by Gary Brozek
Marc and I looked at each other and then back at the cow, which was taking its last breaths and still looking at us. We didn’t say anything. We didn’t need to. We both knew that could easily be us at some point.
We stayed at that finca for three nights, and I was grateful for the rest. As I took in our surroundings, I was fascinated by the structure of the place. We were seemingly out in the middle of nowhere, and I wondered how anyone could get lumber up there to build anything. I’d been observing the FARC on our march, and a few times when we stopped for a longer rest, they’d taken some smaller trees with a diameter of anywhere between one to three inches. They’d cut those trees into smaller lengths, delimb them, and use the cut lengths as posts to create makeshift shelters. As Marc pointed out, these weren’t true Gilligan’s Island–type huts—with woven sides and palm leaves thatched as roofing. They were nylon tarps or what we called tent tops. The ground was so soft that the guerrillas were able to drive the pointed end of these poles in just about anywhere except the rocky creek or riversides.
Similarly, the ranch house appeared to be made from lumber that was milled on-site. The rough-hewn boards, what they called tablas, were actually ripped out of the nearby trees. They didn’t have a fancy table saw to do this with; they used a chain saw. I spent part of one afternoon watching the guerrillas as they cut down a jungle tree, stripped off the limbs, and then cut it lengthwise into tablas. You could tell that the exterior of the house was made from these rough-hewn tablas because the chain saw left distinctive semicircular grooves in the surface. The FARC used these tablas to make all kinds of fairly crude pieces of furniture. Platforms to sleep on, tables, chairs, and benches. A few of the guerrillas took advantage of this bit of downtime to use their machetes to fashion fishing poles. I was beginning to think that if you gave a FARC guerrilla a machete and a chain saw, he could build a pretty stout house just about anywhere in that heavily forested jungle.
Their ability to live off this tough land was impressive. We all commented that it was too bad that they were using their skills at construction to such a malicious end. Many of the drug labs the FARC controlled were made out of the same jungle woods and using the same methods. When we’d been in the air above we hadn’t been able to tell what they were built of, but being on the ground gave us a different perspective and a new appreciation for the intelligence we couldn’t gather from the air.
At times, I found myself slipping into the role of a field observer or an anthropologist. It became my way to escape the reality around me and prevented me from growing even more stressed out than I was. The three of us would talk about our situation, but we could only do that for so long without getting our nerves all in a jangle. We agreed that considering our physical condition, we were actually doing okay. Our strategy of being nonconfrontational had worked. In our minds, goal number one was to survive. Goal number two was not to do anything that betrayed our beliefs. We were captives but that didn’t mean that we would behave like criminals. We were going to have to tread a fine line mentally and behaviorally. We weren’t guilty of anything, and we could never make it seem to the FARC that we had done anything wrong or that we had intended to.
In those earliest hours, we heard from Sonia and a few others about our imperialist presence and aggression, but it was just FARC party-line propaganda, so we didn’t respond. As we heard more anti-American sentiment, we ignored it. The best way to combat those feelings and opinions was by conducting ourselves as honorably as we could. Even though none of us was active-duty military, we were doing work for the Department of Defense and other agencies of the U.S. government. We took seriously the role we were playing to combat narcotics trafficking and as representatives of a country we all loved. None of that would change just because we were being held captive. More than anything, we all had a sense of what was fair and just, and even though we were hostages, we would still demand to be treated fairly and justly. Being tortured, interrogated, or both was still very much on all our minds, and we all agreed that there were lines we simply would not cross.
These lines had become apparent to us a few days earlier as we were climbing down from the airplane. We were negotiating steep terrain, and we noticed that one of the FARC, a slight, delicate woman who could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen, was looking very pale. She wobbled on for a few hours in that state. Suddenly she passed out. Her compatriots just stood around staring at her, and the three of us stepped through the circle of gawkers.
Looking at her on the ground, we could see that she wasn’t sweating, which was sure sign of dehydration, or possibly even heatstroke. We decided that she needed to be cooled immediately. We took off her shirt and loosened her pants to help circulate air around her as best we could. We elevated her feet and gave her water. She had on the usual guerrilla rubber boots, so we pulled them off. That seemed to help. Listening to our suggestion, the FARC began to fan her. All those things were doing the trick, but then she started shivering. Keith still had his fleece jacket with him, so he gave it to her.
In one sense we’d crossed a line. We’d helped one of the FARC by giving this young girl aid and comfort. But we learned then that there was another line that we wouldn’t cross. Just because we were being treated inhumanely didn’t mean that we had to give up our humanity. All three of us had kids, and both Marc and Keith commented at the time that they were thinking of their daughters, who were respectively nine and fourteen at the time. Looking at this girl was a lot like looking at their own children. How could they have walked away? How could any of us not do the right thing, the thing we would have wanted for us or our own children?
Very early on, Keith said to us that there was the right thing to do and there was the wrong thing to do. There was the easy thing to do and the hard thing to do. We had to do the hard right thing, as much as humanly possible. That was our challenge to ourselves and to one another.
