“The mind is its own place, and in itself,
can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven.”
John Milton
When we imagine individuals going “beyond
limits,” what usually comes to mind are the pioneering
achievements of creative geniuses and record-breaking athletes
or the miraculous feats of great yogis and saints. Their
groundbreaking exploits push the envelope for us all,
challenging us to question unexamined assumptions about what we
consider humanly possible. But there are others who are more
reluctant heroes. Their stories come to us from hellish locales
of oppression and the killing fields of war. Pushed to the
breaking point by the onslaught of extreme circumstances beyond
their control, these ordinary men and women find access within
themselves to a spiritual strength and compassion that can be as
deeply moving as that of the great saints.
John McCarthy is one such reluctant hero. On April 17, 1986,
this twenty-nine-year-old British journalist on his first
foreign assignment with Worldwide Television News was driving to
the Beirut airport to catch a return flight to London. That
morning he had been deeply shaken as he filmed his last news
report in front of the ruins of the British embassy residence,
still smoldering in the wake of a rocket attack by Hezbollah,
the fundamentalist Muslim militia. After leaving the outskirts
of the war-torn city, his car was ambushed by gunmen and he was
kidnapped. Soon after, blindfolded and stripped of his
belongings, he was led underground and pushed into a tiny dark
cell. The door was locked behind him. It would be over five
years before John McCarthy would again stand in the light of the
sun.
As weeks turned into months, the unremitting darkness,
cramped isolation, and deepening cycles of fear and despair
began to take their toll. One night, desperately
teetering on the verge of a total breakdown, he was suddenly
overwhelmed by a profound spiritual presence. The utterly
life-affirming grace of this experience infused him with a
deep confidence that he could and would survive his hellish ordeal.
Shortly after this revelation, he was blindfolded and
abruptly escorted from his cell at gunpoint. Eventually, another
door was locked behind him, and as he slowly lifted his
blindfold to survey his new surroundings, his eyes met the eyes
of another man, also cautiously peering out from under a
blindfold. Brian Keenan had been kidnapped while walking to the
Beirut University campus where he was employed as an English
teacher. Ironically, McCarthy had filmed a news feature on
Keenan's disappearance only a few days before his own capture.
These two men—McCarthy, an amiable middle-class Englishman
with a raffish sense of humor, and Keenan, a passionate Irish
intellectual raised on the strife-torn streets of
Belfast—were to be companions in captivity for the next
four years.
In the preface to his book An Evil Cradling, Brian
Keenan writes that at the heart of their shared ordeal there lay
an implicit paradox: that “in the most inhuman of
circumstances men grow and deepen in humanity.” Both
An Evil Cradling and Some Other Rainbow, John
McCarthy's own candid account, are deeply moving testaments to
the power of the human spirit to prevail in the darkest of dark
nights.
Chained alongside each other by their wrists and feet in the
confines of a squalid subterranean cell—not knowing why
they were being held or if they would ever be
released—McCarthy and Keenan endured a grinding monotony
and unimaginable degradation. “We both instinctively knew
never to share weakness until you understood it,” writes
Brian Keenan. “'Share only strength' was an unspoken motto
between us.” Together they fought for their dignity in the
face of their erratic fundamentalist captors, mostly young men
whose behavior could morph without warning from disarming
expressions of warmth to gratuitous acts of violence. And they
bore together the terrifying trauma of sudden moves to different
locations, for which they would either be mummified in masking
tape with only their nostrils exposed for air or chained wrists
to feet and thrown into a sack. Crammed into the trunk of a car
or an airless, coffin-like box beneath a truck, they would then
be transported to some new, unknown part of Lebanon. In every
cell to which they were eventually delivered after these
tortuous journeys, they again had to steel themselves against
the merciless assault of stifling heat, ravenous mosquitoes,
giant cockroaches, and the ever-gnawing shadow of despair.
With the recent UK release of the film Blind
Flight—a powerful dramatization of their shared
incarceration—the story of how McCarthy and Keenan
re-entered the sunlit world of freedom, not as broken and bitter
men but as heroes ennobled by a rare dignity, wisdom, and
compassion, has once again been in the public eye. John
McCarthy, now an author and documentary filmmaker, spoke with us
about his life-changing experience as a hostage in Lebanon.