Out of Captivity: Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

by Gary Brozek

  I looked up and recognized the familiar shapes of Tom and Keith as they bobbed along on some pack animals. I said a quick prayer to Jesus for delivering them to me in apparently no worse shape than when I had left them. It felt like Christmas, and I’d just opened the package that contained exactly what I’d been hoping for.

  TOM

  Mounting that rise to the campesino house where Marc was, I was relieved about two things: that he was safe and that we were finally at the rest place the FARC had been telling us about. If it is possible to be elated and exhausted all in the same moment, that’s what I was at that moment. Even with the aid of the mule I was on and the pony that carried Keith to our reunion point, the journey was still extremely painful. Seeing Marc barefoot lifted my spirits as well. Knowing that he found some relief for his feet made me wonder if I could find the same.

  At least my hip wasn’t troubling me anymore. The previous day I had been in so much pain that I was reduced to walking with a stiff-legged gait, swinging my leg forward and trying not to use my hip at all. It went on like this for some time, until finally, a young female FARC injected me with some kind of painkiller. I was in such agony, I didn’t think twice about dropping my pants for the injection or asking what the medicine was or how many times the needle had been used. Without that shot, I would have asked to be put out of my misery.

  Keith was slightly ahead of me, and when he dismounted, Marc was there to meet him. I got down off my mule and gingerly walked toward them. Marc had come toward Keith carrying a small aluminum pot. I saw Keith look at it and shake his head. The pot was passed along to me, and I could see why Keith had refused it. Inside was a thin soup with a pale chicken foot bobbing on the surface. I knew Keith had been complaining about severe stomach distress and he wasn’t able to eat. I was sure that sight didn’t do much to help. As I brought the broth to my lips, I thought briefly of Mariana’s wonderful cooking and the last meal I’d had before the crash. I don’t remember much about the soup’s taste, but I was glad for the liquids in my system. My wag on it was that I could have just as well been drinking an IV fluid.

  We joined the circle of cracker eaters, and Keith managed to eat a few. I ate some, too. During my life, I’d traveled a good bit and been to some out-of-the-way places, but this scene defied belief. A group of adults was sitting around a cooking pot suspended over an open fire, their mouths full of half-eaten crackers and a confetti layer of crumbs outlining each of their positions. We were startled into reality when one of the FARC guerrillas began jumping up and down and pointing at us and then toward the house. He was trying to say something, but the congealed mass of flour in his mouth muffled and distorted his words. Finally, after a bit of swallowing and spitting, he made it clear that he wanted us to be quiet. Several of his guerrilla comrades walked over to the house, where a Sony AM-FM radio was hanging from one of the posts supporting the roof.

  “¡Es ustedes! ¡Es ustedes! ¡Es ustedes!”

  We all quieted down enough so that we could hear the report on a Colombian radio station about our crash and capture. The details were sketchy. They didn’t reveal the exact location of where we’d gone down or what the military was doing to find us. I didn’t take much comfort in knowing that we were celebrities in this part of the world. When the FARC heard the radio mention what connected them to us, their response troubled me. They erupted with cheers, acting like the home team had just scored a touchdown at the mere mention of our names.

  After things settled down a bit, the weirdness revved up once more. Several yards away, a few of the FARC had gathered around a well and were washing their clothes. The young men had stripped down to the briefest of bikini-type briefs and so had one young woman. I’m not a prude, but their unself-consciousness surprised me a bit, only because it seemed so out of place. Having been all around Latin America, I was used to the region’s mores and practices. But the sight of that woman was jarring because it was the picture of innocence in a place and in a set of circumstances that I considered anything but innocent. Of course, all my thoughts of innocence were immediately wiped out when she walked past us to get some food. The other guards, all of them, like her, no more than eighteen years old or so, began hooting and nudging us. “Look! Look! What do you think of that? How do you like her?” It felt more like an outdoor cafeteria at a high school than a temporary prison encampment.

  A while later, I saw a little girl riding a pink Barbie pedal car. I understood then that this house didn’t belong to the FARC, but to a family. How the hell these people were able to get that car out into the middle of the mountains, and how much it must have cost them in effort and money, was both touching and confusing. Nothing seemed to match with the landscape, and we all sensed it.

  “This place is freaking me out. These kids are all in their costumes playing guerrilla.” Marc stretched and rolled his head around his shoulders.

  “I know exactly what you mean. If it wasn’t for the radio, I’d say we’d gone from the information age to the Stone Age,” I added.

  We hadn’t seen Sonia for a while, and after how she had told us about killing Tommy J, I wasn’t exactly missing her warm presence. A few minutes later, I saw her coming toward us, moving at her usual pretty good clip. She was making a beeline for Keith, who was sitting on one of the stump seats the campesinos had crudely carved out. I thought that no good could come of this. Either she was going to confront Keith about something, or she was going to take him away somewhere. She had on her face the expression of someone who had been wronged and wanted to be sure that whatever had been done was now made right. I’d seen that look before on my wife’s face.

