Ex-Hostage’s Joy Is Tempered by Those Still Held

Jack Frazier’s days as an American hostage inside a Baghdad safe house passed quickly enough. The Santa Ana man filled the long hours scouring the home’s upstairs bathrooms and leading a daily exercise class for 20 fellow hostages. On Fridays, he would cook for the others sharing the house.

But after dark, the pain and pressure of captivity would bear down on him, the 53-year-old construction superintendent said Tuesday. Too much time to think about mistakes, about little slights done to loved ones.

“I think the worst part that I had was the nights,” Frazier said during a phone interview from his Amman, Jordan, hotel room, where he was taken along with 13 other American hostages released by Iraq Tuesday.

“When you shut the light out at night, your mind kind of plays games on you. Incidents would pop back in my mind that I didn’t really handle too well. I may have got upset at my son. At the time, it wasn’t a major item. But when you wake up at 2 in the morning and say, ‘My God, I’m in Baghdad and I’m a hostage!’ Well, it makes you place appreciation and affection on things that maybe were trivial before.”

After arriving in Amman, Frazier immediately called his mother and fiancee in Whitefish, Mont., and his daughter, Kimberly Albrecht, in Santa Ana.

“It’s a mixture of the happiest day in my life, and the anticipation of getting everybody else back home safely,” an emotionally shaken Albrecht said after speaking to her father.

Frazier will fly to New York today, catch up on some sleep and arrive in Los Angeles on Thursday, he said.

“I guarantee you,” he said, laughing, “I will kiss the ground on arrival.”

State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said the 14 Americans released Tuesday included six from a list of 69 people in urgent need of medical care. Frazier, a construction crew manager for San Francisco-based Bechtel Power Corp., is a diabetic who takes oral medication.

Frazier was among 700 to 800 Americans trapped in Iraq and Kuwait since Aug. 2, when Iraq invaded the small emirate.

Iraqis call them “special guests,” and while those in the group were not rounded up and detained, they have been hostages since shortly after the conflict erupted, when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein banned the departure of thousands of foreigners whose governments are trying to drive him out of Kuwait.

For the first three weeks after the invasion, Frazier remained at the Sheraton Hotel, where he had been living. Then, he and numerous other Americans were told to move to the American Embassy or other safe havens. Frazier declined to identify where he stayed because other hostages are still there.

Frazier said he spent the past several weeks in a two-story house, a hostage without blindfold or physical torture but trapped nonetheless.

“I was most certainly being held against my will,” he said Tuesday. “We were told not to go outside for our own safety.”

Frazier said he was told not to discuss why he and the others were selected for release. But he said a group of Iraqi-born Americans called the Iraqi Businessman’s Assn. secured freedom for the 14 hostages after discussions with Hussein.

When he left Baghdad, he said, it was with a mixture of relief and anguish.

“One of the toughest moments in my life was when I got into the vehicle and stood there and saw my friends who remain,” he said. “I found it rather difficult to even put the feeling into words. It’s been eight hours since then . . . but it’s tough. They are friends for life, those people.”

Albrecht said her father was saddened during his departure from Iraq because he did not want to leave the other hostages who, because of their unique ordeal, had become “bonded together.”

“He was crying on the flight out of Baghdad,” she said. “My father was working with the Iraq-American (group) over there. He wanted to make sure there is nothing more that he can do before he leaves the Middle East. He said he would do everything he could to help get the rest of the hostages out of there.”

It would be three weeks after the Iraqi invasion before Frazier’s family learned that he was alive in Baghdad. Prayers, Albrecht said, were the family’s only solace.

“We were very worried. It took about three weeks for us to receive word from the State Department,” said Albrecht, who, during the two-month ordeal, has acted on behalf of her family with State Department representatives. In turn, she would contact each member of the Frazier family, including her two brothers, Scott of Santa Ana and Robert, a captain in the U.S. Army at Ft. Ord.

On Tuesday, the emotional roller-coaster finally ended for the family.

The ride for Frazier himself wasn’t quite over. Still revved up from his ordeal and travels, Frazier talked eloquently of the life lessons he had learned as a hostage.

“At 53 years old, I’ve got a whole new education,” he said with a sigh. “I learned a lot of compassion. I’ve learned that there’s a lot of agony and pain in this world that I wasn’t aware of, and that there’s a lot of very hard people who have no compassion.

“The comrades I was with, we tried very, very hard to bolster each other and not allow each other to get down,” Frazier said. “But at night, you look out, and you see the stars, and you wonder: ‘I wonder what my daughter’s doing? I wonder what my fiancee’s doing?’ Nobody can tell you what an emotional roller-coaster it is.”

Frazier several weeks ago said he hoped “when this history finally is written, and that last chapter is over, I will get a chance to read it.”

Now on his way home, he said, he hopes to work on his health, to find a new job with Bechtel and catch a couple of homes games of his beloved but beleaguered Los Angeles Rams.

“I think things will turn around for them now,” he said confidently.