He’d fantasized about meeting journalistic “phonies”-the kind who covered the country without ever really knowing it-perhaps “in a sandwich shop … or a collective taxi.” There he would deride them with his superior vernacular knowledge of the “chaotic but beautiful upending of the social order sweeping through the country.” Real understanding of Syria, he had imagined, would come from living among Syrians, partaking in their poverty and privations.
His abuse over the following two years is also a process of disabuse-a conversion from a bumbling, sunny aesthete into a nearly destroyed man who peered into an existential abyss and was shoved in headfirst. First Padnos felt pain, then dissociation, then, ironically, more of the same curiosity that led him to Syria in the first place. Raw material for that most self-indulgent modern cultural product, a personal essay about the experience of misery in a foreign land, was “the butterfly I had chased over the precipice,” he writes. (In each case he gets close but not too close, like a kid at the zoo in front of the tiger cage.) His happy-go-lucky curiosity led him to Syria. In two previous books-the one about Yemen, and a memoir about teaching in a Vermont jail-he wrote about his acquaintance with wayward violent youth. Padnos’s memoir, Blindfold: A Memoir of Capture, Torture, and Enlightenment, is particularly grueling because its author courted risk so nonchalantly. Read: The Syrian war is creating a massive kidnapping crisis in Lebanon To read their books is to explore our failings and trot a few miles of their ultramarathon of remorse alongside them. No one would endure this intensity of introspection voluntarily. Most of us feel regret-but not like this. In books by hostages taken in the 1980s by Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad in Lebanon, certain themes emerge: the solace of religion, for Terry Waite and Terry Anderson, held from 1987 to 19 to 1991, respectively the sanity-preserving humor and comradeship of fellow hostages, for Brian Keenan (1986 to 1990) and regret about choices the hostages had made in their lives before, as husbands and fathers, and sometimes just as humans on whom freedom was wasted while they had it. Being gagged for years makes one voluble, and readers want to know what it’s like to live under the sword of Damocles. Bradley, then The Atlantic’s sole owner and now the owner of a minority interest in the magazine, devoted considerable personal resources to the search for Padnos and several other Americans held hostage in Syria.)įew who survive a long hostage ordeal can resist writing a book about it. Soon Padnos was soaked in blood and undergoing a regimen of physical and psychological torture that lasted nearly two years.
The next day, his guides announced that they were members of the local chapter of al-Qaeda and beat him senseless. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” he thought to himself, channeling Wordsworth. He drank the beer alone and looked forward to the freedom of the open road in rebel territory. He made his way through the barbed wire into the war zone with these men he barely knew and a small backpack containing a notebook a copy of Dark Star Safari, by Paul Theroux and a can of Efes, the Budweiser of Turkey.
Six years later, he remained gregarious and trusting. Padnos made friends easily and indiscriminately: In 2006, he was in Yemen researching a book about foreign converts on the path of jihad, and he showed me around when I arrived in the country. I n October 2012, in the second year of the Syrian civil war, a 44-year-old freelance journalist named Theo Padnos crossed from Turkey into Syria with two young men he thought were his friends. This article was published online on April 5, 2021.
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