After our three nights of rest at the finca, on what I calculated to be the second day of the appropriately named month of March, we set out down the slope and across one of the many mountain streams. We walked for a few hours before making camp for the night. The next day the FARC provided horses for us. We didn’t complain about being able to mount up instead of walking. Our route took us upstream. Sometimes the FARC led our horses along the water’s edge and sometimes within the stream itself. The streambed was rock-strewn and angled steeply upward. I marveled at the agility of the horses. I was behind a young colt that was following his mother upstream over and around boulders. At several points we moved off the stream unexpectedly, and through the foliage of the banana trees and other vegetation, we could catch glimpses of tumbling and frothing water from sets of rapids.
The path through the mountains was a narrow single track, with a steep drop-off on the downhill side. A number of times, the ground beneath the horses’ hooves gave way, causing the horses to lurch to the side or rear up and sending us crashing to the ground. More often than not, the horses regained their balance, but once, my horse fell with me still on it. It happened quickly. One second I was riding along, and the next I was on the ground, with Keith’s voice in my ear shouting at me to move. I rolled over just as the horse’s massive body collapsed onto the patch of ground where I’d just been.
I probably should have been more concerned about my safety than I was, but I was so grateful not to be on foot that I didn’t really care. Not walking gave us more time to heal. Still, each fall from the horses, and we all took more than one, aggravated our injuries and brought back a more intense level of suffering. We weren’t eating much, but the FARC were still feeding us a steady diet of hope:
“Negotiations for your release are going on right now.”
“You’re going to be set free very soon.”
“The final details of the negotiation are being worked out.”
Each helping of a lie was spiced with “Keep on moving.” “You need to hurry.” “We must go.”
In so many ways, we wer
e victims of our own hope. We wanted to believe what they were telling us so badly. It was as if those fishing poles they made were used to dangle bait in front of us, and we desperately wanted to take it. We’d analyze every little detail. They’re wearing hats today. Bosses must be around. Bosses have connections to the higher-ups. The higher-ups would be involved in the negotiations. If a boss is around, maybe he’s here to take us to a release/exchange point. Everything became a sign or prediction for the future.
I don’t know if any of us really believed what we were being told, but we knew that at some point we had to stop allowing our hope to be used against us. It was there for us and we couldn’t let them use it for their ends.
KEITH
One morning, a few days after we’d helped the young girl (who did return my jacket and thank us), Johnny told us to drink up. We were heading over another mountain pass and there would be no water. He wasn’t exactly right, but close. We sipped a few drops from some bamboo shoots, and the FARC were able to extract water from some plants that grew in clusters. They had palmlike fronds that were so tightly intertwined that they formed little gutters that collected rainwater.
Being the largest of the bunch was not easy when it came to clothes. What they’d given me barely fit. Worse, the boots they’d provided didn’t fit, either, but they insisted I wear them anyway. They knew we were being tracked, and these mountains were filled with what I was used to calling goat trails—paths no wider than a single person that were always muddy enough to leave clear footprints. If the army saw one set of footprints that wasn’t like the standard-issue track the rubber boots made, it would have been a big arrow pointing the way to the gringos. To accommodate my big feet, Johnny cut the toes off of a pair of boots for me so I could march and not be a human locator beacon. It suited their needs but did little for mine. If you’ve ever done any hiking, you know that having your toes flapping in the breeze out ahead of you is an open invitation for bad stuff to happen. I’m not just talking about stubbing a toe, I’m talking about real bad stuff.
As the days went by I started getting a better idea of what some of those possible bad things were. One night the FARC macheted a small clearing for us to lie down on, and when it was time to sleep, the three of us quickly nodded off. A few seconds later, we heard a woman’s scream followed by the sound of boots striking the ground. A young guard named Martín rushed past us with his machete drawn and a panicked, bug-eyed look on his face. For the next thirty seconds or so, we couldn’t see a thing, we could only hear the crisp sound of Martín’s blade as it rose and fell quickly and without hesitation. He came back, retrieved a long pole, and returned to where he’d been. Using the pole, he jabbed at something on the ground and raised up a snake so big that he struggled to lift the whole thing off the ground. It was about seven feet long and as thick around as my forearm. He carried it all around the camp, showing it off to everyone.
The three of us simply stared in amazement.
“What is it?” Tom asked.
“Riaca” was the reply.
I was thinking it was some kind of constrictor, but when we did the international sign for squeezing, they shook their heads and made biting gestures. I looked down at my already ground-up toes and thought that was all I needed, to have my bloodied toes out there like we were chumming for sharks like they had done in Jaws. “I think I’m going to need bigger boots,” I said.
If huge poisonous snakes weren’t enough, we also had to contend with the nasty invisibles infiltrating our bodies. We consumed a lot of water every day, and there was almost always a ready supply of it nearby, but it was also one of the things that was ravaging our digestive systems. When some people who travel to foreign countries fall victim to turista, the little guys causing them problems move on in a few days. In our case, though, the little bug that crawled inside each of us took up residence and did some major housecleaning of our intestinal tracts, ridding them of most everything they found in there and anything we tried to put back in. Trying to keep hydrated was difficult, and we kept getting weaker and weaker.
