Authors: James Loney
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We say goodbye in the hotel lobby. Harmeet looks good in his new golf shirt and loose-fitting pants, Sonia’s Nike running shoes, the toque he’d worn during the delegation. I keep watching the movements of his hands, marvelling at the fact that there is no longer a handcuff between us. “I’m going to miss you, brother,” I say. “There’s no one to bring me a glass of water in the mornings anymore.”
He laughs. “You kept me sane.”
“You too,” I say.
He is nervous about going home. His visit with his father has gone well, but there remains real tension in his family. I ache for him. I know that I am going home to the unconditional support of my partner and my community and my family. I so much wish the same for Harmeet. But I’m not sad. Harmeet is going home, and I am going home. The nightmare is over. Our lives have been returned to us.
“Would you like some champagne?” Gordon asks as we take our seats in business class.
I hesitate. “No thanks, I’m okay,” I say.
“Come on. We have to celebrate!”
“I don’t want to cost the government any more than I already have,” I say.
“Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s already included. There’s no extra cost.”
I know Gordon is exhausted, but I can’t help myself. I pepper him with questions. I ask about his family, his work, what he knows about the psychology of hostage-taking. I tell him more stories from the kidnapping. He asks me what I am going to say to the media. My heart immediately starts pounding. I’d rather not say anything, I say.
He says I should think about it. The media are not going to give up until they get something from me. He recommends that I prepare a brief statement. I don’t have to take any questions, just read the
statement; that will satisfy them and then they won’t bother me after that. I agree that it’s a good idea and something I feel I can handle.
I tell him about my conversation with Harmeet, our concerns that it was a negotiated release made to look like a rescue. I tell him about my frustration with not being given any real information about our captors, the events leading up to our release, whether or not a ransom was paid.
He asks me why it matters, since I am free. I say I need to know the truth. He explains again the reasons for not being able to tell me, the importance of protecting their methods, the possible danger posed to informants, the confidentiality he is bound by law and sworn by oath to keep. He swears to me as a Christian that no ransom has been paid. I am convinced. Gordon’s personal integrity is something I can believe in.
As for the captors, he says I’ll feel differently in the future.
What do you mean? I say.
He tells me that I’ve been protecting them. He talks about the Stockholm Syndrome, how it is a normal and helpful survival mechanism, how hostages will often attempt to bond with their captors, take on their agenda in the hope it will offer them safety. “Did you ever ask them to let you go?”
“No,” I say, stunned.
“Why not?”
“I … I don’t know,” I say. I didn’t know how to begin explaining. I wanted to, considered it hundreds of times, but could never bring myself to do it.
“It’s okay,” he says. “I’m not here to judge. It’s going to take time. But you’ll feel differently someday.”
When we’re back on the plane after a stopover in Frankfurt, flying over the Atlantic on the last leg of our journey, Gordon asks if he can read my statement. I wrote it in the business class lounge in Germany. He says it’s good but I have to thank the people who rescued us. How can I do that? I say. I haven’t thanked anyone in the statement. It’s impossible! I don’t know where to start. There are so many people, I don’t want to value any one person’s contribution over another’s.
He understands that, he says, but if I don’t thank the people who rescued us, they’ll think I’m ungrateful, which clearly I’m not. If I don’t say thank you, that’s what they’ll focus on, and they won’t hear anything else that I have to say.
I get to work right away and show him the revision. Good, he says.
I see that Gordon is starting to nod off. I suppress my need to talk and let him sleep. I stand up, stretch, sit down, try to read the paper, try to sleep, can’t, get up to talk to the stewardesses. I am too excited to sit still. It is really happening. I am going home. Finally.
We’re walking through the airport. Uniformed policemen with guns. Someone with a radio. Gordon, Stewart and his wife Giselle, who is also a diplomat and travelled with us from Abu Dhabi. I follow them through airy corridors and sliding open doors. My arms are swinging free. I love that! People are looking at us, looking at me. I walk briskly, pretend not to notice them noticing me, pretend like I’m a regular passenger going to get his luggage.
I see them down a long hall. Dan is to the left, in a blue shirt. My brothers Edward and Matthew are in the middle. Donna is to the right. There are two tall men in suits I have never seen before.
