The Tightening Dark

by Sam Farran

  “It’ll be okay,” I said, as much to myself as to him.

  We sat there and waited for what seemed like days, though it likely lasted two hours, perhaps three.

  The sinking feeling started to creep in.

  Scott kept checking his watch.

  The Omani pilot came over the intercom again: “They’re not releasing the third American.”

  We both had the same thought: We’re leaving someone behind. That was a huge taboo in the military. Drummed into our heads. But what could we do?

  Our thoughts turned once more toward the reality, the dubiousness of our situation: They’re going to renege on their word and take us back too now.

  Helpless, hopeful but tense, and never letting ourselves really feel any joy, we sat and sat. Deep in our hearts we knew they’d do it. Either the American side or the Houthis, one of them would call it off, insist on all three of us hostages or none of us. That formed into both a worry and a sadness, because we wanted to get out of there but also didn’t want to leave someone behind. We were totally torn. We heard his name discussed among the stewardesses: Luqman, Waleed Luqman. I knew the name; he was another Marine veteran, but one who had come to Yemen to teach English. He’d been taken off a bus, trying to flee with his family across the border to Saudi Arabia. I suppose, like me, he had thought his religion, and in his case his family, would keep him safe. It did not. They detained him for no cause, just as they had done Scott and me.

  Upfront a commotion ensued. The lead Houthi negotiator, Muhammad Abd as-Salam, had stood and was taking up a blocking position in the doorway of the plane. Outside a couple of armed guys argued with him, pointing at Scott and me, insisting that we get off the plane so that they could take us back. The Houthi negotiator stood firm though, saying, “No, it’s going to be bad for our negotiations.”

  This escalated into yelling and screaming, right over the heads of the whole delegation in first class, pointing at us, waving their guns.

  In the end Abd as-Salam’s argument, or his shouting, prevailed. He got back on the plane. The stewardesses hurried to close the doors. The pilot fired his engines up, and—with Scott and me still in shock, still not believing that we’d managed to stay aboard—the plane plodded out onto the runway, where I knew a few dozen guns mounted on the back of vehicles, tanks, machine guns, and .50cals were all pointed at us and could stop us or drop us like a stone from the sky. Yet the plane rolled on, cornered, and took its stance like a bull pawing at the ground. The engines roared, and we felt the acceleration run down our spines as the plane chugged, then sped, then finally grew weightless as the runway, and Sana’a, and Yemen disappeared below.

  Again, for perhaps the tenth time that day, Scott and I broke down in tears and hugged each other, a sense of relief like none other, coupled with the unbearably sad knowledge that we’d left a fellow American behind.

  We were served a meal on the plane, and I broke my fast in celebration, just a simple cheese sandwich, but it tasted great after all the prison food. I drank a soda too, for the first time in six months—a 7Up.

  After all that waiting, the flight seemed super short, only two and a half hours to Muscat.

  We landed.

  The senior member of the Omani delegation on the plane, an official from the sultan’s office, lined us up, the two Americans, a Somali-UK citizen, and three Saudis still in handcuffs. We would precede the Houthi delegation off the plane. He looked at me, thinner and more pitiful than Scott by far, and said, “You go first, then Scott.”

  I almost fell down the stairs in my weakness and my utter tearful joy. I couldn’t see straight, let alone walk straight. I’m glad I didn’t fall though, because thirty or forty people waited below, some of them news crews with cameras. It would have been really embarrassing to have this moment of freedom and release memorialized forever with images of me face down on the tarmac.

  We could see the crowd out the window before we disembarked, waiting aboard as the Omani airport workers wheeled the stairs into place. In addition to the news cameras, of which there were seven or eight, the gathered people included a number of personnel from the embassy: the ambassador, Greta Holtz, of course, her deputy chief of mission (DCM), the embassy doctor, and—the first familiar face I had seen in six months—the embassy’s legal attaché, or LEGATT, Paul Crutcher, who had served in the same post in Yemen until the embassy was evacuated there.

  I don’t remember all of the words that were said, not in exact detail. Emotion overwhelmed everything to a great extent. Some of it is captured in video, and I can watch and rewatch it on news clips from the time. But doing that seems like I’m spying on someone completely different. I hardly recognize myself in the photos or the videos. I’m gaunt, pale, haggard despite having shaved for the first time in a long while. My eyes look hollow. I can tell I’m not focusing very well.

  The ambassador thanked the sultan and his staff for their work on our release; then we were taken into the Omani VIP lounge. Sultan Qaboos was not there himself, but one of his senior ministers greeted us, along with a few other high-ranking Omanis, all in their traditional ceremonial outfits—khanjjars, kumah caps on, long robes—very distinguished and solemn but also happy and understandably proud of the role they’d played in our release. In the lounge we sat for a few minutes for pictures, talking to the ambassador and DCM and doctor. Then the doctor took us into another room and did a quick medical checkup to see whether we needed any urgent treatment. He gave both Scott and me some Tylenol, just in case there was pain, and pronounced us fit enough to make it through the night, until the next day, when he’d conduct a more thorough examination.

