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Chapter 1: What psychological challenges does captivity present?
The war on terror wasn't just dangerous for those carrying weapons. It was deadly for civilians, journalists and aid workers alike. And between September 11th, 2001 and 2008, the Middle East and South Asia became a graveyard for Westerners who'd ventured into conflict zones. Many of them trying to help, trying to tell the truth, trying to rebuild what war had destroyed.
Documentary filmmaker and journalist Sean Langan wasn't naive. As a filmmaker who'd spent years covering these regions, he knew exactly what could happen to Westerners in the hands of terrorist organisations. He'd seen the headlines. He'd watched the news reports. He knew the names. It started with Daniel Pearl in February of 2002.
The Wall Street Journal reporter was in Pakistan chasing a story about a terrorist when he was kidnapped in Karachi. He thought he was going to interview an Islamic scholar. Instead, he was taken by militants connected to Al-Qaeda. Weeks later, a video emerged showing his beheading. It was one of the first times the world witnessed this particular brand of horror.
Chapter 2: How does Sean Langan describe his initial realization of being kidnapped?
Then came Nick Berg in May of 2004, a 26-year-old telecommunications contractor from Pennsylvania who'd gone to Iraq looking for work. He was kidnapped, held in an orange jumpsuit and beheaded on camera by al-Zarqawi's group. The video was posted online. The message was clear. This is what happens to Americans in Iraq.
That same year in September, Kenneth Bigley, a British civil engineer working on reconstruction projects in Baghdad, was kidnapped along with two American colleagues. Both Americans were beheaded within days, while Bigley was held longer, appearing in videos, chained in a cage, pleading for his life, begging then Prime Minister Tony Blair to save him. His family mounted desperate appeals.
Muslim leaders called for his release, but none of that mattered. In October 2004, he too was killed, and his body never recovered. Just weeks after Bigley's murder came Margaret Hassan, an Irish-born aid worker who'd lived in Iraq for 30 years. Married to an Iraqi, spoke fluent Arabic, she dedicated her life to helping Iraqi civilians.
Working with Care International, bringing medicine to children, rebuilding hospitals, she was beloved by the Iraqi people. Hundreds of them took to the streets demanding her release. Even prominent insurgent groups condemned her kidnapping.
Chapter 3: What survival strategies did Sean use during his captivity?
But it didn't save her. She appeared in videos, tearfully pleading, saying that these might be her last hours. She begged not to die like Mr Bigley. However, in November of 2004, she was murdered. This wasn't some distant abstract threat. This was a reality for people going into these places. Sean knew all of this. He was a journalist. And now he finds himself in the same situation.
Hoping desperately for a different outcome.
moon in the sky i'm looking at the moon in the sky it shouldn't come as a surprise but i can't sleep war in my mind i'm trying to fight a war in my mind i don't know who's the winner tonight but it ain't you
Chapter 5. Escape is not an option. In our previous episode, Sean and his fixer had been placed in a room and were told that they were not allowed to leave. They weren't being held captive, it was all just precaution to ensure they hadn't been followed. However, Sean's fixer was nervous. Not a great sign.
But he himself was remaining positive and doing his best to convince himself and his fixer that all was fine. However, that facade would come crashing down when the commander of the group comes into the room.
Now, the commander, he had the charm of the devil because he'd be very charming, but he was like a sociopath, I've discovered. He came in the next evening, like your avuncular uncle at Christmas, bringing lots of Christmas gifts. And he had a big box and he sat me down, he put his arm around me, said, look what I've brought you.
And he was pulling out the box, like big family size shampoo from, you know, mainly Pakistan, big family size chocolates and,
toffees and he'd be look at this and I've also got you this and I'm thinking how long am I here for this supposed to be an interview but that shampoo like that's like a giant family pack and I'm being very slow like why is it what's the size of those peanuts and they were like pulling bags of and in the meantime he just four minutes to welcome me he says sure he pulls out a sheaf of papers and hands it to my fixer
who's reading this scroll, you know, it's like ancient Greece. He's reading the scroll. His face just was drained of blood and white as he's reading. But meanwhile, the commander's still saying, don't worry about him. I've also got you toffees from Iran.
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Chapter 4: How does the brain respond to extreme stress in captivity?
Like Iranian toffees, apparently. Fuck knows why. And I'm like, Jesus, what's happening? And then finally, after showing me all these wonderful gifts, what a nice man he was, he just gets up and says, right, read that, and you've got some questions to answer, and walked out. And I turned to my fixer, and I'm like, what's he saying? He reads out this, and it's an official Taliban-headed notepaper.
By order of the Emir, Siraj Akhani, you're hereby charged with working for foreign enemy government. And I go, fuck, we've been kidnapped. And my fixer's looking at me like I still don't get it because we've been accused in that letter of being charged with being spies, working for foreign enemy governments. And he looked at me, it hit me like we've been kidnapped.
He went, Sean, you know, we're dead. And we went into a tailspin of panic and adrenaline, which lasted two days where you're trying to figure out how to escape. Who fucked you over? Was it the Muller? How do you get out of there?
Chapter 5: What does becoming the 'gray man' mean in hostage situations?
