ShareThisRoy A. Hallums, who endured 311 days in captivity as a hostage in Baghdad, has a way of stating what might appear hyperbolic with a calm earnestness.
"I hoped they wouldn't decide to just cut off my head and videotape the occasion for mass distribution to the international media -- an opportunity for them to declare victory for al-Qaeda in Iraq," he writes in the first chapter of his new memoir.
Hallums, who was kidnapped in Baghdad five years ago this month, tells other tales not recommended for the squeamish in "Buried Alive", scheduled for release in January.
"All you can think about is: this isn't going to last forever. It's going to be over. It's going to be over in a little while," Hallums, 60, said in a telephone interview from his home in Cordova, Tenn. A screenplay based on his experiences is being shopped around in Hollywood.
The memoir chronicles intimate details of the horror of being forced from his office compound as an employee of the Saudi Arabia Trading Co., blindfolded and tied up 24-hours a day and held in an underground hell hole, at times with nine others, and ravaged by sand fleas. Among the things he endured were routine beatings and overhearing fellow hostages being subjected to electric shocks.
A native of Paragould, Ark., Hallums had been working in the Middle East for 12 years. During a stint in the U.S. Navy, he held a security clearance and worked intelligence at the Pentagon, and later worked for the Royal Saudi Naval Forces, he writes. In an interview, he said he did not work for the Central Intelligence Agency.
"The gang always said, 'We know you're in the CIA,' but I said I'm not ... I was just a contractor over there working," he said.
The memoir describes the efforts his family back home undertook to seek his release, often over the objections of FBI minders who were urging them to limit contact with the news media and others.
Daughter Amanda Hallums, now, 30, sought out Muslims of Memphis chairman Nabil A. Bayakly for help translating a $40,000 ransom offer into Arabic that was later scattered as a flier in the streets of Baghdad. He was happy to oblige.
Amanda calls her father's release "a miracle."
Carrie Cooper, 33, Hallums' older daughter living in California, said she has only read the memoir's first chapter.
"I'm being completely honest: I've never spoken to him about everything because I don't want to put him through more," she said. Carrie said her work as a licensed marriage and family therapist helped her cope during the ordeal.
Other efforts to help free Hallums involved web sites and email to keep his story alive, especially after his fellow trading company hostage, Robert Tarongoy of the Philippines, was released in June.
Hallums' ex-wife, Susan Hallums of Riverside, Calif., called the Libyan Embassy to enlist its leader, Moammar Gadhafi, in support of an amnesty request and took heat from her FBI handler for it, she said. She also called in to a radio station in Burbank, asking the host to play Linda Ronstadt's "Somewhere Out There" for her hostage ex-husband.
"I never gave up hope," Susan, 57, a dog-breeder, said by phone last week. "It made me appreciate -- it made me have a whole, totally different outlook on life. I definitely don't sweat the small stuff now."
Hallums, now retired, says he is occasionally asked to address FBI field agents and military Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training classes about his experience.
Some SERE training encourages hostages to try to befriend their captors or at least to "become a real person" to them on the theory that it's harder for them to mistreat someone with whom they have a personal bond, Hallums said.
Hallums said he tells them, "You have to cooperate or you're dead ... I told the survival school, 'These guys were not my friends and were never going to be my friends, and I knew it. The less I talked to them, the better. If you tell them something and they catch you in a lie, then you're going to be beaten."
On the day he was rescued, he heard the helicopters move in and drop the Special Forces commandos but couldn't make out whether the shouts he was hearing were in English or Arabic. When someone began sledge-hammering the trapdoor above him, his mind raced.
"I was thinking there's probably two possibilities. Either somebody's here to rescue me, which was probably too much to hope for after 311 days; or the gang's here to kill me before they can rescue me.
"That's when the soldier jumped down into the room and he pointed at me and said, 'Are you Roy?' and I said 'yes.' And he said, 'Come on, we're getting outta here.' "
E-mail reporter Bartholomew Sullivan at sullivanb(at)shns.com.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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