Authors: Brian Keenan
In front of us, chained to the wall a few feet away, sat our American companions. For a few moments we stared at each other in silence. I looked at each of the men who for so long I had only seen above the bridge of a nose, and took in the full face, bearded and unkempt. I remembered how in those silent conversations shaping words in the air I had so desperately wanted to reach out and touch these men.
The Bekaa valley is a huge lush valley through which one must pass to enter Syria. It is renowned for the ruined temple of Baal, a pre-Christian deity. The Romans, when they entered this area, unlike Lebanon’s most recent invaders, did not seek to destroy the civilization that existed there but merely to conquer and control it. The fertile land and the seasonable climate allowed rich harvests to grow here.
The Romans grew grain to sustain the population and their own occupying armies. Much of the other produce found its way back to Italy. It was known to the Roman conquerors as the bread basket of the region. The ruins of the temple at Baalbeck are still standing. But the tourists from Europe, the archaeologists and students of history have long since left. It is no place for a Westerner, no matter how passive or academic he may be. The valley itself shelters many different factions. The Syrian army makes frequent excursions into it, and factions of the PLO maintain their headquarters in the valley. A contingent of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards had set up quarters in an army barracks evacuated by the Lebanese army many years ago.
Strange to think that Kahlil Gibran, Lebanon’s famous poet and mystic philosopher, used to wander these hills.
Five men in this underground room somewhere near Baalbek sat looking at one another, unaware at the time that our presence here added to the notoriety of the valley. Our exchange of greetings was not the exuberant welcome between comrades-in-arms or even between prisoners suffering under the same system, reunited after separation. We looked at one another, embarrassed and shy, curious and I think a little bit frightened. It had been years since either John or I had been in a room with other men with whom we could talk. The Americans’ initial hesitancy spoke, I suppose, of the same inhibitions.
Terry Anderson was first to break the ice and introduce himself. ‘I’m Anderson … you must be McCarthy.’ John shook hands, and I followed, then Tom Sutherland introduced himself. Frank Reed sat back, silent. He did not seem to want to come forward. Terry said ‘This is Frank Reed … He’s been with us for some time now.’ Frank edged forward on his mattress and shook hands with both of us.
Unlike us Frank kept his blindfold shielding his eyes, and on his head he wore a towel. I wondered why, but said nothing.
Initially we spoke of the horrors of the journey that brought us all here. The Americans had been carried separately by the same method.
They were amazed that both John and I and a guard should have travelled so long under such conditions. We all agreed that it was an unbearable experience and none of us wanted to repeat it. In the next few days we shared what news we had collected at the different locations and from the different guards who had held us. Crisscrossing with this exchange of recently acquired information each man in his turn talked about his own abduction and the conditions in which he had been held.
Terry Anderson told how for the first few weeks he had been chained by both wrists and both ankles to a mattressless bed. It was extremely uncomfortable. The guards seemed not to care when he complained. Often in the night, chained on the bare springs of a bedstead, blindfolded, he would be visited by the guards and some would poke their guns at him and others stroke his chin with a handgun and whisper threats, laughing teasingly. Others would stand on his naked body and jump up and down. There was another whose perversion was of a different kind, for his mind was full of childish horror: at night he “would sit stroking Anderson’s face with his gun and say ‘I am Dracula, tonight I kill you.’ At first, said Anderson, the humour was not lost on him, but as the nights went on this man’s visits and his childish abuse became sickening.
Anderson was known by his captors to have once been a sergeant in the American Marines. Hence the prolonged period in chains. He told us how one of the chiefs of the organization, who we all came to know as the Haj, had come to visit him and warned him with slow and serious deliberation that if he tried to escape he would not be shot or killed but he would suffer great pain for many, many days. It was simple and direct and he meant it. Anderson spent only a short period on his own and then was put into the company of the American hostages Jacobsen, Jenko and Weir, all of whom had since been released.
Sutherland’s story was different, for he had spent only a matter of days on his own before being united with the other Americans. He spoke about his abduction and those first months of his captivity in a different voice.
