Anderson Vows to Forgive, Tells of His ‘New Life’
Vowing to forgive the Muslim fanatics who kept him chained like an animal for more than 6 1/2 years in the dank cellars of a country he still hasn’t stopped loving, journalist Terry A. Anderson wept Friday as he at last began to tell his story.
He told of faith, courage and the will to survive. But most of all, his was a story about the human spirit and the unfathomable bond that forms between strangers who come to rely on each other for their very sanity.
“Look, those weren’t wasted years,” Anderson said at a press conference at the U.S. military hospital here. “And they weren’t empty. I lived through them. I learned some things from them, and I’ll use them, I hope, properly. So I just start from here again. I’ve got a whole new life. It’s going to be happy. I’m going to enjoy it, God willing.”
Since his release Tuesday as the last American hostage in Lebanon, Anderson’s enjoying life has meant reveling in the small miracles of his newborn freedom. Like jogging in the fresh morning air. And, though it is winter, marveling at the greenness of grass.
Appearing pale and wearing a Buffalo Bills sweatshirt, the 44-year-old journalist faced the press and endured being the news himself with a dry wit familiar to his friends and a tenderness new to even his family.
His sister, Peggy Say, clasped his hand tightly and held him as he wept tears of gratitude for her relentless campaign to win his freedom and the wellspring of public support it generated. “This is not the same Terry,” Say said, “and it’s one I like a whole lot better.”
Anderson quietly recalled how hungrily he drank in the beauty of his first hours of freedom.
“I remember when I was driving in the car from where I was released to Damascus,” he said. “The sky cleared . . . and I was peering out the windshield . . . looking at the stars--the first time I had seen stars in so long. And it was beautiful.”
For 2,454 days, he lived without a sky, without stars or sunlight. He was moved “15 or 20” times to blacked-out rooms or cells that were sometimes no more than 6 feet square. He used water jugs as barbells and, when the chains were too short to move, tensed his muscles in isometric exercises.
“There were some pretty bad times,” he said, alluding to beatings in his early years of captivity when, other former hostages said, Anderson at one point grew so frustrated he banged his head against a wall until blood ran.
“One of the first things I got, a few months after I got there, was a Bible, and that helped. My faith kept me from giving up, from giving in to despair, giving up on hope. . . ,” he said.
His devout Catholicism also provided lively fodder for debate with fellow hostage Thomas M. Sutherland, who has said he lost his faith in God during his captivity and spent hours arguing passionately about it with Anderson.
Anderson spoke at length about the nine other hostages who were imprisoned with--and sometimes chained to--him at points over the years. There would be friction, he acknowledged, but the men’s devotion to each other became as important as the fresh air they could not breathe and the stars they could not see.
“These men all gave something to me, helped me,” he said. “I hope they got something in return.”
From accounts given by several of the hostages who came out ahead of him, Anderson was the feisty heart of their bittersweet brotherhood. It was Anderson, said Sutherland, who persuaded their captors to let the hostages keep radios over the last two years, Anderson who “absolutely insisted” that they be given books, which he read voraciously. Anderson became Sutherland’s literature coach, pressing the 60-year-old to wade through the dog-eared classics that came their way.
Sutherland, a professor of agriculture, taught Anderson in turn everything he knew about animal breeding, genetics, statistics. Together, they built and operated an imaginary dairy farm, down to every last detail.
“I needed them,” Anderson said of his fellow prisoners. “I needed their minds. I needed what they knew. I needed them to keep my mind going.”
The hostages “learned from each other everything we could possibly teach. And we explored each other’s minds. We talked. It wasn’t always easy. . . . And I think those of us who were together in the room came through pretty well, mentally, because we had each other.”
Anderson, chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, said he did not regret staying with the story that ended up costing him 6 1/2 years of his life, years that saw his father and brother die of cancer and his daughter, Gabrielle, grow from a giggly little girl into a young woman. Another daughter, Sulome, was born while he was held; she is only now getting to know the father who was a stranger she would blow videotaped kisses to on his birthdays.
“I belonged in Beirut and I had to go about my business,” he said. “That got me caught. I paid for it. I still don’t see what else I could have done.”
Anderson was playing tennis on a Saturday morning with a young photographer, Don Mell, when the kidnapers came. (The kidnapers let Mell go.) Anderson had sent Gabrielle and her mother home to Japan the year before because he felt Lebanon was becoming too dangerous. Two cats and his rambunctious Rhodesian ridgeback dog, Jolie, had stayed behind to keep him company in the beachfront apartment and to preside over the champagne parties he liked to host on his balcony to watch the sunset on the Mediterranean.
Like many war correspondents, he coped in part by being cavalier at times toward the violence around him. He and his best friend, a British reporter, could often be found in the AP offices dueling with rulers, re-enacting a hyped Lebanese radio account of hand-to-hand combat at a furniture store on the Green Line.
But Anderson was also moved by the plight of the Lebanese, and once wept over his typewriter after having seen a baby die of burns after an Israeli attack. He would point out the legions of rats swarming over garbage heaped in his street one minute, and comment the next on the beauty of a seaside Ferris wheel whose lights twinkled above Beirut’s eerie warscape.
“I like Lebanon very much,” Anderson said Friday. “I sympathize with Lebanon very much. . . . I like the Lebanese. They’re fascinating, intelligent, brave, courageous, stubborn, independent people.”
Although he harbors no sympathy for his captors, he refuses to hate them either. “I don’t hate anybody,” he said. “I’m a Christian and a Catholic, and I really believe that. And it’s required of me that I forgive, no matter how hard that may be. And I’m determined to do that.”
While fellow hostage Alann Steen on Friday told reporters that the captors deserved to be punished, Anderson said he is not concerned with “whether or not these people are going to be caught, captured and punished.” He voiced strong support for the U.S. policy of not negotiating with terrorists, saying the hostage drama ended in a fashion “that everybody can be satisfied with and proud of.”
And while the highly publicized crusade for his freedom neither hastened nor delayed his release, Anderson said, the reports of public support he heard over the radio, along with messages from his sister--and once, out of the blue, a birthday card from Philadelphia schoolchildren--kept the hostages from slipping into the abyss of despair.
“I think the worst day I had was Christmas of 1986 when we were in a pretty bad place,” he said. The hostages were in solitary confinement and “had nothing, no books, nothing.” They were forbidden to speak, but Anderson remembered bits of American sign language he had learned in high school 30 years earlier. What he did not remember, he made up and taught secretly to the other hostages. They conversed for hours in utter silence.
That Christmas, Anderson removed his glasses. They fell and broke. Without them, his eyesight was too poor to make out the hand signs.
But even in the darkest moments, he said, “I never thought I wouldn’t be free . . . eventually--it was just taking a long time.”
He will stay at the U.S. military hospital in Wiesbaden for a few days before heading home at last. He said he needs the time to decompress. “I mean, you don’t just walk out of a cell one day and walk out into the world the next. It’s a pretty strange place.”
Once home, Anderson has no definite plans. He’ll go jogging again. Think about writing a book. Catch up with the world. And maybe look at a few stars.