Thoughts of his Lombard childhood helped Mark Frerichs endure captivity in Afghanistan

Second of two parts. To read part one, click here.

Mark Frerichs quickly realized there was no logic to the punishments he faced while a hostage of the Taliban.

“They would just find reasons,” said Frerichs, a civil engineer who was captured after a car crash in Afghanistan on Jan. 31, 2020, and held hostage for 2½ years.

For example, the guards would leave garbage in his cell, attracting mice and scorpions. Then they’d dump the accumulated trash in front of him.

“They made me go through every piece of trash and put it in a bag while they watched. Just trying to humiliate me.”

To cope, Frerichs would retreat into his thoughts.

“I’d drift off into a fantasy world. I’d think of my childhood,” Frerichs said. “I’d think of my favorite movies. I’d think about engineering projects and what I would do when I finally got out of here.

“Thirty-two months in solitary is a lot of ‘me’ time.”

Life in Lombard

The childhood memories that diverted him included growing up in Lombard in the 1960s and ‘70s. Frerichs describes it as “kind of a picket-fence town,” where neighbors kept their windows open.

It was a time before privacy fences, a time when many homes lacked air conditioning.

“You could smell what they were cooking for dinner, hear what they had on TV,” Frerichs remembered. “People would lend a hand to each other.”

One favorite pastime was watching “The Bozo Show” featuring magician Marshall Brodien’s Wizzo the Wizard.

And when he received a Brodien magic kit, Frerichs mastered it quickly and eventually turned his skills to performances at birthday parties, Scouting events and weddings. His sister Charlene would assist as he did card tricks and made coins disappear.

Frerichs loved magic. “It taught me a lot about people’s attention span and how easy it is to distract people, because magic is essentially premeditated deception.”

Frerichs attended Glenbard East High School, excelling in math and sciences. He competed in track at school, belonged to a speed skating club, and fixed up cars, notably a 1963 Lincoln Continental.

“I got it all painted up and put a stereo in. It was like a mobile living room with power windows and leather seats ... and suicide doors. It was my cruisermobile.”

After graduation in 1980, Frerichs felt unanchored. “I thought, there’s more out there than Lombard.”

Frerichs found that “something more” at the U.S. Navy nuclear power school program in Orlando. Fatefully, it was near a Navy female boot camp.

“At 19, I was more into studying girl science than nuclear science. So my grades suffered.”

He shifted to service on the USS America and later volunteered for the Navy’s elite deep sea diving squad.

“It was pretty intense physically and mentally. One exercise they’d do is tie your hands and feet together and put you in water. You had to tread water for 20 minutes -- they called that problem-solving.”

On any given day, he could be responding to pilot crashes or performing submarine security checks. “I like adventure,” Frerichs admitted.

When the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded in January 1986, Frerichs helped retrieve remains and military payload. The job was wrenching, but “it was like being part of history,” he said.

A different world

After his service ended, Frerichs earned a civil engineering degree and held jobs as a builder and developer. He married in 1989 but divorced a decade later.

Seeking a change of scenery, Frerichs gravitated to the tumultuous environment of Iraq in 2005, working as a government contractor.

Another challenge beckoned in 2009, when he contracted with the U.S. and Afghan governments coordinating construction projects.

Nothing was easy, he realized, from recruiting labor to acquiring equipment.

“You’re dealing with a remote area, it’s hostile, getting materials is difficult, and the stuff you get is substandard, most of it. To top it off -- clients want it up to Western standards.

“The first three years I hated it. Once I hated it long enough to get good at it, (I) started liking it.”

Frerichs later formed his own construction company and acclimated to a culture and people he described as hardworking, generous, deeply religious, close-knit and distrustful of outsiders after years of conflict and upheaval.

TV images didn’t do justice to the situation in Kabul while he was there, Frerichs said.

“I think there’s two working traffic lights. There’s armed vehicle checkpoints. The streets have no name signs, the houses are not numbered. The water and electric service is sporadic. There’s no ambulance or fire service. No trash pickup. When you enter a bank or supermarket, you’re patted down by armed guards. Imagine that being your everyday environment for two generations.”

‘We have to get him out’

On Jan. 31, 2020, Frerichs was on a slippery road when a car crashed into his vehicle, leaving him vulnerable to kidnappers. He spent the next 2½ years in captivity at the hands of the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network.