He spoke slowly and softly, sometimes faltering at the memory of his early experience. Even with the companionship of his American friends, he had felt himself completely devastated. For months his mind was in such turmoil that he could not relate to the people around him. He found their simple questions confusing and could not indulge in any conversation with them. He felt so worthless that he sat for many hours every day in these first months in uncommunicative silence. Tom’s face as he spoke showed he was still deeply troubled by his experience. We listened in silence. For each of us knew what he was talking about.
When we related our own stories I spoke directly to Tom. The others listened but I wanted to speak to him. I wanted to reassure him that what he had felt and might still feel was common to all of us. All of us were subject to that debilitating loneliness. All of us felt impotent before it. I spoke of some of my own experiences and feelings.
However something in me warned me to be careful. It was not time yet to give oneself wholly. For we were still feeling one another out, taking the measure of each other to discover how much we should withhold.
Tom had been physically abused, sometimes badly. As we already knew, the guards considered him a spy. A man less likely to be anything of the kind I could not imagine. As the weeks and months went on I thought to myself how often that word ‘spy’ was in the mouths of our jailors. Spies are men more used than they are capable of using others. Tom’s honesty, his openness, his innocence and occasional naivety would make him a sound target for those agencies which work in darkness. But Tom had no capacity to be involved in that murky underworld.
Frank spoke little of his experience. He told the story of his abduction in detail. But something in him prevented him from revealing his feelings about what was happening to him or how he had come to deal with it. We didn’t question him about intimate things.
One learns in such situations to receive, with thanks, only what is given. To drag a man into talking of something he has neither the desire nor the ability to discuss is a kind of selfish brutality. Each gives according to his abilities. The appropriateness of what he gives is not a subject of moral evaluation. In this hole in the ground, all of us were equal, none was better than another. Our captivity was the great leveller by which position, status, intellect or ability ceased to be self-possessions.
They became the common goods of all.
Having told his story, John was curiously quiet for the first couple of weeks. Gone was that outgoing exuberance. He was not withdrawn, but retiring and observant. I sensed his reticence and in those early conversations would try to draw him in with a joke or abusingly accuse him of something. He would retort with some equally abusive crack, but he was not ready to go beyond this, to be fully committed.
But as time went on, and we became more confident, we all began to interact more directly. We began to explore each other with more openness. There was increasingly less need for retreat into silence and observation.
The room that was now our prison was approximately eighteen to twenty feet long by perhaps thirteen feet wide. There were no windows underground. In one corner our toilet and shower room stood, a brick-built oblong with a door, the usual hole in the floor and a shower head. The rough concrete surface was covered with a torn blue rubber-backed carpet. In the corner opposite our toilet a drainpipe ran up through the roof and into the daylight. From this we received our fresh air. One small fan at the aperture of this drainpipe-like air vent drew in the air and another small fan near the door of our cell blew it out. In the opposite corner from the air vent a closed-circuit camera was mounted.
Each morning after breakfast the three Americans would be unleashed from their chains to wash and take twenty minutes’ exercise. After them, John and I would fulfill our routine. All of us except Frank took the opportunity to exercise, but he sat quiet and preoccupied behind his blindfold. Frank never revealed his eyes to us.
He would always sit in the years ahead, on the occasions when we were with him, with his blindfold on. It was for him like a child’s security blanket. Behind it he was safe, he could not be seen; behind it he travelled in his own space and time, occasionally returning to us to join in conversation. Frank rarely entered into a conversation spontaneously. Only when a question was put to him directly would he answer. Always his response was short. Sometimes his answers when they were of any length seemed unrelated to the subject we had been discussing. Often he went off on odd tangents, confusing us.
On other occasions we might be discussing some point at great length or in great depth. Suddenly Frank would interject, angrily contesting some statement or some statistic that his fellow Americans had contributed to the conversation. He would be adamant that they were wrong. I later became aware that Frank’s sudden interjections, sometimes full of bitterness, were not made because he disputed the claims of Tom or Terry but rather because he disliked them. Here was a man chained between two of his fellow countrymen and he chose to hide himself from them. There was something in Frank’s interruptions that spoke more of envy than of disputation.
