Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings by The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America

“the Great Satan,” they declared that Americans were their mortal enemies.
    President Jimmy Carter seemed helpless to end the crisis. Khomeini considered himself a messenger from God and refused to negotiate. Military threats wouldn’t work, for the militant Islamic revolutionaries were willing to die for their cause. “Why should we be afraid?” asked a defiant Khomeini. “We consider martyrdom a great honor.” For 444 days Americans waited, tying yellow ribbons on trees across the nation as a symbol that the hostages were not forgotten.
    Barry Rosen, born in 1944, was one of the hostages who endured the long ordeal.
    I n the months before the shah left Iran you could see a tremendous deterioration of the government’s power. The Iranian people were up in arms. Every night I would hear shouting on the rooftops,
“Allah hu akbar! Marg bar shah!
God is great, down with theshah!” I would walk around and then report what was going on back to the United States embassy. Sometimes, of course, I’d get rifle butts stuck in my back and people would tell me to move on. But I could feel it, sense it, smell it—the regime was falling. The day the shah finally left was one of the most potent and vivid days imaginable. It’s difficult to fully understand just how much the Iranian people hated him. And then when Khomeini returned, ecstatic crowds carried him through the streets of Teheran. It was as if the Messiah had landed.
    To me, November 4, 1979, seemed like just an ordinary gray, rainy Sunday in Teheran. I was at work at ten o’clock that morning. All of a sudden I heard marching sounds coming from the main avenue in Teheran. I looked out my window and saw Iranian students climbing the gates and jumping over the walls of the embassy. They had photographs of Khomeini on their chest and they were yelling,
“Marg bar Amrika!
Death to America!” The students banged on my door, and then came storming in with clubs and some small arms.
    We were taken to a library in the embassy, where the hostage takers interrogated me and my Iranian coworkers. They eventually let all the Iranians go. I had become good friendswith the Iranians in my office, and I cried because I was happy that they were being let go. They cried because they were sure that I was going to be executed. I was tied up and blindfolded and then led out of the library into the courtyard, raindrops hitting me on the head. That’s when I started to think about my family, and I began to wonder, “Will I live through the rest of the night?”
    My captors dragged me into the cook’s quarters, where they took off my shoes and started searching them, trying to tear the heels apart. They thought that I had some secret message machine in the heels of my shoes. They were convinced that we were all CIA agents and would do anything to escape. That’s why they tied us up day in and day out.
    One of the most wrenching moments in my captivity was when the students tried to get me to sign a letter indicating my crimes against Iran. This young man held an automatic weapon to my head and started to count down from ten to one. It was then that I realized that I would do anything to survive. I wanted to be a good American, and I didn’t want to sign something that would state that I was not, but I knew that the best thing to do to survive was to sign whatever needed to be signed, so I did.
    The worst pain of it all was brought on by the length of captivity. Not the boredom, but the fear that grows inside of you over a long period of time. The fear of death. A fear that creeps into the subconscious. That, and just not being able to go outside, to see a bird fly, or to take a walk. The physical cruelty, getting beaten up or being pushed around or being blindfolded, was less of a potent force than the lack of freedom.
    There was no other alternative but to live. I spent several months sharing a room with a