Maine ex-reporter recalls time as hostage

When Richard Dudman heard the news Thursday that American journalist Jill Carroll had been released unharmed from captivity in Iraq, he couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief.

He didn’t know Carroll personally, but as her story has unfolded over the last few months, the Ellsworth resident and retired newsman found himself quietly rooting for her safe return.

“Frankly, I didn’t think she had a chance, but I’m very happy that she got out,” Dudman, now 87, said Thursday afternoon from the Ellsworth home he shares with his wife, Helen.

After all, the young woman’s experiences closely paralleled Dudman’s own from more than 30 years ago, when he was a foreign war correspondent in Vietnam.

While covering the war for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1970, Dudman was taken captive with two other reporters and detained for 40 days in Cambodia.

“When I was captured, I was scared stiff,” he said, still able to recall the events vividly. “I didn’t know if I’d get out of there with my life … but the two reporters who were with me, I told them, ‘You know, if we get out of here alive, we’re going to have one hell of a good story.’

“She’ll have plenty to write about,” Dudman concluded.

His own capture inspired a book, “40 Days With the Enemy,” which was published in 1971, the year after his release.

Carroll’s release Thursday after months of silence from her captors came a day after a televised plea from the woman’s twin sister that aired on Arab television.

Dudman, too, had a savior back in 1970, and she’s with him still today.

“My wife always knew I’d get out of there [safely] … everybody else thought I was a goner,” he said with a laugh.

“I knew Richard very well,” Helen Dudman said. “I knew how cautious he was; I knew he wouldn’t take any chances. Everyone else thought he was dead.”

While the days passed with no news of her husband’s whereabouts, Helen Dudman took matters into her own hands.

“Her main field is public relations, and she handled this like it was a special account,” Richard Dudman said. “She got a hold of ambassadors, senators.”

“I did everything I could,” she said, finishing his thought. “[The captors] had to be persuaded he was a newspaperman and not a CIA agent.”

While the similarities between Dudman and Jill

Carroll are obvious, he

said things are much different as a foreign war correspondent in today’s world from in his time.

“It’s dangerous, and it’s getting more dangerous,” he said. “But there’s a reason for that. I think, increasingly, information control is becoming a part of war strategy, and in many cases a reporter is looked upon as an enemy.”

Dudman already was a seasoned reporter when the Post-Dispatch sent him to cover the Vietnam War.

‘That war was really duck soup to cover because there was absolute freedom. You could go anywhere,” he said. “Now it’s all organized, and it’s much more rigidly controlled for what a reporter can do and what he or she can see.

“I used to feel that when I started doing foreign work, the press had a kind of immunity since they were not participants, but just interested observers. That immunity doesn’t exist now.”

Dudman said that from time to time he wishes he were back reporting but concluded that he has had his share.

But if he had the chance to speak with Carroll, the veteran reporter said he would tell her – and all the others – “Keep up the good work.”