  Sonia made a quick change in course and diverted to the well. She came back toward us, carrying a large ceramic bowl filled with water. She set the water bowl in front of Keith and then knelt in front of him. Sonia flicked her mane of hair over her shoulder and untied the laces on Keith’s shoes and then pulled the shoes off him completely. I looked at Keith and he seemed as shocked as Marc and I were. We all exchanged glances and shook our heads. Sonia continued to wash Keith’s feet and to massage them. Like all of ours, his feet had been wet for the better part of twenty-four hours. They were swollen, wrinkled, and looked like a relief map of the terrain we’d been covering.

  We wanted to be sure that we kept the line between “them” and “us” clearly plotted on our charts, so we didn’t accept the FARC’s offer of letting us sleep in the house—what they called a finca—that night. We also knew that the spot that Marc had bunked in the previous night wouldn’t hold the three of us. We didn’t want to be separated, and none of us wanted to have anything that the others did not. While not being separated was something we discussed, the desire to be treated equally wasn’t something we talked about; we just naturally fell into that plan. Without words, we had coalesced into a unit; we were all in this together.

  That said, we didn’t begrudge anyone when he got something the others didn’t. I wasn’t upset that Keith had gotten his feet treated as they had. Likewise, I had gotten a pair of the rubber boots, and Keith and Marc hadn’t.

  We slept on top of a small hay mound, and all through the night, we could hear the campesinos’ horses moving around in their little corral just beyond where we slept. They were clearly uneasy about something, and their agitation bothered us, since they could have easily gotten out, come to claim their feed, and stomped on us. In the end, though, sleep won out and we stayed put for the night.

  We were awakened in the morning by one of the horses munching on the hay that had been our bed, but it didn’t matter. That morning we were back on our march, this time riding the same horses that had annoyed us the night before. It became clear as that day progressed that the FARC’s efforts were more coordinated than we’d first thought. After a few hours, we would stop and dismount. Whoever had been guiding would head back down the trail in the direction he’d come from. Another guide, sometimes a civilian, sometimes a guerrilla, would show up. He’d take the lead down t
he trail. At times we felt like we were the batons that runners in a relay race were handing off to one another. It went on like this for days. Guides arriving and departing, rests coming at intervals of multiple hours, collapsing from exhaustion for the night, and waking up the next morning to do it all over again. With each passing day, we held out hope that we’d meet a FARC member of some importance or in possession of information who could at least give us a better sense of where we were headed, but none arrived.

  Finally, several days into our march, we found one FARC who seemed to have some real intelligence. We were stopped at the head of another trail that climbed even higher than the previous ones. The FARC had spread out a sheet of plastic for us to lie down on. That seemed unusual, and we weren’t sure what it meant. Briefly, I thought that the sheet would make it easier for them to wrap up our bodies after they’d shot us up. We were lying there when a new FARC guerrilla showed up.

  “Hola, me llamo Johnny. Yo soy un médico.”

  His Spanish was more precise and formal than the campesino Spanish the rest of the Colombians spoke and I didn’t have to slash my way through a jungle accent. I assumed that as a medic, Johnny had more formal education than the others.

  “Were any of you taking any medication before?”

  “I’d been taking medication for my blood pressure,” I said.

  Johnny nodded and jotted something down in his notebook.

  “I will be sure that you get what you need.” He actually smiled and wasn’t being sarcastic or cruel. “Let me see your head wound.” He cupped my chin in his hand and tilted my head so that he could examine the gash. “There is no infection yet, but you have been lucky so far.” He seemed to wince at his use of the word lucky and stood up and returned a moment later with hydrogen peroxide and some cotton balls. As he carefully dabbed at the wound, I watched his pupils dilate and contract. “This is quite deep.” He raised his index finger and asked me to follow it as he moved it from side to side and closer and farther away from me, watching my reactions as I had just done with him.

  “I will be back,” he said.

  “Is it more serious than the wound?” I asked.

  Johnny turned around and then glanced to the side. “It has been several days since you hit your head, so it is difficult to say if you had a concussion. In all likelihood, yes. How is your vision?”

  “At times blurry, but I don’t have my glasses.”

  He listed the other symptoms, some of which I had, but they could have been the result of other things—headache, nausea, but fortunately no vomiting.

  “Excuse me, I will be back.”

  He returned a while later with some medicine for me and some gauze for the blisters on our feet. He started treating all our feet.

  “How long have you been a medic?” I asked him for Marc.

  Johnny shrugged. “For a while now. I was wounded in a battle, now I have to do this.” He didn’t sound very happy about his new role.

  “A medic is very important.”

  Johnny paused in wrapping Keith’s foot. “Not nearly so important as a fighter.”

  “But you must have had a lot of training.” Keith paused, “Mucho educación.”

  Johnny smiled. “When I was a young man, I wanted to be a doctor. My family had no money and so I couldn’t go to school.” He stopped and shrugged, and in that gesture a whole ruined life was revealed. We could put it together that it was at this point in his life story that he’d joined the FARC. I hoped that maybe he hadn’t understood our question about his training, so I asked him more specifically how the FARC had trained him to be a medic. As he wrapped Marc’s foot, he looked around. “No training. I learned by doing.” When he was done with all of our feet, he said, “I hope this helps.”

