Even when it’s over, it isn’t over. Former hostages are marked for life by their ordeal, waking to the memory every day and defining themselves by the experience. Last week Terry Anderson, Alann Steen and Joseph Cicippio were in the first predictable stage of returning to the world: euphoria. But re-entry will be complex and often painful.
The most obvious scars are physical. Like Steen, Cicippio and Jenco, several hostages were brutally beaten, including Frank Reed, a former schoolmaster, and Thomas Sutherland, who had been dean of agriculture at the American University of Beirut. Robert Polhill, a former business professor at Beirut University College, returned from 39 months of captivity with throat cancer that consumed his larynx. The mental and emotional damage is subtler, but most former captives report varying degrees of anger, anxiety, depression and disorientation. Some have nightmares and flashbacks; many have trouble fitting back into families and jobs.
For many, the first euphoria is reinforced by unexpected celebrity. “Enjoy it a little,” Jenco advises dryly. “You’ll be a footnote in history 20 years from now.” At first, he says, “you wonder, ‘How am I ever going to thank all these people?’ " But then the demands begin: come and speak to the school that held prayers for you; please play bingo with a group that began each session by praying for the hostages. “I called Tom Sutherland,” says Jenco. “He was out giving a talk to a school, and I thought, ‘I know the process’.”
Hostages can be disoriented by the way the world has changed, in ways large and small, and all of them say they need time to catch up. “Everyone wants to overload your circuits with the past,” says Reed. Polhill was “flabbergasted” by the Soviet Union’s collapse. But he also had a mild shock at the inroads of computers into everyday life: “I didn’t expect to come home and have to push buttons to get into the bathroom.”
The most jarring adjustments come in family life. Like Terry Anderson, several hostages have had to form relationships with children or grandchildren they have never seen. In Wiesbaden last week, Steen looked at his frowning 9-month-old grandson Dillon and said, only half in jest, “I don’t think this one likes me.” And the ordeal inevitably changes the relationship with a wife or fiancee. The Rev. Benjamin Weir reports that while he was a hostage, he and his wife, Carol, effectively reversed roles, he becoming passive and introverted while she overcame her shyness to crusade for his release. Frank Reed had thought his marriage was over: during his captivity, he was told twice that his wife, Fahima, was dead. These days, he says, Fahima can’t understand why a man who has been in solitary confinement needs to spend time alone. She and their son Tarek, he says, “are hostage to my hostaging experience.”
It’s understandable that, like Reed, some ex-captives are left rootless and groping for a role in life. “I don’t know where I belong,” he says. But others resist being stereotyped as posttraumatic cripples. “You come out basically the same as when you were kidnapped,” says David Jacobsen, who spent 18 months in captivity. “We can function.” And some find a fresh sense of purpose. Father Jenco has come to Christian terms with his captivity and even with his captors. When one guard asked forgiveness for keeping him in isolation for six months, Jenco asked the guard’s pardon for having hated him. “After that, there was a peace between us,” he says. “Call it the Stockholm syndrome if you want. I know there was love in the end.”
