Each man tutored the others in his own profession, according to a newly published memoir by former U.S. hostage David Jacobson. His group of cellmates embarked on joint projects, including a satirical “Hostage Cookbook” that includes a dish called “Hint of Chicken”-rice that a chicken has walked across, leaving behind its droppings. They sang to one another, recited poetry, talked of their travels. Still, many of the 21 Western hostages held for extended periods struggled with black despair, especially after their captors promised to free them, then reneged. The others would comfort them. “Choose joy,” McCarthy would say. “We had to work very hard between us to keep our spirits up, to keep ourselves happy, determined to carry on,” McCarthy said. “We have done that very well, I think.”
The early years were the worst. Hostages were held for months blindfolded, shackled and in solitary confinement. One guard delighted in spitting water on his victims. Some were cuffed repeatedly on the ears; one U.S. hostage suffered permanent hearing loss. U.S. hostages were racked by diarrhea caused by their foul diet; the guards watched “Dallas,” “Knots Landing” and “That’s Incredible,” ignoring the hostages’ pleas to be allowed to go to the toilet. When they were moved, they were wrapped up like mummies in adhesive tape and stuffed into a car or trunk or the wheel well of a truck. Always, they feared death. A visitor once put Jacobsen up against a wall, pressed a pistol against his neck and said: “You dead.” Said McCarthy: “At times it seemed it would never end.”
In the last year, the hostages’ lot has improved. Their “coarse” diet was upgraded to include cheese-in-pita sandwiches for breakfast and a lunch dish of canned beans and meat that McCathy called “rice and curried garbage,” according to Royal Air Force Capt. Freedoon Amroliwalla, who examined him for two hours Friday. For the first time, they regularly were given salads, fruit and plenty of tea. “John said the first time they were given a bowl of cherries, it was the first touch of color they had seen in the black and gray world they lived in, and they look at them for over a day,” said Amroliwalla. They were no longer closed off from the outside world; McCarthy learned of his mother’s death from other hostages who heard about it on a short-wave radio, and McCarthy himself has been listening to the BBC World Service for the last year.
McCarthy was undergoing at least six days of medical tests at an RAF base in Lyneham, and the initial reports were good. He was think and somewhat out of shape, but alert. “He was cracking jokes,” said Chris Pearson, who helped found The Friends of John McCarthy in London in the second year of the television producer’s five year captivity. But his former girlfriend Jill Morrell found him “extremely tired.” “He’s being very sensible,” she said. “He’s following the advice that he has to take things slowly and is under the care of people who know what they’re doing.”
Adjusting to freedom is McCarthy’s new challenge. Other hostages have found the demands of celebrity and getting reacquainted with family and friends overwhelming. Keenan, freed last August, said he “saw a man grow” during the four years and more that he shared a cell with McCarthy. But an ex-hostage, he added, is a “mutant creation” poorly equipped to cope with the “hothouse of obligations, both personal and public,” that confronts him on release. “The conditions of freedom make it not liberty but another and more demanding king of bondage,“Keenan said. And he ought to know.
