"They were souvenirs for my kids"

We crossed from Tunsia into Libya in two battered mini vans, cases of potable water, cans of tuna and a few gallons of gasoline in back. It was a little over three months since I’d been released from Tripoli captivity. Now I was headed back in with six other journalists for the capital that had fallen days before.

We got our passports stamped with a new Libyan visa inside a container on the sand dune outskirts of Zintan. I watched the sun rise. Clare, Manu and I all vowed we’d come back. I didn’t want people to think I was crazy, and I waited months to make sure that I wasn’t. But I would have paid to return a few days earlier to see the battle of Bab Al-Aziziyah, instead of watching it from GlobalPost offices in Boston.

(photo: An African prisoner held in Tripoli in late Aug.)

Instead, I witnessed the Corinitha— Tripoli’s five-star hotel, gripped by intermittent electricity, no running water and overflowing with journalists, even camping on couches in the lobby. I met the American prisoner, Matthew Van Dyke the first night in the cavernous lobby, still in his black prison clothes and looking as gaunt and traumatized as one of the articles described him when he was freed and found wandering around Tripoli.  Matthew held in solitary for six months in cells so small you couldn’t take four paces in. He was still in a fog but I was fascinated to talk to him.

During the day I scrambled in Tripoli, trying to follow the story of black Africans who had been imprisoned following the regime’s collapse. The rebels seemed to be locking up mere illegal immigrants, Nigerians, Chadians who'd crossed into Libya without papers. 

I stumbled upon the prison where Clare, Manu and I had first been held. A rebel guard told me that Richard Peters, the voice who had prayed with us through the electrical socket, had escaped days before and was still in the neighborhood. Amazed, I asked the new guard to guide me to Richard.

When I first laid eyes on Richard, he was kind of how I had imagined him— big, outgoing, sporting a Fu Manchu, with the muscles of a SEAL warrior even in his sixties. This time he told more stories than scripture; and we talked schemes. Richard wanted to get his contracting business restarted in Tripoli. I wanted to go to Bani Walid. We broke out his Bible after lunch.

In the last months he was reduced to eating dates and fending off rats coming out of the prison drain. When he wasn’t playing an old man in front of the guards, he was doing hundreds of push ups and shadow boxing. When all the guards fled in late August, he escaped by drop kicking his cell door some 30 times. I wouldn’t have believed it unless I saw the concrete encrusted door laid Lazarus-like beside the cell.

(photo: Richard poises next to his Tripoli cell door that he broke out after six months of captivity.)

In prison Richard told us that he’d been trying to leave Libya by driving from Tripoli to Egypt, but it never made sense. The regime clearly suspected Richard of heading east to help train the rebels.

Richard even had the name of an air force defector in his belongings when he was arrested trying to leave Tripoli, but managed to crumple the slip of paper and throw it in the dirt.

When Richard busted out of the cell, with a knife fashioned out of a toilet seat, he held himself up in a room in an adjacent building. The neighborhood rebels broke the door down with guns. Richard held up the knife. They saw Gaddafi posters in his possession. Richard immediately ripped one up. “Gaddafi bad,” he proclaimed. The rebels nodded. “They were souvenirs for my kids,” he said to me.