How Faith, Family, and Hockey Helped a Man Survive Syrian Prison

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Up next, a story about faith, family, resilience, and hockey. Saint Louis Blues run to the twenty eighteen Stanley Cup to be precise. Here to tell his story is Sam Goodwin, author of Saving Sam, a true story of an American’s disappearance in Syria. Take it away, Sam, which.

00:00:38
Speaker 2: One stands out to you the most that maybe had the higher expectations this year that just hasn’t lived up to one? Well, I think the changes that the Saint Louis Blues made in the offseason. I mean, this isn’t just a local flavor that I’m giving you.

00:00:50
Speaker 3: You ask anybody around the National Hockey League’s the answer?

00:00:54
Speaker 2: When I look back on their roster that year, they really did have a lot of the pieces that are necessary for winning the Cup. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that a team’s gonna win the Cup just because they have the pieces. A break away from Riley it over time. Can he be the hero?

00:01:11
Speaker 4: Yes?

00:01:13
Speaker 2: During that season, the twenty eighteen twenty nineteen season, the Blues, at roughly the halfway point, were at the bottom of the NHL, but they pretty incredibly turned things around in the second half of the season.

00:01:26
Speaker 4: They peaked at the right time that year.

00:01:28
Speaker 5: Six station all to the most waiting over time unbelivable.

00:01:41
Speaker 2: Throughout, primarily their playoff run. I was traveling quite a bit. I was in the South Pacific, I was in Singapore. I remember watching them the Western Conference final from Iraq. This series is over, the wait is over, and the Saint Louis Blues.

00:01:58
Speaker 6: Or the Stay.

00:02:02
Speaker 2: And they win their first Stanley Cup of franchise history, and I’m in a Syrie in prison. I started playing hockey when I was about four or five years old. Played my entire life for ple A Hockey through high school, the year junior hockey in Texas, and then from there. I was recruited to playing Division one in college and remained close to the game. I unfortunately had pretty bad concussion injuries and that sort of was the end of the road for my formal playing career. But I had an opportunity to help launch a tech startup business in Singapore and kind of unexpectedly ended up playing quite a bit helping to grow the game in a non traditional market. I coached the Singapore national team for about five years, and ran charity hockey schools around Asia and the Philippines, and I coached the North Korean national hockey team. I coached balllleyball and cobble. I went to a Formula E race in Saudi Arabia. I originally only planned to be in Singapore for about three months.

00:03:13
Speaker 4: I ended up staying for six years.

00:03:15
Speaker 2: During this time, I traveled as much as I could. I had the world’s best airport in my backyard, had a little bit of flexibility in my work schedule. I was in my early twenties and when I traveled, I didn’t like to repeat places. So even if I went somewhere and had a fantastic experience, the next weekend, the next holiday, the next opportunity, I would just go somewhere different.

00:03:39
Speaker 4: And in early twenty eighteen.

00:03:43
Speaker 2: I realized that I had traveled to about one hundred and twenty countries in the world. And it was at this point when I remember thinking, well, how many are there. There are one hundred and ninety three fully recognized un sovereign states. So I thought to myself, well, maybe I could go to all of them. The competitive athlete in me like setting goals and working toward achieving them. I was going to give this a shot. I had no idea if I could do it. I didn’t even know what that would look like, but I became committed to working toward achieving something that I thought was extraordinary. About a year later, I had traveled to a one hundred and eighty of one hundred and ninety three countries in the world, and Syria was number.

00:04:34
Speaker 4: One point eighty one of one ninety two.

00:04:37
Speaker 2: Syria a country that’s experiencing arguably the most tragic humanitarian disaster of our lifetime, the attack on contract who produced terrible images of children poisoned by nerve guests. By conservative estimates, half a million people have died in the conflict. The UN stopped counting at two hundred and fifty thousand.

00:05:00
Speaker 4: But one of the most.

