My Father the Hostage
Terry Anderson
Born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1947, Terry Anderson is a journalist and foreign correspondent. He has two daughters—Gabrielle with his first wife, Mihoko Anderson, and Sulome with his second wife, Madeleine Bassil. On March 16, 1985, while living in Beirut, Lebanon, and serving as the Middle East bureau chief for the Associated Press, he was kidnapped by a group associated with Hezbollah, becoming one of the 104 men and women held in the Lebanese Hostage Crisis from 1982 to 1992. Sulome was three months old when he was kidnapped. After being held for six years and nine months, he was released in 1991.
Terry with Sulome (six years old) in Damascus, Syria, following his release from captivity in 1991. This was their first meeting.
“i liked your father,” says the man who held him hostage for nearly the first seven years of my life.
He sighs. He wants me to understand. “It was nothing personal,” he tells me. “Our fight was not with him or the other hostages. Our fight was with the people who had slaughtered our families.”
I am interviewing one of the guards who watched over my dad as he crouched, chained and blindfolded, on a series of dirty basement floors in Dahieh, a Shia suburb in south Beirut. This man is now a local Hezbollah official in south Lebanon, but at the time he held my father, he was just a teenage militiaman—pretty far down on the terrorist totem pole, as these things go.
Like my father was at the time of his kidnapping, I am now a journalist working in Beirut, and in a bizarre twist of fate, I’ve ended up face-to-face with one of his captors. To make matters even more complicated, the man seems very sorry about it.
“If I could go back in time, I would put you in your father’s arms myself,” he tells me.
I remember when I first felt my father’s arms around me. It was the night he was released, at the US embassy in Damascus, Syria. They were stiff and unnatural, like an overstarched sweater. He was smiling from ear to ear, but his eyes were empty in a hollow face. My dad was finally home, but I instantly began mourning the loss of another father, the chubby, kind-eyed man whose photo I used to sleep with under my pillow—the person he was before they took him.
When I was nine, I snuck a copy of the memoir he wrote about his time in captivity into my room, where I read the whole thing in a day after being grounded following one of our daily screaming fights. My parents hadn’t wanted me to read it, thinking I was too young, but I had to know more about this stranger-father and why he couldn’t love me.
I learned a lot from that book. I found out why he called me “Button,” a nickname I hated for the unnatural way he said it in the rare moments he showed me affection. The first time he saw me on TV, when his guards allowed him to watch the news, he thought my tiny nose looked just like a button. I cried as I read, wondering what was wrong with me that he could feel so much love from afar but not when I was living in the same house, not for the stubborn, hurt little girl who just wouldn’t be quiet and do what she was told.
Every detail of his captivity—the torture, the agony, the casual cruelty of his kidnappers—was forever burned into my mind. I read that when his captors wouldn’t let him send us a Christmas message one year, my father beat his head against the wall until he was covered in blood and they had to restrain him. They couldn’t let him hurt himself too badly, after all. A dead hostage is no longer valuable. He wasn’t even allowed the agency of suicide.
In the years after my dad came home, I would remember the time before he returned with a guilty nostalgia for which I hated myself. I was happy before he came barging into my life. I had been a bright, curious child, and the people around me had given me lots of attention and praise; I was the adorable little girl whose father was a hostage. I knew who I was back then.
When he first returned, I would tentatively try to share my thoughts and childlike discoveries with my new father, but unlike the adults who once cooed and exclaimed at my precociousness, he usually brushed me off. I knew almost immediately that he was jealous of my relationship with my mother, who had orbited me like a little moon from the moment of my birth. He was determined to make me less spoiled, as he saw it through the lens of his own upbringing. I realized later that when he would yell at me to sit still and stop being a smartass, his parents’ words were coming out of his mouth.
By the time I was ten, I had become deeply, chronically insecure. My thoughts and feelings, which had once mattered, suddenly did not—at least to the one person I yearned for them to matter to. I began seeing myself as flawed and unwanted, the kind of gift you hope comes with a receipt. One day, I cut off my cloud of blond curls with a pair of craft scissors, trying to make myself look as ugly as I felt. Among my peers, I would adopt a similar interpersonal pattern as with my father, alternating between extreme vulnerability and an overaggressive demand to be noticed. My schoolmates smelled weakness, and I became a target for bullying, which only widened the fracture between the confident, assertive little girl I had been and the wounded preteen I was becoming.
That wound at my core would continue to fester for years, leading me into a spiral of pain and addiction that lasted well into adulthood. My father remained little more than an angry stranger for most of my life, and until recently, I would look in his eyes and see my deficiencies mirrored in his remoteness.
So two decades later, as the man who had taken the father I needed from me before I was born looks me in the eye and tells me he is sorry, I want to spit at him.
“You ruined my family,” I tell him. “You nearly destroyed my life.”
“What can I say, Susu?” he replies, pain etched across his face. “Your father is a good man, the best out of all those we took. But it could have been anyone. If someone else had caught our eye, we would have taken him. I look at you now and I feel for you. I think about your father and I feel for him, too. But at the time, we didn’t see your father as Terry Anderson, the person. To us, he was America.”
I think about the way the chasm between my father and me has diminished in recent years, as I begin to accept him for who he is and not who I always wished he could be. I hold the moments of closeness we’ve had next to my heart, the shared love of journalism, the increasing flashes of emotion and genuine affection he’s shown me since he realized how much his trauma damaged my psyche.
My father’s kidnapper is right. My dad is a good man. He may never have been the parent I longed for, but he has become something else to me, something just as precious and coveted. He is my friend now, and nobody can ever take that away from us again.