January 20, 1981 - Day 444
Mister Cyrus Vance, the American Secretary of State who resigned in protest at President Carter's disastrous rescue attempt, was the first to greet the hostages as they emerged wearing what was an unintentional uniform, the military-issued parkas given to each of them to ward off the vicious cold of Frankfurt in January. Despite their long hair and beards, despite their twelve hour journey from Tehran, they looked anything but haggard, anything but tired. Their joy overcame the formality of their welcome and they paid as much attention to the cheering crowd behind the barriers twenty yards away, as they did to the officials who greeted them.

The dark warnings and predictions of the psychological aftermath they may suffer, faded into the background for the moment as the hostages seemed fit, in full possession of their faculties - just ordinary people, very, very glad to be home, or well on their way home.

The journey was not yet over. Now there was a drive to the military hospital in Wiesbaden, twenty miles away.

The Wiesbaden hospital was at first hardly a place of rest. For the nurses and doctors and those on duty and many others who turned up for the occasion, had packed the entrance hall and the balcony above it to provide a welcome as ecstatic as the last.

Now it was almost dawn as the extraordinary convoy of police cars escorting the two buses appeared. The whole affair had rivaled the presidential inauguration for public interest among Americans. Now the hostages' last half mile home resembled a presidential cavalcade.

Their journey had, as it turned out, been a reunion within a reunion, for they'd been held in small groups during their captivity, brought together only for the flight from Tehran. They were, however, for the first time since their capture, now together. Embassy staff, the soldiers who guarded them in normal times and civilians who were visiting the embassy to find themselves in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

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