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The powerful account of the remarkable peace activist kidnapped while leading a peace delegation and held for ransom by Iraqi insurgents until his paradoxical release by a crack unit of special forces commandos.
In November 2005, James Loney and three other men — Canadian Harmeet Singh Sooden, British citizen Norman Kember and American Tom Fox — were taken hostage at gunpoint. The men were with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), an organization that places teams trained in non-violent intervention into lethal conflict zones. The then unknown Swords of Righteousness Brigade released videos of the men, resulting in what is likely the most publicized kidnapping of the Iraq War. Tom Fox was murdered and dumped on a Baghdad street. The surviving men were held for 118 days before being rescued by Task Force Black, an elite counter-kidnap unit led by the British SAS. Captivity is the story of what Jim described upon his return to Toronto and reunion with his partner Dan Hunt as "a terrifying, profound, transformative and excruciatingly boring experience." It presents an affecting portrait of how Jim came to be a pacifist and chronicles his work in Iraq before the kidnapping. It brings the reader immediately into the terror and banality, the frictions, the moral dilemmas of their captivity, their search to find their captors' humanity, and the imperative need to conceal Jim's sexual identity. It examines the paradoxes we face when our most cherished principles are tested in extraordinary circumstances and explores the universal truths contained in every captivity experience. At its heart, the book is a hope-filled plea for peace, human solidarity and forgiveness.
From James Loney:
Why I Wrote This Book
I often wondered, during those excruciating days of handcuffs and chains, fear and boredom without end, would I ever get to tell anyone about the strange and bizarre things that happened during our captivity? Being transported in the trunk of a car. Sleeping with my left and right hands handcuffed to the person beside me. Explaining to the captors how to use “men’s gel.” Picking open our handcuffs after watching a Hollywood movie.
It is a paradox. I went to Iraq as a pacifi st on a mission of peace and was kidnapped, threatened with death and held hostage with three other men until we were rescued in a military operation. It is an extraordinary privilege to be able to tell the story of this paradox, to explain why I remain committed to the principles of nonviolence despite the fact a member of our group was murdered and our freedom was secured by armed force. The crucible of captivity was a kind of school in which I was able to see the innermost workings of the universe, how we are all connected, how our liberation is inextricably tied together. I want to share this story in the hope of contributing to the emergence of a world without war, the single greatest challenge of the 21st century. Everything depends on this, for without peace nothing else is possible.
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #1443107 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Vintage Canada
- Published on: 2012-04-24
- Released on: 2012-04-24
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.99" h x .89" w x 5.17" l, .66 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 432 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"This incredible story captures all the beauty and the ugliness that we humans are capable of. It is a reminder that grace is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free. It is a heart-wrenching and timely invitation to become extremists for love in a world where hatred often hijacks the headlines."
—Shane Claiborne, author of The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical and Jesus For President
"During 118 days of agonizing and terrifying Captivity, James Loney strained to see the humanity in his captors; to see himself through the other's eyes, to see even the work of peacemaking with that radical sympathetic doubt which is the heart of peacemaking. . . . His riveting story illuminates the potential that impassioned commitment to non-violence may yet hold for human and planetary survival."
—Kathy Kelly, peace activist, author and three-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize
"An exquisite testimony to the human spirit and the healing that comes through forgiveness of those who have wronged us, and an uplifting reminder of the excellent work being done by the Christian Peacemaker Teams around the world. Anyone who wishes to live in a world of peace and justice should read this book to understand the central role of love and generosity in global healing."
—Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of Embracing Israel/Palestine and editor of Tikkun
"[Captivity] is a book about freedom, the freedom of all human beings to decide on how we will respond to the conditions around us. Loney's integrity throughout his 118 days as a captive in Iraq, his indomitable spirit, his refusal to succumb to hate, his capacity to humanize his captors, his faithfulness to his comrades in Captivity, his refusal to yield to anything but compassion-all testify to an extraordinary mensch."
—Farid Esack, Islamic Liberation Theologion and Head of Religion Studies, University of Johannesburg
"Jim Loney is one of the toughest and most gentle prophets on behalf of justice and peace in North America today, an amazing blend of idealist and realist. His kidnapping as part of a Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq in 2005 represented a watershed moment for those experimenting with a non-violent presence in warzones, and the profound lessons he draws in this book are deeply personal and political. An epic and exemplary story."
