Haunted by nightmares of brutality, ex-hostage Joe Cicippio struggles to leave his 5-year ordeal behind. But even an exhaustive schedule and a loving family won’t make the past go away. : A Captive No More?

Sometimes, late at night, it all comes back to Joe Cicippio. The horror of Russian Roulette. The time his guards threatened to castrate him. The trauma of 1,908 days in captivity.

Six months after he was freed by his Lebanese kidnapers, Cicippio still has trouble sleeping and often gets up at 3 a.m. to pace the floor. Those are the good nights. Sometimes, he wakes up screaming.

“I hear him shouting ‘No! No!’ and wake him up,” says his wife, Elham. “These are nightmares, because he can’t really believe that he’s free. In his mind there’s all this terrible memory. He’s in such pain.”

It’s a side people rarely see. These days, Cicippio is a highly sought-after figure, speaking throughout the country and making media appearances. He works tirelessly to tell his story, sounding upbeat and reminding listeners that if he could overcome tremendous odds, they can too.

During his long ordeal, millions of Americans came to view Cicippio as something of an Everyman in Captivity--a quiet businessman from Norristown, Pa., who got caught up in a political nightmare. That image may be further strengthened by a fall lecture tour, a book project and a Hollywood movie deal. His schedule is booked months in advance, and Cicippio initially dismisses the notion that he’s had trouble readjusting to freedom.

“I don’t have time to worry about me so much because there’s so much every day that I have to do,” says the former controller at American University in Beirut. “I have all these obligations and commitments.”

He also has a load of grief that could take years to overcome. While he was in captivity, the eldest of his seven children died of a heart attack. Two sisters lost battles with cancer. His health has suffered and at times Cicippio can’t hold his emotions in check. Confident one moment, he’s troubled and shaken the next.

The public and private man tell vastly different stories, and only persistent questioning bridges the gap. After hours of conversation, the 61-year-old survivor grudgingly admits that his captivity still casts a pall.

“I guess you can’t deny it,” he says, staring at the floor. “Somehow, the memory is always there.”

It’s been a long road back for the 15 U.S. hostages who returned from Lebanon alive. Some, such as Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson, have become quasi-public figures, while others have retreated into anonymity. All are trying to rebuild their lives, but carry memories that could haunt them for years.

Indeed, some may experience Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a psychological condition long associated with soldiers traumatized by battlefield experiences in Korea and Vietnam. The symptoms include periodic flashbacks, emotional numbness and heightened anxiety in everyday life, experts say.

No two hostages react to trauma the same way, and how they cope depends on the strength of their character before they were captured, according to Dr. Frank Ochberg, a Michigan psychiatrist who has written extensively on the subject and formerly was associate director of the National Institutes of Mental Health.

“Some people put it behind them in a way that doesn’t cause re-enactment or anxiety,” he says. “But others are destined to bear witness to horror, to keep the image alive for the rest of us. They have too much pain to simply make a clean break and turn a new page in life. They remember the Alamo.”

So it has been with Joe Cicippio.

A Mysterious Operation

Hours after being freed last Dec. 2, the former hostage was stunned by the news of family deaths. He also learned that his wife had paid a small fortune to Lebanese political operators, who promised her information about him, took the cash and vanished into the slums of Beirut.

“It cost us darn near everything we had,” he says, his eyes filling with tears. “But I told her it was OK. She did the right thing. She had to.”

Doctors who examined the gaunt, ashen-looking Cicippio after his release learned that he had undergone a mysterious operation in captivity that left a long abdominal scar. He received a severe head blow when kidnaped, which may have aggravated an existing speech problem. Cicippio suffered frostbite on his hands and feet after being imprisoned on a balcony during the winter of 1987.

The worst pain, though, was psychological.

“Learning about my son Joe’s death was the toughest thing of all,” he says, his voice breaking. “I can get through the day if I don’t think about him and talk about other things. I still can’t cope with that.”

Cicippio’s world has changed profoundly. But in one sense, he seems much the same. Before his kidnaping, the university official was a self-proclaimed workaholic. He spent hours at his desk, even though he had recently married Elham, a Lebanese citizen and his third wife. Despite his schedule, friends described him as a cheerful and outgoing man, always anxious to please, no matter how great the task.

Today, despite his shattering experience, Cicippio has trouble refusing even the most intrusive requests for his time. Family members beg him to slow down, to no avail. Three weeks ago, he collapsed from exhaustion after a speech, but quickly resumed his hectic schedule. He’s being paid by American University for the next year, while he actively seeks new work.

