Safe at Home

"They had never, never been to a baseball game," he said. "You see a baseball field for the first time and it's a beautiful, beautiful thing. I got Alexander a glove, I got the kids hats. My little girl was squirming all over the place. But we were all together and that was the important thing."

For the next several years, the family fractured by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's revolutionary leader, went to baseball games together, often as many as 10 times a season. The ritual was always the same, as soon as the coming year's Mets schedule came out, Alexander and Barry picked the games they wanted to see. Then Barry called the Mets and the tickets would be waiting.

"It really cemented my family," said Rosen, who now runs Columbia University's Afghanistan Education Project. "Even now, my son is going to be 30 and we still go to games. It's a way to connect."

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In the days after they came home, the gifts started arriving. It began with a rush of American flags, attached with overwrought missives insisting the flag had flown for 444 days over the sender's home and how they wanted the hostage to have this memento. "A lot of them looked like they had just been sewed," Laingen said.

But it was more than just flags. Soon, some or all began receiving an eclectic collection of presents -- a new Electrolux vacuum cleaner ("the really good one" recalled William Belk, an embassy communications and records officer), a Ducane grill, the promise of a new pair of jeans every year, free rentals from Budget Rent-a-car in Detroit, free dinners, trips to Mardi Gras, trips to Hawaii, trips to Puerto Rico.

There seemed no end to the glut of handouts.

It's hard to pinpoint the worst moment of the 444 days, but the mock executions seem a good place to start. For several days in late January and early February of 1980, the captors showed revolutionary films to the hostages, gory movies with scenes that always ended the same way: with a supposed enemy being tortured and shot.

Then, one morning, about a week later, Sickmann remembers being jostled awake at 2 a.m. by men wearing masks, just like the executioners in the revolutionary films. Sickmann was pulled out of bed and dragged by his hair to a hallway outside where, he said, the other hostages were lined up against the wall. His heart dropped.

"You thought instantly that there had been a military rescue and they're going to shoot us," he said. "You want to be tough in that situation, but everything changes. You lose body fluids. Some were praying, some were cursing left and right."

They took Sickmann into a room and told him to strip -- an act of shame in Islamic culture. His mind flew back to the films. There were three men with rifles and he was certain this was the end. They told him to turn around and put his arms in the air, then they blindfolded him, which in the films was the final act before the killing.

He braced himself and waited for the bullet to crash into his skull.