Forty Years a Hostage

Today is the anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979.  My family was with another family for a week-end get away at the Outer Banks, and it was one of the few times we had the TV on. My dad saw the coverage and shook his head. He said, "This doesn't look good."

It would be worse than we realized. Everyone in that house that day, the grown ups like my parents, the high school kids (me), and the little ones--we all thought that it would be quickly settled. It must be a mistake, right? Crazy school kids taking over an embassy who would soon come to their senses--now, of course, we know it was nothing like that.

In later years, as I've worked in a variety of places with a vast assortment of people, I've returned to the thought of those hostages, taken and held in their place of work. I can't imagine spending over a year in captivity with most of my colleagues. I'm lucky in that I like most of them well enough to spend a working day with them. But to be cooped up with them day in and day out?

I think of what I keep in my desk; I do keep stocks of items that might be important in an emergency: dental floss, tampons, other toiletries, a bit of cash, water, oatmeal, pens, office supplies of all sorts. Still, after a month or two, I'd run out.   And if I was held for any amount of time at all, I'm sure I'd rue the other items that never made it to my office.  And those hostages would be held for over a year.

Those hostages haunt me--did they have any sense of what was going to happen? Did they know they were in danger but stayed in their diplomatic post regardless? 

I think of those students.  It was just supposed to be a sit-in, that day at the embassy.  How on earth did those students manage to take an embassy--and hold it for so long?  Did they wake up periodically saying, "How on earth will we get out of this?"  Did they fear it would end badly?

  

I know that many released hostages have troubles after being released. I remember at national youth assemblies of my high school years where one or more of the Iranian hostages would come to talk to us--but they often glossed over the troubles with adjusting.

And here we are, forty years later.  The relationship between Iran and the U.S. was changed forever on that day.  It would have been changed by some turn of events, regardless--but how unlikely it seems, both then and now, that it would be a protest turned into a hostage situation that would be a catlyst for so much geopolitical change.

In so many ways, that event still holds us hostage.