I have personally been in a few of these moments in my life, when I was thought that I would be killed. I have never been a hostage on my way to my own execution, but I have narrowly escaped death in combat a few times when I thought beforehand that surely I would not make it. There is a lot of adrenaline, and the human mind definitely employs some tricks to shield us from realizing our own fate, or at least to stop us from applying much critical thinking about the situation. Being so close to death is a very base, very visceral, animal thing. Incidentally, this is closely related to one of the reasons I grew to feel at peace while fighting and at war -- and the chief reason I have such a hard time with civilian life afterwards -- and in a way, I came to enjoy it (I waited a couple of days to post this comment because the reality of it will shock the conscience of many, but I wanted to be honest). Not of course the moments where things are going quite badly, but the more base existence.
That feeling is totally unique, of being there on the edge of life where everything is so simple, and where nothing else matters, or nothing else seems to matter very much. From talking to people and hearing stories, I suppose most people think of family when they're close to death. I didn't so much think about family as much as I had kind of very simple and straightforward "aw-shucks" moments of regret about not doing the things I wanted to do in life before I got into those situations where thought I would be killed. Incidentally, after my tours, I traveled a lot in order to settle those regrets and ended up meeting a woman that became my wife. I also created some very deep and meaningful friendships. I'm kind of getting off track here, but my original point was that what you've said is true, but at least for my part, "the long wait" is only happening after the fact. Navigating through the civilian world has been a really tough experience after all that, specifically those times where I thought surely I was a dead man. That was something I didn't expect, "the long wait" coming after everything else.