Hostages’ Letters Tell of Fear, Boredom

Letters, mostly brief and bitter, have slipped out of Kuwait and Iraq.

The pleas have reached the United States circuitously: smuggled out by freed hostages, then dropped in mail slots everywhere from Maryland to England to Bangladesh.

Addressed to loved ones, the letters are touched with black humor, daily trivia and tales of atrocity. They also carry the hostages’ provisional attempts at proper goodbys.

“The situation here is entirely out of control,” wrote a Midwestern dentist whose letters from Kuwait were provided on the condition he not be identified. “I am in a ‘safe’ house with a good friend. We are surrounded by Iraqi troops . . . and there is a great deal of shooting in the area at night.”

Some letters are hastily scrawled on note paper; others are typed. All offer stark, urgent views of the Persian Gulf crisis through the eyes of those trapped by it.

“This may be the last communication you get from me . . . since almost everyone (who can) has departed,” the dentist wrote in a letter dated Sept. 28.

“(The Iraqis) have destroyed all forms of normalcy here. Looting, rape and sodomy and wanton destruction. . . . Food stocks are almost gone and the garbage and rodent problems are increasing . . . things here get worse by the day.”

The estimated 1,000 Americans stuck in Kuwait and Iraq are from varied backgrounds. They were in the Middle East as teachers, diplomats, oil workers, engineers and consultants.

But in their letters are common themes: calls for quick and decisive American intervention, complaints about boredom and fatigue. For many hostages, time is measured by what they are missing at home.

“Darling, the days and nights are long and boring,” Fred F. Harrington, a Redmond, Wash., businessman, wrote to his wife.

“I do lots of reading, American and British novels. There is TV and VCR in the lounge. Breakfast is at 9 a.m., lunch at 1 p.m. and dinner at 7 p.m. Food is lousy . . . my back hurts,” he wrote in a letter dated Sept. 4.

“Tensions run high,” wrote Mike Nickman, whose work on an irrigation project in northern Iraq was interrupted by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

“They have security police sitting outside our door, waiting for one of us to leave,” he wrote in a Sept. 4 letter smuggled out of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad by a British woman who forwarded it to Nickman’s parents in Pleasanton, Neb.

“You have given me great joy,” Joseph Murphy, a 63-year-old teacher from Fremont, Calif., wrote to his daughter in a letter smuggled out of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait.

“Be smart and strong and brave, my darling. You have a great life ahead of you,” he wrote. “I love you.”