“Yankee go home!” one of the Iranians screamed in English at Hermening. He thought,
When they let go of him at the foot of the stairs, Hermening ran up into the plane. It crossed his mind that someone might take a shot at him as he went up, and he practically flew up the stairs.
Bill Royer in his rumpled tweed sport coat felt a sense of pride and satisfaction as he was escorted to the airplane down the jeering corridor. Whatever the arrangements had been, and he didn’t know what they were precisely, he was confident that his captors had not gotten what they’d wanted. They didn’t get the shah back, for one thing, and that had been their primary demand.
Farsi-speaking Vic Tomseth toyed with the idea of shouting out his own slogan as he was led through the gauntlet, something along the lines of “
Koob was frightened but made an effort to walk through the gauntlet with her head up. She was led up the stairs of the plane and steered down the aisle, where she saw Laingen and, beside him, her boss John Graves. Before them sat Barry Rosen and her assistant Royer. She slipped into the empty seat between them and they both recoiled with surprise to find her just a slender remnant of her former hefty self.
John Limbert heard the doors of the bus open and he was led out into the night air, where his blindfold was finally removed. The guards took the sack he had packed and searched and removed everything from his pockets.
“Steal, steal, and steal again,” Limbert said, and kept repeating the phrase.
Stripped of even this small horde of possessions, skinny and shaggy, Limbert walked happily across the tarmac toward the plane. The insults shouted at him were more disappointing to him than threatening.
Laingen saw Limbert’s face first when he reached the top of the stairs. To him, the political officer looked like he hadn’t changed a bit. They embraced and laughed with joy on seeing each other again.
Joe Hall just ignored the crowd. He kept his eyes fixed on the stairs leading up to the plane, and once he was on board he took a seat and held on for dear life.
Bill Belk raised his middle finger and responded to cries of “
Colonel Chuck Scott made a point of marching through the gauntlet. He had come to Iran as a soldier and he was going to leave it like one. He regretted that Akbar, the guard he had come to admire, had not been able to say good-bye.
Jimmy Lopez looked down at the watch on his wrist. It was the self-winding kind and it had worked perfectly through the entire captivity. He wondered if he might get to make a commercial for Timex watches when he got home.
On the bus, awaiting his turn to leave, Dave Roeder sat wondering what was happening to his friend Metrinko. Had he been taken off the bus? Was he being left behind? He felt helpless and angry, at both the Iranian guards and his friend and roommate. Didn’t the man know when to keep his mouth shut? He admired his friend’s constant pugnacity, but there were times when it crossed over into pure stupidity.
Metrinko had had much the same thought when he heard the bus move off. His heart sank.
It was explained that he had shouted an insult.
“You have to get him to the airport,” the guard said angrily. “He has to get out of here with the others. They all have to go.”
Metrinko had been placed in a car with Lee Holland, a white Mercedes. His blindfold was removed. Evidently they did not want to attract attention on the roads by having a blindfolded man in the backseat. Metrinko watched with fascination as they drove off through the city. It was the first time he had been able to see Tehran in over a year.
At the airport, waiting for his turn, Metrinko watched as his colleagues were led through the gauntlet. To him it all seemed rote, like a summer camp initiation ritual. The guards no longer had their hearts in it. Everybody was exhausted by this game.
Metrinko finally walked through the jeering crowd in a cloud of joy and disbelief. He felt none of the slaps or jabs and heard none of the insults. More than a year of near constant abuse coated him like a shell. As he reached the end he was pleased to see armed, uniformed Algerian guards. He mounted the steps and entered the plane and there, arrayed in seats on either side, were all the embassy workers he had barely known and the few, like Roeder, Regan, and Ward, whom he had come to know well in captivity. Everyone looked skinny, poorly dressed, and shaggy—long hair and long beards. It felt wonderful to see them, all of them. People reached out and touched him as he passed down the aisle. It was like a reunion he had just happened upon, and for the first time in more than a year he felt surrounded by countrymen, by warmth and friendship.
For all the joy of reunion, the plane stayed silent. People sat together not in the groups that might have formed according to the hierarchy or job descriptions at the old embassy, but in the random groupings of their imprisonment. This was partly because the various roommates had grown close during their captivity, but also because they did not yet feel free. So long as they were still in Tehran, they were still hostages.
Only when the plane taxied down the runway and its wheels left the ground did the great weight of fear begin to lift for the fifty-two Americans on the plane. There was still some disbelief. Billy Gallegos thought it entirely possible that the Iranians would let them take off and then hit them with a surface-to-air missile.
Real celebration didn’t begin on the plane until the Algerian pilot announced they were out of Iran. The freed hostages went wild with happiness. Shouting, cheering, crying, clapping, falling into one another’s arms. Hall fell into an embrace with Jerry Plotkin, whom he didn’t know and had never seen before. Champagne corks popped and half full plastic cups were passed around the plane.
There was something more complicated than joy in the hours of celebration that ensued. There was a sense that they had weathered an extraordinary adventure, had all involuntarily participated in an historic ordeal, but they had not done so together. Many of them had not known one another before the takeover, and were strangers still. Yet they would always be tied together now. Those who had been forced to live together in close quarters for months and months had seen each other at their best and at their worst, and they would forget neither. Colonel Scott, who still burned over the time his onetime roommate Bob Blucker had refused to hurry his meal so that they could go outside for a walk, was not the only one who harbored anger toward the prickly economics officer. Dave Roeder hung a sign on the back of Blucker’s seat that read, “I’m an asshole.” Many of the passengers eyed Army Sergeant Joe Subic with scorn and made resolutions to report his behavior when they got back. Nearly all of them had done or said things over the past fifteen months that made them feel proud, or that made them feel ashamed. How would their behavior in captivity be assessed? Few felt heroic. The experience had been in many ways humiliating. Some of them were ashamed of things they had done or said, secrets they had named, weaknesses they had revealed. There was no sense yet of the frenzied national welcome that awaited them at home, the reunions with families and friends, the crush of press, the ticker-tape parades, the speeches, the gifts, the great smothering embrace of American sympathy fully aroused.
Rick Kupke finally had a chance to confront Tom Ahern over something that had been bugging him ever since the day of the takeover, when he had been soundly beaten after being stranded on the roof of the chancery.
“Why did we surrender?” he asked the CIA station chief. “I wanted to stay there in the vault for two weeks and force the United States government to make a decision—we still had a phone line open—whether to come save us or not.”
Ahern said that the decision was his responsibility, his best judgment at the time.
“So why did you open the door when I was on the roof?” Kupke asked. “When I came down, they just kicked the hell out of me!”
Ahern explained that they had Golacinski outside the door with a gun to his head.