00:05:00
Speaker 2: Significant things that I had learned through my travels is that places that are negatively perceived or that we’re not supposed to like these were places where I had many of my best experiences and where my perspectives were most meaningfully impacted. So despite everything that was happening, I was confident that the same was going to be the case, and on May twenty fifth, twenty nineteen, I went to the northeast region of Syria and it was frankly all a very straightforward process. I went into an immigration office on the Rock side of the border and they stamped my passport, went to cross the river to another office on the Syrian side and they stamped my passport there. And then I got in a taxi and went to Comishli and I didn’t feel unsafe. I’m not saying it felt totally comfortable, because it was still serious, but there were certainly places in the world where I felt a lot more uncomfortable. This is an area of the country hundreds of miles from any ongoing conflict, and I was frankly excited to be there was a place that I had wanted to visit for a long time. It’s one of the most culturally, religiously historically significant places in the world. It’s the cradle civilization. Just two hours after I arrived, I was walking through a roundabout on the way to meet up with my guide. I was talking to my mom on FaceTime when all of a sudden, a black truck pulled up next to me. Two armed men jumped out of the backseat and instructed me to get inside, and I didn’t have a choice. And as we sped down back alleys of the city, the officer sitting next to me, he reached into his pocket and he pulled out a blindfold and he put it over my eyes and accused me of espionage, of being an American spy and collaborating with terrorists. And these men, I learned were loyal to the Syrian president. But charl lessad the truck then stopped. I stepped out of the truck and they took the blindfold off, and I looked up above me and I was underneath a massive Syrian military airplane out on the tarmac of an airport. And at that point they handcuffed me behind my back, took me over to the ladder, and threw me into the cargo hold of the plane. About thirty minutes later, the plane took off.

00:07:26
Speaker 1: When we come back more of Sam Goodwin’s story on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of our American Stories. Every day on this show, we tell stories of history, faith, business, love, loss, and your stories. Send us your story small or large to out email oas at Ouramerican Stories dot com. That’s oas at Ouramerican Stories dot Com. We’d love to hear them and put them on the air. Our audience loves them too. And we continue with our American Stories and with Sam Goodwin’s story. When we last left off, Sam, a Saint Louis native who’d made it his goal to travel every country in the world, found himself detained and thrown into the belly of a plane in Syria. And you’ll be hearing not just from Sam in this segment, but from his father, his sister, and his mother. Let’s continue with the story.

00:08:34
Speaker 2: Sometimes I asked, how often have you ever been flying on an airplane.

00:08:38
Speaker 4: But didn’t know where it was going.

00:08:46
Speaker 2: We landed in what I learned to be Damascus, which is the capital city of the country, and I was taken from the airport, driven into the center of town. Take it into the basement of a facility that I now know is called Siria’s Military and tell Legend’s Prison Number two fifteen, a facility notoriously known for housing political prisoners.

00:09:05
Speaker 7: Shocking allegations of systematic executions and torture carried out by the Syrian regime. Amnesty International says it has evidence that around there, and.

00:09:15
Speaker 2: The officer who was in charge escorted me to a cell in the back of the basement, and it had no window. It was all concrete. I had nothing but a small blanket to lay on the concrete floor as a bed. When he put me in there, I’ll never forget. He went to the inside of the cell door and he said, feed water, toilet, knock, and he did a knocking motion on the inside of the cell door, and then he said otherwise, quiet, no talking, and he slammed the door and laughed. I was stunned and in disbelief about what had happened in just a few short hours. I mean, my life had spiraled out of control in the most terrifying of ways.

00:10:00
Speaker 4: I felt exactly the way they.

00:10:03
Speaker 2: Wanted me to, hopeless utterly cut off from any control of my life. The only human interaction I had was for a few seconds in the morning and evening when the guards brought bread and boiled potatoes and water. But the most challenging part for me was the uncertainty. I had no idea what was going to happen to me. Was I going to be in that cell forever? Was I going to be released in five minutes Was I going to be released in a week? Were they going to open the door and shoot me? Or torture me or stop feeding me? Based on the information that I had, I believed that all of these things were possible, and trying to entertain all of these potential options twenty four to seven was emotionally and psychologically exhausting. On date twenty four, in solitary confinement, I was. I was interrogated for three hours on both days, handcuffed, blindfolded. A man from across the room began talking to me in perfect English, but he basically started from the day I was born and worked his way all the way up to the present day, asking everything about me, where I was born, where I lived, where I played hockey, where I had worked, my school, my siblings. And he told me, Sam, if you don’t start telling the truth, I’m going to do a one to eighty with your life. Do you want me to hand you over to Isis, I’ll do it right now.

00:11:43
Speaker 4: The news of my disappearance was learned through me going dark.

00:11:47
Speaker 2: I was always very good about keeping inside, especially if I was in more of an unstable place, and I had communicated that I was going to be in Syria for just a few days, and they began to worry.

