A US writer who went missing in Libya for months returned to the US on Saturday night, telling reporters he went to the north African nation to participate in the uprising against late Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi and was on a reconnaissance mission when he was captured.
However, Matthew VanDyke, 32, said his mother and girlfriend did not know when he set off from Baltimore for Libya that his goal was to support the revolution.
“You don’t tell your mother that you’re going to go fight in a war,” he said. “When I got out of prison, I was going to finish what I came to do. So the past several weeks, I’ve been in combat on the front lines in Sirte fighting Qaddafi’s forces.”
VanDyke, dressed in his military uniform with a scarf tied around his head, held up a Libyan flag as he walked out of the concourse at -Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport into his mother’s arms. He was also met by friends and family waving flags and holding up signs.
Later, as he talked to the media, his girlfriend, Lauren Fischer, arrived and planted a big kiss on his lips. The two stood hand-in-hand for the rest of the time he spoke.
Earlier this year, VanDyke was in Baltimore working on a book and film about a motorcycle trip across the Middle East and Southeast Asia when he began to hear from friends in Libya about their relatives disappearing.
“I wasn’t going to sit back and let this happen to people I care about and not do anything about it,” he said. “I see how people are suffering under regimes like this and it’s time for it to end.”
VanDyke said he was on a reconnaissance mission in Brega with three other fighters with weapons in a truck when he was captured by Qaddafi forces. He was questioned once, he said.
VanDyke spent more than five months in solitary confinement in Libyan prisons. He said he sang Guns n’ Roses songs to himself and tried to name all of the Star Trek characters to pass the time. He said he also suffered from the psychological effects of solitary confinement.
Fischer and VanDyke’s mother, Sharon, held strong to their belief that VanDyke would return. Sharon VanDyke even traveled to Turkey with photos of her son in hopes of speaking to Libyan diplomats in hopes they could work to free him.
The two women enlisted US Representative C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersburger, a ranking member on the US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, who held a news conference in May to call attention to the situation. Libyan officials initially denied VanDyke was being held, but in July, they acknowledged he was in custody.
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