Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 15, 1992 TAG: 9203150120
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TERRY ANDERSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
I should have known better. After 2 1/2 years in Lebanon, you get to be able to smell danger. Unfortunately, my nose went numb.
The day before they got me, four men in a new Mercedes had tried to kidnap me as I drove back to work from lunch in my seaside apartment.
They screeched past me at a turn and tried to force my car to the curb. I whipped my car around theirs and kept going. They chased me and tried again, but I got away with a sharp right turn down a side street. They gave up as I neared a Lebanese army checkpoint.
The next day, I just got up as usual and went to keep a 7 a.m. tennis date with AP photographer Don Mell. I don't know why.
Maybe too many chances taken successfully had made me too sure of my safety.
It didn't last.
As I stopped to drop Mell off after the game at his apartment a few hundred yards from mine, the Mercedes reappeared. The men, armed with pistols, leaped out and yanked open my car door before I could move.
It would be almost seven years before I would be a free man again. In that time, I was moved to nearly 20 places - underground cells, secret hiding places, even ordinary apartments but with windows covered with sheet metal - in Beirut, South Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley.
Like all the hostages, I spent much of my time blindfolded and chained. Some were beaten. Some were psychologically abused. Several died of sickness or neglect - murder just the same.
The physical and verbal abuse was, of course, hard to take. But it was less difficult for me than for some of the others. Six years in the Marine Corps and 15 knocking around the world for the AP - Asia, Africa, the Middle East - had taught me to take whatever came along, good or bad. The first time I was beaten, by two armed and vicious guards, as I lay chained by both hands and feet and blindfolded, I offered no resistance - just telling myself over and over "Do nothing. Fighting back is useless. They'll get tired."
The humiliation of such treatment, and the thousands of major and minor humiliations that followed over the years, were harder to deal with. The only real defense was to remember that no one could take away my self-respect and dignity - only I could do that.
Constantly over the years, I found consolation and counsel in the Bible I was given in the first few weeks. Not other-world, "this is just a test" kind of consolation, but comfort from the real, immediate voices of people who had suffered greatly, and in ways that seemed so close to what I was going through. I read the Bible more than 50 times, cover to cover.
The other most important factor during those years was my fellow hostages.
Except for a total of perhaps a year of solitary confinement, in spurts of varying lengths, I always had companions. All of the nine men I shared cells with at various times helped me, and I hope I helped them. We talked, endlessly and about everything. We played chess, and cards (secretly at first with homemade decks - cards are forbidden by the strict fundamentalists who held us. Later, they conceded us the privilege.) We made a Monopoly set, and a Scrabble game. We taught each other things - agriculture, economics, education, journalism, literature. Mostly, we depended on each other.
The treatment improved after a while, though it often slipped back. We were allowed a radio, and books from time to time, and for the last year, news magazines almost every week - Time, Newsweek, The Economist, Business Week. But the chains and blindfolds stayed.
Strangely, though, there seemed to be no great personal dislike toward most of us. "It's political," my captors often said. "There was nothing else we could do."
Their logic was impossible to grasp. Our differences went beyond culture or religion or language. Their minds were just different from ours. Two and two made not four but six, or 16 or 60 or whatever it might be fantasized to.
Even the most reasonable of them, those we could talk to in English or French, eluded us and we would give up, too weary to try to build what seemed to be an impossible bridge.
I'm convinced they believed there was nothing else they could do to bring their demands to the world's attention. I told them often that there is always some other way.
And now, their demands aside, events went forward - their jailed brethren in Kuwait were free, Iran-Contra happened, the war, shifting balances, the prospect of peace talks and finally the changing situation in Iran, with President Rafsanjani's desire to use trade with the West to repair Iran-Iraq war damages. But the fundamentalists needed to know that holding us would not help them achieve their aims.
Finally, the United Nations was able to take a hand and its able special envoy, Giandomenico Picco, made secret and dangerous and finally successful trips. And then, slowly and agonizingly, it came to its end - except for the two Germans still held by a particularly fanatic family, the Hamadis, who demand the release of two Hamadi brothers jailed in Germany.
