Confessions

One particular aspect of the recent incident involving the 15 British sailors captured by Iran has been nagging at me: the way that 13 of the 15 had “confessions” coerced from them very quickly, and without any apparent long-lasting consequences (within hours of returning home, all 15 appeared at a press conference, looking hale and hearty).

This was manifestly different than incidents I remember from the Vietnam war, especially the famous story of Admiral Stockman, but also including many other American heroes. These American soldiers resisted every attempt by the their captors to subvert them — and these attempts included physical torture so severe that many American prisoned died of the injuries sustained, and they went on for years. More recently, I recalled the stories of the U.S. Marines captured when Iranian “revolutionaries” captured the American embassy in Tehran almost 30 years ago. Mark Bowden, in Guests of the Ayatollah, put it like this:

For many weeks, Political Officer John W. Limbert, Jr. had no contact with anyone other than his guards. He began to worry that something had happened. Had everyone else been released? Had he been left behind? Had the others been killed?

Then one day a guard asked him to define some English words that he didn’t understand.

The words were “raghead,” “bozo,” “motherfucker,” and “cocksucker.” Limbert laughed. It warmed his heart. Someplace nearby his captors were still coping with the United States Marine Corps.

It warms my heart, too. I know it would be no different today.

This tradition of brave resistance was one that I thought the British shared. This recent incident indicates otherwise, and makes me wonder what has happened to the famous British grit in the space of one generation. These sailors behaved more like what I’d expect from mainland European soldiers, as the stories of NATO soldiers in Afghanistan reveal.

I suspect the Iranians had this softness — which they would know well from operations inside Iraq — in mind when they selected British targets instead of American targets…