Dark Moments, Fear Haunt the Freed Hostages

With joyous family reunions and yellow ribbons bedecking the Main Streets of dozens of small towns, America embraced its former hostages Tuesday, welcoming them home in time for the holidays after months of fear and uncertainty over their fate.

But as they seek to adjust to normal life after four months as fugitives in Kuwait, or “human shields” in Iraq, many of the former hostages say they are haunted by chilling memories that not even the joys of a holiday homecoming can banish from their thoughts.

Peter Simard, a construction company manager from Boston, remembers most vividly a moment that came suddenly and violently in the middle of the night, when about a dozen heavily armed Iraqi soldiers burst into his apartment in Kuwait city, taking him and several other foreigners hiding there prisoner.

Talmadge C. Ledford, a defense contractor from Windham, N.H., remembers not so much a moment as a constant, gnawing fear that a “call would come from Baghdad” and that he and the other Westerners being held as human shields at a Kuwaiti oil installation would be executed.

“There was no question in our minds” that if an order to kill them “came down from Saddam Hussein, it would have been followed,” Ledford said.

And Donald Latham, an Albuquerque, N.M., engineer working on a defense project in Kuwait, went through an experience that even now he will not talk about.

“We’re not going to say anything about that at all, OK? It just didn’t happen. . . . Just forget it, please just forget it. . . ,” he said when asked about news reports that he killed a looter who broke into his apartment one night.

Whether they huddled in fear in darkened apartments and other hide-outs provided by resistance fighters in Kuwait or spent months in Iraq being moved in the middle of the night from one strategic site to another, the hundreds of Americans swept up in the crisis that erupted with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2 all came home with tales of hardship, if not outright terror.

One man, held at what he assumed to be a weapons testing complex southwest of Baghdad, lived with the sound of continual explosions--and the fear that he and his fellow hostages would be killed not by a U.S. air strike but by “Iraqi incompetence” if a munitions test went awry.

Cleveland businessman Jeff Sanislo recalled the fear that made his stomach knot when Iraqi troops spotted him hiding on the roof of an apartment building in Kuwait city. To escape capture, he squeezed into a 2-foot-high box on the roof, waiting silently for four hours until Kuwaiti resistance forces helped him escape.

“You pray a lot at a time like that,” Sanislo said. “You think about family. . . . ‘Will I ever get to see them again?’ You get faith real quick.”

And yet for many former hostages recounting their stories, it wasn’t the flashes of fear or the hardships of prison camp life that marked their ordeal so much as it was the boredom and the anxiety of not knowing how or when it would end.

“The boredom was something that would just drive you up the wall,” said Al Stone, a construction company manager from Las Vegas who spent more than three months hiding in a two-room apartment whose doors were welded shut by Kuwaitis attempting to keep him from being discovered.

“It was the tension, the tension and the stress. Your stomach was always tied up in knots,” said 69-year-old Eugene Hughes of Albuquerque, N.M., a former pilot who was visiting his stepson, Donald Latham, when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait.

At one point, Iraqi troops surrounded the two-story villa where Hughes and Latham were hiding in Latham’s second floor apartment. “They rang the bell and rattled the gate, but I guess they weren’t sure we were inside because they went away eventually,” Hughes said.

Jack Hogan, 54, of San Diego, urged President Bush to get tough.

“I haven’t yet met a hostage who didn’t want the military to come in and take it to him,” Hogan said of Hussein. “He’s nothing but a thug.”

Like most of the Americans who managed to evade the house-to-house searches by Iraqi troops, Hughes and Latham credited the Kuwaiti resistance with saving their lives--sometimes at the cost of their own.

“The people, the beautiful people of Kuwait kept us free,” Hughes said in a voice choking with emotion. “They brought us food and kept our whereabouts secret. We would not be here today if it was not for them.

“They’re running an elaborate protection service for the foreigners there,” added Latham. “Anyone who needs medical help, the resistance gets him a doctor. Anybody who needs food, they get him food. If you needed money, you got that too.”

John Gerald Jr., a lawyer from North Myrtle Beach, Va., said the flies and mosquitoes were “incessant” at the munitions testing site where he and six other foreigners were held.

“Had the Iraqis allowed care packages through, my first request would have been for bug spray,” he said.

Gerald said his Iraqi captors told him he was being held at a “screwdriver manufacturing plant” and that the bunkers he saw were “archeological digs.” He said he assumed they were at a munitions testing site because of the periodic explosions he heard. “I never saw a single screwdriver,” he added.

While Gerald remained at the munitions site for his entire captivity, other hostages said they were moved from one site to another, always in the dead of night. Bill Rodebush, an oil rig maintenance engineer from McAlester, Okla., spent time at a heavily fortified chemical factory near the Syrian border, a hydroelectric plant near the Iranian frontier, a military complex in northern Iraq and an ammunition plant south of Baghdad. He said one of his captors told him the hostages were moved often because the officers didn’t want them “to get friendly with any of our guards.”

For most of the human shields, as well as the fugitives in Kuwait, the light at the end of what one described as their “long and terrible tunnel” first appeared on Saturday, when word came through that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had ordered their release.

Hughes recalled the sense of shock he felt Sunday at the sight of the streets of Kuwait city on the way to the airport where he and about 75 other Americans boarded a U.S.-chartered flight to Baghdad on the way to Frankfurt, Germany.

“When I arrived, it was such a beautiful city . . . but when I left, it was a garbage dump. Garbage was everywhere, and all the buildings were burnt, shot up or torn down. It was sickening to see what devastation the Iraqis had done.”

Cheers went up as the plane carrying them to freedom left Baghdad--but there was yet one more moment of fear the newly released hostages would have to endure.

Just as the plane was about to touch down in Frankfurt early Monday, the Iraqi pilot jerked back the throttle and nosed the plane back into the sky. “We all thought the same thing, that we were going back to Baghdad, and we immediately began to make plans to hijack the plane,” Hughes recalled. “And we weren’t kidding. We were really going to overpower the crew, and I was going to land the plane.”

But just as the passengers were about to make their move, it became clear that the pilot was circling to make another landing because he had botched his first approach.