by Gary Brozek
When I’d been at home in Florida, every now and then I’d watch a nature show with my kids, but watching nature on the Discovery Channel and living in it full-time were two very different things. The FARC had pigs, actually they were peccaries, that would come around to eat whatever scraps were left from our meals. I didn’t mind them too much, but their squealing, when added to the rest of the incessant jungle noises of insects, birds, and monkeys, made it hard to forget where I was. The guards were as bored as we were, and they sometimes treated the pigs like pets, scratching their bellies and giving them nicknames like Niña. Niña means “girl,” so the guards weren’t the most imaginative people in the world; they were like kids naming their dog Dog.
Given all of the juvenile traits they’d displayed during the march, I wasn’t surprised to see the FARC playing with peashooters. Actually, we admired their peashooters and copied them. One of the plants in the area produced shoots that were easily hollowed out. It also produced seeds, so it offered both weapon and ammunition. One of the guards would doze off (they also took shifts in pairs) and the other would shoot him. Sometimes they’d shoot at us, and we’d return fire.
The FARC were almost fanatical yo-yo players as well. One of the cereal grains they were supplied with had included a yo-yo. While they didn’t play with the yo-yos all the time, if a guerrilla had one, a few of the others would gather around. It was both funny and sad simultaneously. They were trying to teach one another how to use a yo-yo and their efforts were hilarious and heartbreaking. I mostly laughed, but later on, when it was getting to be dark and things were quieting down, I could feel my sadness settling down on my shoulders. I’d think briefly about the guards and know that they were so impoverished as kids that a yo-yo was something they could only dream about. That made me think of my own kids. They were well provided for, but they were missing a vital part of their lives—me.
Whatever enjoyment we got from peashooters and yo-yos, and it was very little, didn’t last. On the march, we had so much to occupy our minds—just the relatively simple act of walking took so much concentration because of the harsh terrain. I can’t say that I would have preferred to keep walking, but I realized in Monkey Village that as much as we were fleeing from the Colombian military, we were also running from the reality that we were captives. Now the truth was unavoidable. The facts of our situation set in, and set in hard.
I don’t know if it was for that reason or because I knew that it was important to stay physically active, but I walked a lot to ease the boredom and relieve my mounting anxiety. I could only pace back and forth across the small clearing we had, a distance of thirty yards or so, but that constituted the greatest portion of our world. All we could see beyond that were banana and palm tress and tangled masses of undergrowth.
A friend of mine once told me that he couldn’t take his kids to the zoo. It made him too sad. He knew a lot about animals, and he told me that zoo animals exhibited what was called “zoo behaviors.” He said that as a result of their captivity, lions and tigers, for example, would pace relentlessly back and forth in their cages or enclosures. You would never see them do that in the wild, he told me. I didn’t really understand what he meant at the time, but in Monkey Village I got a firsthand lesson in what he meant, as I found myself empathizing with every zoo animal I’d seen.
Still, my walking burned off some of my nervous energy and allowed me to explore my new world as much as possible. I thought of each of the members of my family and placed a picture in my head of each of them as I walked. I prayed daily, which also helped me some. I was raised Catholic, and though I’d drifted away from the Church, I retained a firm belief in God. I had never wanted to be a priest or a monk, but I was gaining some appreciation for what a life of quiet, solitude, and faith must be like. Some small parts of it I liked, but I hated living in my own head exclusively. It got too crowded in there.
The first time I saw an enormous campaign of ants on the march, I immediately thought the phenomenon was just like my mental state. The FARC called it the ronda, and it was like something out of National Geographic, a massive swarm of ants—as large as a twenty-foot-long football-shaped area rug—moving along in a mass so thick you couldn’t see the ground. After we saw the ronda a second time, we picked up on the signs that it was approaching. The birds would fly in ahead of it, low to the ground, in anticipation of the feast that was to come. Next we’d see the other crawling insects—spiders, tarantulas, crickets—and even amphibians like frogs and salamanders fleeing from the approaching ants. The birds would land and gorge themselves. Everything would move on once the ants passed through our little camp.
Those ants were like my darkest thoughts of being executed or killed in a rescue attempt. Those thoughts in turn stirred up my other fears and worries. There were just too many for them to ever disappear completely. A lot of those fears were, of course, centered around my family, especially my kids. Along with worrying about my own safety, I feared for them. What if Destiney was in a school bus accident? What if Cody or Joey got hurt playing baseball or another sport? What if one of them drowned while swimming? The list could go on and on, and I had to figure out some way to keep that swarm of thoughts from marching across my mind.
At night, I was defenseless against the onslaught. In addition to the marching nightmare, my sleep was troubled by what I called the reverse dream. In it, the reality of our situation would penetrate any defenses I put up, and the “bubble” we had put up as well. Those dreams were so vivid that even after I woke up from them, I had a hard time sorting out if I was dreaming that I was awake and my dream was my real life or vice versa. In one, we were marching through the jungle and we came upon a large trench. One of the guerrillas told me to stop and to kneel alongside it. He put a pistol to my head and pulled the trigger. I’d wake up sweating and thrashing under my mosquito net and the thought that I’d never see my wife and kids again was suffocating me.
