How did he do it? Scraps of news that other hostages brought out about Anderson during the first years of his captivity made it seem impossible that he would emerge so fit and full of life. He had banged his head against the wall until it bled. He was fashioning little crucifixes out of lint. Friends who knew Terry as a rollicking, restless man wondered how he could ever endure open-ended confinement.
Yet there he was, a remarkable survivor. Medical exams in Wiesbaden, Germany, found Anderson fit except for easily treatable sinus and lung inflammations. His closest friend in Beirut, British journalist Robert Fisk, wrote in The Independent after a private reunion that it was “not unlike a miracle” to find Anderson “happy, free, brave and, now, famous.” “Of course I haven’t changed at all,” Anderson told Fisk. “I have been in the closet, so to speak, for seven years. Time stopped.”
But time didn’t stop. Anderson endured 2,455 days of captivity, more than any other hostage. He was held in 15 to 20 different cells, he said, many of them tiny, dark and damp, all sealed off from the sun. “Look, those weren’t wasted years, OK?” Anderson told a press conference in Wiesbaden. “And they weren’t empty. I lived through them, I learned some things from them and I’ll use them, I hope, properly.”
Even as a child, Anderson had a habit of prevailing over the chaos around him. “Terry had to invent himself,” sister Peggy Say wrote in a recent book, because the hard-drinking Anderson parents had “what could politely be called a troubled marriage.” He turned aside college prospects in favor of two tours as a Marine reporter in Vietnam. He returned a converted liberal and a committed journalist. After college, he joined the Associated Press and rose quickly. In 1981 he was posted to South Africa, but that was too tame for him. “He wanted more action,” his former bureau chief once recalled. Two years later he seized the chance to head the AP bureau in Beirut.
Though his first marriage broke up there, Anderson thrived in Beirut. He insisted on eyewitness reporting, even if it meant taking big risks. During lulls in the fighting he liked to host dinner parties in his book-filled apartment on Beirut’s seafront, lubricating guests with his favorite Lebanese wine and Irish coffee. Anderson scoffed at danger, saying his position as a journalist would protect him, and he refused to vary his own routine. “Terry had turned cocky, arrogant, kind of cold,” Peggy Say wrote of his last visit home. “I did not like what Lebanon had done to my brother.”
Yet some of those same traits may have saved his sanity after kidnappers ambushed him on his way home from a customary Saturday-morning tennis game. He never stopped resisting, and “he never relinquished his role as a reporter,” former hostage David Jacobsen wrote. Once thrown together with other hostages, Anderson became a kind of squad leader. He insisted they keep the cell clean. He made a deck of cards from bits of paper. When guards took away the cards, he created a chess set from scraps of aluminum foil. He served as the group’s tailor; throughout his captivity, he wore the same endlessly darned pair of socks. After two clerics joined the group and formed “The Church of the Locked Door,” he rediscovered his Roman Catholicism, knotting rosaries from string plucked out of plastic floor mats. And he built on the hostages’ greatest strength–each other.
When they were allowed to talk, Anderson hounded his cellmates for intellectual conversation. “I needed them,” he said. “I needed their minds, I needed what they knew. I needed them to keep my mind going. They were my friends as well, and I tried to help them as much as I could.” When the others were exhausted, he would pace the cell, still holding up his end of the debate. He worked at learning Arabic. Fellow hostage Thomas Sutherland taught him French with the help of an obscure historical text eventually provided by the guards.
Anderson spent most of his captivity with Sutherland, a dean of the American University of Beirut, “sometimes on the same piece of chain, always within arm’s reach,” Anderson said. Sutherland taught Anderson about agriculture, and the two planned a dairy farm “down to the last penny,” Anderson said. Sutherland said after his release last month: “Without Terry Anderson I could not have made it for six and a half years.”
Anderson defied his captors. He once baited a short guard, telling him: “You fire that big gun and it’ll knock you on your ass,” Jacobsen recalled. “I got in a lot of fights with them from time to time,” Anderson said last week. One guard nicknamed him “Bronson”; others challenged him to wrestling matches. Beatings stopped after a few months, but other tactics were crueler: holding out the prospect of freedom, then taking it back. Once, recalled former French hostage Marcel Fontaine, “[the captors] put him in a new suit and he wore it every day. A week later they came in and told him to get undressed. They took his suit back.” Gradually he won the guards’ grudging respect, partly because of his Marine training, and they began meeting some of the group’s demands.
Anderson wanted books. The first one he was given was the Bible, and it “got a lot of service,” he said. According to Jacobsen, Anderson amazed his cellmates with his ability to memorize huge passages. Briefly in 1985 and permanently starting last year, he had access to the most prized possession: a shortwave radio. With that, he could monitor world events. It also brought messages of love and support from friends and relatives.
Still, there were periods of “near despair.” Anderson would stop his exercise program and accept “the routine of just kind of doing nothing.” His low point, he said, came in l986. He had taught the others sign language so they could communicate while being held in separate cells, forbidden to speak. But on Christmas Day he broke his glasses; he couldn’t read the signals. He “would sit through those long nights and speak with great pain and remorse and longing for his daughter,” said fellow hostage Brian Keenan. The worst thing his captors did, Anderson said, was “take me away from the people I love and hurt them much more than they hurt me.”
His companions, his faith and his stubbornness helped him soldier on. “You just do what you have to do,” he explained. “You wake up every day, and you summon up the energy from somewhere, even when you think you haven’t got it, and you get through the day. And you do it day after day after day.” Now Anderson can choose what to do with the rest of his days. His prison writings were voluminous, including a collection of 32 poems. “Doesn’t every journalist want to write a book?” he noted. But his main challenge is to go forward. “I’ve got a whole new life,” he said. “It’s going to be happy, I’m going to enjoy it, God willing.” Given what he has been able to overcome, that seems a foregone conclusion.
