Word: metrinko
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After his first night at home, above his family's tavern in Olyphant (pop. 5,138), Michael Metrinko looked out the window at the gently falling snow. "I knew at that moment that at last it was over," he says. "There I was, standing in the bedroom of my boyhood. Nobody was threatening me. No one was calling for my death. I was home...
...Metrinko, a 1968 Georgetown University graduate who was a political officer at the embassy, it was a particularly blessed moment. He was one of the hostages treated most harshly by the militants. He spent a total of 261 days in solitary confinement because of his constant defiance. His captors were convinced that their Farsi-speaking prisoner was a CIA agent. They interrogated him more than a dozen times, usually late at night and for up to seven hours at a time. Says Metrinko: "They had broken into my office safe, and they had the names and phone numbers...
After two weeks, the militants put Metrinko into a 6-ft. by 8-ft. basement storage room that was furnished with only a mattress. Says Metrinko: "When I was awake, I'd lean it against the wall because you couldn't move around with it on the floor." He spent four months there, volunteering to scrub toilets, mop floors, "do anything that got me out of that hole." He spent many of the hours reading, including The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's grim portrait of Soviet prison life. Says Metrinko dryly: "I can't imagine...
...April, Metrinko was suddenly moved to a large embassy office with two windows overlooking the main street. The reason quickly became apparent: within an hour a Red Cross representative came to visit him. A day later, he was moved into a smaller office. Says Metrinko: "The new room was at least large enough to exercise in, and it had a chair, a table and a mattress." To pass the time, he drew geometric patterns on the gray walls with red, blue and green pencils...
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...