by Gary Brozek
I slept fitfully, if at all, and in the morning, all my pent-up anxiety needed to be let out somehow. I’d wake at first light and the guard would open my hooch to let me out. I’d walk a loop around the perimeter of the camp. Every day it seemed to rain at least a bit, and the track I made grew gradually muddier and muddier. I started with 60 laps and increased that to 150, walking in circle after circle after circle. I was sure that Keith and Marc were getting sick to death of the sucking sound of my boots in the muck and mire, but I had to do something physical. My thoughts were racing out of control. I couldn’t get out of my mind the idea that we were going to be there for six years. I’d take one step and I’d hear the word six in my head. I’d take another step and hear the word years. I’d repeat those words and imagine I was tromping them into the mud, but they’d just keep rising back up like a hand wanting to pull me down beneath the surface.
We still couldn’t speak to one another, and even though Keith and Marc were in such close proximity to me, the isolation was really upsetting. About three or four days into what we referred to as “the New Camp,” I hit a bottom that I didn’t even know existed. I thought I’d made firm contact with this dark runway before, but I fell even deeper. Even though during the day we were allowed to move freely about our enclosure, that day I chose to sit off in a corner of the camp on a tablas bench. For a long time, I sat there questioning my ability to make it through this, until Keith walked past me and dropped a small scrap of paper on the ground within my line of sight. I waited until he was back at the far end of the clearing near Marc. I unfolded it and read, “We are not forgotten. People are looking for us. One day at a time. We will go home.”
The skies didn’t suddenly brighten and I didn’t feel like dancing, but it was a start. I looked over at Keith and Marc and they both nodded at me. It was like they were driving their point home, nailing that scrap of paper on the wall so that it could serve as a constant reminder of what I needed to stay focused on. I’m not a spiritual guy. Religion for me begins and ends with a period. But I knew at that moment that I had to start believing in something, mostly myself and my ability to endure this. That note was like someone opening the door of the cockpit and telling me to get back into the pilot’s seat. This was a whole new aircraft, a whole new way of piloting. I didn’t have any of my old maps or charts, but I did have a couple of guys who were going to help me figure out a course. I’d have to learn how to fly the bird, but I had plenty of experience at doing that.
Keith’s note also made me realize something else. Part of my stress during this time was because I was the one who spoke the language. I was the one responsible for doing most of the communicating. Knowing that my ability to speak and understand Spanish was crucial to the survival of all of us, I was putting too much pressure on myself as I focused on how my actions affected Keith and Marc—not just me.
I was also anxious because of Keith’s condition. Keith was by far the most physically imposing of us and he was also one of the brashest, most confident people I’d ever met. As a former Marine, he had more survival training experience than the rest of us. To see him injured and laid low by his stomach issues was frightening in this respect—if he was hurting that bad, what did that mean for Marc and me? If the march had taken a toll on Keith and Marc, two men far younger than I was, what did that mean for me and my health? Mission one was to endure and get home. What if I didn’t have the skills it took? While Keith’s health seemed to be improving, he wasn’t nearly as physically active as he’d been before. I’d known him as a guy who was full of life and energy, seldom able to just sit still. In Monkey Village and in the first days at the New Camp, he seemed to be spending a lot of time in his hooch alone. His note let me know that if he was weaker physically than he’d ever been, he was probably more mentally strong.
Seeing Keith’s note, I realized that we all had different and necessary skills to succeed. Figuring out how to use those skills to survive captivity was what we now needed to concentrate on. We were applying old skills in a new environment. That was going to take time and trial and error. I had never been a very patient guy and my walking around in furious circles was proof of that.
I learned something about patience and how to get through the day from Marc. I’d always been a guy who liked a set routine. That was one reason why each morning I walked the camp. I was also very meticulous about caring for the few possessions I had—part of my pilot’s training specifically and my temperament generally. I liked to do things as quickly and efficiently as possible. The FARC did not. There seemed to be very little in the way of orderliness to what they did. While I was impressed with their construction abilities, even though the structures they built were hastily erected and somewhat slipshod. I knew that in most cases what they built was temporary, but I was always a believer that if you were going to do something, it was worth doing it right and making it last.
Though Marc didn’t realize it at the time, he turned into my teacher. Each morning he would wake up and scrub clean all his possessions with an old toothbrush. What we had didn’t amount to much. The clothes we wore, our spare clothes, our boots, the plastic lawn chairs we’d sat on in the back of the pickup truck, and a few other odds and ends. In our other life, we probably could have scrubbed all that spotless with that toothbrush in an hour, but Marc could occupy himself for an hour just getting the mud out of the treads on the sole of his boots. He’d sit there with a look of deep concentration on his face, rarely even looking up from his work.
I began to copy him. I thought that if I could just slow down like Marc and really take my time doing things, I wouldn’t be so anxious. I could get some control over my thoughts and my emotions. I began to see a pattern emerging in my life. As a pilot, I had been constantly on the move. My job was all about going somewhere. I’d moved around the country and the world; I was seldom still. The march was horrific, but I did have those moments when I marveled at how I was able to keep going. Now I had no place to go. I had to sit idle, which was hard, but Marc’s example really helped me.
