BOOK REVIEW / Heroism under a blood-red sky: 'Tornado Down' - Flight Lts John Peters & John Nichol: Michael Joseph, 15.99 pounds

AS THE crew of an RAF Tornado in 1990, the last thing John Peters and John Nichol were expecting was to be sent to war in the Middle East. When they got there, they certainly did not expect to be shot down on their first bombing mission inside Iraq, captured, imprisoned, and tortured by Ba'ath Party interrogators. During their seven weeks in captivity, the allied airmen suffered mock executions, starvation, solitary confinement, electrocution, beatings with fists, coshes, clubs, boots, truncheons, hosepipes and metal bars. The Iraqis were trying to extract operational information which, the authors note drily, they could have gleaned from a casual perusal of the British press. The two airmen were then paraded on Baghdad television before being returned home to uninvited media celebrity.

There is, however, no self-pity or analytical moralising here. Their story, told in the first person by the flight-lieutenants and Peters's wife, is a plain narration of a process whereby three ordinary people discovered their capacity for coping with adversity, in extraordinary circumstances, while fully exposed to the world's media.

The authors are most at home in the complex world of fly-by-wire techno warfare, and one of the best descriptions is of flying a 30-ton GR1 Tornado, worth pounds 15m, at 600mph some 50 feet above the ground. When Iraq invades Kuwait the squadron is dispatched to Bahrain, where at first the young men can't believe their luck. With its fully marbled interior, they think the Sheraton is the last word in luxury, and that's before they discover the swimming-pools and the Gulf Air Stewardess Training School.

When Peters and Nichol are hit by a SAM missile over Iraq, and the two men eject into captivity, the book changes pace. It becomes taut and menacing as the protagonists confront their interrogators, who chain them in their own excrement and stamp on their testicles eight times a day. The captives survive on a diet of pitta bread and water, which a fellow American pilot tries to turn into 'Chewy soup' by adding the scabs from his wounds.

This book is the story of two minor players in the Desert Storm scenario, with no aspiration to glory or high command, who unwittingly elevate themselves to heroic stature by their refusal to allow adversity to triumph over willpower.