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

by Gary Brozek

  None of us had ever really been locked up until this—not even those times on the march when we slept in a house or other building. It was disturbing to know that you couldn’t get up and move around freely when you wanted or needed to. That first night, it turned out, we all needed to. We’d been fed pretty well that day, including some fried meat just before lock up. All of us were still in pretty bad shape digestion-wise, and at some point in the night, that became a problem. We yelled for the guards. We’d been shown a ditch or zanja that we were to use as our latrine. It was about twenty feet or so from the hooch. A guard finally showed up, and by this time, I’d been clenching my bowels for so long my leg and butt muscles were quivering. All three of us tried to explain that I needed to be let out of this damn thing immediately.

  The guard pointed to our oil container and told me to use that. He wasn’t going to let me out. I started yelling, “Let me out! Let me out!,” and as I was saying this, I could feel my bowels releasing. If the guard thought I was faking before, his nose and his eyes had ample proof that I really needed to get out of there.

  That incident convinced the FARC that there was something seriously wrong with my stomach. I’d started eating a week or so before this, but I was still plagued by whatever bug it was that infected all of us. That next morning the FARC came in and insisted that they were going to perform a procedure on me. Tom translated for me what their intentions were,

  “Tell them HELL NO,” I said.

  “They say all they’re going to do is massage your stomach,” Tom replied

  “Fuck that. Not now. Not ever.”

  “They say they need to do it. They need to fix your stomach.”

  I remembered Johnny and some of the good work he’d done on all of us. I wished that he was there, but he wasn’t. Finally I gave in. They had me lie on the floor on my back and applied some kind of oil to my stomach. Then two pretty powerful guys began pushing on my stomach, starting at the top and then working their way down toward my navel. The pain was intense. It was as if they thought they could force whatever was in the top of my intestine down and out of me through my colon. They were literally squeezing the shit out of me.

  This went on for ten minutes or so. When they stopped I felt better, but only because they’d stopped. Next, two of the stronger guys lifted me up by my feet and dangled me upside down, holding me a few inches off the floor. As I hung there, they lifted me up a bit higher and shook me, dropping me a few inches and then raising me again like a stubborn ketchup bottle. After they were done with the shaking, they took a large bandanna or scarf, and they tied that around my stomach, torquing it so tight I could barely breathe. When they lowered me to the floor again, they said I had to leave what was essentially a kind of tourniquet on my gut for the next twenty-four hours.

  After they left, the three of us started talking about their “cure.”

  “That was almost prehistoric, Keith,” Marc said. “Where would you learn something like that?”

  “Folk medicine,” Tom said, “Not covered by your health plan, but who knows? Maybe it’ll do you some good.”

  “Hey, it hurt like hell, but if nothing else, it proved we are a valuable commodity. If they were going to kill us, why bother to treat me at all?”

  “That’s true,” Tom said. “But they gave me medicine, so why not give you something for your stomach?”

  “Maybe what’s got my guts all in a knot isn’t a bug. Maybe the crash fucked up something internally?”

  No matter what was wrong with me, for the next two or three weeks I spent most of my time in our hooch or squatting over the ditch. My family had always talked about folks going from the poorhouse to the shit house; I didn’t have either house out there.

  My digestive system didn’t get much better as the days progressed. Feeling as weak as I did and unable to eat, there wasn’t much for me to do but sleep. Several times I woke up alone in the hooch. Still half dazed, I’d hear Tom and Marc talking out front and slowly come to the disgusting realization that I was lying in my own shit. In those moments my only thought was Could this get any worse? I was exhausted and miserable. I could do nothing but lie on my back and stare at a beam. Bats were flying around inside the hooch. Ticks would crawl toward me, and get up to my chest before I pushed them away. But they just kept coming back at me. I’d push them away. They’d crawl up me. I’d lie there for an hour until I got the strength to wash myself off.