And you're running around in circles like balloons filled with gas, buzzing around the room, not sleeping, pacing around the room. And I remember my fixer for two days not sleeping. And you're not really thinking properly. Because physically, literally the walls are closing on you, but metaphorically as well. My fixer wife had given birth two days before this trip.
She got these pressures like, oh my God, my newborn son. Didn't even name him. You know, my fixer's name is Sammy. I was avoiding saying his name. But my fixer, Afghan, would be my trusted friend and fixer. Fixers, we use that phrase. It's not derogatory. My fixer is my companion.
but my producer, my translator, and you can't operate as a foreign journalist in these parts of the world without someone by your side. And they're more important in my eyes than an executive producer or a director producer, you know.
Chapter 6: How does routine help maintain sanity in captivity?
The two men are now trapped in a room, having been told essentially that they've been handed a death sentence, one that will likely see them suffer the same fate as so many before them. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind in that sort of situation is, can we escape?
We're really stressed out, and you're thinking about escape. You don't know escape's not possible, but if very quickly it dawns on you, the constant noise, and you're in the mountains, so when you have gunfire and artillery fire, it's not heavy artillery, but it's artillery, it rebounds, it's the reverb. And the echo in the mountains is a really disturbing sound. And it was pretty constant fire.
And that's the Taliban al-Qaeda training camps. And we realized we're surrounded by and we'd seen the checkpoints on the road up there before we were blindfolded near the house. As I was describing, I was driving through a market and it's just covered in fighters. I mean, like hundreds, millions. And they had checkpoints everywhere. And the locals wouldn't be friendly either.
So you're very aware that there's, even if you've got out of that farmhouse, that compound, which had armed men in, you'd be immediately, you know, look at me, you know, can't speak the language, hopeless situation. So I pretty much realised escape wasn't an option.
Okay, so time to get a little bit nerdy and sciencey here, because what happens to the body in times of high stress, even impending death, is fascinating.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of emotional connections during captivity?
When you're in extreme danger, when your life is genuinely threatened, your brain doesn't function the way it normally does. The prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for rational thought, planning, language, decision-making, essentially shuts down. It goes offline. And there's a reason for that. It's too slow.
When you're facing a life or death threat, your brain can't afford the luxury of careful reasoning. It can't waste precious milliseconds weighing options, considering consequences, forming coherent sentences. Those higher cognitive functions take time and energy that you simply don't have. So your brain makes a choice.
It floods your system with stress hormones like dopamine, cortisol, and those chemicals that essentially tell your prefrontal cortex to shut down. But here's where things get even stranger and remarkable. When you're in a life-threatening situation, your brain doesn't just shut down the prefrontal cortex and hand control over to the amygdala, which is part of the limbic system.
It's the emotional processing center of the brain, so when we talk about fight or flight. It also does something fascinating with memory retrieval. The same stress hormones, the cortisol, the adrenaline that impair your ability to think rationally can actually enhance certain types of memory retrieval, particularly in these cases, memories related to survival.
Chapter 8: How do news blackouts affect the perception of kidnapped individuals?
Your brain essentially goes into search mode. It's scanning your entire memory bank for anything, anything at all that might be relevant. Prior experiences with danger, information you've learned about similar situations, stories you've heard, articles you may be read. It doesn't matter if you consciously remember them or not.
Under extreme stress, your brain can pull up semantic memories, factual knowledge, learned information that might give you an edge. And that's exactly what Sean says was happening to him.
Very quickly, other things started happening. I had total recall of my entire life. You know that saying, the drowning man sees their life flash before them. I saw my entire life, but it didn't flash because I wasn't drowning. So I could pause. I just had to give myself a prompt. Like, okay, my first day at kindergarten, at infant school, and I would see myself there, see what I was wearing.
Now, it was a great pleasure, actually, seeing your whole life. Later on, less so. It was like Scrooge, Christmas Carol, where you see the ghost of Christmas past. Because I saw the first day I met my girlfriend, who became my wife, what she was wearing. You know, I saw my best friend, who I became a journalist.
his first day at school when he came into my school and i saw him you realize everything in your life what you think is forgotten is still there in this memory i sat down i named every teacher i'd ever had from the age of five if you ask me now i'll get two names and that is the brain knowing this fucking body's fucked it's dying i don't know what it needs i'll just give it everything
Chapter six, becoming the gray man. And one of those things the brain gave him was the memory of a book he'd read called Bravo 2-0, which is a true story of a British special forces soldier who was taken hostage, as well as another article he'd read about these types of situations and how they talk about you needing to become what they call the gray man.
And I remember going back to my first film about Western backpackers kidnapped. The tourist, a Norwegian tourist, was beheaded. And the reason, I read the FBI reports, was he had been quite confrontational with the captors during the captivity and had accused them of being un-Islamic.
So when it came to deciding which of these backpackers they'd behead to send a message, they chose this guy being a bit difficult. And that's why they talk about being the grey man, to not stand out. The other thing I read somewhere that was priceless, helped me, was it's much harder to kill a fellow human being. than a label. Much easier to kill labels than a fellow human being.
So step one for any hostage is to impress upon your captors that you're a fellow human being. not just a foreigner, non-believer, journalist, spy. And so that was what I immediately did, didn't think of escape, when the people of this house, it was like a Pashtun family house, had been told we were foreigners, unbelievers, and spies.
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