00:12:01
Speaker 5: Different people were chasing different leads, But we were certainly working with the Vatican, We were working with some NGOs on the ground in Syria, we were working with some journalists. We cast the net very wide.

00:12:15
Speaker 2: They reached the FBI field office in Saint Louis, our hometown, would pretty quickly escalated some of the highest levels in the US government in Washington. They communicated two key things to our family.

00:12:28
Speaker 8: The FBI told us that if the word got out and into the wrong hands and it was made public, they’d probably immediately kill Sam or make a situation worse and use it as leverage. So it was very, very important that this was super super hush.

00:12:41
Speaker 4: Hush from day one.

00:12:42
Speaker 9: They said, hey, like this is tough for us, Like we don’t really have much representation in Syria or in that region. It would be wise to manage your expectations, which you know, we could kind of read through what they were saying, like there’s a chance we might not ever see Sam again.

00:12:56
Speaker 8: The only thing might be if you find someone who has any influence.

00:13:01
Speaker 3: On a sodd FBI said, one.

00:13:03
Speaker 8: Hundred percent, the only way that Sam will be released is if a sad signs off.

00:13:09
Speaker 5: That just seemed overwhelming to me, Just how is this going to happen?

00:13:14
Speaker 2: My father works in civil engineering, my mother is a registered nurse turned educator. Both of them are smart people and they’ve had relative success in their respective fields.

00:13:25
Speaker 4: But they’re an average.

00:13:28
Speaker 2: Family from middle and there they had no idea what to do, and they brief my family accordingly about when my captivity ended, I came home, I could be a vegetable, institutionalizing me for the rest of my life. I was in a situation where everything had been taken from me, my material possessions, by communication, my freedom. But in captivity, it’s so important to maintain a connection to the outside, so to speak. And the blues run of the cop was one of the ways that I did that. This was just one piece of the puzzle.

00:14:09
Speaker 4: I to set it on balls. Fit’s done? What two seconds left? He gets it done? In the balls? What it over time?

00:14:18
Speaker 6: Inside my cell, I chipped this rock off the cell wall, and I carved a calendar. I knew when those first four games were and I put small marks on the calendar for those four games so that I could think about that when it happened and have a few seconds of kind of relief.

00:14:43
Speaker 2: Breakly, after several days of pacing back and forth, I finally stopped. I said, hang on a second, maybe there’s some good in this situation, something to be grateful for here. And I remember an inner voice replying and saying, Sam, are you crazy? And you’ve just been taken hostage. There’s nothing good here, there’s nothing to be grateful for. The best this webra being is a period of your life you can forget.

00:15:04
Speaker 4: Well.

00:15:04
Speaker 2: I fought that inner voice and I said, I’m grateful to be alive.

00:15:08
Speaker 4: I’m grateful for my health, my education. I’m grateful for the basic food and water I’m being given. I mean, I’ve encountered a lot of people around the world you don’t have access to those things.

00:15:18
Speaker 2: I mean, perhaps being in this cell would be an upgrade for them. How’s that from some perspective, Each one of these small expressions of gratitude became this silent rebellion against the uncertainty of the situation. So, after channeling a little bit of strength, I didn’t want to then just sit around and do nothing. And despite being in this eight by eight cell, I wanted to take action. What I found was that I could control my thoughts, how much water I drank, and when I went to sleep at night, I could control my routine within that cell. Finally, nothing was more important than my faith. In that cell, I felt this unbelievable closeness to God, something like I had never before, and my prayers became this uninterrupted conversation with God. I was constantly saying things out loud, even though they told me not to talk. I said, God, I’m here, I’m listening. What are you trying to tell me today? What can I learn today? What are perhaps the positives about my situation? And then I finished all of my prayers by saying the Rosary. I’m Catholic, and I would dedicate each decade to something different. I’d prayed for my family, my friends, anybody who I thought might be working to get me out of the situation.

00:16:32
Speaker 4: I prayed very art also for the courage to.

00:16:35
Speaker 2: Forgive my captors, and through that I discovered that I was working to forgive people who weren’t even sorry. And I discovered that forgiveness is not a feeling, It’s a choice. And my number one prayer was always please keep me physically unharmed. My second prayer was then about the timelines. If this was all going on peacefully, then the next question was when. And this was the prayer that for me became the most tricky and intense. And I remember almost positioning it as like a business deal. I said, God, I know you have a plan, but would you consider an adjustment to the timeline?

