Despite his crusty defiance, interrogators did finally manage to disturb Roeder. He was shown a picture of his wife, son, and daughter. It was a photograph he had kept on his office desk in a frame.
“Is this your wife and children?” he was asked.
“Yes. Where did you get that?”
The interrogator seemed to know a lot about his family. He knew that his son, Jimmy, was disabled. This shook up Roeder, although he tried not to show it. He had never considered that his family in Virginia would be at risk but, of course, there were many Iranians in the United States. His interrogator mentioned the stop where the school bus picked up his son every weekday.
“We know the route that bus takes,” he said.
If he did not start cooperating, they were going to take his son off the bus.
“We will start sending pieces of him to your wife,” he was told.
Roeder still refused to answer questions and was led back down to a cold basement room, but he was distressed. It was the lowest point so far in his captivity. His mind raced over the possibilities. Was his family under surveillance in Virginia? Was the U.S. government aware of this threat? Were they protecting his family? How seriously should he take it?
3. Happy New Year
After more than two months of captivity, the hostages and their guards were getting to know one another well and, in many cases, were getting along badly. One night Gary Lee heard an angry American voice say, “What the fuck makes you right and the whole world wrong?” It summed up perfectly the central complaint. Some of the hostages worked at tormenting their captors.
Marine guards Steve Kirtley and Jimmy Lopez, together in a room at the chancery, kept up a constant torrent of verbal abuse. Early on, Gunnery Sergeant Mike Moeller had begun substituting the word “Khomeini” for every foul word in the English language, and his fellow marines adopted it with relish. When they needed to use the toilet, they would tell the guard, “I need to take a Khomeini.” They tried to remember every Polish joke they had ever heard and substituted for “Polack” the term “raghead,” which they used for the Iranians in the mistaken assumption that they were Arabs. They would make sure to tell each other the jokes whenever a guard who spoke English was within earshot.
“You know how you can tell the shah was a raghead, Steve?”
“No, Jimmy, how?”
“Because he was too stupid to shoot enough of these other ragheads to stay in power.”
When the guards passed around an item from the English-language
“What’s it about, Jimmy?” Kirtley asked.
“It’s about all the great stuff Americans are doing back home,” Lopez said. “They’re siccing attack dogs on Iranians, running them over in cars, sheriffs in Texas are beating the shit out of them, stuff like that. It’s great!”
When the two marines found a stack of the guards’ plates and eating utensils piled in the bathroom they urinated on them. One night they wrapped a butter knife in a rag and took turns poking it at the exposed wires of their lamp. It shorted out the electricity in the chancery basement. They waited for the guards to replace the fuse and get the lights back on and then did it again. To the marines’ amusement, the guards raced from room to room, convinced they were under attack. Kirtley cultivated a habit of farting loudly whenever he stood close to a guard. It would make them so angry that they would haul him out to another room and shout at him about his bad manners. He would return to his room grinning.
Finally they became so much trouble that they were separated.
Two of the other marines, Billy Gallegos and Rocky Sickmann, played similar games. Gallegos rigged a slingshot out of rubber bands, and he and Sickmann opened their window slightly one night after lights out and shot Geritol tablets at a guard standing outside next to the building’s back wall. When the first pill pinged off a car nearby, the guard jumped. When the next pill hit, convinced he was under attack, he shot off his weapon. Soon there was a small crowd of guards, weapons up, shouting into their radios. Eventually the guards burst into the chancery and searched all the rooms, but the marines had long since closed their window, disassembled the slingshot, and crept back under the covers on their mattresses.
Once, when he was being questioned, Gallegos was asked if he had ever met with a SAVAK agent.
“Yes,” he said, and pointed at the guard who happened to be posted outside his room.
“Him. He’s one.”
The panicked look on the guard’s face had kept the marines laughing for days.
When the guards installed a camera in the bathroom, after catching on that their captives were leaving notes for each other there, the marines made a point of putting on lewd shows before it, offending their guards’ Islamic sensibilities so badly that they gave up and took it down.
Bill Royer, the assistant director of the old Iran-America Society, noticed that antagonistic guards were generally weeded out. He had rubbed one of the guards wrong in the first days—Royer had smiled at the guard inappropriately, teasing him—and the young man had responded by elevating his middle finger. Royer had responded in kind. Two months later, the American found himself guarded by the same young man, who had not forgotten their exchange of ill will, and their mutual animosity resulted one night in the guard making a karate-style kick at the hostage’s head. Later that evening one of the guard supervisors stepped into Royer’s room.
“You seem to have some trouble with my friend,” he said.
“Yes, and if he comes back I’m going to hit him,” Royer said quietly.
“No, no, you can’t do that,” said the supervisor.
“If he comes back I am going to hit him,” Royer repeated.
He never saw the guard again.
Once when Greg Persinger, a marine guard, was being led to the bathroom, ineptly blindfolded, he saw a guard playfully point his pistol at him as he approached. Persinger snatched the gun from his hand as he walked past, twirled it once or twice like a six-shooter, and handed it back.
“Don’t ever point a weapon at me unless you’re going to shoot me,” he said and patted the guard dismissively on the head.
The guard was stunned. He didn’t speak English, so he didn’t know what Persinger had said. He looked around, hoping no one had seen. He wasn’t about to report the infraction. How could he admit that the hostage had just snatched away his weapon? He settled back sheepishly in his chair.
As time wore on, there were many occasions when the marines, in particular, had opportunities to seize weapons from their amateurish guards. Sometimes they would allow the marines to play indoor soccer with them in the large open space that had once housed all the computer equipment for the Tacksman sites. It gave the young men a chance to vent some of their aggression and energy, an opportunity to actually run through space instead of jogging in place. The Iranians were more experienced ball handlers, but the marines saw to it that they collected plenty of bumps and bruises on their way to victory. Once, when they were shedding layers of clothes preparing to play, Persinger stooped to pick up some discarded jackets and move them to the side and was startled to find an Uzi in the pile. What could he do with it? Suppose he took it and pointed it at someone? Eventually he would either have to shoot somebody or surrender it. He was six-one, pale, with reddish blond hair; even if he made it off the compound, how far was he going to get? He scooped it up and put it down with the rest of the pile and then jogged out to play soccer.
Golacinski intimidated the guards because he was tall, muscular, and athletic. When he lost his temper, they shrank from him and raised their weapons. Once, when Don Cooke had laughed loudly after a guard dropped and broke a glass, he was seized angrily and was being led from the room when Golacinski intervened. He had been in the middle of a workout and had his shirt off and was feeling pumped up, so he jumped at the guard and pushed him away from Cooke.
“You’re not taking him anywhere,” he said. “If you take anybody, take all of us.”
