The journalist who spent six years in captivity
Terry Anderson 1947–2024
Terry Anderson had just finished a Saturday morning game of tennis when they came for him. It was March 1985, and the former Marine was the Beirut bureau chief for the Associated Press, and one of the few Westerners remaining in Lebanon as the civil war reached its 10th year. As Anderson dropped off his tennis partner, three armed men jumped from a green Mercedes, grabbed him, and sped off. He’d spend the next 2,454 days in captivity, held by Islamists from the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah. Kept in dimly lit cells, where he slept on a thin mattress on a concrete floor, he was chained, blindfolded, and beaten. During his long stretches in solitary confinement, he said after his release, only his Catholic faith—and innate “stubbornness”—kept him from going insane. “You wake up every day, and you summon up the energy from somewhere, and you get through the day,” he said. “And you do it, day after day after day.”
Anderson was born in a small Ohio town where his father was “the village police officer,” said The New York Times. After high school he won a scholarship to the University of Michigan but joined the Marines instead. He served in Japan and Vietnam as a combat journalist, then earned a journalism degree from Iowa State and started with AP. He reported from Japan and South Africa before heading for Lebanon, where he covered the war for several years before his abduction. During his captivity, “haggard” images of Anderson issued by his kidnappers “became familiar across the world,” said The Telegraph (U.K.). In the U.S. he “came to symbolize” a hostage crisis that had ensnared 17 other Western victims. Fellow prisoners paid tribute to his “bravery and sense of humor” and described him feistily arguing religion and politics with his captors.
Released at the war’s end in 1991, Anderson returned to the U.S. and “lived a peripatetic life,” said the Associated Press. He gave speeches, taught journalism, wrote a best-selling memoir, and operated a blues bar, a Cajun restaurant, and a Virginia horse ranch. But he also struggled with the aftereffects of his captivity, including posttraumatic stress disorder. “People ask me, ‘Did you get over them?’” he said in 2018. “I don’t know! Ask my ex-wife—ask my third ex-wife.”