—Ched Myers, author of Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus
About the Author
James Loney is a Canadian peace activist, writer and member of Christian Peacemaker Teams. Based in Toronto, he has served on violence-reduction teams in Iraq, Palestine and First Nations communities in Canada. In November 2005, he was kidnapped along with the CPT delegation he was leading and held hostage for four months. One member of the group was murdered, an American named Tom Fox. The surviving three were released in a military operation led by British special forces.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Did it really happen, those four months of handcuffs and chains, terror and uncertainty, excruciating boredom without end? Sometimes, when I’m not sure, I go down into my basement and open a cardboard box to reassure myself. It contains a pair of pants, a sweater, a collared shirt, two undershirts, a pair of socks, two sets of underwear, the green string I used to hold up my pants—and one handcuff. The things the RCMP took from me on the day of our rescue, while I stood shivering in an emergency room hospital gown, in a hospital located in the Green Zone, headquarters for the occupation of Iraq. They said it was for forensic evidence.
I was alarmed. Will I get them back? Even the handcuff? It was the only thing I cared about. Yes, they said. True to their promise, the box came in the mail a year later, each item meticulously folded and wrapped in brown paper. Proof that it really happened.
One hundred and eighteen days. To say “we thought it would never end” would be to dilute an understatement with a cliché. Glaciers moved faster than any single minute of any single one of those days. Each day, each minute was a lash, an open grave, a forced march, an agony and a theft for the four of us held hostage together—Tom Fox, Harmeet Singh Sooden, Norman Kember and myself—and all of our families and loved ones imprisoned with us in that four-month tomb of unknowing.
It is good to be alive. It could easily have turned out differently. The moment of my death might have been recorded on a grainy home video, or I might still be mouldering in the living hell of captivity. Instead I am alive and home free because a unit of crack soldiers risked their lives to secure my freedom. Without regard for my politics or my purpose in going to Baghdad. Simply because it was the duty they accepted. For this I am immensely and perpetually grateful.
I began to record these memories and thoughts in my brother Matthew’s apartment in Montreal. He was away for a while and I needed a quiet place to finally start what I had been avoiding for months and months. My heart was heavy. By some strange coincidence, it was Remembrance Day, and Canadians were gathering at cenotaphs, school gymnasiums and churches to honour those who risk their lives in the service of our country. In Calgary, Diane Dallaire laid a wreath at the cenotaph in Memorial Park. She is the mother of 22-year-old Private Kevin Dallaire who, along with two others, was killed on August 3, 2006, in a rocket-propelled grenade attack while fighting Taliban forces west of Kandahar. She said the ceremony was an important reminder of the cost paid for peace. “I hope they remember where their freedom came from,” she said.
I felt the calamity of that day deep in my body: a fist clenched tight in my chest. I thought of Diane Dallaire mourning the loss of her son. The grief must be too much to bear. I wondered what I would say to her, were she to ask me, “Do you remember where your freedom came from?”
I do. My living, breathing, everyday-walking-around freedom comes directly from the hand of the soldier who took a bolt cutter in his hands and cut the chain that held me captive for four months. Yet I remain a pacifist, a Christian who believes that Jesus’s teaching to love one’s enemy is a call to lay down the sword and pick up the cross, to accept rather than inflict suffering.
It is a paradox. I went to Baghdad on a Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) delegation in opposition to the institution of war. I was kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents who were fighting against the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of their country. CPT used every weapon in its non-violent arsenal to get us out. There was an international up - rising of prayer vigils, solidarity statements, appeals, public witness, moral pressure. Our kidnapping was front-page news for weeks. The constant, unrelenting hope was that our captors would have a change of heart and release us. They didn’t. The days piled into months and Tom was killed. It was a secretive Special Forces operation led by Task Force Black—a joint U.S./U.K. unit established in 2003 to hunt down senior al Qaeda operatives in Iraq and rescue foreign hostages—that finally ended the crisis. Soldiers like Kevin Dallaire.
The first Remembrance Day was declared by King George V on November 7, 1919. It recalled the Armistice signed the previous year by Allied commander-in-chief Marshal Ferdinand Foch and Germany’s Matthias Erzberger in a secret railway carriage hidden in the Compiègne forest. On November 11, 1918, at 11:00 a.m.—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—the First World War was officially over. Twenty million were dead, 21 million wounded. They called it the War to End All Wars.
