SURVIVING IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH (2024)

Not that these three former hostages had no idea, before their seizure and confinement, that they faced possible, if not likely, danger. Terry Waite, a layman active in the Church of England, had gone to Beirut for the express purpose of trying to meet the hostages, having established a reputation in Libya of acting as a mediator between Arab militants and the British government, several of whose citizens had been seized. Terry Anderson had worked in Beirut for the Associated Press several years before he was taken hostage, and knew clearly the danger he faced as a highly visible American in a city, a nation, where hatred of his country was endemic. Brian Keenan chose to leave his native Belfast for a teaching job in Beirut, even though others were fleeing Lebanon -- indeed, the taking of European and American hostages had already begun well before he arrived. His friends worried about him even before he boarded a plane for the Middle East.

Soon enough all three of these men would be held in prolonged captivity -- at times they would be held in the same building, even in rooms next to one another. With them, occasionally, were others -- Tom Sutherland, John McCarthy, Frank Reed, David Jacobsen, Benjamin Weir. Waite was kept alone for over four years; Sutherland was kept alone and with others, especially with Anderson; Keenan spent almost all his time with McCarthy, an Englishman. All of them were chained, harangued, threatened: Keenan and Anderson were badly beaten; Waite was constantly complimented by his guards, yet was exposed to the same wretched circ*mstances visited upon the others and was even told (with a gun held to his head) that he'd be shot to death in a matter of minutes.

The three narrators report in great detail the daily horrors of a prolonged, hostile, punitive, even life-threatening confinement. They were kept in the dark both literally and figuratively. They were, for the most part, fed poorly -- a diet barely adequate for survival -- and were exposed to extreme heat, to hordes of mosquitoes and co*ckroaches which attacked them relentlessly. They were denied contact with their families, or anyone else save the guards, and they were denied information about what was happening in the outside world. They all got sick, suffered great pain, sank into gloom, and for a while, lost hope. They all tried hard to go from day to day, retain their composure, their sense that somehow, someday they would go free, be united once again with family and friends. They all tried to find signals, signs, clues, hints that bespoke of imminent release -- even when days and months had turned into years.

They all fell back, finally, on themselves -- through daydreams and fantasies, through continual return to their past lives, to incidents and events, good and bad luck, surprises and accidents. They tried to construct a narrative line, so to speak, in order to determine a sense of who they had become, how they'd gotten where they were, where they were headed when fate suddenly stopped them cold in their tracks. Most importantly, they all fought long and hard against the total psychological deterioration called psychosis -- a break with common-sense reality, a resort to paranoia, to crazy thinking that doctors characterize with phrases such as "delusional ideation." These were men pushed to the very brink, exposed to brutality, deprivation, uncertainty and, not least, constant accusation, intimidation. No wonder each of them turned on himself, became self-critical -- it is the mind's response to the world, however alien its nature: What others call us, we have our own way of echoing.

On the other hand, these were men of particular strengths, virtues, and so they were also able to fight back with ingenuity and persistence; no doubt these books are themselves an aspect of that struggle. For Keenan, imprisonment was most explicitly a threat to his mind's survival. He feared breaking down enough to become the most assertively resistant of the three. He challenged his guards, stood up to them in no uncertain terms, thereby provoking them into some of their beatings. They wanted from him a reflexic compliance, a submission he refused to offer. His mate in imprisonment, McCarthy, was much more the wry, ironic observer, and a good deal of An Evil Cradling is given over to contrasting these two personalities as they separately and together endured a kind of living hell. The issue is not about right or wrong, the psychologically healthy or unhealthy; rather, the reader learns yet again, that extreme threats to mind and body do not eliminate a mind's history, its accumulated strengths, its favored strategies, its vulnerabilities. Terry Waite is as anxious for us to know about his overall life (the one that preceded his kidnapping) as he is to tell us about his suffering at the hands of the Islamic Jihad. He is less personal than Keenan or Anderson, and given understandably to considerable religious imagery. He has enjoyed a long association with the Church of England and one of its archbishops, has lived in Uganda, traveled the world restlessly, was never, it seems, loath to spare himself danger (in South Africa, in the Philippines), and we learn of his adventures in substantial detail. Sometimes he resorts to Jungian metaphysics,and sometimes his account of a particular deed done, moment lived while working here, there (everywhere, it seems) becomes distracting -- but revealing: This is how he survived, by turning himself into a virtual analysand. He comes across as virtuous, though oddly cold, and his wife as virtuous and long-suffering -- all too often left alone to care for four children, as he tended to other families, other children.

In contrast, Terry Anderson offers a deeply intimate portrait of himself, warts and all. Where Keenan is austerely private, very much a loner, and Waite is not afraid of hifalutin psychological or spiritual pieties, Anderson emerges as a warm, earthy person, whose lusty embrace of life even his captors couldn't take from him. He comes across as bright, urbane, practical-minded, unpretentious, and as an exceedingly shrewd observer of others, not to mention himself. He was, under great duress, concerned not only with himself, but his fellow prisoners -- a decent, compassionate person whose obvious level-headedness is not insistently asserted, but slowly makes itself apparent in the course of a knowing, touching self-presentation. His wife, Madeleine is very much a part of the book; she writes an account of what happened to her during the years of separation from her husband: the birth of their daughter, Sulome; the anxiety, frustration, bitterness, gloom and anger with which she had to contend. Anderson is frank to say that his writing and hers in this book are a means for them to learn what they separately went through -- a part of their joint healing. They are both more forthcoming about themselves than Keenan and Waite, inclined to a candor and critical self-scrutiny all the more convincing for the book's lack of self-importance. These are two human beings who are not about to bask in a post-release celebrity that obscures their ordinary humanity. They tell us of their self-doubts, their resentments, the family troubles that preceded the seizure of one of them and were not banished by the worldwide attention, the widespread sympathy and concern extended during those years of life spent in a small, life-threatening penal colony -- a story, then, of adversity as an eventual instrument of self-knowledge.

These books make up a late-20th-century witness, telling us what a nationalism, a tribalism gone berserk can impose arbitrarily on innocent men who, each for his own reasons, happened to be at hand, ripe for the picking. In a sense, these writers became time-conscious in a quite special way -- prisoners of time, really: each day a hard, painful, uncertain scary road to walk. Unlike Kafka's Joseph K, the men were not confronted at home, upon arising, but in the streets (all were put in Mercedes cars); nor were they left to puzzle endlessly as to the purposes of their accusers, the reasons for their apprehension. They knew exactly what the Islamic Jihad, backed by Iran, had in mind to do with them -- use them as pawns in a political struggle that would take years to end. Eventually, however, each of the three, wrongly accused, fared far better than Kafka's protagonist: They were not killed with a knife to their hearts, but were released, and have lived to try to make sense of what happened, to make sense, also, of life, its meaning and purpose. To do so is no small achievement for any of us, and in the case of these three, evidence of the redemptive side to suffering.

Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard University and the author, most recently, of "The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism."