor to get glasses to replace the pair lost in the crash, he was told: “There is nothing you need to see.”

For Hunter, Army Camp was the first, and most comfortable, of three prisons. He was allowed to use the toilet. A doctor visited every three days. He could exercise. There was sufficient food and water.

At breakfast, he ate a millet-like gruel and two huge, tasty chunks of Iraqi bread. Sometimes, he would get hot, sugary tea. For lunch, there was rice with a small piece of cabbage--once it had a piece of broccoli. At night, meat was served in its own broth.

On the second day at Army Camp, Hunter started doing sets of pushups and deep knee bends--increasing until he did 500 pushups daily. The guards would take the POWs into an open compound area and kick a soccer ball around with them.

Hunter developed a routine. He exercised, then he stared at the wall--losing himself in imaginary conversations with his wife and musing about chores he would do when he returned home. In his mind, he and Mary discussed whether they would go to Las Vegas to play the slot machines or tour the wine country in Napa Valley. Then he would mull over how they would travel: Should they fly? He decided he’d prefer to take the train.

When he tired of that, he busied himself remembering every January of the 29 years of his military career. When he finished with January, he moved on to February. Suddenly, his world seemed full. His eye healed and Hunter began to believe that he could survive.

“I got to feeling very optimistic,” Hunter said. “I thought, ‘I could do 90 days here standing on my head the way this is going.’ ”

At night, the guards would leave and the prisoners were free to whisper among themselves. Once, the guards heard them talking and came back, begging them to be quiet. “Please mister, no speak,” they urged.

Every night, Hunter could hear bombing. It reassured him, seeming to signal that the war would eventually be over. Sometimes it was close and the building would shake. He felt proud that the allied planes kept returning night after night.

On Jan. 31, after eleven days at Army Camp, Hunter’s captors ordered him to put on thick socks and canvas sneakers. Blindfolded and handcuffed, he and the other POWs were put on a bus and moved to another prison, a place the men dubbed the Baghdad Biltmore.

“I was hoping like hell and praying like a crazy man that maybe they were going to do some kind of exchange and turn us over to somebody,” Hunter said. Instead, as they stepped off the bus, he and the other POWs were beaten and slammed into the walls.

“ ‘Boy, this could be bad ,’ ” he remembers thinking.

The walls were thick and, because the guards never left, there was no more talking among the prisoners, each in his own cell for the next 23 days. Hunter’s 10-by-14-foot cell had a slatted window close to the ceiling. He had one blanket to use as a pad on the stone floor, another to wrap himself in, but he could sleep no more than half an hour before violent shivers woke him.

Hunter’s cell had a water spigot and toilet bowl, but after three days the water stopped flowing. The cell had a huge steel door with a smaller steel door in the middle, through which meals were passed. On the first day at the Baghdad Biltmore, he was served some rice.

“I thought, well, that’s one meal, but no other meals came (that day). That was it. And it got worse from there,” he said.

To occupy his time, he again imagined conversations with Mary. He fantasized about her cooking Christmas dinner of beef Wellington, garlic bread and eggnog. And he remembered a 1976 Kenny Nolan pop song, “I like Dreamin.” But he could remember only one line: “I like dreamin’ because dreaming can make you mine.” So he mostly hummed the tune.

“And I’d lie there and say, ‘OK, we’re going to dream for a while.’ And just force myself to start thinking of home events,” Hunter said.

“It was getting easier to get lost in daydreams. You just sort of snap to and you’re staring at the brick wall a few inches in front of your face in your cell.”

The interrogations resumed. He would listen for the jingle of keys. If the noise was at his door, he knew he would be hauled out. It seemed to Hunter that the interrogators were reading from a script because he heard the turning of pages.

Around Feb. 20, he realized that he was losing his strength. He no longer rose from the stone floor except to fetch his food.

“I started to get worried. . . . ‘If it keeps up like this, I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it much longer,’ ” he said. “You hope every day that they would give you some more of their broth soup or a couple more chunks of bread.”

He listened carefully, trying to hear how long his neighbor’s food door was open so he could calculate how much broth he would get. There was no longer any protein in the soup. For several days, he and others had painful bouts of diarrhea. In three weeks, Hunter lost 26 pounds.

It was after an interrogation on Feb. 23 that an Iraqi warned him he would lose his fingers unless he cooperated the next day. When Hunter returned to his cell, the guard left the blindfold by the door--a sign, he figured, that they meant to return.

That night the allied forces bombed the Baghdad Biltmore. When the first bomb fell, the ground shook and the guards fled. Dust filled the air and Hunter could smell explosives. He and the other POWs started banging their doors, beating the walls and yelling in a futile attempt to get help. Bricks showered down, and he crouched on his hands and knees, hiding under his blanket.

For the first time in weeks, Hunter heard Acree, who yelled: “Is there a Guy Hunter down there?”

It was pitch dark. He could hear the other POWs praying. One bomb struck nearby, another hit a bunker next door. Hearing a jet overhead, a POW yelled: “Incoming!” One bomb silenced the antiaircraft artillery. Then a final bomb smashed into the building--demolishing an area where there were no prisoners but trapping some POWs in their cells. The air was thick with dust.

Later that night, Hunter and 10 other POWs were evacuated to another prison where they shared a cell. It was the first time in weeks they were able to talk freely. Hunter was shocked at how bad they looked--gaunt, caked with dirt, hair matted. When Hunter spotted Acree, he laughed: “You know, you’ve got a red beard.”

Acree replied: “Well, yours doesn’t do anything for you.”

The next day, Feb. 24, the men were separated, placed in solitary confinement again. They were allowed to eat almost all the bread they wanted. For the first time in a month, Hunter washed his hands with soap.

On Feb. 27, Hunter was given an Italian cellmate. As Hunter talked to him, a 1-inch hole appeared in the cinder-block wall.

“What the heck is going on?” asked Hunter, who peered through and found himself looking at Acree.

“What do you think about getting out of here?” Acree said.

After they talked, Hunter carefully replugged the hole. On Feb. 28, he heard the firing of antiaircraft artillery but no planes. He thought maybe the Iraqis were celebrating the end of the war.

On March 3, the guards took Hunter to a room with pitchers of water. “Wash, wash, swim, swim,” a guard told him. In the hallway, another Iraqi shaved him. Then another handed him a brand-new POW outfit. And Hunter was given bread and cheese to eat.

“ ‘This is good--they are getting us ready,’ ” Hunter thought.

Two days later, the cells were opened. Hunter walked with the other POWs out into the corridors. At the spot where they usually were blindfolded, an Iraqi stood with a bottle. As they stepped aboard the bus, he sprayed them with cologne.

Though the curtains on the bus windows were closed, Hunter could peek out and see that they were driving toward trucks from the International Red Cross.

“I felt light like a feather,” Hunter said. “I felt like I could float.”

But the euphoria was quickly replaced by an aching fear that stayed with Hunter until the Red Cross plane taking him to Riyadh the next day rose above the heavy clouds, beyond reach of antiaircraft artillery.

Until then, “Everybody was frightened,” Hunter remembered. “What guarantees did we have that they wouldn’t come and get us back?”