So being home in Vermont is a very different experience, then.

I have every privilege in the world. I have to be the luckiest victim of this war in the world.

Before you left to go over, you said in the documentary that your mom had asked you why you felt the need to take such risks. What do you think the answer is?

I thought the risk I was taking was minimal in comparison to what actual war reporters do. These guys go into dangerous situations. That wasn’t at all my sort of thing. I didn’t have the preparation or even the interests. I believed I was going to go and write about something that was far away from the violence and something that was telling, the deeper causes of all of this. I didn’t even bring a camera. I didn’t think I was going to take a risk.

And then, of course, you found yourself taken and held captive.

Believe me, I felt it was rather surreal when it happened to me. It was a perfect storm of events happening. Perhaps one of the reasons why I survived was that I escaped from my original captors. I was turned over to what was nominally a worse group, but maybe they weren’t worse. Maybe the first guys would have killed me.

You have a tremendous amount of empathy for the people who held you captive. That stuck out to me—you talking about how difficult it was to be an al-Qaeda leader, or the hardships the prison guards faced.

Well, when you get to the top, you have a lot of problems. The al-Qaeda chief I was with, his guys kept defecting to ISIS or were getting killed. He invested so much into them and then they betrayed him for nothing. When I knew him, he was depressed. The U.S. government was sending a drone after him, the Syrian government was after him. Everyone wants to kill him. That’s what we’d talk about.

I think you would say the same thing if you were in that situation. A lot of them are trying to do the best for you. They didn’t realize that signing up for this terrorist organization would mean they had to hit this guy. Afterwards, they’d come back and say, “We had to do it because those were the orders.” They’re soldiers. The psychology of the al-Qaeda organization and all the rebel groups is you have to obey your orders, shut up, and do what you’re told.

But it is extraordinary that you’re able to think about it that way about people who were so cruel to you.

I don’t think my reactions are different than any other person would have. I’m a writer. I’m trying to understand them more. I’m interested from a professional point of view, to understand what’s going on in their brains, in getting them to speak to me in an open and frank way. I guarantee you 99 percent of journalists who speak to these people don’t get the truth of that individual person. They write down the slogan these guys are reciting. For the first 20 minutes you talk to all these people, they’ll read you the al-Qaeda white papers that they’re supposed to read Westerners on the Gulf, in what we did in Iraq, blah blah blah. You almost don’t need them to be present to know what they’re going to say. But I wanted to know how they felt about their situation now. Where would they be next year? In what way do you disagree with this ideology? Have you been tempted to abandon it and what would tempt you more? What are you afraid of? Because they’re all afraid. Any dangerous enterprise isn’t your first choice in life. If you had a better opportunity, you’d do it.