Slate has partnered with Brooklyn Brewery and RISC to bring its hit war correspondent interview series to our readers. In this fifth installment, Steve Hindy, founder of Brooklyn Brewery and a former Associated Press foreign correspondent, sits down with Terry Anderson, former Associated Press chief Mideast correspondent and author of Den of Lions, a memoir detailing the horrific six years and nine months he spent in captivity in Lebanon.
“You can get up in the morning and say, ‘Good lord, I can’t do this anymore,’ and nobody blows the whistle,” Terry Anderson says. “You just gotta keep on doing what you’re doing.” In the clip above, the former AP correspondent attempts to explain, as simply as possible, how he managed to endure his horrific six-year-and-nine-month stint in captivity. Surpassed only recently by Robert Levinson, the retired FBI agent last seen on Iran’s Kish Island, Anderson was for many years the longest-held hostage in American history. Moved by his Hezbollah captors to various locations throughout his imprisonment, Anderson details how he survived the day-to-day gauntlet of physical and psychological trauma, reflecting on the strength of his fellow hostages, the ways they passed the time, and the idea that ordinary people often surprise even themselves in extraordinary situations.
