“You know how you can tell the shah was a raghead, Steve?”
“No, Jimmy, how?”
“Because he was too stupid to shoot enough of these other ragheads to stay in power.”
When the guards passed around an item from the English-language Tehran Times detailing the abuse of Iranian students in the United States, the two marines made a big show of their delight.
“What’s it about, Jimmy?” Kirtley asked.
“It’s about all the great stuff Americans are doing back home,” Lopez said. “They’re siccing attack dogs on Iranians, running them over in cars, sheriffs in Texas are beating the shit out of them, stuff like that. It’s great!”
When the two marines found a stack of the guards’ plates and eating utensils piled in the bathroom they urinated on them. One night they wrapped a butter knife in a rag and took turns poking it at the exposed wires of their lamp. It shorted out the electricity in the chancery basement. They waited for the guards to replace the fuse and get the lights back on and then did it again. To the marines’ amusement, the guards raced from room to room, convinced they were under attack. Kirtley cultivated a habit of farting loudly whenever he stood close to a guard. It would make them so angry that they would haul him out to another room and shout at him about his bad manners. He would return to his room grinning.
Finally they became so much trouble that they were separated.
Two of the other marines, Billy Gallegos and Rocky Sickmann, played similar games. Gallegos rigged a slingshot out of rubber bands, and he and Sickmann opened their window slightly one night after lights out and shot Geritol tablets at a guard standing outside next to the building’s back wall. When the first pill pinged off a car nearby, the guard jumped. When the next pill hit, convinced he was under attack, he shot off his weapon. Soon there was a small crowd of guards, weapons up, shouting into their radios. Eventually the guards burst into the chancery and searched all the rooms, but the marines had long since closed their window, disassembled the slingshot, and crept back under the covers on their mattresses.
Once, when he was being questioned, Gallegos was asked if he had ever met with a SAVAK agent.
“Yes,” he said, and pointed at the guard who happened to be posted outside his room.
“Him. He’s one.”
The panicked look on the guard’s face had kept the marines laughing for days.
When the guards installed a camera in the bathroom, after catching on that their captives were leaving notes for each other there, the marines made a point of putting on lewd shows before it, offending their guards’ Islamic sensibilities so badly that they gave up and took it down.
Bill Royer, the assistant director of the old Iran-America Society, noticed that antagonistic guards were generally weeded out. He had rubbed one of the guards wrong in the first days—Royer had smiled at the guard inappropriately, teasing him—and the young man had responded by elevating his middle finger. Royer had responded in kind. Two months later, the American found himself guarded by the same young man, who had not forgotten their exchange of ill will, and their mutual animosity resulted one night in the guard making a karate-style kick at the hostage’s head. Later that evening one of the guard supervisors stepped into Royer’s room.
“You seem to have some trouble with my friend,” he said.
“Yes, and if he comes back I’m going to hit him,” Royer said quietly.
“No, no, you can’t do that,” said the supervisor.
“If he comes back I am going to hit him,” Royer repeated.
He never saw the guard again.
Once when Greg Persinger, a marine guard, was being led to the bathroom, ineptly blindfolded, he saw a guard playfully point his pistol at him as he approached. Persinger snatched the gun from his hand as he walked past, twirled it once or twice like a six-shooter, and handed it back.
“Don’t ever point a weapon at me unless you’re going to shoot me,” he said and patted the guard dismissively on the head.
The guard was stunned. He didn’t speak English, so he didn’t know what Persinger had said. He looked around, hoping no one had seen. He wasn’t about to report the infraction. How could he admit that the hostage had just snatched away his weapon? He settled back sheepishly in his chair.
As time wore on, there were many occasions when the marines, in particular, had opportunities to seize weapons from their amateurish guards. Sometimes they would allow the marines to play indoor soccer with them in the large open space that had once housed all the computer equipment for the Tacksman sites. It gave the young men a chance to vent some of their aggression and energy, an opportunity to actually run through space instead of jogging in place. The Iranians were more experienced ball handlers, but the marines saw to it that they collected plenty of bumps and bruises on their way to victory. Once, when they were shedding layers of clothes preparing to play, Persinger stooped to pick up some discarded jackets and move them to the side and was startled to find an Uzi in the pile. What could he do with it? Suppose he took it and pointed it at someone? Eventually he would either have to shoot somebody or surrender it. He was six-one, pale, with reddish blond hair; even if he made it off the compound, how far was he going to get? He scooped it up and put it down with the rest of the pile and then jogged out to play soccer.
Golacinski intimidated the guards because he was tall, muscular, and athletic. When he lost his temper, they shrank from him and raised their weapons. Once, when Don Cooke had laughed loudly after a guard dropped and broke a glass, he was seized angrily and was being led from the room when Golacinski intervened. He had been in the middle of a workout and had his shirt off and was feeling pumped up, so he jumped at the guard and pushed him away from Cooke.
“You’re not taking him anywhere,” he said. “If you take anybody, take all of us.”
It was foolish. The guard was carrying a submachine gun and there were plenty more of them around the room. But in his shock at the sight of Golacinski towering over him, he backed away. The other guards came running with their weapons up.
Roeder and Don Sharer both stood up alongside Golacinski.
“You sit down!” the guards shouted at them.
“No,” said Sharer. “You stop pointing those weapons at us and I’ll sit down.”
One of the guards broke the standoff.
“We just want to talk to him,” he said of Cooke. “We’ll bring him right back.”
“If you don’t, there’s going to be trouble,” Golacinski said.
They did bring Cooke right back, and that was the end of it, but it had made them more wary of Golacinski than ever. After that, for a time, whenever he exercised, they would position a guard directly in front of him. For a few days a guard sat before his space looking bored as Golacinski did his calisthenics. So he start hacking, coughing, sneezing, and deliberately spraying sweat and spittle, and the practice was promptly discontinued.
Kathryn Koob came to know well the young women who guarded her. Despite their traditional garb and enthusiasm for the revolution, they were not especially religious. Koob was a devout Lutheran who had grown up steeped in her faith, and felt she knew sincere piety when she saw it. The girls who fluttered around Koob were surprisingly Western and worldly. Underneath their manteaus they wore trendy jeans and silky colorful blouses. They colored their nails and wore jewelry and makeup. They were caught up in a tide of nationalist idealism that borrowed the rhetoric of the mosques for political purposes. The chadors they wore expressed solidarity and were the opposite of modest; they were worn not to deter but to attract attention. For many, the veil and chador were a rebuke to their mothers, part of a generation that had welcomed the Westernization of Iran under the shah. Koob, who was forty-one, had met many such women her age in Iran, women who loved Western fashion or who openly wore bright colors and uncovered their hair. At universities, middle-aged female professors once considered the vanguard of the new Iran were being fired for refusing to cover their hair, while for their students, some of them the young girls guarding Koob and Ann Swift, the future ran in the opposite direction, toward Islam and village tradition. Ironically, the old ways symbolized the new Iran. Donning the head scarf and chador was as much a rebellion for the new generation as shedding them had been for their mothers and older sisters. The girls who sometimes huddled in Koob’s room would ask her why Catholic nuns in America had forsaken “their beautiful dresses.” Among this crowd were some very serious, modest, religious young women, but very few. The most stern and dangerous of her female captors were the older ones, some of them true zealots. There was one who had instructed the newly armed young women on the first day of the takeover, “If they speak, shoot them.”