Susan immediately came on the line: “Lyyyyyyyynnnnnnnnsssseeeeeeyyyyyyy!”
I was so relieved to hear a familiar voice. I told her we were all OK and that we were now in the hands of the Libyan government. She told me they were working hard to get us released. The man next to me told me to be quick. I asked Susan to please call my husband and tell him that I was OK and that I loved him very much. She said she would. And the conversation was over. Tyler called his father. Steve and Anthony called their wives. I wished I had been able to speak with Paul.
The next day rolled into night, and no one came to visit us. We spent most of our time sitting around the kitchen table talking, telling war stories, recounting what had happened to us thus far so we wouldn’t forget by the time we had access to pens and paper. Tyler talked about being imprisoned in Chechnya and held at gunpoint in South Sudan. Steve described his ordeal only two years earlier of being kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan, which had ended in the death of Times Afghan journalist Sultan Munadi and one British commando. This was Steve’s third time being detained, Tyler’s second time being held at gunpoint in less than three months, and Anthony’s second near-death experience after being shot in the West Bank. Steve reiterated his declaration from Sirte: “I can’t do this anymore. I am done with this.”
Anthony, Tyler, and I remained silent. The fact is that trauma and risk taking hadn’t become scarier over the years; it had become more normal. It had become the job, especially as journalists became more of a target themselves, with an increase in abductions. The acceptance of that was a natural defense mechanism against questioning ourselves too much. Maybe the three of us didn’t want to admit how sick it was that we would even contemplate continuing to cover war while we were sitting in a glorified prison cell, kidnapped in Libya. We intermittently made small talk about our families, and wondered quietly how long it would be before we saw them again.
Finally we broached the subject of what happened that March 15, three days earlier, the day we had been taken. We all had slightly different recollections of how it had gone down. Each of our brains had a selective memory to deal with trauma. We questioned whether our captivity could have been avoided, whether we stayed too long, and what the likelihood was that Mohammed, our young driver who had been pleading to leave for up to thirty minutes before we actually left, was still alive. Steve and I thought we saw his limp body on the pavement next to the driver’s side of the car. We were collectively responsible for what we assumed was Mohammed’s death. Like many Libyans at the time, Mohammed had seen driving Western journalists as a way to make money, and his way of supporting the revolution. During the uprising, most men his age were either fighters or helping journalists get the word out about what was happening. But was the pursuit of a story worth his life? This was a question without direct answers, in a way. Of course, none of us could say that a story was actually worth a life, or worth the pain we caused others. That was ridiculous. But I hoped we’d been clear with our families, our drivers, and our interpreters about how great a risk it was to love us or work with us.
When the mood got grim, we would all retire to our beds. One morning I tried to cheer up the men by dancing around in my new Magic Girl sweat suit, singing Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” while doing jumping jacks and flailing around my arms. Steve asked why I was singing Britney Spears. We read the books they’d left for us—Richard III, Julius Ceasar, Othello—and Tyler suggested that if we got bored enough, we could always put on a play.
More than twenty-four hours passed. I thought again about the amount of groceries they had bought us. Would we be here for weeks? Months? As captives, our only contact with the outside world was the man who delivered our hot meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, our guard, and the mysterious men from an undisclosed branch of government who came and blindfolded us in the middle of the night to allow us our one phone call. We looked hard for any tinge of emotion in their faces that might indicate what our futures held. When our main guard was rude to us, we were sure there had been some decision made higher up that we were no longer worthy prisoners, and perhaps we would be transferred to a basement somewhere for torture.
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