November 11 is also the feast day of St. Martin of Tours. Martin is the patron saint of soldiers, cavalry and quartermasters. The U.S. Army Quartermasters Corps established the Order of St. Martin in 1997 to recognize the distinguished service of quartermasters. The website reads: “Saint Martin—the patron saint of the Quartermaster Regiment— was the most popular saint in France during antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It is said that French kings carried his cloak into battle as a spur to victory. Usually pictured on horseback dividing his cloak with the beggar, the image of Saint Martin as a Soldier-Provider offers a fitting symbol for Logistics Warriors charged with SUPPORTING VICTORY now and for all time.” Their website also tells us that Martin’s name comes from the Latin Marten Tenens (one who sustains Mars, Mars being the Roman god of war). And that is precisely what quartermasters do—sustain armies by making sure they have everything they need to do their job: gasoline, rations, bullets, boots.
Martin was born in 316 or 317 in the Roman province of Pannon ia (now modern-day Hungary). As the son of a senior officer in the Imperial Horse Guard, Martin was forced by law to join the army at the age of fifteen. While on duty at the age of eighteen, he encountered a ragged beggar at the gates of Amiens. Moved with compassion, he cut his cloak with his sword and gave half of it to the beggar. That night he had a dream in which Jesus appeared in the half cloak he had given away. “Here is Martin,” Jesus said, “the Roman soldier who is not baptized; he has clad me.” Shortly thereafter Martin was baptized.
When Martin was twenty, Julian II ordered him into battle against the Gauls. He refused. “I am a soldier of Christ. I cannot fight,” he told the emperor. (The early Church prohibited the baptized from bearing arms or serving in the military under pain of excommunication.) When Julian accused him of being a coward, Martin volunteered to go onto the battlefield unarmed at the head of the column. Julian accepted his offer and threw him into prison. The next day the Gauls sued for peace and the battle never happened. Martin was discharged from the army.
Martin travelled to Poitiers to become a disciple of St. Hilary, the local bishop, and then later joined the monastery at Solesmes. In 371, he was acclaimed Bishop of Tours against his will by the citizens of Tours. As bishop, Martin worked tirelessly for prisoners. A general named Avitianus once arrived in Tours with a cohort he intended to torture and execute the next day. Upon hearing this, Martin went immediately to the house where Avitianus was staying. Arriving in the middle of the night, he threw himself on the threshold and began crying out in a loud voice. An angel is said to have awakened Avitianus, telling him Martin was outside. “Don’t even say a word,” he said upon seeing Martin. “I know what your request is. Every prisoner shall be spared.”
In addition, Martin was a staunch opponent of the death penalty. Priscillian of Avila was the leader of a growing heresy that advocated, amongst other things, abstinence in marriage. Condemned by the First Council of Saragossa and excommunicated in 380, Priscillian fled to Trier in southwestern Germany. A group of Spanish bishops led by Ithacius wanted Emperor Magnus Maximus to execute him. Although greatly opposed to Priscillian, Martin petitioned the imperial court in Trier to have him removed from the secular jurisdiction of the emperor, arguing this was a church matter over which the secular authority had no power to intervene and excommunication was punishment enough. When Maximus agreed and Martin departed the city, Ithacius persuaded the emperor to follow through with the execution. Priscillian and his followers, beheaded in 385, were the first Christians executed for heresy.
Martin hurried back to Trier as soon as he heard the news in the hope of saving the remaining Priscillianists. Once there, he refused to concelebrate with the bishops who had ordered the executions. Fearing a public scandal, the emperor promised to release the remaining prisoners if Martin shared Communion with Ithacius. Martin reluctantly agreed but then was so overcome with guilt for agreeing to this compromise that he resolved never to attend another bishops’ assembly. It is believed Martin died in 397 at the age of eighty-one. He was buried, at his request, in the Cemetery of the Poor in Tours on November 11.
Irony and paradox. A young man who disobeys a direct order to kill becomes the patron saint of soldiers; a pacifist conscientious objector who leaves the army in disgrace is turned into a warrior icon charged with supporting-victory-now-and-for-all-time. The quartermasters have taken the cloak of St. Martin away from the beggar and wrapped it around the institution of war.
