Beirut Jailers Were ‘Kind People,’ 2 of 4 Hostages Held Separately Say

Two of the four American hostages held isolated from the rest of their countrymen throughout the tense 16-day ordeal gave surprising accounts of their captivity Monday, calling their jailers “kind people” who “made an effort to be on their best behavior.”

Their families and U.S. officials had feared that the four were in danger from members of the extremist Hezbollah (Party of God), a pro-Iranian faction of Lebanon’s Shia Muslims, but Robert Trautmann Jr., 37, of Laredo, Tex., and Robert G. Brown, 42, of Stow, Mass., both said they were well-treated by the men who held them and and two others.

“They never made threats and never even raised their voices,” Trautmann said as he sat at an outdoor cafe here enjoying his first full day of freedom since the ordeal began June 14.

However, there were several terrifying moments, Trautmann said. One came with the reappearance of one of the original hijackers of TWA Flight 847. “He walked into the room and confronted us,” Trautmann said. “He said, ‘Do you recognize me?’

“ ‘No,’ ” we said.

“Then he pulled out a revolver he used on the plane,” he continued. “ ‘Now do you recognize me?’ ‘Yes,’ ” we said. He was greatly pleased and walked away.”

Trautmann said the exchange made him feel “sick--just sick.”

Concern over the fate of the four, whose whereabouts and condition had remained a mystery as the hijacking crisis unfolded, grew even greater during the final hours of the drama, when they failed to answer during a roll call of hostages by the International Red Cross on Saturday.

Yet Brown, who referred to the group as “our captors” and then immediately amended the description to “our keepers,” said:

“I feel sorry that the Hezbollah have been labeled extremists because the people who took care of us, I’m convinced, were Hezbollah--and they were not extremists.”

Brown, speaking Monday morning at the Air Force Regional Medical Center here, added, “They were kind people who took care of us very well.”

Trautmann agreed, saying, “I really think they wanted us to get back to the United States.”

Trautmann, whose father-in-law, Vicente Garza, was a hostage in the larger group, said he agrees with reports suggesting that he and the others--Brown, Richard Herzberg, 33, of Norfolk, Va., and Jeffrey J. Ingalls, 24, of Virginia Beach, Va.--were detained separately because they were thought to have Jewish-sounding names or to be members of the military.

“They asked me if I was Jewish and I told them no, I was Catholic--which I am,” Trautmann said. “They didn’t make a big issue of it, and I didn’t press it.”

Of the others, Herzberg is Jewish and the religion of Brown and Ingalls was not known here. Ingalls, a Navy diver, was a friend of Robert Dean Stethem, 23, a Navy petty officer beaten and killed by the hijackers June 15. The original group of hostages kept apart from the rest in Beirut included a fifth man, Arthur N. Targontsidis, 18, an American of Greek ancestry from Brockton, Mass., who was released June 18. Trautmann said that the four received reading materials regularly and were aware that their relatives were concerned about their safety. “It was quite upsetting to him (Brown)” when he read that his wife had believed he was the man killed by the hijackers, Trautmann said.

Brown said he believed the four isolated hostages were held in the basement of an apartment house. “The double garage door opened and we drove in and down two flights and drove right down to the bunker.” He said there were “other cells” at the location, holding other prisoners he described as “petty thieves.”

Trautmann said their quarters were carpeted and air-conditioned, but were “very, very damp--and we did not have blankets.”

He added, “We slept on two foam mattresses on the floor and we were adequately fed.” He said they were supplied with magazines and a radio.

“Whenever any reading material came in, we memorized it,” he said. “And we played a lot of cards.”

Last weekend, he said, “as snags began to develop, our radio was taken away. That’s how we knew something was going on.” Brown, who suffered a broken blood vessel in an eye when he was struck by one of the original hijackers aboard the plane, said that his captors on the ground “gave us a lot of lessons in history, geography, in religion, in politics and in the military in general. I heard nothing about Tehran at all.”

Trautmann said that he, too, received a “crash course” in the Middle East situation although “I think I had what most of the hostages had--a one-sided story.”

But he added, “I don’t feel sympathy for anybody who participates in a hijacking or the murder of innocent people.”

Their captors on the ground in Beirut, he said, “were different people who took control of us. The people who hijacked us were animals. They were on a roll.”

Trautmann said that when Stethem was killed, his screams and the shot that killed him were heard throughout the cabin and that there “was not a single person on the plane who didn’t have the fear” of being next.

Trautmann, whose father flew here to meet him, was asked the first thing he would do upon arriving home.

“Hug my wife and kids,” he said.