DONNA KELLEY, CNN ANCHOR: "CNN 20" today: A journalist's war story.</s>ANNOUNCER: Bringing you the world for 20 years, this is CNN.</s>GREG LAMOTTE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I was asked, because there was fighting going on in southern Iraq, to go into southern Iraq with cameraman Tyrone Edwards (ph) and see if we could get some pictures of this insurrection that was, in essence, going on.</s>UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: All the journalists say they've taken a calculated risk to get to the story in Basara, expecting that the Iraqis would turn them back towards Kuwait.</s>LAMOTTE: Suddenly we found ourselves surrounded by Iraqi troops with machine guns. They took us into custody, they put machine guns to our heads, they told us to sit in a ditch, which at that point in time I had decided they were just going to kill us here, and, in essence, held us for five days in a four-room, no-electricity, no- heat, no-water kind of environment and gave us pees and hard bread to eat. The most terrifying thing about that wasn't anything that they did to us. It was more of the mental anguish that one goes through of not knowing from second to second whether or not you're going to be alive a minute from now or five minutes from now.</s>UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: CNN's Greg LaMotte and cameraman Tyrone Edwards were greeted by anxious colleagues when they arrived in Amman after being released by Iraqi soldiers who captured them near the city of Basara.</s>LAMOTTE: It is an experience I'll never forget. It's not one I want to relive. It made me have a greater relationship with higher authorities, and I think it also made me appreciate life a little more and the fact that it is so fleeting.
CNN 20: A Journalist's War Story, 1991