wood agonised at 'treachery' Wood agonised at 'treachery'By...

wood agonised at 'treachery' Wood agonised at 'treachery'
By David King and Drew Warne-Smith
June 27, 2005
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Duress ... Mr Wood said he felt 'rotten' being home after his two Iraqi assistants were murdered / Channel 10. IN his darkest hours, when all seemed lost, Douglas Wood turned to his memories to sustain him.

His happy childhood, his loving family and his first memories of football kept him sane while he was surrounded by death and despair.
Speaking for the first time in detail about his capture, Mr Wood told how he felt like a traitor.

"I replayed my life, all the girls I've ever known, try and count them, what were their names," he said yesterday as he spoke of his ordeal.

"My first tooth being pulled, my first blood nose, skidding down the banisters, playing footy with my friend Robert Little, four boys running around Lakes Entrance."

He would also cast his mind back to his beloved Cats - the great Geelong teams of 1952-53 - when Brownlow medallist Bernie Smith would stream off the half-back flank.

This was how the big Australian engineer found the will to live through a 47-day ordeal that captured the world's attention and ended with a dramatic shootout in a suburban Baghdad home.

For the first time yesterday Mr Wood spoke of how he endured his time in the clutches of the Shura Council of the Mujahideen, who he described as murderous kidnappers motivated by money.

In an interview with Channel 10, he last night told of hearing fellow captives executed next to him and the sound of guards washing the blood away. He told of his shame as he stared into a video camera and begged the leaders of the coalition of the willing to pull their troops out of Iraq.

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He described how he looked at the camera and tried to cry, repeating the words of the insurgent leader.

In front of him were his two assistants Faris and Ardel, blindfolded, bound and gagged, forced to their knees with guns at their heads.

"I think my strongest emotion was that of a traitor, even daring to say to the President and the Prime Minister that you should take the troops out," he said. "Emotionally at the time I had trouble saying to President Bush and Prime Minister Howard that you've to get the troops out.

"I also physically had a problem that I had to cry because I'm a male chauvinist, and we don't do that."

Mr Wood endured much during his time in captivity.

Physical beatings, psychological trauma, the pain of waiting to die.

But his lowest moments didn't occur as he worried about his own fate, they came as others suffered.

The darkest of these was when his two Iraqi employees - captured only because of the man they worked for - were gagged, blindfolded and marched away to seemingly certain death, while Wood stayed behind. As they left, he had whispered to them the words "caravans, caravans".

He was referring to the trailers his business was contracted to deliver to two clients - and he intended it as a sign of hope for their future.

But in his heart, he feared the worst. "Baghdad's tough," he said.

Those fears have since been confirmed. Their bodies found recently in a rubbish dump, Mr Wood said.

Mr Wood does not think he was captured because he was betrayed by someone in his company. He said it was simply an opportunist grab made by criminals when he ventured into their territory. Late in April Wood went to a private house in Baghdad, on the premise of securing a business deal. He was introduced to the occupants of the house in the usual way, but within minutes the men would become his captors.


At gunpoint he and his workmates were bundled upstairs and into the first of two locations where he would spend the next seven weeks.

Asked what went through his mind as he heard the murders, he said: "When's my turn?"

Asked if he was scared, he replied, "of course".Wood tried to block out the horror of the executions by pretending to be asleep. "My emotion was more like: pretend you're asleep, that you didn't hear the gunshot."

But fellow captive Ulf Hjertstrom couldn't deal with the violence so easily. He has spent $50,000 on bounty hunters to track down his jailers.

Over the time of his imprisonment, Mr Wood appeared in three videos, two of which were broadcast, and on one occasion appeared with black eyes and a shaved head.

He said his beating came after the insurgents had gone to his office to rob him of $176,000 he told them he had there.

"I think they thought I had a lot of money, I had said I had some money in the house, they went there, and found more money than I had said was there. They stomped on my head, just a bang stomping on the head, and a little bit of rub in the heel, and walked off. They just said 'I'm sorry' and went on about their business."

Yesterday Mr Wood described his own dramatic rescue. It was signalled by 15 Iraqis kicking down the door of the house where he had been held. According to the US military, the insurgents fired two shots, which missed their targets, before they were wrestled to the ground.

"I could heard this commotion outside, a violent noise, yelling and screaming ... Iraqis ... Then the door is unlocked and someone races over to me and whips off my blindfold and throws a blanket over me."

The noise and gunfire raged on, until Mr Wood's blanket was removed and his rescuer revealed himself. "I'm Iraqi," he told Mr Wood. "Well, I'm an Australian," he said back.

Even then, however, he said he feared his cell may have been stormed by al-Qaeda. "That means cut-my-throat-time again."

But it was the words "I'm Iraqi army" and then "come with us" from a second soldier that confirmed to Mr Wood he would survive the ordeal.

He was then led outside onto the patio and into the sunshine - and the arms of the awaiting US troops supporting the Iraqi raid.

Of the criticism he has received about payment for the interview, Mr Wood was typically blunt.

"It's a free economy," he said. "What the heck."