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them that things were being done to help them and to encourage them to keep praying. “If you didn’t pray before, you’d start,” Col. Holland said. “On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day I had been interrogated for 35 hours. They stopped 15 minutes before midnight and said ‘It’s Christmas, we’re going to stop now.’ ”
By March the Iranian students were interrogating the hostages more and more. It was very cold there because the elevation was 5,000 feet. During the interrogations warmly dressed students made him sit in a straight hard chair wearing only tee shirt, pants, and sandals. “They wanted to know a lot of secret stuff that we wouldn’t tell them,” Col. Holland explained.
While a gun was being held at his head during an interrogation he asked for pencil and paper. He began to write. They thought he was confessing. When they found out that he had written 39 pages about a little boy growing up in Illinois (his autobiography) they were very angry. “I did this in order to stall for time,” he commented. Consequently, they put him in a basement of a building. “As they shut the door they said to me, ‘Hope you enjoy your years in this room!’ TTiere were four walls and me.”
During his stay in this room two doves built a nest. He told his “keeper” Mohammad that when the baby birds hatched he would become a grandfather. Mohammad told the other guards and they came everyday to see the birds. Col. Holland would get to talk with them in their language, Persian. He wasn’t supposed to have any visitors but every day they came back to talk about the doves. “I had somebody to talk to. It was a way I could survive,” he added.
Col. Holland emphasized how important it is to study the culture and language of any foreign country that an American visits. A few phrases should be known as well as how to act in certain situations while visiting in that country. The people of the country need to know that the American is at least trying to be one of them. Col. Holland’s knowledge of Iranian customs and language were
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