The great reunion of old foes

FULLER VERSION OF MY TIMES STORY TODAY: The trauma of being shot down and captured by irate Iraqi soldiers threatening to kill them is still vivid in the minds of two US Navy bomber pilots 30 years after the Gulf War. However, a remarkable reconciliation and friendship between Lieutenants Bob Wetzel and Jeff Zaun with the Iraqi general who took charge of the two prisoners of war and treated them properly under the Geneva Convention has helped to change their lives. Major-General Layth Muneer, commander of the Iraqi air force’s H-3 airfield in Anbar province in the 1991 war, stopped the soldiers from beating the two pilots and took them to the infirmary at the base where doctors treated them. The following morning he sent them both off to Baghdad as PoWs. That was the last he saw or heard of them. A conversation on a tennis court in Alexandria, Virginia 21 years later led to a reunion between the old foes and their friendship has blossomed ever since. “He saved our lives,” said Bob Wetzel, now 60, married with two children and living in Denver, Colorado. He and Jeff Zaun, his navigator on the night of January 17, 1991, at the beginning of Operation Desert Storm, had been tasked to bomb the H-3 airbase. They had flown in their A-6 Intruder bomber from the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga in the Red Sea – call sign Quicksand - and came under intense missile and anti-aircraft artillery fire as they approached.Wetzel evaded two missiles. But a third, a Franco-German short-range Roland missile hit the A-6 and as the engine was “eating itself with a screeching sound” the two crewmen both shouted: “Eject, eject, eject.” Zaun recalled the terrifying moment when they were forced to surrender after trying to escape across the sand dunes, “surrounded by yelling Iraqi soldiers firing their guns in the air and pushing us around, until the senior officer turned up and called for order”. “He spoke in Arabic to his soldiers but he told us in English that he would take care of us,” Wetzel said. Wetzel had two broken arms and other injuries from the ejection and was taken to a hospital in Baghdad. Zaun had suffered severe bruising but with no broken bones and was sent to the Iraqi secret police headquarters in the capital where he was beaten with rubber hoses and forced to appear in a TV propaganda broadcast. His battered face became one of the enduring images of the Gulf War. General Muneer left Iraq, lived in Egypt and then arrived in the US and applied for asylum. His application is bogged down in the asylum courts and his request will not be heard until 2026. However, his love of tennis opened a new chapter in his life. He told his tennis partner Rodrigo Cruz about the two American pilots and how he and his son, a soldier in the US army, had given up trying to find them. “I assumed Bob and Jeff had survived the war but I failed to find them until I mentioned it to Rodrigo who traced Jeff’s mother,” Muneer said. “The Great Meeting as I named it was in Crystal City [Arlington, Virginia] at Ted’s Montana Grill. I was so excited to meet them after more than 21 years. They were supposed to be my enemy at that time and now they have become my friends at this time. The world is too small,” he said. His tennis partner Cruz who was at the reunion said: “I will always remember what Jeff said when I first contacted him. He said, ‘what, is the general still alive, is he really in the US? You’re not bullshitting me?’” Meeting up with the Iraqi general was “pretty bizarre”, Zaun, 58, who lives in Jersey City, admitted. “I was working three blocks from the Twin Towers on 9/11 so I don’t get fazed by much. I’m hard to amaze but it was kind of cool,” he said. The three old enemies meet every year on January 17, except last year because of the Covid pandemic. They are hoping to meet again soon. The two US pilots are giving their full support to General Muneer in his asylum application for residency. But Zaun said: "I don't think it's anything to do with the general personally, it's just that the asylum courts are overwhelmed with applications and there are not enough judges to deal with them."