Voices of their captors

...The psychological effect of this bond has even been given a name—the "Stockholm syndrome," named for the woman held hostage during the robbery of the Kreditbank there...

...But when I went back to check his book in view of this new knowledge, I found something else we should heed as well...

...It is now well known that a queer bond develops between captor and captive...

...For giving us the same food they had, and for saving our lives three times, when U.S...

...I refused to tell intelligence officers in Saigon the exact place where we had been released...

...These admissions come as something of a revelation...

...What Richard Dudman warns us to expect of the hostages on return or in interviews must certainly be heeded...

...Furthermore, he and the other two correspondents had had the rare opportunity of seeing the war from the other side...

...They had been beaten on the first day of capture...

...How well will we endure the battle of attrition all this implies...

...Everyone there from cabinet members to school children had done what he could—signed petitions, written letters, used every means of access to plead or negotiate for his release...

...But Dick Dudman is a kindly man, well-loved in this town of transients for his ability to maintain enduring friendships and the gift of devoting time and interest to his friends, old and new, despite the pressures of his work...

...war-planes attacked our area...

...The parallels are obvious, and the similarity of technique in the selective release of women and blacks, the media-oriented demonstrations, and the Christmas invitation to sympathetic clergymen, all too visible...

...His warm nature made him vulnerable...

...Abigail McCarthy 15 February 1980: 73...

...He and two other reporters had blundered into a zone dominated by Communist-led guerrillas while trying to follow American and South Vietnamese troops during our incursion into Cambodia during the Nixon administration...

...Furthermore, since their object was influencing public opinion, they responded best to foreign intermediaries, private American citizens and groups, and possibly members of Congress, but not to the executive...

...For not killing us...

...She became emotionally attached to one of the robbers, broke her engagement to another man after the incident, and maintained her attachment to her former captor during his prison term...

...It was thought that he could help them to be prepared for the changes captivity would have wrought in persons held so long, because he himself had been held captive by guerrillas in Cambodia...

...If he was soft on his captors that fact was more or less obscured by the excellent reporting in his book, 40 Days with the Enemy, which, as General Ridgway wrote at the time, threw new light on a little known facet of the situation in Southeast Asia...

...When they released us I felt I was leaving true friends...

...The mind has its defenses, and the characteristic double view of the writer, who observes, as it were from afar, at the same time that he or she is experiencing the most intense of experiences and emotions, is one good defense...

...A lot depends on our being prepared to meet the realities...

...Dudman freely acknowledges that he was affected by the syndrome: "Looking back at that time, I can recall my exaggerated gratitude toward the five guerrillas who were put in charge of us...

...I remember now that he wandered through that happy crowd looking a little dazed...

...Dudman writes of a time of war, but who doubted that the radicals in the embassy conceive of themselves as in ,a state of war...

...Why were we released...

...He says that he now knows that he was not fully himself for two years after his capture, and that he did not fully escape the syndrome until Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia—nine years later...

...He could not, of course forget the newsmen still in captivity, I thought—but it now seems possible that he was coping with the psychological disorientation of which he and the specialists on captivity now warn...

...We must remember that they have become, at least partially, and for a time, the voices of their captors—and we must understand why...

...Louis Post-Dispatch...

...In writing about the experience, I recalled with fondness the pleasures of eating roast dog and playing chess with our captors...

...To those of us in Washington, where Dick Dudman is one of the most highly respected of journalists, his attitude on his return seemed consistent with his long-held and outspoken conviction that the war in Indochina was a disastrous adventure, unworthy of the United States...

...They also released them on a token basis, never in wholesale numbers...

...asks Richard Dudman rhetorically, and notes that the Viet Cong usually released prisoners only for a clear political purpose...

...I tried to avoid calling them guards . and preferred the term 'escorts.' My analysis at the time was that we had faced a common danger together and in a sense had become comrades...

...For promising not to mistreat us any more...

...Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy VOICES OF THEIR CAPTORS WHEN THE HOSTAGES COME HOME WHEN THE FAMIILIES of the hostages in Iran came to Washington to meet with the president and to be briefed by the State Department, one of those asked to meet with them informally was correspondent Richard Dudman, bureau chief of the St...

...There probably never was such a gathering in Commonweal: 72 the capital as the block party his friends and neighbors (of whom I count myself one) gave to celebrate his return...

...The most outstanding and acute example of the effect of the Stockholm syndrome in this country is undoubtedly that of Patty Hearst...