TINA SUSMAN, a reporter for The Associated Press, works with words. But words were failing her.
She was trying, in a telephone interview from South Africa last week, to describe her feelings toward the Somali kidnappers who held her captive for 20 days this summer. They kept her in a series of hiding places in Mogadishu under 24-hour guard, and, sometimes, one of them threatened her with a pistol as they tried to get a ransom from The A.P.
"Words can't describe the intense repulsion you feel, and that horrible despair you feel every morning when you wake up and see you are still in the same place," Ms. Susman said last week, back at work for the first time at A.P.'s bureau in Johannesburg.
She was released on July 8, after Somali clan elders helped negotiate with her kidnappers, who did not seem to have any political motive. The A.P. said it refused to make any payment to the captors to avoid encouraging kidnappings of its other journalists around the world.
Journalists sometimes feel that they are immune to the terrible things that can happen to other people. Tina Susman, who has worked for The A.P. for 10 years, was the latest to show that journalists are as vulnerable as anyone.
And, maybe, more vulnerable than ever. Before the cold war ended, the fighting in the world seemed orderly compared with the kinds of eruptions that are in the news now, said William A. Orme Jr., the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is based in New York.
"The norm of conflicts these days is anarchy and chaos, whether it's in central Asia, Angola or the former Yugoslavia," Mr. Orme said. "The risks for a combat reporter in the past were being caught in the crossfire." Today, he said, the dangers are coming from all directions.
When the shots rang out that day in June, Ms. Susman said, she thought she had been caught in the middle of someone else's shootout. Her driver slowed to a halt on the road from her hotel to the United Nations headquarters in Mogadishu.
She was traveling with an A.P. photographer and their two armed guards. Much later, she said, she was stunned to learn that her driver, who had been working for The A.P. for several years, had been in league with the kidnappers.
That day, it was only when someone dragged her out of the car and she opened her eyes to see two very young Somali men with AK-47's that she realized she was the target of an ambush. The photographer was left behind.
"At first," she said, "I thought they were going to take me somewhere and kill me," as other journalists had been killed before in Somalia.
But she soon realized that she was a commodity that her kidnappers believed could be traded for money. The fact that she was a journalist, she said, seemed to matter to them only because she was attached to a large company that might pay a large sum for her safe return.
In the first filthy room where they put her, she said, she started working on surviving. She lied to the men who held her. She is 35 and single, but she told them she was 23 and married with two children because she thought they would be more sympathetic to a younger married woman.
For about six days, she had no appetite, even though The A.P. managed to get military rations to her through an intermediary. Then, when she tried to stand up and became dizzy, she decided to force herself to eat. "I figured if the chance came to escape," she said, "I wanted to be strong enough to do it."
In time, she began to understand that The A.P. was drawing a hard line with the kidnappers, passing them the message that there would be no ransom. "I kind of felt I had been punched in the gut, momentarily," she said. "I felt personally like I was being abandoned by my company. But I realized after I shook off that feeling that it was the right thing to do."
Even so, she kept suggesting to the kidnappers' erratic leader that they could exchange her for money. Perhaps their first demand, $300,000, was too high, she suggested. They dropped the number to $150,000. Then to $60,000. She gave the leader her mother's telephone number in Oakland, Calif., so he could try to get the money from the family. He never made the call.
When the leader of the group of eight or so kidnappers waved a pistol at her on her 13th day, she said what they told her to say on videotape: the ransom had to be paid within 48 hours. She did not ask what would happen if it wasn't. She did not want to know, she said.
She often thought of Terry A. Anderson, the A.P. reporter who was held captive in Lebanon for nearly seven years until 1991. She wondered how anyone could last that long. She was obsessed, she said, with fantasies of escape and she often spent all day dreaming of ways to get past the single guard who was left with her.
When she developed what seemed to be symptoms of malaria, the kidnappers agreed that the intermediary could pass her medicine and sleeping pills from A.P. people in Mogadishu. Then, she said, she spent a lot of time thinking about whether she could slip the sleeping pills into her guard's tea.
The A.P. did not publicize her kidnapping, believing that publicity might embolden the kidnappers. Other news organizations also agreed to refrain from reporting about the kidnapping.
But in captivity, she did not know that other journalists were trying to help. Occasionally, her guard would let her listen to the Voice of America or the BBC radio news. She would listen for news about herself. When there was none, she concluded that no one cared.
"I just remember listening," she said, "and thinking, 'Boy, I'm really alone here.' "
On the 20th day, there was scuffling outside her door. It was a large group of armed Somali men sent by a clan elder to rescue her. One of them had a shawl in front of his face. He pulled it back.
"Tina," he said, "Don't you recognize me? We're your friends."
She did vaguely remember him as one of the Somali men who had worked with Western journalists. But right then, even though she is a reporter who usually asks many questions, she did not ask any.
She went with the group so quickly that she left her shoes in the house where she had been a captive somewhere in Mogadishu.