Ex-Captives’ Experiences Still Linger : Released a year ago, Frank Reed and Robert Polhill are taking different approaches to restoring their lives.

Now that spring is here, Frank H. Reed is heading for the golf course, trying to tone up muscles still flabby from the 44 months he spent as a bound and blindfolded hostage in Beirut. Robert Polhill, a captive for 22 months, is fighting to learn to speak again, having lost his larynx to throat cancer surgery.

It has been a year since Reed and Polhill were released, the last two Americans to emerge from imprisonment.

With the Arab world shaken by the Gulf War and some of the issues that led to hostage-taking fading, rumors are circulating in the Mideast and in Washington that freedom could be near for the six Americans still held in the netherworld of Middle East terrorism, along with at least a half dozen other Westerners.

Neither Reed nor Polhill allows himself to get his hopes up, however. And both know from painful experience that life after release is not without its difficulties.

There have been rumors before, Polhill said, “but I can’t have much faith.” The conditions for freedom continually change.

If anything, Reed said in an interview Wednesday, the prospect of the others being released has been made more unlikely by the Persian Gulf War. He is convinced, as he has been since he came out of Lebanon last April, that freedom for the other hostages will require negotiations with the captors. With the war and the reshuffling of Arab politics, he said, “there are now even more components to the kind of deal required for their release.”

Reed and Polhill, after coming out of captivity in fragile health, have over the last year taken distinctly different approaches to restoring their lives.

Polhill, a diabetic who estimates that he suffered 400 insulin reactions during the 168 weeks he was held, learned during physical examinations after his release that he had throat cancer. Eleven months after removal of his larynx, he is well on his way to being able to speak again, using his esophagus to do the work on his larynx.

Last month, he was invited to the White House, where President Bush presented him with the American Cancer Society’s annual Cancer Courage Award. He still struggles to make himself understood and his days are consumed, he says, with “practice, practice, practice.”

Other than that, he works in the public education battle against cancer and diabetes, and in support of the remaining hostages. He is no longer preoccupied with the months he was a captive. “I got it behind me the minute I got in the car from Beirut to Damascus,” he said.

To Frank Reed, the hostage experience still weighs heavily.

Suffering from chronic arsenic poisoning, and suffering painful aftereffects of beatings after escape attempts, his weight was down to 130 pounds when he was released. He has since gained 50 pounds, but he is still weak.

Besides trying to regain his physical strength, he is at work completing his dissertation for a Boston College doctorate in education, and circulating a proposal for a book on hostages. He has so far not settled back into a job, and his efforts to launch a new organization he called Hostagepeace have faltered. So instead of leading a new organization studying the phenomenon of hostage taking and publicizing the plight of the captives, he travels the lecture and talk show circuit.

Unlike Polhill and some other former hostages, Reed takes exception to the Bush Administration’s refusal to negotiate the freedom of the others, including Terry A. Anderson, the Associated Press correspondent kidnaped on March 16, 1985. And unlike others who have been freed, he has not been invited to the White House.

“When you have been on the hook, you have a duty to the others,” he said, “and I’m going to do it whether anybody likes it or not.”

Although the President’s popularity has soared throughout the war with Iraq, Reed says he continues to get a generally sympathetic hearing when he takes issue with the Administration’s hostage policy. “People have laid off of me,” he said, “because I have been a little sacrosanct so far.”