  The only thing that kept me going during those initial days as a prisoner was a spiral-bound notebook and a pen, both of which Ferney had given us along with other basic toiletries—a toothbrush and toothpaste, a razor, laundry soap. Every day, no matter how horrible I felt, I’d think of Lauren, Kyle, the rest of my family, and Malia. I’d write them all a letter. I wouldn’t write so much about what was going on in Monkey Village; instead I’d tell them how I felt about them. I’d also write to them about my favorite memories of being with them. I told Lauren about something that happened when she was just nine years old. For a divorced father with custody of two kids, life could be pretty hectic, but a lot of nights Lauren, though only nine, would stand on a plastic milk crate in front of the stove to help make dinner. In this particular memory, she was up there reaching into a cabinet to bring down some macaroni and cheese and a few spices. She added a can of tuna for Kyle and me, and she was so proud of her homemade Tuna Helper. Kyle asked me, “Dad, is she going to burn it?” I told him that no matter what, we were going to eat it, we were going to love it, and we were going to tell her so. It hurt like hell to remember all that and put it down on paper, especially when I wrote that I couldn’t wait to get home so she could make it again for us all.

  After the first week, I was starting to feel better. Having control of your bowels will do that for you. I wasn’t ready to go out and run a marathon, but I could at least participate in more of the regular routine. I was stressed out, and not being physically active made my brain work overtime. With no mental stimulation, my mind was running rampant and that had to be contributing to my physical problems. My mother had taught me a few simple meditation tricks when I was a kid. I tried to focus more on my breathing, counting to six on the inhale and the exhale. That seemed to help calm my nerves.

  From the beginning of our stay at Monkey Village, we tried to figure out who was important and whom we might be able to work to our advantage among the FARC. We were there with about thirty guerrillas, an estimate we based on the rotation of the guards. Though we could hear female voices, we never saw any women. The FARC camp was secluded enough from ours that we could see where it was—flashes of movement, the sound of them talking and cooking—but not much else. Marc made an effort to get to know a guerrilla they called Lapo. Fairly soft-spoken and decent, he’d been on our initial march. We asked him to give us the chain of command, and according to him, the Frenchman was the commandant—the lead jailer of the camp. Lapo said that he was number two, and Pollo—who looked like a chicken with his beady eyes, pimply, pebbled skin, and scrawny neck and shoulders—was number three. A day or so later, we asked another guard (who we called the Plumber) the same question. He said the same thing about the Frenchman but flip-flopped Pollo and Lapo. As a result, from that point forward, we referred to Lapo as 2.5.

  We liked 2.5. He told us that he had studied in Bogotá before joining the FARC, something he was very proud of. What that meant was that he’d gone through a few early grades of school and learned to read. He was likely a homeless street kid and the FARC offered him a better gig than that—the old three-hots-and-a-cot mentality. To 2.5’s credit, in those first few conversations we had with him, we could tell that he had something going for him. Even though our Spanish wasn’t the best, a lot of the other FARC we talked to were conversational black holes. They would try, but when it came time for them to express any kind of original thought or opinion, they fell back on the usual FARC rhetoric. All of them had been brainwashed, but a few of them, like Pollo, had been left in the spin cycle too long
and it turned them stupid and mean.

  Others, like Songster, were pretty easy to get to know. He was only about sixteen or so, a pimple-faced kid who was good-natured most of the time, although he drove Tom insane because he walked around camp singing nonsense songs about elephants and a bunch of other shit. Marc and I couldn’t understand what he was singing, so it didn’t bother us too much, but Tom wanted to choke him. He was kidding, but he did write in his journal: “Date of first headache in captivity: March 6th, 2003 / Source: Songster.” Of course, we had to name him Songster, and we had to put up with him and his warbling. He seemed to be a pretty new recruit, filled with the zeal of the recent convert. He kept engaging us in conversations about politics and spewing the FARC propaganda about American imperialism. Songster said that he was really mad at us because the U.S. still controlled the Panama Canal. We explained that the U.S. gave up control of it in 1999, but he wasn’t hearing any of it. For a bit of fun, Marc, Tom, and I engaged him in one of those yes-we-did-no-you-didn’t debates until he told us we were just being stupid. He stomped off and didn’t talk to us for a few days.