  We loaded into a car and easily, somewhat majestically, like all the world was frozen in time, sealed away behind glass, completed the last leg of this journey to freedom in an embassy car, letting them take us to the waterfront Sheraton in a nice area of Muscat. The concierge had rooms already set up for us. They just gave us keys and ushered us in. “You’re the guest of the sultan. Anything you want, just order it, please.”

  It seemed weird getting to a hotel room and having that much luxury, a bed, sheets, perfumed towels, a view over the beach and the Indian Ocean. I sat for a moment, collecting myself, sighing. Then I undressed and took the longest and hottest shower of my life, thinking the whole time that running heated water was probably the greatest invention of all time. In the cell we’d barely gotten to take a lukewarm bath, always waiting for the warmest of days and then, in Sana’a’s mountain air, hoping the sun at noon or 1 p.m. might warm the rooftop water tanks just enough. Then the guy who went first would be luckiest, and we’d take turns afterward in the lukewarm water. That day, though, in the Sheraton, I luxuriated.

  I’d put on a terrycloth bathrobe and soft slippers—no more shibshib!—when a knock on my door stirred me.

  The concierge stood there, holding a cell phone on a platter. “Please,” he said, “use this and dial whomever you’d like.”

  I remembered my sister’s number. I knew she’d be with my mother, so I called her first. They had some advance warning that I might be set free, but they had not received confirmation yet. Worse, they’d been told once before that an American was being released, but it turned out not to be me. So they were waiting, breath held of course, but also not counting on anything as a certainty. Indeed, three of us were supposed to be released that day, but only we two made it out, so they were wise in guarding against too much optimism.

  I picked up the phone and dialed.

  “Hello,” I said, “it’s me.”

  I could hear my mother inhale, a big sucking noise. But no words came out.

  Silence.

  Then I heard her weeping.

  Connected to my mother like that, through the umbilical cord of modern technology, all the way around the world, I couldn’t help but remember the words of my cell mates in the Sana’a prison.

  “Yes, Mom, yes. This is my new birthday.”

  Epilogue

  WALEED L
UQMAN, the Marine who did not get on the plane with Scott Darden and me, boarded a similar plane to freedom later that year.

  Scott and I flew to America after a short layover in Oman. We first touched down on American soil in New York City, fitting as the beacon of liberty, even if that stop was simply a layover. From there, I continued onward to Detroit. As I came off the plane in Detroit, personnel from Homeland Security, from immigration, from customs, and from the FBI all met me in the terminal to make sure everything went smoothly. This was necessary, because I didn’t have any of my papers—though the embassy had issued me an emergency passport.

  All the news channels swarmed me at the airport and even at my house after I arrived. You can see it still in clips on CNN and YouTube—my homecoming, being greeted by my mother, family, and relations.1 The best part about it was when my granddaughter ran to me, letting me pick her up, jumping or nearly flying into my arms, as she said, “Jido, Grandfather, are you here to take me to Chuckie Cheese?”

  This, of course, doesn’t end the story of Yemen’s troubles, even though it largely ended the story of my troubles there.

  The Saudi coalition’s war continues amid what is now the world’s worst humanitarian disaster: famine exacerbated by blockade and disease, including, of course, COVID-19 (though it is tough to know the numbers) as well as a terrible outbreak of cholera. Qat addiction continues, and arable land that could grow food for many Yemenis is used instead to generate profits and service the national Yemeni pastime. And then there is the war too—people living in the crumbling, bombed-out buildings, people dying in wreckage. The rumor is that all sides want to resolve the conflict. They consider this war their Vietnam. Everyone is tired of it—everyone except the ex-Yemeni government figures who continue to live in five-star hotels in Saudi, Lebanon, Jordan, and elsewhere as they “negotiate.”

  I’ve been in Lebanon for most of the time since then, living in a house I built on the outskirts of my village of Tebnine. I’m surrounded there by my family. My granddaughters come to visit in the summer from Dearborn. My sister is there, though most of my childhood friends have emigrated to the United States. Yesterday, as a matter of fact, I walked the same side street that leads up to the ruin where my grandfather’s house once stood. A few doors down, I sat and had coffee with my cousins in the shade of their family house, during that long and golden hour of communal bliss we call the saha. The cousins sit there every day. Every day they have their coffee. Every day they have their chitchat. Some things never change.

  My family has served forty-three continuous years now in the United States armed forces, beginning with me and my generation, but now with both my son Tech Sergeant Ali Farran and my niece Captain Rowan Latif in the US Air Force. Captain Latif is, in fact, deployed in Kuwait as of the writing of this epilogue.

  I believe the experience of my family as immigrants to and faithful warriors and servants of this country is not unique. We are, almost all of us, immigrants to this land. These last years have been divisive in many ways, not the least of which involve changing perceptions of the value of immigration. As such, I’d like to leave you with this excerpt from President Ronald Reagan’s final farewell speech, a speech that talked about the immigrant strength of our nation:

  I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.

