Word: metrinko
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...attempts to prove that the embassy had been a cockpit of intrigue and espionage. Although for the most part the hostages were not subjected to torture, their detention and humiliation were in themselves an outrage and came complete with occasional beatings and sham executions. Spectacularly uncooperative types like Michael Metrinko, a political officer who could insult his guards (and their mothers) in fluent Farsi, were routinely roughed up and thrown into solitary. That may have been preferable to being subjected to political harangues by true believers like Massoumeh (Screaming Mary) Ebtekar, then a volcano of fundamentalist cant, later the first...
...Metrinko passed the next two months in more pleasant quarters: a room in a onetime art gallery. He never seriously considered trying to escape, since even when he was allowed to take a stroll in the courtyard he was surrounded by 20 or more armed guards. Says Metrinko ruefully: "It was like a grade-B movie, but I'm not James Cagney." The Ayatullah Khomeini's son Seyyed Ahmed talked to the hostages for half an hour one day. Metrinko complained to him that the food consisted of "rice and grease" and that he was not allowed...
After he was moved to a prison in Tehran in late June, Metrinko cursed his guards in Farsi as "thieves" and "liars" for taking away his watch and glasses, and denounced Khomeini as a "killer." The militants blindfolded Metrinko, punched and slapped him, and put him in an isolation cell. For two weeks he slept on its bare floor with no heat or light, except for what little came over the transom of the steel door...
Even at the last moment, Metrinko was defiant. When he was boarding the bus to go to the Algerian plane that was to fly the hostages to freedom, a guard called him an "American bastard." Replied Metrinko: "Shut up, you son of a prostitute." Guards dragged Metrinko off the bus; as it left for the airport, they punched him a few times. But he was finally taken to the airport in a car. Says Metrinko: "I was awfully close to missing the whole show...
...When Metrinko got home last week, he went immediately to Saints Cyril and Methodius Church, where he had been baptized as a child into the Ukrainian Catholic faith. He blew out the votive flame that had been lit on the 100th day of his captivity, and wept when the priest read the Sermon on the Mount. Metrinko now plans to retreat to a cabin deep in the woods for a few weeks. The hideaway has no phone or TV, but, he says "there's a wonderful fireplace, and I'm going to spend my time chopping...