Cover Story

By NANCY GIBBS

It was a cold day in hell when Terry Anderson won his freedom at last. The snow fell hard in Mount Lebanon as he spent the last 24 hours pacing in his cell, playing solitaire by candlelight and listening to the BBC broadcast stories of his progress on the road to Damascus. Those last hours passed with infernal slowness; his captors continued to argue over whether to let him go at all. But when at last the path to freedom cleared, he appeared to a world captured in a camera lens, and all was finally well.

What is the best unit of measure for courage? Is it registered in the 2,455 days lost, the countless millions of ribbons tied, the prayers asked, the letters sent, the rumors of death, the hopes dashed and then raised again? Where did he find the generosity of spirit to smile when he walked out of captivity into a roomful of colleagues and told them, "You can't imagine how glad I am to see you. I've thought about this moment for a long time, and now it's here, and I'm scared to death. I don't know what to say."

In a way, what was most impressive was what he didn't say. Here was a man who had been wrapped like a corpse from head to foot in adhesive tape and moved from one hiding place to another in a coffin. With the others, he endured beatings and blindfolds and boredom, months spent chained to furniture, months without bathing, without real food or his professional staple, news of the world outside his grave. And yet there was no hatred, little bitterness, only that great wide smile and a promise of forgiveness that prompted the millions who watched to wonder, How would I have fared? Would I have had that strength?

The prayers, he said, made all the difference during the dark times. Yet he and his fellow prisoners had no way of knowing the place they held in America's heart. They did not hear the anchors keeping count of the days on the evening news, the countless appeals and press conferences in which the hostage families and dear friends pounded on the nation's attention to force Americans to keep them in mind when many would have just as soon forgotten. The captives did not know that people they had never met wore a tiny yellow ribbon on their lapel every day for seven years, with the words FREE THE HOSTAGES.

Anderson credited his friends and his stubbornness and his faith, as practiced in their private sanctuary, the Church of the Locked Door. Thomas Sutherland taught him French; he taught the others the sign alphabet for the deaf so they could communicate when they were not allowed to speak. It was Anderson who made the tinfoil chess pieces, the Scrabble games, the Monopoly set. In a sense, as the longest held and best known, Anderson had become a symbol for all the captives, for the 17 Americans who were taken -- the three who died, the 13 others who have retrieved their freedom one by one, including Joseph Cicippio and Alann Steen, who finally saw daylight last week.

As the last Americans came out, they were freed from their symbolism -- no longer did they stand for national helplessness and failed presidencies, for ill-fated schemes and a foreign policy with its principles held hostage. Instead they were real, grateful, living people with daughters they had never seen, scars that will never heal, long nights full of lessons they will never forget.

If, as the scholars observed last week, the '70s was the decade of terrorism and the '80s the decade of hostages, there is sure to be a new nightmare waiting. This chapter, now nearly closed, is not the end in a part of the world where all too often old hatreds die hard, people are pawns, and lives are meant for sacrificing. Two Germans remain imprisoned, and all accounts remain unsettled. But after all this, perhaps it is not too much to hope that last week brought a portent of peace to a waiting world tired of weeping over the opportunities it has already lost.