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SOMEHOW WE ALL FELL asleep sitting up in the back of the Land Cruiser. It was light out when we awoke, stiff and sore, to the sound of soldiers banging on the door. We were thrown into the back of a pickup truck. Bound, blindfolded, and lying on the bed of the hard metal pickup, we drove west for two hundred fifty miles along the Mediterranean coast under an unforgiving sun. I imagined what we looked like, being paraded through the streets like medieval trophies of war from one hostile checkpoint to another. I was so tired of being scared, of wondering what was next. The unknown was more terrifying than anything. Tyler was our eyes: He was able to see out from beneath his blindfold and narrated the scene to us in a hushed voice as we drove along the endless road. Anthony was our ears: He translated the slurs and shouts, like “Dirty dogs!” (a grave insult in Islam). For most of the time I crouched in a fetal position to shield myself from the street and rested my head against the metal arch of the wheel, my bound hands covering my face. My collarbone and shoulder ached with every bounce of the truck, but I thought if I could dig myself deep into the flatbed, no one would notice I was there.
At each checkpoint one of us was beaten. I heard the thump of what I imagined was an AK-47 or a fist to the back of my colleagues’ heads, and a whimper of contained agony. At one checkpoint I felt a soldier sidle up next to me alongside the truck, and immediately afterward he poured the weight of his body onto my cheek with his fist. Tyler, in a gesture that would get me through the next few days, managed to move his bound hands over to me and hold mine while I wept in misery.
“You are OK,” he said. “I am with you. You are going to be OK. You are going to be OK.”
“I just want to go home,” I said aloud as hot tears dampened my blindfold. I found reassurance only in the fact that we were all still together.
It was afternoon when we arrived in Sirte, Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, which lies halfway between Benghazi and Tripoli. We were still blindfolded when they led us downstairs into an area that felt, smelled, and sounded like a prison. The man leading me put me up against a wall and told me to place my hands above my head and spread my legs. I imitated the position I had seen so many times on police TV shows. We were being searched again. Like all the other Libyan men before him, he rested his hands on my breasts for a bit too long while he checked my pockets. I had a small container of saline for my contact lenses that I was able to convince the previous soldiers to let me keep for medical reasons, but this soldier confiscated it immediately. He took the plastic watch off my wrist. The man felt me up one last time and walked me into a cell.
“Is everybody here?” Steve asked.
“Yes,” we all replied.
Eventually they untied our hands and undid our blindfolds and brought us a dinner of orange rice and plain white bread rolls. Our cell was about twelve feet by ten. There was a small sliding window in the upper left corner, four filthy foam mattresses on the floor, a box of dates, a giant bottle of drinking water with some plastic cups, and a bottle for urine in the corner by the door. I was too distressed to eat and, despite my thirst, too terrified of needing to use the restroom to drink. I had a splitting headache from caffeine withdrawal, and my contact lenses were dry and irritated. My eyesight was -5.5; I was nearsighted and almost blind without them. My glasses had been stolen with our gear. If I cried a few times a day, I thought, I could keep my contacts moist.
The men took turns urinating into the bottle in the corner, and I longed for a funnel, or a penis. There was nothing to do but sleep, talk, and wait. They came to take Anthony away for questioning a few times, and we couldn’t decide whether the men in the prison in Sirte had gotten word of who we were from Tripoli or whether they still had no idea we were New York Times journalists.
“Do you think anyone realizes we’re missing?” I asked.
Anthony, Steve, and Tyler were sure. “The New York Times is a machine,” Steve said. “They will be doing everything they can to find us.”
“Really?” I asked skeptically. I couldn’t imagine that anyone even realized we were missing in the chaos of the front line. I had been so immersed in my own head, in staying alive, that I hadn’t once thought about the mechanisms in place for trying to rescue us.
“Four missing New York Times journalists is a big deal,” Tyler stepped in.
“This is it for me,” Steve said, unwavering. “No more war. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do this to Reem [his wife]. This is the second time in two years.”