Shouldn’t he take it easy for his own good? Cicippio scoffs at the thought, and says he feels fine. Although government officials have offered him referrals for counseling services, he so far has declined.

Such behavior is typical, according to Dr. Judith Lewis Herman, who teaches psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Many hostages try to duplicate their former lives as quickly as possible, as proof that they have reclaimed their identity. Still others feel that asking for any help is a sign of weakness.

“Everybody has to heal in their own way, but there’s a danger in too much activity,” Herman adds. “People in this situation can plunge into serving the needs of others, while neglecting their own needs for privacy, for time and space. Sooner or later, the stress catches up with them.”

On a rainy June morning, Cicippio invites a visitor into his Princeton home, pours a cup of coffee and tells the story of his captivity. In the beginning, he sits upright in a chair, rattling off facts like a television anchorman.

But as the talk wears on, he slumps in his seat and rubs his eyes; his voice grows weak. When the events of Sept. 12, 1986, begin to unfold, Cicippio shrinks into himself. The trauma is only a memory away.

Chained to a Wall

It began like any other morning in Beirut. By 6:30 a.m., Elham Cicippio had put a cup of coffee on the kitchen table for her husband before she left for work at the U.S. Embassy. Less than 15 minutes later, Joe strolled out of their campus apartment.

In recent years, at the insistence of local officials, he had taken security precautions. He almost never ventured off campus and did so only with Lebanese escorts. Although Americans were being kidnaped on the streets of Beirut, the university was considered safe. Months before, the controller learned he had been targeted for capture by extremists. But he refused to panic. Hadn’t he married a Lebanese woman and converted to Islam? There was no reason to flee.

As he walked to his office, Cicippio saw three young men talking at the end of a driveway. When they called his name, he looked up and suddenly was grabbed from behind. Initially, he thought it was all a joke.

“I had raised tuition at the school the day before, and it was a very unpopular decision,” he remembers. “So I thought these were angry students who wanted to talk to me.

“But all that changed when I saw the gun.”

As he fought to break free, one man struck Cicippio’s head with a pistol, throwing him to the ground. Blood spurted from his wound and a captor thrust a gun into his face, vowing to blow it off unless he lay still and closed his eyes.

Within seconds, kidnapers pushed him into the back seat of an old Mercedes and demanded that he be quiet. After a 15-minute ride, they shoved Cicippio into a garage, pulled off his clothes and stuffed him into the car trunk. By the end of the day, he lay in a dark room, dazed and bleeding.

So began the ordeal. For the next five years, Cicippio would be hustled from one location to another. Without warning, he would be interrogated by a group that called itself the Revolutionary Justice Organization. He would be chained to a wall, threatened with death.

Like many hostages, Cicippio felt guilt, terror and defiance. His every move--including the right to speak--was controlled by gun-toting kidnapers. But there were also times when he was left alone and had long, tedious hours to ponder his life and character.

The Pennsylvania native had been his family’s success story, the only one of nine brothers and sisters to leave their small hometown and seek his fortune. After working in U. S. banks for 26 years, he had been lucky to find stimulating work in the Middle East. The job he began at American University in June, 1984, had broadened him. Yet, it had taken a heavy toll.

Looking ahead to a day when he might be free, Cicippio vowed not to be a workaholic. Nor would he be emotionally distant from people, a problem that he now believes contributed to the breakup of his two earlier marriages. The new Joe Cicippio, he promised himself, would be different and take life one day at a time.

It was a healing experience, but survival was his chief concern. Cicippio’s first test came several weeks after his capture, when he heard shouts and learned that kidnapers had dragged in another victim. It was Edward C. Tracy, an American writer, and guards began beating him with a 9-inch cable.

As Tracy screamed, Cicippio guessed he was next. The door burst open and three masked men asked him harshly if he were a CIA agent. When Cicippio said he was not, the guards forced him to his knees, held his arms behind his back, ripped off his pants and brandished a knife.

“They threatened to castrate me,” he remembers. “They had the zipper down and held the knife against my legs. I was scared, I’ll be honest. I was shaking.”

Three more times, Cicippio’s guards taunted him with the knife and possible emasculation. Then they switched tactics: Twisting his arms behind his back, they held a gun to his head and played Russian Roulette. Again and again, the gun barrel clicked.

