The Foreign Service Journal, March 2015

36 MARCH 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL sure that their point of view was the only point of view in the world, and that everything you may have done was wrong. But by this point I was used to that attitude. I had already gone through a year and a half of listening to similar people. They were not trying to indoctrinate me. They knew I was a lost cause. They were trying to extract information, especially about revolutionary officials who they thought might have been collabo- rating with us in the embassy. So I think I must have mentioned the name of every revolutionary official I could think of. “Oh, yes, he was educated in the United States. Ha, ha.” I was throwing them as many bones from their own ranks as I possibly could. Survival Techniques I ended up spending quite a bit of time in a small, semi-closet area in the basement of the embassy. I got by by doing a tremen- dous amount of physical exercise. When I say that, I mean a really tremendous amount of physical exercise. I was doing many hun- dreds of situps a day. I’d run in place for two or three hours. And I would do this all day long every day because I had to get tired enough to fall asleep. Otherwise you don’t sleep. Food was no problem. They always fed us, even when it was only bread and tea. I never saw anybody else all that time. I would read, exercise, read for an hour, stand up, run in place for an hour. I never blamed the U.S. government. The U.S. government was us. I could blame myself for lack of prescience. But, you know, a revolution is an act of nature. In fact, it would be the “perfect storm.” A revolution is natural; it occurs in politics—not all the time, but as a cataclysmic event which, when you’re involved in it, you cannot deflect. You can lay back and enjoy it; you can go with it, hope to survive it; but you can’t stop it, and you can’t sit back and say, “Gee, if only I had done this” or “Why doesn’t my govern- ment do that?” I knew my government. And I also knew all the various conflicting trends of thought in Washington about how to deal with the revolution that we were going through. I remembered very, very clearly from junior officer training, we had been told that if we were taken hostage, the government would not deal with hostage takers. I was in that situation. I did not expect the government to do anything. May 1980 was when the incident in Tabas occurred, when Americans were killed trying to rescue us in one of the most stupidly planned, botched-up military-political escapades of the Flags set up as a memorial to the Iran hostages in Hermitage, Pa. The photo was taken after the hostages returned.