The reason, I think, is very simple. Every war needs a cloak. Every war needs something to surround and protect and dignify it, something to conceal that it is really a rotten stinking corpse. Every act of violence needs a pointing finger, a reason, a story to explain why it is necessary. And every soldier needs a blessing. They need to know that the horror of what they are called upon to do has purpose and meaning, that it is legitimate and just, even noble. Without this cloak, this story, this blessing to protect them from the flesh-and-blood consequences of their actions, their work becomes impossible.
Perhaps the quartermasters have chosen more wisely than they know. By enlisting Martin as their patron, they have put him right where he is supposed to be, at the front of the battle column, reminding us that we need not be governed by the imperium of war but that we can, at any moment, lay down our swords and stand up, or sit down, for peace. Perhaps it is those who are most involved in the institution of war— soldiers, quartermasters and cavalrymen—who most need Martin of Tours, the voice who says there is another way.
Christian Peacemaker Teams is an experiment in this other way. “What would happen,” CPT asks, “if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to non-violent peacemaking that armies devote to war?”
The question comes from theologian Ron Sider’s challenge to the Mennonite Church at the 1984 Mennonite World Conference in Strasbourg, France. Conscientious objection to war is not enough, he said. “Too often we fall into an isolationist pacifism which silently ignores or perhaps profits from injustice and war as long as our boys don’t have to fight.” Mennonites, he argued, had become “soft and comfortable,” even wealthy, staying home from war. “To vote for other people’s sons and daughters to march off to death while ours safely register as conscientious objectors is the worst form of confused hypocrisy.” In contrast, Sider argued, “Those who have believed in peace through the sword have not hesitated to die. Proudly, courageously, they gave their lives . . . For their loved ones, for justice, and for peace, they have laid down their lives by the millions.”
Sider challenged pacifist Christians to get out of their easy chairs. “Why do we pacifists think that our way—Jesus’s way—to peace will be less costly? Unless we . . . are ready to start to die by the thousands in dramatic vigorous new exploits for peace and justice, we should sadly confess that we really never meant what we said.
“What would happen if we in the Christian church developed a new nonviolent peacekeeping force of 100,000 persons ready to move into violent conflicts and stand peacefully between warring parties in Central America, Northern Ireland, Poland, Southern Africa, the Middle East, and Afghanistan? Frequently we would get killed by the thousands. But everyone assumes that for the sake of peace it is moral and just for soldiers to get killed by the hundreds of thousands, even millions. Do we not have as much courage and faith as soldiers?”
The speech created a stir. A 1986 conference in Chicago was convened to discuss how to implement Sider’s challenge. A steering committee was organized and Gene Stoltzfus was hired as the first full-time staff member in 1988. The first delegation went to Iraq in November 1989. In 1993, CPT held its first training and sent its first team to Haiti.
Currently, the CPT Peacemaker Corps includes 40 full-time and 170 reservist members, all of whom receive a month of training before joining a team in the field. Full-timers receive a needs-based stipend; reservists cover their travel and living expenses through fundraising. As of this writing, CPT has teams working in Hebron and the shepherd village of At-Tuwani (both located in Palestine), Colombia and Iraqi Kurdistan and with Aboriginal communities in Ontario. We only go where we’re invited and generally work in partnership with communities experiencing lethal violence who are struggling to effect social change through the power of non-violence.
We sometimes conceive of our work as violence-reduction. Peacemaking is a complex, time-consuming, multi-dimensional dynamic process, and often what we are able to accomplish in a given context is very modest. We look for ways to reduce and limit violence through what we call a “ministry of presence”: street patrols; observing in volatile situations with cameras and notebooks; de-escalating body language; physically intervening to protect those facing an immediate threat of violence; accompanying those who have been targeted for violence. We sometimes call this the grandmother effect: you’re less likely to stick your hand in the cookie jar while Grandma is watching. While many CPTers are grandmothers, an international passport can sometimes have the same effect. In Colombia, for example, paramilitaries and guerrillas tend not to commit acts of violence in the presence of internationals in order to avoid the international scrutiny that would result.
In addition to this ministry of presence, we are becoming more and more involved in the work of documenting human rights abuses. At the time of our kidnapping, CPT was documenting the torture of Sunni men at the hands of Shia-identified departments within the Ministry of Interior. CPT issued a report in November 2003 documenting seventytwo instances where the United States had violated the human rights of Iraqi men they were holding without charges. Seymour Hirsch, who broke the Abu Ghraib story in The New Yorker in April 2004, said, “Most of the things that I ended up writing about in Abu Ghraib, most of the general concepts, they [CPT] knew a great deal about earlier, as did Human Rights Watch and Amnesty.”
