Joe Cicippio was held hostage by the Islamic group Hezbollah in Lebanon for five years, often chained to a radiator in a room with blacked out windows, cut off entirely from the outside world. Within weeks of his release in 1991, he asked if he could go back to his old job as the comptroller at the American University of Beirut.
He didn't get rehired. But the workaholic Cicippio is still a full-time businessman at age 83, running a technology company in suburban Washington. He's the drum major in a marching band. He travels with his elegant Lebanese wife, Elham, two or three times a year to Beirut, where they have a home, many good friends and a large boat docked on the city's seafront.
What was the secret to rebuilding his life?
"I don't get mad. I don't believe in holding grudges. I don't have any animosity toward anyone," said Cicippio.
The release of Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier held by Afghanistan's Taliban for five years, has unleashed a political firestorm that's still playing out. As Bergdahl continues receiving treatment at a U.S. military hospital in Germany 11 days after his release, one of the many unanswered questions is what his mental and emotional state is. He has reportedly not called his parents.
A generation ago, some two dozen American men were seized in Lebanon at various times in the 1980s and held for years. The outcomes were very mixed. All suffered mental and emotional anguish during captivity. Several were killed by their captors. Some survivors emerged with deep psychic scars and never fully recovered.
Cicippio spent most of those five years with just one other hostage, a man who spent his days and nights talking incessantly, as if addressing a room full of nonexistent people. Another former hostage was consumed with bitterness, saying for years afterward that the hostage ordeal had ruined his life. Terry Anderson, an Associated Press journalist held for seven years, received a 2002 legal settlement estimated at $26 million in compensation for his captivity — and filed for bankruptcy seven years later.
Reliving Positive Experiences
Cicippio said he drew on all the positive things in his life before he was seized, and this helped him endure the endless days and return to the world largely unscathed.
"When I got out, the doctors couldn't find anything wrong with me. My wife said I was the same as before. And I just wanted to get back to my life. So I did," Cicippio said in an interview at his Washington home, just down the street from Vice President Joe Biden's official residence.
But there were, he acknowledged, rough spots along the way.
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