  And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

  Footnote

  1 See Associated Press and Belinda Robinson, “American Hostage Who Was Freed After Being Imprisoned During Yemen’s Raging Civil War Returns Home to the U.S.,” Mail Online, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3246160/Man-2-US-hostages-freed-Yemen-returns-Michigan.html.

  These are the ruins of the house in Tebnine, Lebanon, where Sam Farran’s grandfather lived. Sam stood next to these ruins, in the street, on the exact spot where he remembers his grandfather sitting every day, enjoying the rhythm of life in this small, traditional Lebanese village. (Author collection)

  Sam attended Fordson High School in Dearborn, Michigan, where some of his formative moments as an American occurred, including his first real romance and his burgeoning desire to join the US Marines. (Photo by Remhermen; CC 4.0 International)

  Sam poses for an official photograph in his full Marine regalia. Despite being a native speaker of Arabic, it took Sam two tries at volunteering—even after 9/11—to put his language skills to use for the Marine Corps. He finally landed just where he was most needed, though, working in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) attaché program in locations across the Middle East. (Author collection)

  Sam, like many Marines, supports the yearly Toys for Tots donation program around the Christmas holidays. One standard part of the Marine Corps ethos is that no one is ever a “former Marine”—once a Marine, always a Marine. So too for Sam: even after assignments all across the world, ending in Yemen, the Marine Corps has remained a big part of Sam’s life. (Author collection)

  The port of Aden, on the Indian Ocean in Yemen, bustled with commercial cargo traffic, at least before the Houthi uprising and subsequent civil war. Sam was nearly called here in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of the USS Cole, which occurred here, in Aden. A year later, just after 9/11, Sam arrived in Yemen and began working from the embassy in Sana’a. Even then some of the strands of the Cole bombing were not fully wrapped up; they affected life and attitudes in the country and in the work Sam was doing. (Photo by Brian Harrington Spier; CC SA-2.0)

  Beautiful traditional buildings of the Old City in Sana’a, seen here before the destruction of the civil war between the Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition attempting to support President Abdrabbu Mansour Hadi, were known for their multistory construction and for the frosted details around their windows. (Photo by Jialiang Gao; CC SA-3.0)

  The view of Jibla shows the intensively terraced mountainsides and dense but traditionally built cityscapes of much of Yemen. This is the town where Sam investigated the senseless murder of three Western doctors who had been working in Yemen for over twenty-five years, a sign that the extremism fueled by radical concepts of Islam would soon make Yemen inhospitable for non-Yemenis. (Photo by Rod Waddington; CC SA-2.0)

  Most Yemeni men, and many women too, partake in the daily ritual of a qat chew, stripping fresh leaves from qat branches and chewing them in a wad in their cheeks. Qat produces a talkative euphoria mixed with calmer contemplative periods. It is a social pastime in Yemen, with most chews involving several individuals and often lasting from the middle part of the afternoon into the evening. (Photo by Ferdinand Reus; CC SA-2.0)

  Former President Ali Abdullah Saleh served as the ruler of a unified Yemen from May 1990 until stepping down as part of the Arab Spring in February 2012, replaced by an interim government headed by his former deputy, Abdrabbu Mansour Hadi. Before that he was President of North Yemen from 1978 until 1990. (Kremlin, Presidential Press Office; CC 4.0 International)

  Abdrabbu Mansour Hadi was the head of Yemen’s interim government during the National Dialogue process to affect reconciliation after former longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down. He remains the head of Yemen’s UN and the Saudi-backed government-in-exile, even as the Houthis have effectively controlled the capital of Sana’a and
much of the rest of the populated portion of Yemen since late 2014. (US Department of Defense)

  Air strikes from the Saudi-led coalition attempting to return Abdrabbu Mansour Hadi to power have reduced much of Yemen’s capital city of Sana’a to rubble. Though, for obvious reasons, no photos of Sam in Houthi captivity exist—or at least none that the Houthis have cared to share—Sam’s captivity began because of the mistaken idea that he might have been contributing to the Saudi targeting at the beginning of this bombing campaign. (Photo by Ibrahem Qasim; CC 4.0 International)

  Construction in Sana’a, and in much of Yemen, is simple concrete and rebar. It has not borne the brunt of bombing and blockade well since the start of the Saudi-led coalition’s Operation Decisive Storm, which began in 2015. During this maelstrom of destruction, Sam (and many other prisoners) could do nothing but listen from their cloistered jail cells to the sounds of war outside, never quite sure whether the next bomb might fall on them. (Photo by Ibrahem Qasim; CC 4.0 International)

  Shipments of military materiel, like those seen here on the tarmac at Sana’a’s International Airport, require close coordination from military personnel in roles like Sam’s as attaché so that they meet all the regulations and inspection requirements of host nation authorities. Interestingly, when the Houthis first took over Sana’a International Airport, they did not stop US shipments outright. They simply observed. This phase only lasted a few months as they consolidated power. Then the Saudi-led bombing began and things got more hostile, leading to the US Embassy withdrawal from the country. (Author collection)