We do not position ourselves in a conflict as third-party neutrals who mediate between, or separate, two opposing but roughly equal sides. We work in contexts where there is an imbalance of power, where a smaller group is experiencing violence at the hands of a larger and more powerful dominant group—violence that is often manifest in systems of social, economic and political oppression. Our thinking is that one cannot remain neutral in the face of injustice, for to do so is to become an accomplice to that injustice. Rather, we see ourselves as allies working to confront, expose and transform the systematic injustices that we so often find at the root of a violent conflict. We are trained in non-violent direct action and are ready to perform nonviolent civil disobedience (i.e., break unjust laws) in order to expose injustice and mobilize positive social change.
It’s difficult for me to assess just how successful CPT has been in this approach to peacemaking. More often than not, success for us is better measured in terms of what is avoided or prevented from happening. Nevertheless, we have enjoyed a spectacular success now and then. I think of Sara Reschly, her image flashed around the world standing with her arms outstretched in front of an Israeli soldier, preventing him from shooting a group of Palestinians who were non-violently protesting a week-long, 24-hour curfew. I think of Lisa Martens and Cliff Kindy taking around-the-clock media calls during the 2003 bombing of Baghdad, telling the world the truth about war. I think of Lena Siegers, who videotaped officers from Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans officers ramming the boats of Mi’kmaq fishers and then clubbing them while they floated helpless in the water. This videotape was broadcast around the world and embarrassed the Canadian government into a change of policy. I think of Chris Brown and Kim Lamberty, who were attacked by masked settler youth with bats and chains while accompanying Palestinian shepherd children to school. Their cuts, bruises and broken bones captured international headlines and forced the Israeli government to protect the very same children they once said they couldn’t.
CPT’s budget in 2010 was $1.1 million.
Humanity is in trouble. We have entered the eleventh hour. Half of the world’s coral reef species, a third of its amphibians and a quarter of its mammals are at risk of disappearing. The UN issued a report in 2007 that said a major extinction of life caused by human activity is under way. Global warming, peak oil, the loss of arable farmland, growing food and water shortages, alone and in combination, are a clear and present danger to the social and economic systems that undergird human civilization. Meanwhile, unknown thousands are dying every day and unknown millions more are suffering in refugee camps, shantytowns and destitute villages from the violence of poverty. The future is precarious, the present an outrage, and yet the world spent a staggering $1.5 trillion on the institution of war in 2009. It is estimated that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will cost U.S. taxpayers $3 trillion.
The prevailing wisdom says we have no choice. We must do what it takes, always be ready. War is inevitable, forever looming. War for defence, security, reconstruction, democracy. War to end war. War necessary, right and just.
I too believe that we have no choice. “Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace,” Martin Luther King Jr. said on the eve of his assassination in 1968. “But now . . . it is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world. It’s nonviolence or non-existence.”
The choice facing us is as simple as it is stark. A major extinction of life is under way. We can’t afford to waste another minute or another penny building and maintaining the war machine. If our children, and their children, are to have any hope of a future, we must make a turn, take a different road, mobilize everything, do all we can—and do it today. But we have been taken captive by an idea. The handcuffs and chains that bind us have been forged in the false confidence that violence will save us. It cannot. Inevitably and irresistibly, it will lead to an abyss of mutually assured doom and catastrophe.
Irony and paradox. Here we are in the eleventh hour. The eleventh day of the eleventh month is when we honour the memory of those who have fought and died in war. It is the day we remember a pacifist saint whose cloak is used to mantle the very thing he walked away from. It is the day that I happened to begin writing this book, the story of a pacifist who was taken hostage in the course of opposing a war and was freed by the very institution he condemned.
This book is the story of this paradox. It is the story of my captivity and what I saw there—of the human spirit and freedom, of violence and the way to find our liberation from it. As with any paradox, there is no answer to it; it can only be lived. I tell this story in the hope that we might yet find another way.