00:17:15
Speaker 4: Can that work with your plan?

00:17:19
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to one heck of a story, Sam Goodwins story. The book is Saving Sam. You can go to Amazon or the usual suspects and you can get it.

00:17:28
Speaker 4: Here.

00:17:28
Speaker 1: He is in a small prison, He’s making marks on a calendar, trying to set some hope in his life. Saint Louis blues games and maybe there’s something good that can come of this. He’s thinking of himself and he’s looking for things to be grateful for. And in the end he said, my expressions of gratitude were a silent rebellion, and he felt closer to God because of that uninterrupted time with God. When we come back, what happens next on Sam’s story?

00:17:54
Speaker 4: Here?

00:17:55
Speaker 1: On our American Stories? Can we returned to our American stories? And the final portion of Sam Goodwin’s story. When we last left off, Sam, a Saint Louis native, had discovered ways to make his captivity in Syria more bearable, including thinking about the Saint Louis Blues run to the Stanley Cup. But all he wanted and all he prayed for, was release. Let’s continue with the story. We begin with the audio of Sam’s sister and his family.

00:18:35
Speaker 2: For the first time in their history, the Saint Louis Blues are the Stanley Cup champions, Champrey Chamity.

00:18:44
Speaker 8: Sam had been gone for three weeks now and there was very, very, very little hope.

00:18:51
Speaker 9: Up until that point. It was like throwing darts in the dark. There was nothing that was really concretely sticking.

00:18:58
Speaker 3: Everyone was telling us this wasn’t gonna end well.

00:19:00
Speaker 8: Everyone told us to manage our expectations, or that we never see our brother again.

00:19:03
Speaker 3: There were like no words. I just felt like this, this is going to take a miracle.

00:19:08
Speaker 2: On July twenty six, one of the prison officials came to the cell I was in.

00:19:12
Speaker 4: He called my.

00:19:13
Speaker 2: Name and he indicated that I was being moved, and as he escorted me out ron he stopped and he said, Sam, You’re very lucky. President. I saw it has agreed to release you. This sounds encouraging, but I had been lied to so many times in the past two months that I had essentially become immune to believing anything like this. Outside, I stepped into a black SUV, which turned out to be part of a five vehicle convoy that raced out of Damascus at what seemed to be one hundred miles an hour. I mean, we didn’t stop traffic lights. We used the shoulder of the road to maneuver around traffic. Nobody in the vehicle said a word. I remember the nice cars. The professional nature of the operation made me think that this was all.

00:20:00
Speaker 4: This was either really good really bad.

00:20:04
Speaker 2: I’m about to experience one extreme of the captivity spectrum here, but I didn’t know which one it was. And we came up to a checkpoint one that seemed to be some kind of significan border, and as we passed through, the officer of the vehicle sitting next to me quietly, kind of subtly tapped me on the leg and I’ll never forget he said, Sam, you’re in Lebanon.

00:20:26
Speaker 4: You’re safe now.

00:20:28
Speaker 2: And this was also pretty encouraging, but I was still trying to figure out everything.

00:20:33
Speaker 4: That was happening.

00:20:34
Speaker 2: But we drove from there for about another hour into Beyrout, the capital city of Lebanon, and I was taken to the office of Lebanese Internal Security, sort of like the equivalent of the FBI here in the US. And when I walked into the office, my parents were there, which was this moment that was indescribably emotional, one that many people thought would never happened, and frankly just a breath taking display of God answering prayers. Yeah, when I reflect back on that moment, sometimes I think that if this story were to ever be adapted for something on screen, if it were ever be a film, nothing in that moment would need to be dramatized for the movie.

00:21:19
Speaker 4: We could just.

00:21:19
Speaker 2: Take the CCTV footage inside of Lebanon’s General Security office and just put it on the screen. Then, just a few minutes after being reunited, I was thinking about everything that had happened in the past nine weeks, and I kind of innocently said to my parent, I have a story for you, And they looked at each other and then look back at me, and my mom said, well, Sam, we have a story for you too. This threw me off a little bit, because when I was trapped on the inside, I had no idea about anything that was happening on the outside. Everything that happened on the outside I learned later. And essentially they reached the FBI field office in Saint Louis, our hometown, which pretty quickly escalated some of the highest levels in the US government in Washington. They said, don’t let the press get hold of this, because if they do, and Sam’s captors feel that type of pressure, they might just kill him. And from there, about three weeks later, my younger sister, Stephanie, who was twenty five years old at the time living in Nashville, she particularly became entirely overwhelmed with everything that was happening, and she decided that she needed to haul someone and talk to them about this and just blow off some steam.

