BAGHDAD, Iraq – American hostage Thomas Hamill was sitting in a mud shack with a bullet wound festering in his arm when he heard the rumble of Army Humvees and made a break for it. He stumbled into the desert and waved his shirt to get the attention of passing soldiers.
“He was yelling, ‘I’m an American, I’m an American POW,’ ” recalled Lt. Joseph Merrill, a member of an Army platoon that happened upon the grizzled Mississippi contract worker north of Baghdad on Sunday morning.
As Hamill whooped, soldiers radioed in that a farmer was approaching them. Hamill tripped and fell a few times, rising each time. Soon the soldiers understood he was shouting in English and somebody recognized the hostage, Merrill said.
“From a distance, it was obvious he was unarmed, so we did not have our weapons trained on him,” the lieutenant said.
The 43-year-old truck driver was taken Monday to the U.S. military’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany for treatment and a reunion with his wife, Kellie, expected today.
“He’s doing good, very good,” Landstuhl spokeswoman Marie Shaw said.
Hamill’s whereabouts had been unknown since he was seen in a dramatic video taken after guerrillas captured him during an April 9 ambush on a supply convoy. Gunmen shot up and set fire to the vehicles on the outskirts of Baghdad. Hamill was wounded in the right forearm.
Hamill’s captors eventually took him to a mud farmhouse near the town of Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad.
Hamill escorted the platoon Sunday back to the shack, which was empty. Soldiers found an abandoned AK-47. A military photo taken in the shack showed his bed arranged on a couple of couch cushions on the dirt floor, with a blanket tossed over them. A bucket served as his latrine.
The Mississippi man told soldiers he’d been well treated by his captors, who gave him a rudimentary medical kit, a box of cookies and an oil lamp. Troops arrested two Iraqis farming in a field near the shack, Merrill said.
Hamill’s cousin, Jason Higginbotham, told CNN that Hamill had tried to escape before but went back to his captors, apparently unnoticed, after finding himself in the desert without food or water.
“He escaped one time about three days earlier and he was out in the middle of the desert. A helicopter came over and he tried to flag it down, but they evidently didn’t see him,” Higginbotham said. “They were taking fairly good care of him, so he went and put himself back in captivity without them knowing.”
Hamill, who works for Halliburton Corp. subsidiary KBR, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown &Root, was among seven American contractors who disappeared after the April attack. The bodies of four have been found, and two are missing.
Across Iraq, five foreigners remain hostage and 11 others are missing, according to the U.S.-led occupation authority. Ten abducted foreigners have been killed and 35 released, it said.
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