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Couple Recalls Iraq Hostage Days

"To live the noblest tenets of his or her profession."

Those are Jill Carroll's words, written a year ago, reprinted in a London newspaper last week, and her explanation for why a journalist, particularly a freelance journalist, would go to Iraq knowing the risks

"It really just brings it all back and it's very difficult for me personally and as well for my family to see this happening again," says Micah Garen.

For documentary film makers Micah Garen and Marie-Helene Carlton, there is a chilling deja-vu quality to their friend Jill Carroll's story. A year and a half ago, Micah was kidnapped in Iraq. Marie-Helene worked to free him. Their story had a happy ending, but no one knew at the time that it would.

In 2004, the couple traveled to southern Iraq to document the archeological looting taking place there.

"This was the birthplace of history," says Micah. "This is where writing was invented. What comes from these sites is just phenomenal--incredible works of literature, poetry, art, historical documents."

Like Carroll and other freelancers, they did not confine themselves to the relative safety of Baghdad's heavily guarded green zone hotels.

"The more dangerous it gets, the less news coverage there is or the harder it is to get news out, and therefore the more important the news becomes," says Marie-Helene.

"It's all passion, really," says Micah. "It's about really wanting to report something accurately, and maybe that's something that's not being reported."

Disguised as Iraqis, they were able to get disturbing pictures no one else had. The failure of the United States or any other coalition country to stop the systematic theft and destruction of Iraq's cultural heritage was a story few journalists would touch, because getting at it was so dangerous.

"You have to decide if the story is important enough for you to go over there and risk your life," says Micah. "I can't think of one that was more important."

In southern Iraq during the summer of 2004, a Shiite militia called the Mahdi Army, loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, was fighting American soldiers. A critical fact, it turns out, when Micah and his translator, Amir Doshi, were kidnapped. It was Friday, August 13th.

"A car drove up very quickly and there was one man in the car in the front who was just screaming at me in Arabic, and he had a pistol and he was waving it and then pointing in my face," recall Micah. "I actually managed to hang on to the blindfold they used during the ten days, and you can see here in the blue paint was a message written out to praise Muqtada al-Sadr."

Blindfolded and tied up, after hours in a van, Micah and his translator Amir were led into a small clearing hidden by trees.

"Immediately when I got there, I saw there was another blindfold on the ground. "You don't have time to be terrified, but you go into survival mode. You're pumped full of adrenaline and you're desperately trying to figure some way to kind of get out of this. So the fear is there, but foremost in your mind, is "how am I going to survive this?"

"Frankly, I thought he was probably a goner," recall John Burns, a New York Times correspondent who also had survived being kidnapped. "At that time the odds against anybody who was kidnapped were very heavily against."

And nothing's changed. According to the Time just four days ago, "more than 400 foreigners have been kidnapped since 2003, and at least 36 journalists. Most foreigners have been released, but dozens have been killed."

"It is, after all, a country so volatile," says Burns. "Every hostage is teetering on the edge of the abyss from the moment he is seized."

"I didn't find out for 3 days that Micah had been kidnapped," recalls Marie-Helene.

She had left Iraq a few days before.

"I remember vividly getting on the plane and turning around to see Micah, and he waited and waited, and the last time I turned around, he wasn't there. He and Amir had left, and when I look back, that seems very prophetic."

Micah still has the packet of cigarettes in which he carved a message to Marie-Helene telling her he loved her,

"I said to Amir, if we get out of this the first thing I'm going to do is take a shower. The second thing is ask Marie-Helene to marry me."

"When you're stripped of everything, and you really are facing your mortality, you can clearly kind of reassess the situation and say this is what's important."

Marie-Helene remembers the phone call from Micah's mother telling her that he was kidnapped. Within hours a group that came to be known as "The Blob" had assembled in a one-room apartment in New York.

"We had about nine friends and family members, the dog, and then starting Monday night the FBI agents," says Marie-Helene.

They posted the telephone numbers of every journalist, every diplomat, every sheik who might be able to convince the kidnappers to free Micah and Amir. And with Marie-Helene taking the lead, they started calling.

"It's important immediately to get the word out very publicly that this person who's been kidnapped is a journalist not a spy," says Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, whose members on the ground in Baghdad were enlisted to work their Iraqi sources on Micah's behalf.

"It's the most dangerous place in the world right now," says Cooper. "I've talked to war correspondents who covered Vietnam, Bosnia and other conflicts, and they say, 'I've never seen anything like this.'"

Eventually the kidnappers send out the video.

"It's your worst nightmare," recalls Micah. "There were about a dozen militants standing there with guns, and I could see the banners on the wall written in Arabic, and there was a stool in the center and they had a video camera. I had seen this plenty of times before. It had become the stage set they used to execute people."

Marie-Helene remembers how hard it was to watch.

"To think of Micah in that position where others had been, where there had been no hope, it was too painful to imagine. And I feel like part of me separated from my body because it was too painful. You just couldn't take it."

The kidnappers were demanding U.S. forces pullout of Najaf or they would kill Micah. Najaf happened to be the place where the militant religious leader al-Sadr was holed up inside a mosque under siege. With the media outside and the clock ticking, it was time for a desperate gamble.

Micah's sister, Eva, issued a public statement on television. She was terrified, but her appearance on an Arab television station was one last chance to reach the powerful Shiite clerics who could order the hostages' release.

At first the plea appeared to work. Two important sheiks issued statements condemning the kidnappings. One was from al-Sadr himself. Hope was high that Micah's release was imminent, except it wasn't.

"It's a roller coaster ride which is altogether more likely to end at the bottom than at the top," says the Times' Burns. "So even when we have statements from Sheik al-Sadr, I wouldn't' t have given you more than one chance in three at that point that Micah would return alive."

For two more days, nothing happened. And then the end finally came late Sunday night..

"The head of the FBI group opened the door and he gave us thumbs up," recalls Marie-Helene. "He said he's home. And we fell down and jumped up at the same time."

Micah then phoned home, but there was one small problem.

"I knew at some point he'd see the media reports, and that he would see that it was reported that he had a fiancée, and I didn't want him to feel freaked out or pressured by this," say Marie-Helene. "I had said this purely to position myself to be in a good place to help him with this kidnapping. And then I started to explain why fiancée, and Micah just cut me off."

"I said to her Micah Garen does live with his fiancée, and this was my strange satellite-phone proposal," says Micah.

The book Micah and Marie-Helene have written about those ten awful days was their version of therapy, but it was not enough to blunt the impact of Jill Carroll's kidnapping.

"I was there myself in front of that camera. It's a very tough thing to see. But when I see the video of her, I'm actually heartened because I see that she is being very strong and I think that's the most important thing," says Micah.

Jill Carroll has written that she was willing to risk everything in Iraq "for love of the story." Micah Garen and Marie-Helene Carlton, of all people, understand.

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