We're being fired upon.
And I felt the burn.
I'd been hit.
They throw me in the back of the truck.
I just thought, Oh my God, I'm captured, they have me.
What's your name?
Shana.
I'm a prisoner.
I'm a prisoner of war.
When I was 13, my parents gave me a hand mixer and a cookie press.
I was always baking.
She was talking about going to culinary school, and, you know,
I remember telling her, "You find something that you really love and you go for it."
For me, that was cooking. I wanted to be a chef,
and the Army was the way to pay for it.
I laughed at her. I said, "Shoshana, the military doesn't produce chefs.
They produce cooks." She said, "Well, I can get a start."
And she did. She joined the service.
Let's go! Let's go! Hurry up!
I developed good friendships in the unit.
Laurie Piestewa and Jessica Lynch,
we got to know each other.
Slept in close quarters.
Laurie and I spoke about being moms quite a bit.
Being a cook in the Army is considered
a safe job,
but I soon realized there is no safe job in the Army.
My fellow citizens,
at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations
to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.
We ended up falling significantly behind.
We ended up basically by ourselves.
We were lost, and I was worried
because the Iraqis had time to set up an ambush.
We could hear gunfire hitting our vehicle.
The adrenaline started going.
I was terrified.
We were kind of run off the road by an Iraqi truck.
We're still taking fire.
We get underneath the vehicle, try and return fire,
and I felt the burn of my legs.
I've been hit. So I know those bullets are coming underneath the vehicle now.
I started praying.
I hoped my daughter would be OK and
I hoped that, you know, my parents had a body to bury.
And then I feel extreme pain in my legs,
and I'm being dragged from underneath the vehicle.
I just thought, Oh my God, I'm captured. They have me.
I'm getting hit and kicked
and punched and just beat all to hell.
My helmet falls off, and my braids come out.
And one gentleman in uniform realizes I'm a female
and I am dragged away.
You automatically think rape, torture, kill.
We're blindfolded, hands tied,
and then we're taken to a location.
I have no idea where.
Next thing you know, the guys start coming in.
Sgt. Riley, Patrick Miller, Edgar Hernandez, Joe Hudson
and the two pilots from another unit. Now I'm thinking, Well, there's more.
Yet, there was no more.
It was just them.
So I thought, really, the whole unit was dead, except for us.
And then a man in charge in uniform took the edge of the AK and put it right here on my face
and brought my face down
so I wouldn't look at him directly in the face.
Now at that moment, you realize he could just pull the trigger and it's all over.
Then we were taken one by one and interrogated,
and that's when the camera crew comes in.
What's your name?
Shana.
And I was asked a range of questions.
From any unit in...
American Army?
507th Maintenance.
We didn't have POW training.
I mean, given our jobs...
It's just a basic code: You don't give up information.
Sunday morning, we're having our little breakfast,
and then, bam, the door gets kicked down.
Go! Go!
It was, it was glorious.
It was glorious. Clear English:
Get down, get down.
Clear English.
I didn't get down.
Like, I was like, I'm an American.
They're not talking to me.
So I was like,
I was looking at the guards and I'm thinking: They're talking to you.
They're not talking to me. And I remember the Marine coming up:
"When I give you the signal, you move to that vehicle right there,
that tracked vehicle right there." And I had been holding on tight.
I wasn't going to cry.
And that's when I broke down and cried because
I couldn't walk.
He was like, "But that's OK, you're going home.
I got, we got you out of there, and you're going home."
When Shoshana returned home,
she was thrust into the limelight,
Shoshana was the first Black female prisoner of war.
And I told her it was history and that's what was happening.
We were not happy with all the attention.
We were rescued, were thrust into the limelight,
and we had no moment to grieve for those who passed away.
Even 18 years later, we're still, I think all of us are still dealing with the weight of it.
The first thing I noticed was that Shoshana would panic for things that would seem,
you know, just ordinary.
She was fearful of the crowds, and her eyes were still darting from side to side
like somebody that was going to be captured again.
Sort of what we saw in the clip that was shown when she was captured originally.
They know something is wrong,
but they don't know what is wrong, and those symptoms go unnoticed.
It is not acknowledged as real until things start happening.
You don't realize as you're
trying to go forward what's going to trigger a memory.
It could be a smell, a sound, seeing a picture. It's a lot of different things.
And I have to admit, the thing that helps me gets through it is when I'm with other veterans,
and we go back to the basics of what we did together.
Nothing can duplicate that.
And that really sets me right again.
I think for a lot of veterans, it's a long road.
It can't be done by yourself. If you could, you would have already done it.
So seeking help doesn't make you less.
It makes you stronger because you know
that you have weaknesses and how to build upon yourself to grow bigger.