Female POW: I wasn't a hero
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SAN ANTONIO - Her mother walked through her days in a fog, not knowing if her only child was dead or alive. Her father prayed day and night. Hundreds of people she had never met wore POW bracelets inscribed with her name.
Locked away in a Baghdad prison for 33 days, Melissa Coleman had no idea such a fuss was being raised about her. She assumed the video and snapshots taken by her Iraqi captors let everyone know she was OK.
And, amazingly, she was.
"Even though it was in the middle of a war, and it was air raids going on - I could see the traces of them shooting anti-air warfare - it was peaceful," says Coleman, then Melissa Rathbun-Nealy and the first of two female U.S. prisoners of war in the Persian Gulf War.
"I was just alone, I was by myself, and I had to rely on myself and my mind. I'd talk to myself. It's weird to say, but it was peaceful."
Today, the only outward traces of her service are a fingertip-sized shrapnel scar on her forearm and two scars the size of jelly beans in her upper arm from the puncture and exit of a bullet.
But like thousands of fellow veterans, Coleman says she suffers from chronic fatigue, memory loss, headaches and muscle pain. The ailments are associated with an unexplained condition known as Gulf War syndrome.
Teenager, truck driver, POW
Now 30, she left the Army in 1993 and is a stay-at-home mom living off medical disability and her husband's pay. The San Antonio apartment she shares with her husband, fellow Gulf War veteran Michael Coleman, and their 7- and 8-year-old daughters bears no symbols of their days at war.
On a recent afternoon, her husband was sleeping after an overnight shift at the post office, and her girls were at school. Her parents, Leo and Joan Rathbun, were visiting for the winter from Newaygo, Mich.
Fiddling with a shiny purple press-on nail and running her fingers through her hair, Coleman recalls how she went from a sassy, rebellious teenager who joined the Army on a whim to a soldier who drove tank-hauling trucks to a POW at age 20. And then, how her life changed on Jan. 31, 1991.
More than three weeks before the 100-hour ground war began, Coleman and her partner, 23-year-old Spec. David Lockett of Bessemer, Ala., were hauling tanks to the front lines when they made a wrong turn and accidentally crossed the border from Saudi Arabia to Kuwait.
"All of the sudden, we hear gunfire, and I just jumped on the floor," she says calmly.
Blood splattered. Coleman was shot in the arm. Both were cut by shrapnel. The truck stalled. Lockett pulled Coleman out, and before they knew it, they were surrounded by 10 to 15 Iraqi soldiers wielding AK-47s.
Three meals and a courtyard
Coleman cried at first, then prayed for strength.
Over the next day and a half, the two were whisked across the desert and interrogated at abandoned buildings along the way.
She finally got medical treatment at the prison in Baghdad where they ended up.
While some of the 21 U.S. POWs said they were beaten, starved or held in solitary confinement, Coleman says she was fed three meals a day, given access to a courtyard and allowed to walk freely from her cell to a bathroom down the hall.
"Looking back, it really wasn't that traumatic," says Coleman, who is believed to have been the first U.S. servicewoman imprisoned by enemies since World War II.
Back home, word spread that a female truck driver was missing in action.
No name had been released, but Leo Rathbun had a pit in his stomach.
He went out and bought a fifth of whiskey. After a couple of drinks, the doorbell rang. Through the window, Rathbun saw an Army uniform. It was the beginning of a long month of waiting and wondering.
"It was almost like a case of hopelessness because we couldn't get any information from the government at all," Joan Rathbun says. "We knew that they weren't in the truck. We didn't know if they tried to escape, whether they were shot dead, whether they were buried in the sand someplace - we knew nothing."
Their fears finally were put to rest March 4, when they turned on CNN after an excited phone call from a friend and saw Coleman and other POWs being turned over to the Red Cross at a Baghdad hotel.
Unaware that her high-school senior picture had been published and broadcast worldwide, Coleman was surprised to hear the shouts from strangers: "Melissa, are you OK? Melissa, did they hurt you?"
Over the next several weeks, the swarms of news crews were about as daunting to Coleman as her imprisonment. But she found a way to cash in on her fame, making "nice sums of money" by telling her story to tabloid TV shows.
"What did I do to be a hero?"
Less than a month later, Coleman returned to her post in El Paso and quickly married Michael Coleman, who had proposed before the war. She then was exposed to the downside of celebrity when she received hate mail over her marriage to a black man. Coleman, who is white, began shunning the spotlight.
Today, she has settled into a quiet routine of driving her daughters to school and taking computer classes. Her Purple Heart, Prisoner of War and National Defense Service medals are stuffed in a closet. When her dad suggests she dig them out and display them, she shrugs, much as she scoffs at being called a hero.
"What did I do to be a hero?" Coleman says. "I didn't do anything. The ones that flew the air raids, the ones that got Kuwait back, they were the ones that were the heroes."