How much of a toll that was taking on us was something we discovered when we came to a bridge crossing. Just as they’d done with the airplane, the guerrillas had been telling us for at least forty-eight hours that we were coming to a bridge. Listening to them talk about the bridge, you would have thought that the jokers were part of the FARC chamber of commerce or something.
“You have to see this bridge.”
“We’re coming to the bridge soon.”
“Soon we will be at the bridge.”
I was glad to hear that there was a bridge for a couple of reasons. First, it meant that we were going to be near civilization. Second, crossing a bridge meant that either we weren’t going to have to ford another river or stream or we weren’t going to have to descend and then climb up the other side of a ravine. Flat was good but extremely rare.
When Marc, Tom, and I finally exited the thick jungle into a very small clearing, a couple of our guards nodded and pointed ahead of us saying “puente” or bridge. We all looked. The scene was like something out of a movie. Indeed there was a ravine ahead of us, but the bridge was not exactly the enormous public-works project I’d been envisioning. Instead, it looked like a replica of the rickety wood-slat suspension bridge from Romancing the Stone. No more than eighteen inches wide, the walkway was made out of the tablas we’d seen just about everywhere. The tablas rested on top of a couple of ropes. Thin wire rose vertically from the slats and another rope ran parallel to the supports under the slats on each side. Together those wires and ropes formed a thin handrail.
Fifty feet below us was a dried riverbed with just a trickle of water and some massive rocks. Slip and fall and you were a splat and not a type of lawyer. The FARC must have sensed our unease because they told us that if the bridge started swaying too much, we should just grab the rope handrail and push it out away from ourselves. That would put tension on all the strung supports to stabilize everything. On a good day, it would have been a sweaty-palm crossing, but given how weak and light-headed we all were, this would be a knee buckler. Only one person could be on the bridge at a time, so it took a while until we all made the crossing.
We each went, and when Tom, the last to cross, made it over, he stood next to me, his face twisted in a knot of anger and disbelief.
“Why would anyone build a bridge out here in the middle of hell and gone? This makes no sense.” Marc and I looked at each other, and we were both about to say it, when Tom waved us off, “Don’t say it! Don’t say it! ¿Quién sabe?”
I felt bad for Tom. He was a pilot first and foremost, and he’d spent his life having to think logically, problem-solve efficiently, and view the world as an orderly and explicable place. He and I had been chewing on the possible answers to what happened that caused the plane we’d seen a few days before to plant itself on the ridgeline of that mountain. Tom’s methodical, precise mental ratcheting through the possible options had served him well in the past, but it didn’t in our current situation.
Tom and Marc took off ahead of me, and I assumed my place at the back of the line. With about forty FARC guerrillas ahead of me, Tom and Marc disappeared into the jungle, and soon we came to a series of makeshift shelters—slightly more advanced versions of the temporary pole shelters the FARC had built while on the run. The place looked like an old FARC camp, one that had been abandoned in a hurry. There was a series of tent tops already set up, and another group of FARC who weren’t with us on the bridge were crossing there as well. They had a kitchen area put together, but what really blew our minds was that in addition to the usual jungle sights and sounds, we could hear a generator and see a television with a small satellite dish. The television was in another little coleta building slightly larger than the rest. Inside the TV room was a series of low benches with backs that angled sharply away from the seat. The only activity they looked appropriate for was a dental exam.
When I walked in, Tom and Marc were
sitting on one of the benches, resting their elbows on their knees and their heads on their fists. They were staring at the screen. On it was an old black-and-white movie. I took a seat behind them and leaned over the back of their bench.
“What the hell is this?”
Tom turned his head slightly toward me. “We got here. They showed off their TV and asked us what we wanted to watch. We said CNN, of course. They put it on for us, but there was nothing about us. Crossfire was on. Talking heads.”
“I was watching the crawl,” Marc said. “UN inspectors are in Iraq. They just destroyed two Khartoum missiles. Nothing about us. After a couple of minutes, they”—Marc motioned his head toward where the FARC were clustered around the TV laughing—“put this on.”
We all shook our heads in confusion. The FARC continued to laugh at the screen and Marc and I asked Tom what was happening. Tom explained that the two men onscreen were in a market stall somewhere in Mexico arguing about the price of tomatoes. Apparently tomato prices were a great source of amusement to terrorists.
“I can’t believe they even let us start watching CNN,” Marc said. “And then they stop us because they’re bored with it. Doesn’t any one of them have a clue?”
Marc was absolutely right. CNN could have really helped us cut through some of the FARC bullshit and let us know if there was any truth about their words that our release was just around the corner. Knowing anything for certain would have eliminated ¿Quién sabe?
As it turned out, Sonia did have a clue. We had nothing better to do than to watch the movie, and after that, we watched something called Murder of a Wizard until Sonia came over and told them to shut the thing off. She was clearly pissed that they were letting us watch TV. She ordered a few guerrillas to lead us away from the main camp to a kind of annex, much older and more run-down. There were a few magazines there, old ones, and Tom started leafing through a book.