‘I was captured and used as human shield by Saddam’s forces...’
Jon Godsall was working in Kuwait when he was stopped by Iraqi forces who had just invaded the country, and held hostage in terrible conditions for four-and-a-half months. Here, the proud Welshman tells Lucy John of his terrifying ordeal...
AS JON Godsall stepped off his flight and walked through the terminal at Heathrow Airport on a cold December morning in 1990, he was met by a minibus full of his family who couldn’t wait to see him.
But the 23-year-old who stood before them wasn’t the same as the person they had last seen six months earlier. He was more than three stone lighter and subdued in his character.
He had just been released by Iraqi forces who had invaded Kuwait and kept him captive for four-and-a-half months. He had been a hostage of Saddam Hussein, leaving his family wondering if they would ever see him again.
“I don’t think family knew I was coming home until that very morning,” said Jon.
“They were phoned in the morning and they got a minibus to meet me at the airport and it was one of those experiences that doesn’t feel real life.
“I felt like a rabbit in the headlights going back home because I had gotten really good at switching myself off from what was really happening. I just shut myself down for those first few days and weeks.”
Now aged 53, Jon grew up as one of 11 siblings at his family home in Mount Pleasant, Swansea.
After leaving school he followed in the footsteps of his father and older brothers by starting an apprenticeship installing air conditioning and refrigeration with Pontardawe business Kenyon.
Before the fateful day that would change Jon’s life forever, he had taken his trade across the world, installing air conditioning in various British embassies and picking up electrical work along the way.
He had worked at the embassy in Kuwait for around six weeks and felt in complete safety, little knowing there would soon be an invasion.
On August 2, 1990, Jon set off in his car for work as though it was any other day. But he realised something was wrong when he was stopped by several police officers as he neared the embassy. The next thing he knew, he was on the floor with a gun pointing towards him.
“I had literally driven into the invading forces that were taking Kuwait city on my way to work. They took me out of my car and things started getting heated and violent. I was on the floor with a boot in the back of my head, guns at my head and rifles in my ribs.”
The Iraqi soldiers took Jon right into the city, where they held him at the forecourt of the parliament building as they tried to occupy it and the Kuwaitis tried to defend it. He was there the whole day, frightened and confused by the violence he saw before him.
For the next four-and-a-half months, Jon was moved around by soldiers to various military and civil installations – mainly in the south of the country.
The first two weeks were relatively comfortable as he and other western captives spent time at Baghdad’s Mansour Melia Hotel, but for Jon his treatment went downhill rapidly.
“Within three weeks it had become abundantly clear that the likes of myself, who was a single man working in Kuwait with no family out there, were going to be left to use as what they called ‘ human shields’ (held captive).
“As time went on, there was no contact with home and conditions and treatment got worse.
“There would be times when there was no food and it would get very heated as we were a group of seven to nine men with nothing on our minds other than our families back home. And when tempers flared, they’d come up with some sort of treatment to subdue us.
“Thinking of a word to describe it, surreal almost isn’t strong enough. It was almost like being in a hologram for the whole period whereby everything around you is just not real life, because it’s not supposed to be real life.”
While the captives stayed at these various locations, Jon said they were guarded by anti-western soldiers who took great pleasure in tormenting them through any means they could.
Some of the men Jon met completely withdrew, while others would react against the guards violently “and then they’d be taken away and never seen again”.
“Generally there would be three or four plain-clothes security guards with weapons who would be in the room with us,” said Jon.
“How we were treated depended pretty much on what those guards were like. Sometimes no food would turn up, and when I talk about food I’m talking about some stale bread and maybe some boiled eggs.
“They would say we could call our family tonight and then when the night would come, they would just walk out laughing.
“Those are the occasions which would happen day after day and would cause us to lose our temper.
“Conditions also got worse. The last place I stayed at was covered in human faeces when I walked in. I ended up in hospital with dysentery.”
Jon said that although the whole experience was degrading, one incident really stuck out in his memory as being the worst.
He said: “They loaded us onto a coach going slowly through a protesting crowd. People were there with their placards and their news cameras and they were banging and spitting on the coaches.
“Then they took us off the coaches and marched us through the streets.
“Crowds were gathering and throwing food and spitting, we were walked through the streets.
“Supposedly we had a line of soldiers protecting us, but of course they were allowing the punches to come in from the crowds.
“We were just there to allow them to vent their anger on us until we were eventually put back on the coach, bruised and covered in food and spit.”
For Jon, the cruel mixture of his poor treatment and inhumane living conditions led him into a dark mindset.
He didn’t care what happened to him as the months went on and fell into a state of resignation, where he believed he would probably die during captivity in one way or another.
“I just didn’t care what happened to me, all I was concerned about was my family back home who didn’t know if I was dead or alive,” he said. “I actually felt like the lucky one in the situation because at least I knew what was happening.”
Jon said he had been writing home to his family to reassure them that he was alive, but his letters would arrive home six weeks later.
It meant the family only knew for sure that he had been alive six weeks earlier and not knowing if something had happened to him in the meantime.
Around three months into his captivity, Jon said Saddam started making humanitarian gestures and began inviting the families of captives to come over and see their relative to show they were OK.
He said: “That scared me no end that my family would take up that offer because I knew what it was really like – I was afraid of the treatment they might be met with. However, my family were determined and they made the move for my eldest brother who was 40 to come up. He flew up to Jordan trying to get a flight into Baghdad.”
One night Jon was told to pack his few belongings in a plastic bag because he was leaving. However, in instead of being overjoyed, Jo Jon simply didn’t believe it.
“They put me in a car and w we drove from Nasiriyah. W We drove for a few hours th through the night up to Ba Baghdad and we stopped ba back at the hotel from where it had all started. They took m me in there, they told me to s sit down in the foyer and ne n next thing I know, my br b brother walked in.
“There was that initial sh shock and then we sat do down and he gave me lette ters from my family. I felt an overwhelming sense of gu guilt, but my brother took th that away by making me la laugh – he managed to g get us a beer and we sat back in the hotel and he said ‘what’s all the fuss about? because it’s not too bad here actually’.”
Jon said this was e exactly what Saddam Hussein wanted outsiders to believe about the treatment of the captives but, of course, it couldn’t have been further from the reality of what many endured.
“After a few days, my brother quickly caught light of the situation. He wasn’t allowed to leave the grounds of the hotel, which he didn’t expect, he became ill with the food, and became quite low and, of course, I was of a very different mind frame,” said Jon.
“After about six days of him being there, it was announced that we could go home. And, just like that, they put us onto coaches and took us to the airport onto a British Airways flight. There were a lot of people celebrating but I just sat there very subdued still not believing a word of it.”
When he finally saw his family, every one of them was overcome with a sense of relief and disbelief.
They had been campaigning to get him home from the first day he was taken and now everything they had so desperately hoped for had finally come true. However, Jon never felt like quite the same person again.
For the first six months of Jon being home in Mount Pleasant, he has very little recollection of what happened or how he felt as he turned to alcohol to try to numb his memories of his time in Iraq.
But he said something suddenly changed in him and all he wanted was to get back to Kenyon’s, the humble job he left behind and to settle down with children – and that is exactly what he did.
“I got my life back on track,” said John. “But that hologram feeling, where everything just seems to happen in front of my eyes, has always stayed with me.”
Jon said that until now, he had completely buried the details of what really happened to him – even to his own family, whom he wanted to protect.
However, a sequence of events in lockdown has led to him opening up for the first time in 30 years. He is currently working with Swanseabased author John Morris to tell his life story. He said the process was finally helping him to come to terms with his ordeal and that he felt very positive for the future.