  It took a lot of observing and listening to identify and rank all the guards. For the most part, with the exception of the Frenchman and the Fat Man, as near as we could tell, the rest were just grunts. They’d sometimes call one another Camarada———and use a name, but most of the time it was just camarada. The Frenchman was always commandante, and in that isolated camp, he wielded the power of God. He was just as stupid and mean as the rest of them, but because he was in charge he was worse because his stupidity and meanness could hurt us more deeply.

  MARC

  About ten days into our stay at Monkey Village, around the nineteenth or twentieth of March, the three of us were sitting outside in hammocks that the FARC had provided. The hooch was so unbelievably depressing that even lying in a hammock and being bitten by the enormous horseflies out there was an improvement. Hundreds of them would swarm all over and gather on the bottom of our hammocks. They had iridescent green heads and hypodermic-like stingers that could pierce your skin through the hammock’s fabric and your clothes, but at least we were out of the mud.

  That day, Keith, Tom, and I were sitting outside talking about how strange this entire scene was. The FARC had a toilet, not connected to anything, sitting up on a rise about twenty feet outside our clearing. If that wasn’t odd enough, the toilet was also fenced in.

  “Why would they put that thing on display?” Tom asked.

  “No idea. Check out what I found up there.” Keith handed Tom a small wooden knight from a chess set.

  Tom turned it over and over in his hand, and with a heavy sigh he asked, “Did you guys have it again last night?”

  Keith and I both said yes.

  For the first few nights of our imprisonment, each of us had had the same nightmare—what we called the marching dream. They were the most vivid nightmares and each of us could hear the others moving all around their beds. We were dreaming of marching, and our bodies were acting it out as we lay sleeping. We each reported waking from it and being completely surprised that we hadn’t moved out of the hooch.

  We’d been sitting there, turning over the dreams for a bit, when the Frenchman came in. Normally he stayed out of camp, leaving the day-to-day monitoring to the other guards and only doing an occasional walk by to check on us. The fact that he was coming into our hooch let us know something was up. He pulled Tom aside and I saw Tom’s face go pale. Tom licked his lips and came back toward Keith and me.

  “We’re going to be separated,” he began. “We’re not to speak to one another, either. If we do, they’ll move us even farther apart and we won’t ever see one another again.”

  I’d spent the previous thirty-four days thinking of all the possible terrible things the FARC could do to us, but I hadn’t considered this one. This was going to hurt. All we had was one another, and now they wanted to take that from us.

  Even as Tom was speaking, I flashed to a conversation the two of us had a few days before. We were both lying in our hammocks looking up at the treetops. The sunlight reflected off the top of them, and that image reminded me of home. Tom was talking about going to work at a Toyota car dealership when we got back. Selling cars seemed pretty safe, he told me. As silly as that conversation sounded, it had taken us out of this place. Being in his own head all day every day was not something that any of us was looking forward to, but it seemed we had no choice.

  A few minutes after the Frenchman left, the other guards started to set up our new arrangements. Tom remained in the hooch and Keith and I were once again back in a coleta underneath nylon tent tops hung over wooden frameworks. Keith was at one end of the clearing, and I was at the other. I think the FARC knew that our being able to see one another but not being able to speak to one another was worse than complete separation. With that arrangement, we would be constantly reminded of what was being taken from us.

  Before Keith and I were led to our new quarters, the three of us got together. Together we’d formed what we referred to as a “bubble”—a place together that enabled us to endure this madness.

  “Look, guys in Nam that were POWs figured out ways to communicate with another. Even in the Hanoi Hilton they managed to put up with some shit that was about as bad as it could get.” Keith looked at Tom and me and nodded.

