'I'll never watch the footage of me being tortured by the Iraqi forces’

In the 1991 Gulf war, RAF Navigator John Nichol and his pilot John Peters was shot down in the first air assault over Iraq, before being captured, tortured and paraded on TV

John Nichol still hasn’t watched the footage of the darkest moments of his life. It’s been 33 years, but the shame still burns him up. Aged 28, the former RAF navigator and his pilot John Peters were shot down while taking part in the first air assault of the 1991 Gulf War in Iraq. After their Tornado was struck by a missile, the pair ejected out of the fireball and were captured after three hours on the run in the sun-scorched desert by Saddam Hussein’s troops.

Nichol made headlines around the world when he was paraded on TV by his captors. With his body battered and bruised - the pair had been severely beaten with rubber truncheons, and had cigarettes extinguished on their flesh - he was forced to read out pre-written answers to his captors’ questions on camera, or face death.

After seven weeks of being moved from place to place, tortured, deprived of food and hearing the screams of other prisoners ringing through the filthy Abu Ghraib jail they ended up in, Nichol and Peters were finally released.

“Being paraded on TV was the worst moment of my life,” John says now. “The shame of it. In the video, which is two or three minutes long with me answering questions, what you can’t see is there’s a gun pointing at me and I’m under threat of execution. That was the greatest shame of my life, the darkest cloud. But that was my sliding doors moment - if none of that had happened, I wouldn’t have married my wife Suzannah, who I met at my second book launch, and I wouldn’t be sitting here today.”

Having left the RAF after serving for 15 years, John went on to write books about his experiences and the invisible marks they left - he is still unable to hear fireworks or a balloon popping without “jumping out of my skin”. His 19th, out this month ahead of Remembrance Day, is a poignant tribute to the Unknown Warrior, the remains of a young man killed during World War I who was brought back home and buried with a full state funeral in Westminster Abbey.

And it was John’s own brush with death that drove him on to find out more about the million-plus soldiers from the British Empire killed on the battlefield between 1914 and 1918, with more than half a million of them buried without a marked grave - or still missing.

“How does a body go missing? You can’t comprehend it, but if you’re hit by a shell, your body is blown apart,” says John. “Or you’re lost to the mud in places like the Somme. They were burying the dead amidst the battles, so if you couldn’t identify someone right away they became ‘unknown’ as soon as they were put in the ground, with perhaps a cross or a rifle put there to mark the grave. Sometimes the field padres [chaplains] would keep a record, but then they would be blown up and the record would be lost, or the fighting would move back and forth and the dead would be blasted and their remains scattered again.”

The trauma faced by those responsible for burying the war dead was immense. John unearthed old diaries, searched through newspaper archives and spoke to descendants of serving soldiers to find out how, in a world before social media, people back home were able to learn of the fate of their fathers, husbands, sons and brothers. Identity disks - now known as dog tags - were worn by British soldiers to display their name, number, religion and regiment, but if it was removed from the body, there was no other way to record a fallen man’s remains.

“One man writes about having a heap of slime on a couple of shovels and having to put his hands in the chest of this rotting slime, because if they’re wearing an ID tag, that’s where he’ll find it,” recalls John. “That’s when you really begin to understand and value the people who were doing that work. They were savagely traumatised by what they were doing, and in those days they didn’t speak to anybody about it. It’s not like they had therapists to offload to. And they were still recovering the dead ten years after the war, after thousands upon thousands had already been buried.”

Those who survived the brutal fighting returned home as different men. Some suffered shell shock - what would now be recognised as post-traumatic stress disorder - while others were left physically disabled or simply too broken to carry on. Few ever talked about what they had seen and done. Families who had lost their fathers or sons - perhaps the breadwinners - were forced to continue as normal without having that vital closure of knowing where their loved ones were buried.

It was this unspoken grief that gave rise to the idea of having a national monument dedicated to the memory of all the unknown warriors who gave their lives. Padre David Railton, who ministered to soldiers on the frontline at the Battle of the Somme, came up with the idea and wrote to the Dean of Westminster to ask if an unidentified British soldier could be buried in the abbey to represent all the unknown war dead. Then-prime minister David Lloyd George and King George V agreed, and the monument was to be commemorated with the state funeral on November 11, 1920 - the same day the Cenotaph was set to be unveiled.

More than 20,000 applications for tickets were sent in for the 1,600 places at the abbey, with the committee in charge having to sift through each of them to prioritise women who had lost both their husband and a son in action. Some had lost every single male relative to the war. On the day, hundreds of thousands of people silently lined the route to watch the wooden coffin containing the Unknown Warrior on top of a gun carriage being drawn through the streets of London by six black horses.

“The gathering, the crowds, the grief - it’s astonishing,” says John. “People wanted to believe that that man in that coffin, being transported to that grave, could be their loved one.” One 12-year-old boy had written to the committee asking for a ticket. “The man in the coffin might be my daddy,” he had begged in his letter. “Parents were saying, ‘that’s your dad’, or telling their friend, ‘that’s your husband’. Because it helped. It was a salve to the grief,” says John.

The black Belgian marble slab situated in the western nave of the abbey is the only grave within the building that is never walked over by visitors. Flanked by a rampart of red poppies, its simple inscription says: “Beneath this stone rests the body of a British warrior. Unknown by name or rank. Brought from France to lie among the most illustrious of the land. And buried here on Armistice Day, 11 Nov: 1920, in the presence of His Majesty King George V, his Ministers of State, the Chiefs of his forces and a vast concourse of the nation.” Touchingly, the Queen Mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, left her wedding bouquet on the tomb when she married George VI, as tribute to her soldier brother Fergus who was killed in the Battle of Loos in 1915 and whose body was never recovered. All royal brides since then have continued the poignant tradition.

2024 marks 110 years since the beginning of the Great War, and still we mark each Armistice Day with poppies and a two-minute silence. These traditions are important to continue, says John, who believes they give the grieving an outlet. “There are things those who served never talked about,” he says, “and some of that still holds today. There’s a little gang of us prisoners of war from the Gulf War who get together every year for a quiet beer, followed by 15 extremely loud ones. Our partners have said on a number of occasions, ‘they never talk about this with us’. But we will talk about it together. If you weren’t there, it’s difficult to explain to somebody what it is like. So I understand why that generation never spoke about the war.”

* The Unknown Warrior by John Nichol is out on September 26 through Simon & Schuster. He is touring the book nationwide from October 4 to November 7, 2024 - tickets at johnnichollive.com .