Imagine it. You are chained to a radiator in a bare, dank room. You never see the sun. When your captors fear that a noise in the night is an impending rescue attempt, you are slammed up against the wall, the barrel of a gun pressed against your temple. Each day you have 15 minutes to shower, brush your teeth and wash your underwear in the bathroom sink. Your bed is a mat on the floor. One of your fellow hostages tries to escape, and the guards beat him senseless. Another tries to commit suicide. One day you too reach the edge of your sanity. You begin furiously pounding your head against a wall. Blood oozes from your scalp and smears down your face.
Life has been like that for Terry Anderson ever since March 16, 1985, when the chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press was kidnaped in West Beirut. The men who grabbed him, members of the Shi'ite Muslim fundamentalist group called Hizballah, were intent on swapping Western hostages for 17 comrades imprisoned in Kuwait for a terrorist spree. Four long years later, Anderson is still held hostage. From accounts by his former fellow captives, TIME has pieced together a glimpse of the life he has led.
The first day: Terry Anderson lies on a cot in a dingy apartment in Beirut's sprawling, bomb-ravaged Shi'ite slums. A blindfold is tightly wrapped around his head, and chains shackle a wrist and ankle, biting into the flesh. He can hear the roar of jets; Beirut airport is near. The former U.S. Marine is % stunned and sobs constantly, frustrated, angry and afraid that the kidnapers intend to execute him. A guard bursts in and threatens him merely because he creaked the bedsprings. "I am a friend of the Lebanese," Anderson had told his family. "They won't kidnap me. I tell their story to the world."
Anderson is lost in the bowels of Beirut, but he is not alone. In the same 12-ft. by 15-ft. bedroom, also shackled hand and foot and crouching on the floor of a dirty clothes closet, Father Lawrence Martin Jenco of Catholic Relief Services (kidnaped Jan. 8, 1985) peers under his blindfold at the new arrival. A month later, they are led down to the dungeon, a basement partitioned into cramped cells with thin plasterboard, and held prisoner with others: William Buckley, Beirut station chief of the CIA (kidnaped March 16, 1984), the Rev. Benjamin Weir, a Presbyterian missionary (kidnaped May 8, 1984), and eventually David Jacobsen, director of American University Hospital (kidnaped May 28, 1985).
The hostages are repeatedly threatened with death. Their meals consist of Arabic bread, foul-tasting cheese and tea. Buckley's treatment reveals the full cruelty of the kidnapers. He catches a bad cold that develops into pneumonia, but the guards show him no mercy. "Mr. Buckley is dying," Father Jenco pleads one day. "He is sick. He has dry heaves. Give us liquids."
Speaking to one another in whispers, the hostages listen to Buckley's moans as he grows weaker, and finally delirious. On June 3, Buckley squats on the tile floor believing that he is sitting on a toilet seat, and food fantasies fill his head. "I'd like some poached eggs on toast, please," he mumbles. "I'd like an order of pancakes." That night Buckley starts making strange grunts and the others realize they are hearing the rattle of death, and a guard comes and drags Buckley's body away. Anderson's first letter to his family contains his last will and testament.