As the two men held me down, one on each side, someone began pouring water onto the
blindfold, and suddenly I was drowning. The water streamed into my nose and then into my
mouth when I gasped for breath. I couldn’t stop it. All I could breathe was water, and it was
terrifying. I think I began to lose consciousness. I felt my lungs begin to fill with burning liquid.
Pulling out my fingernails or even cutting off a finger would have been preferable…Even
though I knew that I was in a military facility and that my ‘captors’ would not kill me, no
matter what they threatened, my body sensed and reacted to the danger it was in… Back then,
we didn’t call it waterboarding – we called it ‘water torture’.