At one point early on, Marc had talked about watching spiders weave their webs and how he could sit for hours to watch the spinning. While at first I couldn’t do that, I did spend hours tying fisherman’s knots with a string. Back home, I’d always anticipated problems and devised strategies to fix them, but in captivity, I didn’t have any real objects to do that with. I began to make lists of things that needed to be done to our newly purchased house, going through the house system by system—electrical, plumbing, structural—and deciding the necessary steps. As time went on, I’d do the same thing with other objects that were familiar and important to me. I’d ridden motorcycles on and off for my whole adult life. I mentally took one apart and reassembled it, piece by piece, every nut, bolt, washer, flange, housing, circlip, switch, and wire. I’d think about whether a part was aluminum, steel, plastic, or rubber, or whether it was milled, anodized, cast, or plated and what that meant in terms of what tools to use on it or what solvents could be used to safely clean it. When I got through with that, I’d narrow my focus down even more intently. For each nut and bolt, I’d picture in my mind what kind of thread it had (coarse or fine) and what its pitch was. When I was done with the motorcycle rebuilding and maintenance, I would start working on a plane.
I was definitely a work in progress. I still worried about my health, and in particular my blood pressure. The FARC seemed to be of the opinion that if they gave you medicine for something once, it meant the problem was gone and you were cured. After the supply of pills that Johnny had given me was gone, I had to ask again and again for more. Our medic was the guard Pollo. He would tell me that he wasn’t going to get me any more of the medicine. I’d have to complain to the Frenchman and he would have to talk to Sombra. Of course, that meant that Pollo would get in trouble for not doing his job—keeping us alive.
A month into life at the New Camp, I developed an eye infection. My eye was red and puffy and itched and oozed a discha
rge. I’d had conjunctivitis before and knew it was a nuisance but treatable. I asked for eyedrops. Pollo brought them and administered them to me. Once! I tried to be patient and explain to him that an infection needed to be treated with a course of antibiotics. A onetime application wasn’t a miracle cure. He administered it again for a couple of days and then stopped again. Pollo was also the one who locked us up at night, so he was no favorite of any of us. The fourth night of the eyedrops, Pollo showed up and locked Keith and Marc in their boxes. He came to my hooch, and I was expecting him to put the drops in my eyes and then lock up. Instead he locked the chain and started to walk away.
“Give me the damn medicine,” I yelled.
He stopped and walked up to the chain-link window, his dark beady eyes even darker and more sinister.
“I don’t want to waste the medicine on you,” he replied.
I lost it. I started screaming and cursing, while Pollo was returning fire. We shouted at each other for a few minutes. I was sure the Frenchman and the other guerrillas could hear us, and I was waiting for someone with some sense to come to sort things out. Pollo walked away into the darkness and no one came. I was so angry I was shaking.
Pollo’s arbitrary behavior pissed me off, but his walking away brought to real life a dread fear that I’d been having since we’d been captured. I walked around a lot of the time with this sense that there was a black hole nearby that I was going to disappear in. Being ignored was like being told I didn’t exist. Being told that he didn’t want to give me the drug I needed was like being told I didn’t matter.
In truth, this argument with Pollo was just one in a series of unsettling things that had put me on edge. The FARC kept seven white pigs across the creek from us. Sometimes they would cross the creek to our side. Some of the FARC would yell and scream at the pigs to get them back across to their side. We didn’t think much of it, but later we heard the bloodcurdling sound of a pig screaming. The FARC had apparently decided to castrate one of the domesticated pigs, but were botching the job or doing it in the most inhumane manner possible. The pig’s screams went on for forty-five minutes, shattering whatever calm any of us had managed to find for ourselves.
Even worse, a few days before the pig castration, we were in our boxes when we heard a single gunshot and a woman’s piercing scream. We heard the FARC scrambling around and a whole lot of commotion and yelling and sobbing. No one would tell us what had happened, but it was clear that someone had been shot. Was it a guerrilla? A hostage from another group? (We’d heard rumors that there were other camps similar to ours scattered around our zone.) Were executions starting? Had the FARC purposely killed one of their own? In the absence of any information, our thoughts and speculations ran wild.
To say the least, my nerves were already frayed when Pollo showed up and refused to give me my medicine. None of us expected the FARC to treat us with kid gloves or hand out special privileges. We simply asked that they treat us humanely and decently. That was how we were treating them and we expected that it be returned in kind.
KEITH
Stress does different things to different people. I’d seen it in all kinds of situations on the job, with my family, driving down the street. Tom, Marc, and I all had to choose how we were going to deal with our confinement. I think having to stay flat on my back in the hooch made my choice a bit easier and kept the monkey on my back under control. I knew that at some point, I was going to have to dig pretty deep, so I figured why not reach inside and see what I had right away?