He had been through a lot. He had been beaten frequently and was still being abused by the guards. He had suffered long periods of isolation. Such isolation drives men deep into themselves. Finding only what is within us to entertain us, to guide us out of the periods of madness, we are forced to drive ourselves beyond our capacity. We were all bruised by our own perceived inadequacy. We became self-loathing creatures, unable to bear ourselves, and we chose to offload this burden onto others, someone we admired, perhaps even someone we loved. All of us had to struggle with this inward-turning anger and seek to take control of it and to understand it. When we were held against our will, when the only human beings who entered into our tiny self-contained world beat us and abused us; when they spat on us and kicked us; when they tortured and humiliated us; when they laughed at us and treated us as less than animals, then that awful self-loathing could imprint itself permanently. No human being can abide such absolute self-loathing. He must as we all must seek to escape. But when the walls around you are impenetrable and the guards who hold you too and too strong then you can be tempted to seek another numerousroute, half-unknowing, that of inner flight.
Sometimes that flight takes on its own perversity. We seek to escape by seeing in others the ugliness that is in ourselves. Frank’s outbursts were really moments of affection and admiration for these men. But he had lost his way for too long; he had been exposed to too much brutality. The ability to express love, affection, desire and warmth was sometimes diverted or twisted from him, but only momentarily.
Like all men, Frank had many sides to his personality. Sometimes, tired by his self-possession, another Frank would emerge into our prison and I would listen with rapturous delight to stories so funny, so rich that I wanted to reach out and hug this man, so deeply hurt yet so deeply human. ‘Frankie the Shoe”s stories of the street life of Boston and the vivid characters that lived in them had us laughing recklessly for hours.
The French word ‘oubliette’ means a place underground where prisoners are kept until they are forgotten. Those who resided in our oubliette will not easily forget it, even if in time the world shall forget.
Here in this netherworld were living men. Each suffered his own torments and his own personal hell. But we learnt to talk confessionally to each other about our feelings and of our desire and of our experience, without hiding or turning away. As we suffered with a friend his deep moments of loneliness and grief, that awful renunciation of life itself, we each of us acquired, almost instinctually, a deeper and richer capacity for joy, for humour, for laughter. When you have so little you find joy in insignificant things.
John and I were back at our antics. Our exercising periods were less exercises than dances of delirium around our confinement. Again the insatiable hurling of dog’s abuse at one another, and laughter bursting forth, cradling us in its outrageous obscenity. At first the Americans looked at us in disbelief, unsure whether our seemingly malicious and deliberate abuse of one another was real or not. An Irishman and an Englishman so far apart in background should obviously be at one another’s throats. We played out the game oblivious of them, each of us silently acknowledging that we were the entertainment in this place. We were performing for them. And their amazement and confusion entertained us. But as they came to understand and be delighted by our buffoonery, they themselves became intimate participants in the game.
Tom Sutherland began telling jokes. His eyes filled with tears and, giggling hysterically, he infected us all. And no matter what the punchline of the joke, which usually fell flat, the sight of this man uncontrollably laughing at his own joke reduced us to a quivering mass. Even Tom’s half-confessional, half-delirious tales of his adolescent love life thrust him again and again into those tear-filled raptures.
Terry, though enjoying the comic atmosphere, would not allow himself to be overcome by it. He was a man of vast intellect. It needed feeding. He was ravenous. He could not do without deep, complex conversations. Everywhere he went he insisted that his Bibles be brought to him. He always had two or three. He had become an authority on the history of the Scriptures. Though not a deeply religious man, he found himself now profoundly sensitized to needs within himself. I always felt that beneath that bluff and hard-nosed journalist there was a very tender and compassionate man. Terry, too, had reached inside, had seen things we all would prefer not to see. But being the man he was, rather than run or hide away, he chose to remake himself out of the self-revelation that his incarceration had thrust upon him. He spoke deeply and passionately about his family, as did we all. But now he found in himself other qualities that had long lain redundant or undiscovered.