Town Erupts With Joy at Hostage’s Escape

One of the most remarkable days in the history of Macon, Miss., started at 5:30 a.m. Sunday with a single ringing phone.

Kellie Hamill was awakened in the small brick house where she has kept an anxious vigil for three weeks. After that, the news spread in all directions like an electric current: Pastor Greg Duncan awoke at 6 a.m., opening his front door to a policeman who was bouncing up and down on his front step, grinning.

Mayor Dorothy Baker Hines got a phone call at 6:15, and shouted out praises to God. By the time the bells started ringing for church, every retired schoolteacher and gas station attendant and home health aide in Macon knew it: Tommy Hamill was free.

Since April 9, when Hamill’s convoy was attacked near Baghdad, and as bodies of his fellow dead contractors were identified one by one, tension has weighed heavily on Macon.

But on Sunday, not long after Kellie Hamill got word that he was safe, she received a call from her husband. She heard the words, “Hello, baby,” and began to weep, she said.

“He sounded wonderful,” she said. “He sounded like he normally does.”

Sunday was a day unlike anything people here could remember: Car horns blared, their joyous occupants hooting and hanging out of windows.

Worried that the day would slip by and she would forget how it felt, Mayor Hines wrote a single sentence on the inside of her Bible -- “Tommy Hamill is safe today.”

“I’ve been happy when my children were born, and my grandchildren, but this is completely different,” said Hines. “It’s tears of joy.”

Solemn emotions coursed through a crowd that gathered for a prayer vigil at dusk, in front of the tall white columns of the county courthouse. Holding their children, their baseball caps respectfully removed, residents held hands and sang “Amazing Grace.” Some knelt on the grass in the cool spring evening.

One after another, ministers praised God for intervening on Hamill’s behalf.

Hanging back from the crowd with his arms crossed, in a plaid shirt and Wrangler jeans, was Leo Hamill, 68, Tommy’s father. Tears came to his eyes when he was asked how he would greet his son.

“I’m going to hug his neck, I reckon, and say ‘I’m glad to see you,’ ” he said.

Last month, Hamill, 43, was videotaped in the back of a sedan in Iraq, gazing steadily at a cameraman. He is known in Macon as a tough, quiet country boy who, after struggling to pay off debts on his family dairy farm, found that his best opportunity involved working in a war zone.

Last summer, he agreed to drive trucks in Iraq for Halliburton Corp., which offered tax-free salaries of $80,000 and up. By this spring, he was so pleased with the assignment that he told friends he might stay on after his yearlong contract ended. Then, on April 9, Hamill’s fuel convoy was attacked and he disappeared along with six others.

In his call, Hamill reassured Kellie that his captors had treated him well.

“He kept asking about how everybody was,” said his aunt, Coleene Higginbotham. “He was asking how his mama was doing. He wanted specifically to know how his kids were doing.”

A crowd of several dozen reporters and cameramen trailed the family when they attended services at Calvary Baptist Church, said Duncan, the pastor.

“It’s been really wonderful, and a little chaotic,” Higginbotham said. “We’re getting bombarded ... but it’s a good kind of bombarded.”

Higginbotham said the family never doubted that Hamill would return home safely.

“God hears the prayers of people,” said Higginbotham. “We know it was God who allowed Tommy to get where he is. We all believe in the power of prayer, and now we see it working.”

People in Macon have responded to Hamill’s captivity with marathons of prayer. Local churches held 24-hour-a-day vigils, appointing members to pray in shifts all night, and vigils on the courthouse lawn became a nightly tradition.

On Friday, Hines, the mayor, found an unsigned note on her desk at City Hall. It said, “Your prayers are going to be answered.”

On Saturday, the weather turned bad, and the yellow ribbon blew off the tree in Hines’ yard.

“I said, ‘Lord, wouldn’t it be wonderful if I didn’t have to put that bow back up?’ ” she said.

Those who know Hamill say his choices epitomized the values of this close-knit town. With unemployment in the county at twice the state average, Hamill took a second job and worked to the point of exhaustion, quietly refusing charity of any kind, friends and family said. For him, filing for bankruptcy was out of the question.

Sandy Sansing, who grew up with Hamill, described him as “a country boy, a Skoal-dipping, tobacco-chewing guy.” As soon as he was captured, she voiced her certainty that he would somehow escape the captors who had threatened to kill and mutilate him.

“I said, ‘If anyone could make it out, he can,’ ” said Sansing, 36.

Many neighbors wondered how a private, reticent truck driver would react to the national attention trained on him and his family.

He’s probably not prepared for the celebration the town is planning, much less the crush of national news crews.

“Believe me, Tommy’s not going to want to participate in something like that,” said Scott Boyd, publisher of the local Macon Beacon newspaper. “He’s a very private man. He’s not going to want the attention.”

Nevertheless, Hamill will be stepping into a heroic place in the community’s history.

“He’ll be held in high regard for a long, long time,” Boyd said.

At the prayer vigil, Kellie Hamill was so exhausted that family members held her shoulders upright while she sat in a chair. She will leave for Germany shortly to meet her husband, said a family spokesman. For their homecoming, Hines has promised to throw Hamill “a parade so long it will never end.”

Macon doesn’t even have its own marching band, Hines said. But she added, “I’ll bet we can find one.”

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Sloan reported from Macon and Barry from Atlanta.