Word: blanket
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After the failed rescue mission, Metrinko was driven to the holy city of Qum and held for a week with two other hostages in a filthy, rat-infested prison cell whose windows were covered with blankets. He often heard the crack of a whip followed by screams; once when a blanket fell, he caught a glimpse of some Iranians being flogged...
Airman James O. Hughes, 31, another hostage released after 16 days, spent most of his captivity tied to a chair blindfolded; guards sometimes placed a blanket over his head. During repeated interrogations, his guards constantly played with their guns. Said Hughes: "I thought they might kill me just for the hell of it." Though he told his captors nothing, he said, the experience so unnerved him that he sought psychiatric help after his release. Explained Hughes: "Sometimes I still dream that I open a door and an Iranian wearing this big face of Khomeini on his chest shoots...
What had that local commitment been? Was it different from his repeated blanket commitment never to lie to the country and to do his own best? If you had lived a great part of your life in so intimate a place, one where sustained deceit is impossible, wouldn't you have promised to make them proud of their share in you, their contribution to the shaping of your faculties? That was surely implicit...
...medical wing of the prison, where their condition is closely monitored by doctors. For nearly three hours each evening they are allowed to see each other, a privilege not granted other protesting prisoners. Their relatives are also allowed a weekly visit, again an improvement over arrangements for the "blanket-men." But none of the fasting prisoners have touched the food that is routinely prepared and offered, and their spokesmen continue to insist that their demands are nonnegotiable...
...first three decades of this century Pittsburgh citizens lived under a literal blanket of smoke. Streetlights had to be lit day and night, forming a network of luminescent arteries up and down the hillsides, even at midday. People who grew up in Pittsburgh in those times will tell you how they used to walk through the streets holding handkerchiefs over their faces, and of youths spent in continual shower-taking without ever getting clean...