00:22:47
Speaker 8: It was always in the afternoons. I felt like I was having the hardest time with things. Something came over me that I felt like I really needed to tell somebody something, And the only person that came to mind was Steph, my old college roommate.

00:23:01
Speaker 3: So I called Steph and I say, you’re never going to believe this.

00:23:04
Speaker 8: My brother went missing in Syria, and she says, that is so awful.

00:23:09
Speaker 3: Is there anything I can do to help?

00:23:11
Speaker 8: And I said, from what I’m told, unless you know someone who’s friends with the sad, all you can do is pray. And her response was, is it okay if my dad calls your dad?

00:23:19
Speaker 3: And I said, yeah, it is yeah.

00:23:22
Speaker 10: Because it turns out, you know his friend, the general is one of the few people in Lebanon that have a relationship with President and as’ad. That was probably the first time that I’d heard somebody is confident. I don’t think he said we could be successful, but he goes tag I can help.

00:23:43
Speaker 2: It turns out that roommate Steph is Lebanese and her uncle is good friends with General Abbas Ibraham, who heads Lebanon’s internal security, essentially the spy chief for the country. And General Ibraham has a some a secret back channel relationship with the Syrians and was able to mediate my release when so many others were struggling to do anything. So this is kind of a situation where the FBI, the CIA, the White House, Middle East, ENNGO is the Pentagon, the Russians were all struggling.

00:24:18
Speaker 4: To be effective.

00:24:21
Speaker 2: But my sister’s college roommate could identify a path to get an American hostage release from captivity in the Middle East. Sometimes people ask me if I get my sister a special Christmas gift every year, which we certainly have a special bond, but just so grateful that things ended the way they did.

00:24:40
Speaker 3: I was just like absolutely elated, like just like.

00:24:44
Speaker 8: Running around outside like crying, like I could not believe this, that like a miracle like basically had been done onto our family.

00:24:52
Speaker 10: Everything happened extremely quickly. We landed in Beirut and travel at a high rate of speed to a military office.

00:25:04
Speaker 5: We get out of this vehicle and we ride this elevator up and they open it up, and Sam is right there and I just hugged them and just you know, seeing them, I just love you so much. And I go, were you okay? And he said yes? And then I said did they hurt you? And he said no.

00:25:19
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:25:19
Speaker 10: Once we got comfortable that Sam was okay, so to speak, he quickly was asking about the Saint Louis Blues Stanley Cup.

00:25:32
Speaker 4: When my captivity ended, I came home.

00:25:36
Speaker 2: It was kind of surreal because I opened up YouTube and I typed. In twenty nineteen, Stanley Cup Final in the first video that came up had the posted six weeks earlier, and when I read the title of the video, I thought, oh my gosh, they won. You know, there must have been a parade, There must have been all of these celebrations, but I had missed all of it. When I’m home in Saint Louis or really anywhere and I see people wearing sweatshirts or see flags or or whatever that say Saint Louis Blues twenty nineteen Stanley Cup champions, it’s a very humbling reminder of where I was during that time. I don’t want to be known for the things that happened to me. I want to be known for the way I’ve responded to them. I think that when we’re at our lowest point, we have the best chance for a huge breakthrough.

00:26:21
Speaker 4: And people last week quite a bit.

00:26:22
Speaker 2: Sam, if you could go back, when you still travel the way you did, or still go on this trip, And on one hand, I would never want to relive captivity, and I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. But on the other hand, and I think more importantly, I would also never want to give up everything.

00:26:38
Speaker 4: That’s come from it.

00:26:40
Speaker 2: The opportunity to meet some remarkable people, to grow in character and in faith and in understanding really just the stuff in life that actually matters.

00:26:51
Speaker 4: There were a lot of.

00:26:52
Speaker 2: People who said that my life was over, but in truth, it was just getting going.

00:27:01
Speaker 1: And a special thanks to Sam Goodwin and his family for sharing this story. The book is Saving Sam. Sam’s website is Sam Goodwin dot com and he does speaking engagements. Folks bring him in and if you have a church a family might most certainly bring him in. The story of Sam Goodwin here on our American Stories