From the Hardcover edition.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Captivity, A Breathtaking Masterpiece
By Theresa Vallotton
Captivity is a Masterpiece! It is beautifully written. It literally took my breath away at times for the insight, as well as the suspense. Illuminating and profoundly compelling, Jim Loney lays himself bare. He tells the raw personal truth in this most grueling and excruciating of circumstances. From the darkest of places in the human heart to the very light of grace, he gives voice to all of humanity. It is difficult to express the astounding depth and breadth of this true story. I had followed the captivity of Jim Loney and his colleagues closely, praying in earnest for them. I am so very grateful to now know what happened.
It is a must read!
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Captivity is spell-binding!
By Rosalie G. Riegle
Captivity made me realize that in some ways, we are all captive--captive by what we need, by what holds us captive, whether it be material goods or ideology. It also, and this was surprising to me, made me see the world with brighter, more hopeful eyes. I had expected the opposite--that learning more of the incredible suffering of both captives and the Iraqi captors would reaffirm my general hopelessness about the state of the world and the Middle East in particular. But in the end it didn't.
So that you, too, might perhaps experience this change of heart first hand as a reader, I won't tell you why I ending my reading with this conclusion but say simply that reading the acknowledgements after I finished the narrative made me realize the complex and beautiful web of peace people that surrounded James Loney, Norman Kember, Harmeet Singh Sooden, and Tom Fox, the American who didn't survive. Throughout my reading, I was haunted by the paradox that Jim mentions in the "Introduction," that the three who weren't murdered were rescued by the very institutions of war they work to abolish. From that paradox I realized anew the inescapable truth of the oneness of all humanity.
I've known Jim for years as a Catholic Worker colleague and I remember driving through dark and snowy Chicago streets to pray with the Christian Peace Team on that first awful night when the four were kidnapped. I followed the news stories, vigiled for their release, and read the sanitized versions of their ordeal, but didn't let myself think in particulars about what they might be going through. But Jim's honest rendering made me know with a hard knowing what it means to be a captive. Yes, there were the physical constraints of being chained and hungry and rarely able to bathe. Even more compelling to me were the wrenching days of living with guards who didn't speak English and could never be believed and the even harder task of living with the other captives. All four had been schooled in nonviolence and techniques for community living, but they still found it incredibly difficult to survive the strain of handcuffed and unrelenting togetherness. When I read the details--the weeks without toothbrushes and the filth of their prison--and the different ways each had of dealing with such a complete loss of freedom, I couldn't help asking how I would have coped. Would I have been able, as Jim did, to be angry and impatient but yet turn to God in faith? To massage my captor's sore muscles? Or would I have subsided into the deafly prison fog I know from Shoa literature and from my oral histories of peacemakers who serve time in US and European prisons?
Reading Jim's remarkable recall of the changes his spirit endured throughout the ordeal, the wrenching decisions he made, the grace that carried him through, was a life-changing experience. Thank you, Jim, for your candor in showing us the soul of a survivor.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
What happens when hatred meets compassion?
By Lorin Peters
The book is beautiful and moving - I read it very slowly over many days and weeks.
I am still wrestling with its truth - it is profound and challenging.
`Junior' (the most abusive of Jim's captors) mimes being a suicide bomber and wiping out American soldiers - they had killed his family in the bombing of Fallujah. Jim is mortified, and finally finds a way to give Junior hope and a desire to go on living - back massages.
Junior whispers in tears on his prayer mat - his 17 year-old sister is dying. Jim, who is sick himself, and his fellow captives promise to pray for her. Junior is deeply grateful, and promises medicine, and eventual freedom.
Jim writes to the soldiers who `rescued' him, "I am unspeakably grateful... But the gun is still in charge and nothing has really changed. I have begun to see that there is no such thing as `American freedom' - there is only human freedom. The gun will never make us free (- it can only make us) a slave of fear, going around and around in a spiral of death, becoming more and more like the thing that we hate."
It is audacious to say to the one who has harmed you, no matter how seriously, "I forgive. I no longer hold you. You may go; your destiny is your own. You are free. Go without expectation, obligation or libation. Go with my blessing: May you be healed of your violence. May you be reborn in the knowledge of your forgiveness. May you start a joyous new life of giving life."
"When we forgave our captors, something extraordinary happened: the captivity suddenly made sense. It had a purpose. It had become a seed of healing, a seed of forgiveness."
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Captivity: 118 Days in Iraq and the Struggle for a World Without War, by James Loney PDF
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