In the jungle, I needed to set my bullshit detector on “self” and strip away the many layers that had built up during my precaptivity days. I knew that the standard operating procedure of before was not the SOP that would get us through this. Course corrections were the order of the day and it was going to take some time to get our bearings before we started to plot out where we needed to head next. I tried to look at the silence as one of those right, hard things, something that had to be done, even if it added to my stress. I’d gotten through the brutal boot camp at Parris Island when I was in the Marines, and found the mental discipline that we leathernecks had to develop or risk getting booted from the corps. I’d also spent hundreds of hours tearing down and rebuilding various aircraft and aircraft systems in my time in the Marines and as a reservist. Knowing that what you were doing could make the difference between a flight crew and others onboard living and dying, you refined your ability to focus and to shut out distractions.
The mind is a funny thing, but the longer I lay there, the more I learned I could control my thoughts as long as I filtered out the distractions. Maybe it was the messed-up physical condition that allowed me to just lie so still for so long, but having some time to reflect was good for me. When I was a kid or even later as an adult, if I had a problem, I’d go off by myself into the woods or wherever else I could be alone to sort things out. My hooch became my sanctuary, even though I could barely fit in it.
A lot of this reflection centered around the thing that had gotten me into this mess—my job. Tom and I had several conversations about this during the march. We both loved our jobs and what they enabled us to do for our families, but there was no way around the truth: If it weren’t for the money, we wouldn’t have been in Colombia. We were making good coin, and that was important to us—what it bought us, what it meant to our egos, what it might mean down the line for our kids and our retirement. I wasn’t so much interested in being a hero with a capital H as I was in being a hero to my family and in my own mind by bringing down some big bucks. Call me shallow. Call me greedy. Call me what you want. I didn’t care. I still don’t, really. All I was doing was living the American Dream.
Both of my parents were academics, Ph.D.s. Very, very smart and loving folks who busted their asses but didn’t, in my mind, reap the financial rewards they might have. My father was a director of a vocational education center and my stepmom worked in administration there. They did good, important work and they told me there were other ways that you could be rewarded besides a salary.
I stored that as good advice and went down my own road, but now I was rethinking things. Humping through the jungles and mountains of Colombia, my guts twisted in a knot, I had said to Tom, “When we get out of here, there’s no way I’m going back to work like we were doing. No way.” Tom agreed.
Stretched out on the floor, I knew I’d messed up things for my family, and I vowed to never do that again. Other things were more important than the number of digits in a bank account or on a paycheck. I’d tell myself I could cut some spending here, cut some there. We’d be okay. I didn’t need to make that kind of money. I could be happy without it. I’d gotten a pretty nasty wake up call, but that was only the start for me.
I went back to a lesson my father had taught me, a lesson as old school as it gets, but it helped. He was a big believer in the “T list”—put your positives on the right and your negatives on the left of the vertical line. As much as I focused on painful memories, regrets, and the guilt I felt about what I was putting my family through, I also thought about some of the good things. I was proud of being a good father to my kids. It wasn’t easy being a single dad, and Malia had come on board like a second mom to Lauren and Kyle. I wasn’t the best husband, fiancé, or boyfriend, but I was a good dad. My relationship with Patricia, the Colombian flight attendant I’d had an affair with, was an example of an experience falling on both sides of the plus and minus line. I was upset with Patricia and me for her getting pregnant, but I was also glad to be a dad again. I was upset with myself for all the pain my affair caused Malia, but I was glad that our bond was tight enough that we were working things out. I had to figure out some strategy to stop getting in they way of my own success by doing something dumb and selfish.
While my mind wandered through this jungle of thoughts, I felt some of the same anxiety that Tom and Marc did, but I dealt with it differently. I was able to relax, and inside the cramped confines of my hooch, I could just vegetate. A wh
ile back, my dad had given me some audiotapes by a guy named Dr. Wayne Dyer. I’d listened to them and picked up a few things about the mind-body connection. I’d think about things and try to imagine what was going to happen to us in the next few months; I tried to anticipate as best I could what the wazoo FARC had up the sleeves of their grimy little Che T-shirts.
I continued my study of the guards and the other guerrillas. One cat I couldn’t figure out at all was Milton. He seemed to be Sombra’s right-hand man. We almost always saw the two of them together, but there was something odd about the pair. The Fat Man was fat obviously, but he was pretty slick with the language, tried to joke quite a bit, and always made promises he wouldn’t keep. Milton, on the other hand, was a blank but damned ugly slate. We weren’t sure if a real thought passed between the guy’s ears. As it turned out, a bullet had passed through that same neighborhood once, and now Milton was the Fat Man’s little toady or even his little mascot. Everywhere Sombra went, there was Milton. He’d just stare vacantly and nod in agreement with whatever the Fat Man said.
It was sad in a way, knowing the guy had been wounded, but we figured there had to be more to him than met the eye.
In the New Camp we continued to exploit a weakness in the guards that we’d first noticed in Monkey Village: nicotine. Periodically, we were given cigarettes, but we didn’t really take up smoking. For us, they were currency. Most of the guerrillas were seriously addicted to smoking. Advantage: Americans. We saw the way nearly all the guerrillas were puffing away on the things and figured that we could parlay that into some sweet deals for ourselves. Like most things, cigarettes came into camp sporadically, and because of this, we were able to wheel and deal with our stockpiles of smokes. Even if we couldn’t buy any material goods, we could at least make a down payment on some goodwill with some of our more susceptible captors.