The rest of us are back in "the real world," as we used to refer to it, just the way we did in Vietnam. That phrase, used then in mockery, seems very appropriate now.
The pain, frustration, rage and loneliness of those years seem as though they happened in some other world, not my real one.
I thought I was well prepared for the shock of the real world. I'd watched and heard the experiences of more than a dozen others over the years. When we heard John McCarthy, after his release, on the BBC's Outlook program saying, "I had no idea how intense it would be," we even thought he might be exaggerating a bit. He wasn't.
From the moment I appeared before the journalists at the Foreign Ministry in Damascus, friends and colleagues all, I began to understand what John had meant. My own emotions were overwhelming. Many others seemed to feel it as strongly as I did.
From the brief press conference, I went directly to the U.S. Embassy to be reunited with my fiance and our daughter, Sulome, who was born after my kidnapping. Sulome was asleep on a couch - it was midnight of a very long day for her. We woke her gently. She didn't know what to say, didn't seem to grasp that it was all finally real.
"I know your real name is Sulome Theresa Anderson," I said. "But I'm going to call you Button. Do you know why?"
She shook her head.
"Because I wrote a poem about you, and I called you Button. So that has to be your nickname."
"Yes," she said, smiling.
After meeting a close friend, Robert Fisk, at the embassy, and talking with my family by phone, we went to the waiting U.S. Air Force plane, and on to the military hospital at Wiesbaden in what had become a routine for released hostages.
New York had never been so friendly, so welcoming. People from the AP headquarters in Rockefeller Plaza and neighboring buildings jammed the street to greet me. Taxi drivers refused to take my money, and people in restaurants sent over bottles of wine when we went out for dinner. Washington was equally openhearted. A visit to the White House, the Christmas tree lighting, a reception hosted by the organization called No Greater Love and the Journalists' Committee to Free Terry Anderson - it was a homecoming I had never dreamed of.
As a crowning touch, the AP sent us to a private resort on a small Caribbean island, one of the loveliest, quietest spots I've ever visited. There, with the help of two psychiatric specialists in hostage and prisoner decompression, I began to understand fully what readjustment would mean. It will take a long time, and it's hard work. But it's joyful work, learning again about the people I love, and about myself.
There have been both physical and psychological aftereffects. I found myself much weaker than I thought - I could barely run a hundred yards, and a few days walking on New York's concrete sidewalks made my knees and ankles ache. Daily sessions of weight lifting at a gym are solving that problem.
The first few weeks found me late for every single appointment, and incredibly disorganized. I'd lost the skill of managing all the small things that make up a day - when to shave, where I put my wallet, what I'm supposed to do next.
Most of all, I've been bemused by the sudden onslaught of choices - from where and what to eat to what will we do when this enormously pleasurable vacation is over.
I've been a journalist nearly all my adult life, and most of that for the AP. Twenty of the last 25 years I've been out of the country. Do we go back overseas? Where? Do I change careers? I'm 44. This is the last chance I'll have to make major alterations in my life. What should they be?
There are many things, though, that are less confusing. Getting to know my daughter has been a joy. She finds it a bit startling - the father image in her mind is suddenly a real, live (and not always enjoyable) person, with whom she has to share her mom. But she's highly intelligent, spirited and beautiful, like her mother.
And that's another joy. John McCarthy put it so well after he was released. "It's wonderful," he said in an interview on the BBC, "to fall in love again with the woman you already love."
This is one of the lessons I learned in those seven years - what's important. People are important, and the ones you love are more important than anything else - job, money, anything.
Sometimes as we walk down the beautiful beach late at night, ankle-deep in the clear water, with thousands of stars overhead, I think about that mocking reference to the "real world."
This isn't the real one, either. It's too beautiful.
The real one, with its bustle and intensity, its crowds, its hopes and its pains, large and small, is still waiting for me. I'm almost ready for it.
by CNB