“It seemed that I could be dying at any minute,” he recalls, slumped back in his chair, his voice almost a whisper. “One guard kept saying, ‘This is no movie.’ But would you believe that after it happened two times, that I relaxed? I thought, ‘If I’m going to die, I’m going to die.’ ”

The worst moment came in 1989, when Cicippio was pulled from bed at 4 a.m., taken to a room with video equipment and ordered to read a prepared statement. To his astonishment, it said he would be hanged if the Israelis did not immediately return Abdul Karim Obeid, a Moslem cleric they had just captured. The crisis cooled after diplomatic intervention, but Cicippio still seems stunned by those events.

“You lived in a state of constant fear,” he says. “I spent 48 hours waiting for something bad to happen then and it didn’t. It was disturbing, but I wasn’t upset because I was chained to a wall. What could I do to resist?”

A Glimmer of Hope

Cicippio’s only venture into the outside world came in Sept. 1991, three months before his release. He awakened one morning in agony, unable to keep down food. When doctors failed to cure him, he was blindfolded and rushed into emergency surgery at a local hospital.

To this day, he doesn’t know what was wrong. Physicians in Beirut said only that he had a stomach problem. Cicippio recovered for eight days at an undisclosed location before he was returned to his cell. He didn’t know it then, but the end was near.

“One day, a guard who spoke some English told me: ‘Next week, soon, you go to America.’ But I didn’t believe it because we’d been built up that high before,” he says. “That’s how the game was played.”

The glimmer of hope became brighter when Cicippio was allowed to watch TV accounts of accelerating efforts to free American hostages. When his captors awakened him one day to give him new clothes, he knew something was up.

Hours later, they ordered Cicippio to climb into a box, which was loaded into a car. Suddenly, after being driven to several locations, he was told to get out and guards handed him over to Syrian officials. He was free.

In Damascus, Cicippio received a new suit and was whisked to the U.S. Embassy. Within 30 minutes he was reunited with the woman to whom he had been married for little more than a year when he was kidnaped. The former hostage still finds it hard to describe:

“It was very emotional, because we couldn’t talk. We just held each other and she said, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK.’ She kept saying that over and over. We cried in each other’s arms.”

Other reunions lie ahead: Family members flew to meet him in Germany and an even bigger party awaited his return to the United States.

Joe Cicippio was home, but his struggles would continue.

Back to Normal

During his first month of freedom, the former hostage spent hours at his older brother’s home in Norristown. Tom Cicippio adored Joe and served as the family’s spokesman during his captivity. He knew his brother better than anybody, and was surprised by the changes.

Unable to sleep, for example, Joe would come down to the den at 4 a.m. and watch videos of the hostage crisis. Tom joined him and they talked quietly about their deceased parents, their childhood and the kind of life Joe wanted from now on. He tried to tell the story of his captivity as best he could, hoping to put in some kind of perspective. But it was hard.

“I think Joe is more emotional now than he was before,” says Tom. “When it comes to holding in his emotions, a lot of times he can’t. He gets upset over an awful lot of things that someone may say to him. Things like losing a son, that upsets him to no end.”

His brother also worries about Joe’s speech problems, which he says have worsened. Occasionally, Joe has difficulty pronouncing words that begin with S and F , and gropes for alternative words. But the main problem, Tom says, is that his brother can’t seem to relax.

“It’ll be a while before Joe gets back to normal,” he predicts. “He’s very anxious to please as many people as he can, which was something he always did over the years. I think he needs to slow down.”

More important, Tom adds, there will come a time when the spotlight fades and the American hostages will have to get on with their lives.

“Right now, it seems like all of them are adjusting quickly, (but) I don’t know if that’s a good sign or not,” he says. “I often wonder, in my mind, could they be in for some sort of a letdown? We’ll have to wait and see.”

Elham Cicippio takes a more upbeat view, saying her husband is still a generous, warmhearted man. She’s glad that he’s tried to resume a normal life, but also worries about his frenetic pace. She’s concerned he might headed for another collapse.

But Joe Cicippio doesn’t have time for such thoughts. He’s organizing a trip for 40 homeless Lebanese kids to next year’s Rose Bowl Parade. His phone keeps ringing and a secretary organizes his schedule. He’d like to spend more holidays with his family, but he’s agreed to speak in Miami on July 4.

After all that’s happened, the former hostage insists he’s forgiven his captors. He speaks movingly about the futility of Middle East terrorism, saying it has accomplished nothing. And he reminds a visitor that America must never forget.

As for his own needs, Cicippio smiles gamely and says he’s doing fine. His nocturnal flashbacks are not terribly frequent, and his wife knows how to calm him. She talks to him gently, until the incident fades.

“These things wake you up in the middle of the night, when you don’t feel like you’re thinking,” he says with a shrug. “For me, the night is only so big. Sometimes, you just have to forget it all happened.”