  “Whether we’re in the same hooch or forty feet apart doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’re still in the bubble. We just need to check on each other everyday. Get ourselves back in it.”

  Tom said, “We’ll figure out some way to get through this. We’ll be strong—stronger than them.”

  The FARC’s imposition of silence on us was cruel, and I couldn’t see what advantage it had for them. We’d figured out early on that they wanted to keep us calm and in control. Silence and separation would only do the opposite—make us agitated and angry. I had to remind myself that responding to those feelings would not be a good idea. We were sure that the FARC could further separate us and make good on their promise of us never seeing one another again. The FARC were holding hostages all over the country, and the thought of another long march to a different camp was enough of a deterrent to keep us from blatantly disregarding their rules. It didn’t make any sense to risk the one thing we had going for us—the three of us and our collective strength.

  I knew that I needed to keep to as strict a routine as possible. When Ferney gave us the notebooks upon our arrival, the first thing I did was draw the layout of my family’s house. Our house in the Keys was our first home, and we’d bought it about two years before the crash. A typical Florida Keys house, it was elevated on stilts. I had taken drafting classes in high school, so I sketched the floor plan like it was a blueprint. I also sketched in all the furniture in each room. When I woke up every morning, before I went to bed every night, and several times throughout the day, I would look at that line drawing and imagine I was there in my house. I would visualize what my family would be doing at that exact moment in time.

  The depression that had been lingering in the shadows those first few weeks in Monkey Village set in after the separation. Everything was so foreign. The food was different, the people were different, the language was different, being outside and subject to the whims of Mother Nature was equal parts fascinating and terrifying. But of all that, not being able to talk to Tom and Keith was by far the hardest part. I had a difficult time communicating with the guards. The particular dialect most of the FARC spoke only vaguely resembled the textbook Spanish I’d been learning. Ultimately it didn’t matter, since after the second or third day of the silence, we were told that we couldn’t speak to the guards, either.

  The boredom became all-consuming. I could only write in my journal for so long, could only reread what I’d read so many times. The AM-FM radios the Frenchman had promised to us never showed up. I had twenty-four hours a day to fill up with some kind of activity, and given that there weren’t many activities to do, my logical choic
e was to shorten the day as much as I could. That meant that I would stay in bed in the morning as long as I could. We had no electricity in the camp, so the length of our day was determined by the sun. Keith and Tom got up when the sun rose, but I frequently stayed in bed for several hours after that, skipping breakfast entirely. From the grumbles I heard from Tom and Keith and from what I’d experienced firsthand, I wasn’t missing much. Soup and an arepa—a fried bit of cornmeal—on most days. I wasn’t a big coffee drinker, so I let Tom and Keith take my portion of either the coffee they brought out or the hot chocolate they gave us.

  I knew that by staying in my hooch I was missing out on one thing. The guards brought the food to one point, where they left the pots so we could serve ourselves. If we all gathered there at the same time, the guards didn’t mind. That was an opportunity for us to at least be near one another and to whisper a few words of encouragement or even nonsense. Anything to keep the connection going. I had to weigh my desire for that contact against my desire to shorten the day. There were other opportunities during the day to engage in limited attempts at socializing, so in the mornings I opted to sleep in as long as I could. I did enjoy hearing Tom and Keith grousing about the fish heads in their soup some days, but I definitely wouldn’t have enjoyed having to deal with that soup. I took some satisfaction in knowing that my not participating in breakfast in the jungle would guarantee that Keith’s coffee habit did not go unmet.

  Even before captivity Tom was an early riser, who hated the heat. At Monkey Village he’d get up at sunrise and then lie in his hammock. The flies weren’t out at that hour and that way so he could get about an hour of insect-free peace. He would have spent more time in his building and out of the heat, but there was a rat’s nest in the beams supporting the tin roof and it rained down a constant stream of droppings, twigs, and leaves. He tried to keep his place as clean and orderly as he could, but the amount of effort and the results he could achieve with the jungle broom he was provided with didn’t measure up.