A few times when I was walking, I’d imagine that I wouldn’t see my family for a very long time. When I was released, Destiney was going to be a woman and not my little girl. I would see my family’s life going by in fast-forward, and I wouldn’t be anywhere in the tape. I’d run through the list of things I’d miss out on—dance recitals, school dances, her learning to drive, graduating from high school, first crushes and heartbreaks—all the stuff that makes up a life. Even the most pleasant memories—our recent family vacation to Disneyland or watching The Little Mermaid with Destiney—became painful to replay in my head, but I was like a kid with a loose tooth probing it with his tongue and tugging at it with his fingers. I wasn’t trying to torture myself with the past but I couldn’t shut my mind off, either. I couldn’t control when things would come to me. One minute I was there in the jungles of Colombia, held hostage by terrorists, lying in a makeshift shelter thinking of family and home, and then suddenly the lyrics to the Blues Clues theme song would run through my head:
“Sit down in your thinking chair and think, think, think…”
This happy little jingle would just tear me to pieces. I wrote about these things in my journal all the time; I just poured my heart and soul onto the paper. Sometimes, when I wasn’t feeling so bad, I’d reread what I’d written and realize that I was in a very desperate state. I was so emotional, so sensitive to everything, fragile, and on the verge of being broken. I was glad for those moments when I could see myself clearly enough to recognize what was happening to me. I’d resolve to be better, pray for strength, and inevitably something would happen on those days when I’d just about reached the edge that would pull me back from utter despair.
I continued to pray to God to get me the hell out of there. I did the usual thing and told Him that I would reform myself, become a better person, a better Christian, do whatever it was that He wanted me to do. Thy will be done, but please let Thy will be what I want more than anything else in the world—to see my family again. I received no great revelations. I didn’t hear the voice of God telling me t
hat I would be fine. Instead, I’d look across the camp and Keith would give me a thumbs-up. I’d see Tom sitting in his hammock reading one of the FARC newsletters, and as if he sensed my eyes on him, he’d look up and give me a nod and a smile. I knew they were hurting as badly as I was. To see them struggling with what I could only imagine to be similar thoughts and doubts as mine and not be able to speak to them was as cruel a form of torture as I’d ever experienced. But even though we couldn’t speak openly, the fact that we were sharing this experience with one another helped ease the pain.
In those first weeks at Monkey Village, I was being tested; we all were. And one morning, I felt like I was being rewarded, if not for acing the test, then at least for passing it. I was pacing back and forth, and I saw a butterfly fluttering very low to the ground. It was just fluttering past me, and it caught my eye because it was the most beautiful butterfly I’d ever seen. It had transparent wings that were outlined in a deep red with two pink spots on the back of each wing. The spots were Barbie pink—Destiney’s favorite color. I immediately thought of her and named this butterfly Destiney’s butterfly. Every time I would see it, I would immediately be filled with such a mix of emotions. I would think of my daughter. That butterfly was a sign. It had to be. I knew there was some significance to that butterfly flying past me just when I’d doubted whether I could make it through.
I was in the process of undergoing a great change. If I was going to survive this, I would have to draw on resources that I wasn’t completely sure I had. The transition from being on the march would require a new set of skills. The challenges here were far more mental, emotional, and spiritual than they had been in the mountains. We had descended from the highest point to the lowlands, topographically and emotionally. It was hard to believe that the agony of our feet and legs could be made to seem slight when compared to what was going on in our hearts and minds.
One day I just got tired of all the negative thoughts and emotions I was having. I’d gone over a lot of my life, looked at decisions I’d made, actions I’d taken, and just beaten myself up over all the could-haves, should-haves, and would-haves that make up a life. I sat down with my journal and decided that I was going to lay out a new vision of myself, something I called my PLO—personal life outline. I identified five points in my life where I saw some weakness, some areas that needed improving. I laid out those five points and a plan for bettering myself in those areas. I created a code system so that if the notebook was ever taken away to be read by the FARC (something Sombra told us at the very beginning would happen—but we were “free” to write whatever we wanted), they wouldn’t be able to decipher my plan. I decided that:
I wanted to be a stronger spiritual leader for my family.
I wanted to be stronger in the face of distraction or temptation.
I wanted to become the best father I could to my children.
I wanted to become the best husband to my wife that I could.
I wanted to become the most decent, honest, and fair person in my everyday dealings with other people.
Beneath each of these, I listed a series of subpoints. Doing this helped me keep my mind occupied; it also gave me a project to work on and goals to be achieved. The project was me, of course, but given that all the FARC really wanted us to do was to continue breathing, it was better than nothing. That plan also helped alleviate some of the massive guilt I was feeling. I had put my family into a bad situation, something I never wanted to do. I was causing them pain, and that hurt far more than anything that was being done to me. Since I couldn’t fix this for them, I had to figure out a way to do something that would benefit them, and me, in the long term.
