Beyond the image

John Peters is the man behind an iconic image. In 1991, during Operation Desert Storm in the Gulf War, he was piloting a Tornado aircraft when it was struck by a surface-to-air missile.

After fighting to stay in the air, get back to base, or avoid crash landing, Mr Peters was forced to do the unthinkable – eject into the Iraqi desert.

“By this time, I had complete tunnel vision,” he says. “I was trying desperately to keep this aircraft above the ground … I looked back and there were more flames coming towards us at an incredible rate.So it wasn’t a difficult decision: three, two, one… eject. There’s a quarter of a second delay for the seat to go off, but it feels like a lifetime.” 

Mr Peters and his navigator, John Nichol, found themselves stranded in the Iraqi desert, trying to evade an enemy who knew they were there.

The pair’s attempts to avoid enemy forces would be comical – if they weren’t so serious.

“John picked up his parachute, wandered across, stood above me and said, ‘This will be the Iraqi desert then’. And we laughed. The first thing we did in Iraq was just sit down and giggle,” Mr Peters recalls.

“I mean, it was just so,” he pauses, “pathetic. If you can imagine: I was paid to fly a 25 tonne, £25 million piece of equipment. I’ve got missiles, guns, bombs, computers, engines. I have power. I’m at the front end of the largest air offensive in the history of mankind. Power. And then you’ve got these two little pink bodies in the desert. It’s not meant to work that way.” Mr Peters says in the rush to get to war, certain preparations fell through the cracks, which inevitably hampered their ability to evade the enemy.

Their survival packs weren’t painted appropriately to enable them to travel stealthily through the desert. Rather, there were “two great big yellow fibreglass boxes”.

“Why didn’t they change that? Well, because when things are moving fast and things are changing, it’s difficult to look beyond what’s actually happening,” Mr Peters explains.

“They had looked at the aircraft. They’d painted the aircraft. This was in a box, which was in an ejection seat in the aircraft – which is a contingency of a contingency.”

Much of their survival equipment was redundant for their situation and stood out starkly against the Iraqi desert backdrop – not to mention the burning Tornado “with a plume of smoke going up about 8,000 feet in the air”.

They had to move.

“The experts say you are to evade the enemy,” says Mr Peters. “They say you are to hide your kit. Where? I was trained in Wales.”

So, they walked.

“We walked for about two hours,” he says. “And then we saw a man, and we hit the deck. And I just remember lying there staring at this man. We lay there for 45 minutes – barely daring to breathe. Forty-five minutes. It was a twig. You’re talking two grown men lying there because of a damn twig – because you are petrified. People want to hurt you. People want to kill you and you no longer have the power and the system around you – the aircraft, the bombs.

“You feel completely vulnerable on your own. So after that, we could not stand up. We felt so vulnerable. So we crawled. We crawled on our hands and knees for over an hour. How far can you crawl in an hour on your hands and knees?”

Despite their best efforts, Mr Peters and Mr Nichol were eventually captured by Iraqi forces.

Right before capture, in a hail of bullets millimetres above their heads, the two had a conversation.

“I’m looking at John and he’s looking at me and he says, ‘Should we go out with a bang? Should we go out with a bang?’ Basically, he was saying ‘Should we stand up, take a couple of shots and expect to get split open?’ Or, there was the option of suicide: ‘I’ll shoot you, then I’ll shoot myself.’ I don’t know why – there were all these bullets bouncing around my head – but I turned to him and I said ‘No. There is always hope. Why do their job for them?’”

TRAUMA AND TRIUMPH 

Mr Peters didn’t see his navigator again for seven weeks. They were forced into solitary confinement and subjected to the sort of torture that would never make it past censors reviewing and assessing war films for public consumption. Most of the time, the outcome and the experience were completely out of his control – until his captors gave him a choice.

“They start beating you and beating you and telling you that you have to go on television,” Mr Peters says. “And the last thing you’re meant to do in the military is go on television. But they hit you and they beat you. Then they get a gun out. They put the gun against your head. They say ‘Peters, you’re going on television or you’ll never see your wife and children again’. And in that moment, I agreed.”

His image was beamed around the world: An image of a beaten and broken man, but whom people perceived to be a brave, courageous and heroic individual.

“They reckon about 650 million people worldwide saw that image … And really, let’s face it, that is the reason I’m talking to you today – because we were the ones on television,” Mr Peters says.

“It’s very strange being that one on television. I went to war, got shot down, but when I returned back home, I returned home to massive media attention. I had radio, newspaper, television, everyone coming up to me saying ‘Oh you’re so brave, you’re so brave, we saw the footage on television’.”

He says for 18 months after his return, he couldn’t go to a pub without getting a standing ovation. No-one expected him to pay for a beer, for a snack, for dinner.

“It’s very different being behind those images,” he says. “I have been to war. It was my first mission, our first mission on the first day of the war … I have a very different feeling when I see that image on screen. “When I see those pictures, I remember that I felt like a traitor, I felt weak and I thought it was the last time my family was going to see me alive. And the enduring image my children would have of their father – the children who would never know their father, as my son was two years old and my daughter was six weeks old when I went to war – was that I was a weak, failure, traitor of a man.”

Mr Peters says he doesn’t try to be a hero. No matter what your thoughts are on the politics of war, he says he knows he is not ‘courageous’. “What happened to me was not courage. Courage is about choice. It’s about making the right decision because it is the right thing to do – regardless of how it affects you as an individual. You don’t have to be a prisoner of war [POW]. You don’t have to be in the military,” Mr Peters insists. Courage is about choice, about making the tough decisions. As a POW, you have no damn choice.”
He insists he’s not a prisoner of his trauma. He is not a damaged, broken man who is enslaved by his previous experiences, he says. 

Instead, perhaps, he is a prisoner of his perceived failure. “What stays with me? I failed to drop my bombs – that’s what stays with me,” he says.“Now, before some of you go off on your philosophy of violence … it has nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with your philosophy; it has everything to do with expectation.  The job of a fighter pilot is not to sit in a little box and get beaten up. I’m paid to do my job and that’s what stayed with me. I failed to live up to expectation.”

Even though he continues to insist he failed his mission, he has no doubt that he succeeded when it was time to make the call: “I can tell you, standing here 22 years later – surrendering? Best decision I’ve ever made.”