  When he was through working on our feet, he walked away, and a few moments later another FARC guerrilla came up to where we sat on the plastic, carrying sets of clothes and pairs of boots for each of us. They provided us with camouflage pants and T-shirts. Keith was considerably larger than most Colombians, and none of the shirts fit him properly. He also couldn’t get the boots on because his feet were too large. Even the boots that were too large for Marc, ones he had to wear in spite of them not fitting well, would not accommodate Keith. To make matters worse, Keith was still not able to eat, and he was getting weaker and weaker by the day.

  As much as I tried to keep track of the days, it was becoming increasingly difficult. Not only did each day blend into the next because of the ceaseless marching and the constantly changing FARC guards, but we were sleep-deprived and starving. The FARC were pushing us well past our limits.

  Ultimately, Keith’s more severely damaged body started to go in the opposite direction of mine. I was getting a bit stronger, but without food, Keith was deteriorating. Early on he’d expressed his concern about his ability to continue. Even though a few of the days were spent on horseback, which conserved some energy, he wasn’t taking in enough nourishment. He was on the verge of shutting down. Marc and I grew very concerned that if his condition worsened, the FARC would shoot him. We were clearly in a hurry to get away from the army, and if Keith was compromising our ability to escape, well, then we all knew what that might mean.

  We continued to hold the pattern we’d developed on that first day, with Marc going on ahead of us. We didn’t spend any night separated from him, but he was often well in front of us on the trail. He apologized if that was a problem, but we assured him it wasn’t. We knew that Marc setting the pace for us was a good thing. Charging ahead allowed him to get additional breaks, since it meant that he’d cover a good deal of ground quickly and then could rest. This, in turn, meant that his guards weren’t as pissed with him for stopping. His style also benefited Keith and me because with him as our “race leader,” the overall impression the FARC had was that we were making good time.

  Keith felt bad about his inability to be up in the lead. I knew that it was tearing him apart, and that he was afraid that he might be jeopardizing all of us. In truth, I was also grateful that his pace was what it was. At one point during the first week or so of the march, we were sitting together at a rest point. Keith patted me on the shoulder and said, “Thanks for sticking with me.”

  “Just relax. We’ll get through this thing,” I said.

  At that point in our ordeal, the three of us were so intertwined with one another that it was difficult to tell where one kind of bonding left off and another began. We were also doing what was best for each of us, and as it turned out, this also meant we were doing what was best for all of us.

  After a week of marching, we detected a new change among our guards. We’d been with the same group for a few days, and we were all more attuned to their moods. The medic Johnny was among them. The first time I heard one of them mention an airplane, I thought they were talking about one that had flown overhead at some point. When I kept hearing the word avión, I asked them what they were talking about. We hadn’t seen or heard aircraft for several days. They explained that they were taking us to an airplane.

  For the next three days, as we marched along, they would remind us that we were going to an airplane. When we were all gathered for the night, I told Marc and Keith what they’d been saying. We all agreed that this was potentially a very good development. If they were taking us to an airplane, it meant that we were going to be getting on it and going somewhere. We remained hopeful that some agreement was being worked out and that we were going to be released. Why else would we be getting on a plane except to fly to someplace where the exchange could take place?

  Over the two days that followed, those constant reminders kept us going. Maybe human beings are capable of making themselves believe just about anything because we kept that one thought firmly in our minds—we were going to an airplane and we were going to be flying off someplace. Even though the track we were on was still climbing higher, it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that the FARC had an airstrip somewhere. Keith and I talked at every chan
ce about the type of plane that could get airborne quickly enough. We’d seen enough large clearings to know that something like a turbocharged Cessna 206 was a likely candidate for an inexpensive, third-world, backwoods aircraft that could take off and land in such spaces.

  The day they told us we’d be getting to the plane was one of the most difficult climbs we’d experienced to that point. Part of the time we were marching along a path, traversing the steep mountainside. At other times, we were climbing on all fours, more like rock climbing than hiking, or scrambling among huge boulders and loose fields of stone. As usual, Marc had gone ahead of Keith and me, and this climb was torturous for us both. Finally, the FARC figured out that Keith was not going to go anywhere under his own power. He was grounded.

  Rather than just wait for him to regain his strength, the FARC guerrillas put on their own display of strength, cutting down a tree and hanging a hammock on the shortened length of trunk they fashioned as a carrying pole. They loaded Keith into the hammock and then two of them lifted each end of the pole to their shoulders and carried him. He was slung between them like a jungle cat they’d killed and were carrying home as a trophy. The guerrillas had a serious macho thing among them, so they were practically fighting over who was going to take the next turn to carry all 214 pounds of Keith up that incredibly steep pitch to where we’d been told the airplane was waiting. By the time they got to the top, even the strongest of the FARC were exhausted. They basically dumped Keith to the ground and stood with their hands on their knees, their chests heaving. But neither Keith nor I paid much attention. Our eyes were trained on the airplane, or at least what was left of it.

  In front of us sat the skeletal remains of a single-engine Cessna. Far from being a working plane, this thing had ceased to function a long time ago. Marc had been there for some time before us, and he walked up to me.