This is it! I can’t believe it. I’m beaming. I want to run to them. I want Dan to come running towards me. But he stays where he is. And I just keep walking. It would be too dramatic, I guess. Like something out of the movies.
“It’s over, it’s over,” I say, wrapping my arms around him.
“It’s over,” he says, holding me tight. We look at each other. He looks good. Just like he always does. Maybe a little greyer. And a little thinner. His eyes are brown. He’s smiling. I love that, the way the skin around his eyes crinkles when he smiles.
And then my arms are around Matthew, Edward, Donna, and their arms are around me. I introduce them to Gordon, Stewart and Giselle. I am honoured, grateful beyond words. The people who brought me home meeting the people I’ve been brought home to. I’m introduced to Larry and Mike, the officers who were the liaison between my family and the RCMP. Yet more surprises.
Gordon leaves right away. He has a plane to catch. He’s exhausted, anxious to see his wife, who is recovering from surgery. Stewart and
Giselle slip away too. They promise to come and visit the next time they’re in Toronto, and I promise to cook for them. I don’t want any of them to go. Not yet. Something’s unfinished. They are my last link to Iraq, the rescue, this enormous, bittersweet debt of gratitude. A gratitude I will never be finished with.
We’re in a hall with row upon row of fixed chairs. There’s no one around us. It’s as though we have a whole airport terminal to ourselves. We sit and talk and talk. Our questions run into each other. I want to know everything that’s happened. They want to know everything that’s happened. This talking together, it’s like … it’s like the kind of breathing a drowning man does once he’s safely onshore. I want to just sit here, talking like this forever.
“We should probably get going,” one of the RCMP officers says, looking at his watch. “There’s a whole bunch of press people waiting.”
Oh yeah. A pit opens in my stomach. I really don’t want to be doing this.
Dan looks apprehensive. “What are you going to tell them about us?”
“What do you mean?” I say.
“Everyone thinks you’re this nice guy from Sault Ste. Marie who’s from this nice nuclear family. They don’t know anything about me.” He tells me about how, in those frenzied first days of our kidnapping, they needed a picture, so they chose the one David and Joseph took of us the night before I left. We were standing together, smiling, shoulder around arm around shoulder. They had to cut Dan out of the picture. No one could know about him. No one could know about our relationship. It just about killed him, seeing that picture on newspaper front pages, knowing he was helpless to speak for me. He too had been disappeared.
I put my hand on Dan’s shoulder. “No more prisons.”
We walk down a long corridor. When we’re halfway, a sliding door opens, revealing a wall of people, cameras, microphones. “Oh my God,” I say.
“Are you all right?” I hear my brother Ed say. I feel his hand squeezing my shoulder. It feels good, steadies me.
“Yes,” I say. “All I have to do is read. No questions.”
We’re there. The door slides open again. “There he is,” I hear a voice say. Then people calling my name. The click-whirring sound of cameras. A wall of faces. Confusion held behind a yellow-tape cordon. I pull out my statement, clear my throat and begin to read:
During my captivity, I sometimes entertained myself by imagining this day. Sometimes I despaired of ever seeing it. Always I ached for it. And so here we are. For 118 days I disappeared into a black hole, and somehow by God’s grace I was spit out again. My head is swirling and there are times when I can hardly believe it’s true. We had to wear flak jackets during our helicopter transport from the International Zone to the Baghdad airport, and I had to keep knocking on the body armour I was wearing to reassure myself that this was all really happening.
It was a terrifying, profound, powerful, transformative, and excruciatingly boring experience. Since my release from captivity, I have been in a constant state of wonder, bewilderment and surprise as I slowly discover the magnitude of the effort to secure our lives and our freedom—Tom Fox, Norman Kember, Harmeet Sooden and myself. A great hand of solidarity reached out for us, a hand that included the hands of Palestinian children holding pictures of us, and the hands of the British soldier who cut our chains with a bolt cutter. That great hand was able to deliver three of us from the shadow of death. I am grateful in a way that can never be adequately expressed in words.
There are so many people that need this hand of solidarity, right now, today, and I’m thinking specifically of prisoners held all over the world, people who have disappeared into an abyss of detention without charge, due process, hope of release—some victims of physical and psychological torture—people unknown and forgotten. It is my deepest wish that every forsaken human being should have a hand of solidarity reaching out to them.