Sometimes Frerichs’ guards would share information with him, such as Americans dying from a mysterious coronavirus in 2020.

In summer 2021, they told him that the U.S. government had pulled its troops out of Afghanistan as Taliban forces took over the country. It was a gut punch.

“Then I thought there was no hope. I’d be there for the rest of my life,” Frerichs recalled.

He didn’t know of the grass-roots campaign his sister Charlene and others were leading to secure his release along with influential lawmakers in Washington.

For one of them, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Frerichs’ story “hit close to home.”

In 2004, then Illinois Army National Guard pilot Duckworth’s helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq. Her fellow guardsmen got her to safety, but she lost both legs.

“I’d been sitting in a wrecked vehicle when bad guys were coming to get me. But in my case, my buddies got me out. In Mark’s case, he was in a wrecked vehicle with nobody to get him out,” Duckworth said in a recent interview.

The Hoffman Estates Democrat lobbied both the Trump and Biden administrations to prioritize Frerichs’ case and pushed for a prisoner swap with Taliban drug lord Bashir Noorzai, in federal prison on trafficking charges.

In April 2021 at an unrelated Oval Office meeting, she secured a face-to-face with Biden and spoke up passionately.

“He’s being held prisoner and we have to get him out,” Duckworth recounted saying.

The president “knew of Mark, he knew he was a Navy veteran. He said, ‘Tammy, we’re going to get him home. It might take a while, but we’re going to do everything we can.’”

Another key player was Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens. His office coordinates efforts to free hostages and assists their families.

“Our primary mission is to bring Americans home,” Carstens told the Daily Herald. “For the person who’s in the prison cell, they’re not seeing any of that movement. To them they may feel like they’re forgotten, that no one’s working on the case.”

“What they don’t know is that I have a case officer here in Washington, D.C., who is 24/7 Mark Frerichs. And that we’re having weekly calls with the White House, and that we’re talking to our colleagues with the Department of Defense and the intelligence communities.”

‘A beautiful thing’

Frerichs knew of Noorzai after being forced to shoot a video pleading for his freedom in exchange for releasing the influential Afghan.

Not long before his release, he felt hope stirring when his captors relocated him to a relatively comfortable room and provided vitamins and rotisserie chicken.

On Sept. 19, 2022, the exchange between Noorzai and Frerichs was made at the airport in Kabul.

“They black-bagged me for the last time and brought me to the cargo plane,” Frerichs said. “It was a beautiful thing.”

Years in chains had weakened Frerichs’ muscles and he walked slowly, said Carstens, who was on hand to welcome him.

“I think his body truly was just starting to warm up. Within minutes he was asking questions on the COVID-19 pandemic, which he’d missed, asking for information about the war going on in Ukraine,” and the latest Navy diving systems, Carstens recalled. “He just started gaining more energy every few minutes.”

Back in Lombard, Charlene Cakora received a call at 3 a.m. Sept. 19, from President Biden.

He apologized for the timing and gave her the long-awaited news: “I just want to let you know your brother Mark has been released,” Cakora recounted. Biden added, “If it wasn’t for you, your brother probably wouldn’t be safe at this time.”

Charlene and her husband Chris flew to the hospital in Germany where Mark was being checked out. He characteristically took his sister by surprise as she searched for his room.

“He gave me a big hug and was in really good spirits,” she said.

Carstens’ office has brought home 26 hostages since Biden took office.

“I would say he was probably treated worse than most,” Carstens said of Frerichs. “The prison systems around the world are not that great writ large. But you’ll find people that still receive decent food, decent medical attention; they’re allowed to make cellphone calls to their families periodically.”

Frerichs, 60, is gradually settling back to normalcy.

He lost the savings he invested in his company and his identity was stolen after his abduction, complicating his recovery.

But his legs and arms are improving, a former classmate loaned him a car, and he expects to move into his own place in May.

Some things -- like metallic sounds resembling the turning of the lock in his cell door -- still trigger anxiety.

“I have to kind of regain my composure, but it’s getting better,” he said.

Despite that, Frerichs is buoyant. And he’s grateful to the government for working to secure his release, grateful for current benefits like VA care, and grateful to his family and the many friends supporting him.

“It’s great to have a family to go to bat for you,” he said.

https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20230424/thoughts-of-his-lombard-childhood-helped-mark-frerichs-endure-captivity-in-afghanistan?cid=search