CLINT VAN ZANDT, the Spot sylvania man who helped take FBI hostage negotiating from a fledgling discipline to a well-honed science, will never totally shed the emotional highs and lows of those days.

Sure, he's been retired from the bureau for years, and stays busy with his own consulting firm advising Fortune 500 companies on security issues and appearing often as an analyst on TV programs ranging from "NBC Nightly News" to "Larry King Live."

Tonight at 8, that public persona extends a step further when Court TV premières an hour-long television documentary called "Negotiator, the Weapon of Words: Talking Down Madmen, Clint Van Zandt."

But having been so often into the crucible that is hostage negotiating, where hundreds of lives can hang on your every word, and where not everyone makes it home alive, certain images stick with you.

Like the sight of a terrified 4-year-old boy in Sperryville, lashed atop a crazed gunman's shoulders with a bathrobe.

Though negotiations had gone on for hours, Van Zandt eventually made the call to have an FBI sniper take out the kidnapper who was just seconds away from killing the boy and the mother he'd snatched off the streets of Washington.

Another face that reappears belongs to a woman taken hostage in a bank. Though police didn't know it at the time, the man armed with a shotgun and handguns had already killed his mother, seriously injured his stepfather and wanted police to end his own life.

After telling officials that he'd kill the woman at 3 p.m. if his impossible demands weren't met, the madman did just that, putting enough blasts into the woman to nearly split her in half and force police to take him out as well.

Despite some negotiations like that that ended badly, the thing that kept Van Zandt in the game when he headed the FBI Hostage Rescue Team was the fact that most of the time--in 85 to 90 percent of the situations--he got everyone out alive.

But even that doesn't always mean total job satisfaction.

"One of the really tough negotiations was in Arkansas with a neo-Nazi group called The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord," said Van Zandt.