‘Taxi,’ Terry Anderson, a Marine Turned Correspondent, Would Shout, Whenever His Hezbollah Captors Asked Him Anything

Terry Anderson knew he would not be there forever, stuck in a dark room, the captive of terrorists in a city controlled by Islamic militants. When they asked him anything, he would say, “Taxi,” as if he were calling a cab to take him from the life of misery he had led since three men had bundled him into a green Mercedes on a Beirut street on March 16, 1985.That’s the story he told at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan after they released him nearly seven years later. “We thought every day we were getting out,” he told us, but he needed all the resilience and toughness he had acquired during six years as a marine, much of it in Vietnam, to survive the experience more or less intact, mentally as well as physically.I had no doubt he could make it from what I had first seen of him when he was in Tokyo and Seoul before becoming AP bureau chief in Beirut. I had again run into him after the bombing of the marine corps barracks in October 1983 when 241 Americans were killed, including 220 marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers. As always, he was confident of survival in a city where life was becoming increasingly dangerous.Terry by that time had already shown his toughness as a correspondent covering the revolt in May 1980 at the southwestern South Korean city of Gwangju. I was in and out of Gwangju during the revolt, in which about 200 people were killed in ten days. Terry was there most of the time.John Needham, then with United Press International, saw Terry as the army was about to move in on the protesters, who had taken over the governor’s building, handing us press cards and holding fiery press conferences.“My sharpest memory,” he writes in a book that I co-edited with a Korean correspondent, Choe Sang-hun, now with the New York Times, is of Anderson “coming out of the motel room I had rented, moving on his hands and knees faster than I thought a human could scurry in that position.” As “the first bullets went through the window,” Mr. Needham goes on, “only if you were on your knees, as Anderson and the others were, would you live.”I got to know Terry a lot better not by seeing him before and after his capture in Beirut but over a few days in September 1986 visiting his older sister, Peggy Say, who had been waging an incredibly intense campaign to bring about his escape. Living at Batavia, in upstate New York, with her husband and son, she talked about what had become her total obsession over publicizing his case and getting him freed.“I don’t want to think about an unhappy ending,” was one of her more memorable quotes. “I prefer to think Terry is going to come back home, and everything is going to be just fine.” She’d “written about half the world,” she told me, waiting for when she could “look him in the face” and know that he had put everything “on the line for him.” This, she said, “is what I’m here for.”In conversations over several days for a magazine article, Peggy let on what was never known elsewhere, that their parents and an older brother had died. Peggy, at 45, saw herself as “mother, father, older sister and older brother” to Terry, then 39.The Iran-Contra scandal, in which members of President Reagan’s staff came up with the idea of selling arms to Iran to fund Contra foes of the Nicaraguan regime, torpedoed hopes that Iran might persuade the Hezbollah in Beirut to free Anderson and other hostages, all sharing one hidden room. Newspapers quoted Peggy as saying persons “were blaming us, the hostage families, for pushing the administration into it.” The greatest controversy, though, was whether her campaign for Terry’s freedom did more harm than good. Terry flatly denied that campaigning to get him out prolonged his stay. Long after his release, he said he believed Peggy’s hard work had a lot to do with earning his freedom. “These were very bad guys,” he said. “They could easily have killed us, but they didn’t. They let us go.”

‘Taxi,’ Terry Anderson, a Marine Turned Correspondent, Would Shout, Whenever His Hezbollah Captors Asked Him Anything

‘Taxi,’ Terry Anderson, a Marine Turned Correspondent, Would Shout, Whenever His Hezbollah Captors Asked Him Anything

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