It also seemed as if change was in the air as well as on my mind. We could hear chain saws and hammering in the distance. The FARC seemed especially busy as we approached our third week in Monkey Village. The display toilet was carried off. The next day, the one-thousand-liter cistern they used to store water in was moved. Sombra, who only checked on us once a week, showed up out of the blue. He didn’t have any real news, but he asked us to make a list of all the things we wanted.
“You need a VCR, put it on the list,” Sombra said.
We were attuned enough and adjusted enough to prison-camp life that we knew to ignore the Fat Man’s blowhard exaggerations of what he could get us. So we listed things like sheets, blankets, a few more towels, nonextravagant creature comforts. We asked for radios—again.
We’d also noticed that aircraft were once again overhead near our camp. Change was definitely in the air, but we didn’t know yet what that meant.
FIVE
Settling In
April 2003—June 2003
TOM
About a week after we’d first heard the sound of chain saws in the far distance, the Frenchman asked me to let Keith and Marc know that we would be moving. Handing me three burlap bags, he said we’d be marching in the middle of the night and would need to have our things together.
That next morning, sometime after midnight, we were awakened and led out. The moon had already gone down, and we were in total darkness save for the flashlights the FARC used. We marched for what seemed to be twenty minutes. When we stopped, I initially thought we were just going to rest for a bit, but in the faint starlight light, I saw that we’d arrived at another camp. My heart fell. Even from a distance, I could see the newly downed and chain-saw-milled posts and boards of our new prison. They were the color of bone against the dark backdrop of the jungle. I didn’t need anyone to tell me that this was not good; I felt it in the pit of my stomach, a sensation similar to flying through an air pocket and losing altitude.
I’d been struggling throughout the march and in the three weeks at Monkey Village. We all talked about guilt, and mine was just a variant on what Keith and Marc were feeling. I kept replaying the conversation I had with my wife the night before the crash. What if I had decided that enough was enough and I wanted to stop the vagabond life and live in my dream house in Florida? What would have been so bad about that? Well, I hadn’t and now I was a hostage. Meanwhile, she was an immigrant to the U.S. How would she handle being alone in a country that wasn’t truly her own? She spoke English, but it wasn’t her first language. And then there was my son. At forty-nine, I was a father of a young boy of only five. Was Tommy going to grow up without a father? I hadn’t really gotten to enjoy much time with him because of my schedule and traveling. The last time I saw him I had taken him to the bus stop for his ride to kindergarten. I could tell he was nervous, but he climbed aboard and got a seat near the window. When the bus lurched off, he started waving. He didn’t stop the whole time the bus was visible. All I’d done since we arrived at Monkey Village was lie in my hammock and try to force the image of him waving good-bye to me out of my mind.
When we arrived at this newly constructed camp, those feelings only intensified. I’d been hoping for a release, and instead I’d gotten a longer sentence. I knew that the FARC wouldn’t have gone to the time and effort to build a new camp if they intended to release us anytime soon. The Frenchman led us past a hastily built fence into a round clearing that was about fifty feet in diameter. Three structures stood in the clearing—one larger than the other two. The biggest of the three was in the far corner and that was where we were led. It was made from the usual tablas, and it had a small covered porch area and a door with a chain-link window. Like the previous one in Monkey Village, this structure was large enough to accommodate the three of us, and in fact, this one was divided into three rooms. We all assumed that the three of us were going to be housed in it, but when Keith and Marc stepped onto the porch, their guard, Pollo, said, “No. No,” and led them off to the other buildings. Each of them had a separate building that was no more than six or seven feet long and the same distance wide. They were basically square boxes encased in chain-link fencing. It was clear to me that they were originally intended to be used for storage, but somehow, through the chain of command, an order had been issued stating that
the three of us were going to be separated as much as possible.
When we were shown the bathroom facility, we got an even stronger sense that we were in here for the long haul. Instead of a hastily dug and quickly filled slit trench, the FARC had built an actual outhouse with a manual flush system. As glad as we might have been for that small comfort and convenience, knowing that the ceramic toilet they’d once had on display was now to be used just added months to what we assumed would be the length of our stay. I’d been optimistically telling myself that we’d be held for three weeks. Well, the three weeks had long since passed during the twenty-four-day march and at Monkey Village, and now we’d been moved to what seemed to be a permanent site. The camp was in better condition, we all had raised platform beds to keep us out of the mud, but none of that mattered.
That first night, I experienced what must have been an acute anxiety attack. When the guards had wrapped the chain through the door and snapped the lock shut, it was as if they’d wrapped it around my neck. My heart raced, I sweated, and the racking dry heaves that turned my guts inside out were so violent and loud that Keith and Marc could hear them. They shouted for the guards, trying to reason with them in their minimal Spanish to unlock my door. I made it through the first night, but there was little improvement the next day. I felt guilty that the hooch I had was bigger than Keith and Marc’s. Keith was tall enough that he couldn’t lie completely straight in his without hitting his head or his feet on the wall. I wasn’t claustrophobic, but I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be in those coffinlike shacks. I began to dread nightfall and the sound of the chains being fed through the holes in our doors; the ratcheting metallic clink and the click of the lock were like being water-tortured.