My friend and fellow Canadian in captivity, Harmeet Sooden, showed me something yesterday. Our captors gave us notebooks, and
Harmeet opened his notebook to show me two fractions—3/4 and 4/4—that Tom had written. “It was the only thing he wrote in my book,” he said. Tom, who had been a professional musician, wrote them as part of a lesson in music theory he gave Harmeet—3/4 time, 4/4 time. Harmeet put his finger over the 3/4 and said, “In the beginning we were 4/4.” Then he put his finger over the 4/4 and said, “Now we’re this—3/4.” We are only 3/4. Tom is not coming home with us. I am so sorry, Kassie and Andrew.
People have been asking, “What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?” All I really want to do is to love, and be loved by, the people I love. The one specific thing might be to wash a sink full of dirty dishes. After this, I’m going to disappear into a different kind of abyss—an abyss of love. I need some time to get reacquainted with my partner Dan, my family, my community—and freedom itself. I’m eager to tell the story of my captivity and rescue, but I need some time first—that’s a subtle hint to anyone who might have a big camera or notebook.
For the British soldiers who risked their lives to rescue us, for the Government of Canada who sent a team to Baghdad to help secure our release, for all those who thought about and prayed for us, for all those who spoke for us when we had no voice, I am forever and truly grateful.
It’s great to be alive. Hamdulillah!
As soon as I finish, we’re moving. Larry and Mike lead us through the reporters like human bulldozers. I follow between them; Dan, Ed, Donna and Matthew follow behind us. The reporters swarm and follow us out of the terminal. There are two black sedans waiting for us. Unmarked police cars. Another surprise. They’re driving us right to the door. It feels good to be sitting next to Dan, to be going home, drinking in the familiar sites along the four-lane highways that lead from the airport to our home in Toronto’s west end.
We pull up in front of our house. I get out of the car as soon as I can. I reach my hands up to the sky. The day is blue and the sun is late
afternoon glorious. I am trembling with relief. Finally I am home. Finally I am out, free, released from the world of the gun.
I look around me. There’s only one television camera here. I’m amazed. The media actually respected our request. My friend Sheila Sullivan is standing on the sidewalk. I go over to give her a hug. She bursts into hysterical laughter and runs towards her car. The car door is open, waiting. She’s up to no good. I run after her, laughing too. “What’re you doing, Sheila?” I say. She’s reaching into her car, pushing buttons, trying to play some music. She can’t talk, she’s laughing so hard. The only thing I can make out is the word “Alleluia.” She’s trying to play something with “Alleluia” in it.
“You can’t do that, Sheila!” I tell her. “It’s still Lent.” She breaks into more spasms of laughter. The Alleluia begins. I turn to our house. All the blinds are down and the curtains drawn. We walk up the sidewalk to the front steps. Dan opens the door for me. I walk into the house. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the interior light. I look to my right. My friend Sheila Green is standing in the doorway to the living room, all five feet of her. “Hiya stranger,” she says, waving to me, smiling impishly, bundled up tight in her winter jacket.
“Sheila!” I say, exploding with joy, opening my arms to hug her. “Did the cats miss me?”
“Yeah, they missed you,” she says, nodding, holding back tears.
“Well, I missed you too,” I say.
I look behind her into our living room. There are people sitting, standing, crammed everywhere. I can’t see the floor. I go to Raffi and Tonnan and Sephie Burghardt Marshall first. They are nineteen months, five years and seven years old. Then to David and Jessica Morales, who are nine and fourteen years old. It is impossible to describe, how beautiful, how wonderful, how amazing it is, to behold a child after the ugliness of captivity. And then the tears come, a hot pouring flood of sweet joy relief. I go around the room, greet each person, blessing and being blessed with tears, my extended Catholic Worker family, my CPT brothers and sisters, the friends who organized and kept vigil and prayed and supported Dan and worked night and day for our release.
When all the hugs and all the greetings are done, I am spent. The adrenalin is gone. I’ve had two hours of sleep in the past ninety. I’m a trembling wreck. But there’s pizza, beer, a party, most of my favourite people in the world gathered together in one place!