by Gary Brozek
One of them was a guy named Smiley. He was a young, good-natured kid, very animated and emotional. When he was first guarding us, it was like he had a crush on us—his first Americans. He was one of the first guerrillas I really reached out to as we were figuring out our Hogan’s Heroes thing—how to get the guards to do things for us. I could tell that Smiley had a brain, that he was more of a freethinker and willing to take risks for us. One day, about six weeks or so into our stay at the New Camp, Smiley came up behind my hooch. Back there, he was blocked from view by anyone except me. He looked like he was about to cry and laugh and shit his pants all at the same time. He was smiling and flapping his hands in imitation of a bird, meaning we were being set free. I could tell he was genuinely happy for us. No one was that good of an actor.
Risking the guards banging down on us, I ran to Tom and Marc. “Listen to what I’ve gotten from Smiley. He seems to think we’re going to get released.”
“What do you mean?” Marc said. “How does he know?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve got to find out more, but my Spanish isn’t good enough. All he could do was gesture and hold out his arms like an airplane’s wings.”
“I’ll talk to him as soon as I can,” Tom whispered, and broke off when another guard took notice of us and headed our way. The day after Smiley gave me the bird-airplane signal, Tom asked him where he heard that we were being released. The look on Smiley’s face changed, and his expression turned panicky.
“They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me,” he said as he shook his head.
We were hoping he’d let us know what Colombian radio station he’d heard the news on, but his response was the next best thing. We now had two bits of evidence to prop up our hopes of being released. To add to that, a day or so later, the Frenchman came to Tom all businesslike and told him that he needed all our civilian clothing sizes: shirts, pants, socks, shoes. We were thrilled by this, thinking that if we were getting civilian clothes, it could only mean one thing—release. For the next couple of days, Tom had a real spring in his mud-clomping step, Marc was the cat who ate the canary, and I was already mentally ordering my first meal at my favorite barbecue shack in South Georgia.
To confirm our suspicions, we’d been hearing a whole lot of aircraft activity for a few days and the frequency of the flyovers only increased. The suspense was killing us, and three or four days after Smiley’s revelation, the Frenchman came into our camp. On our behalf, Tom was all over him asking questions about what the FARC’s plans were for us. Normally the Frenchman would take those questions head-on and fling a bunch of bullshit at us. This time he was really evasive and not promising anything. He said that maybe we would be there for years.
I didn’t put too much stock in what he said. The Frenchman probably never knew when he was telling a lie or telling the truth. A few days later, Pollo opened our hooches so we could get breakfast. Usually Marc was out of his hooch pretty quickly and I was the one lagging behind. But on this morning, I didn’t see him and got a whiff of something in the air. Even though we weren’t supposed to, Tom and I walked into Marc’s hooch.
He was sitting on the bed, staring absently at the ground. We could tell immediately that the floor had dropped out from underneath him. We sat down on either side of him and put our arms around him and asked him what was going on. He couldn’t even lift his chin up. Then the tears started. My arm was still around his shoulders and it started twitching up and down with Marc’s heaving shoulders. There was nothing else we could do or say at that point except sit there with him.
After a few minutes, he told us that what the Frenchman had said about being there for a long time had just leveled him. He’d also had a dream that night. He was with his father and Destiney. Destiney was in his lap and Marc was looking at her braids. He said it was so real. He could smell the Johnson’s baby shampoo in her hair, see where each strand of hair was knotted in her braids. And that was when he woke up. He wasn’t with his daughter; instead he was in a box in the jungle in Colombia.
We stayed with Marc as long as we could before the guards pushed us out of there.
A night or two later, the three of us were standing at a spot in our clearing where we could see through the trees. The guards would let us stand there, and since we were a pretty good distance from their station, they couldn’t hear us if we whispered. We were all just checking in on one another. I looked up, and the sun was going down, and Marc pointed to the sky. A bit of rainbow was arcing across the opening.
“Maybe it’s a sign,” Tom said.
We’d all been looking for signs and indications just about everywhere; I supposed this one was as good as any. I looked at Marc, and I could see he was deep in thought, whether it was about what Tom had said or something else I couldn’t say, but he seemed at peace. I wasn’t about to step into those calm waters and disturb them. I just stood there enjoying the moment of communion with them.
From the beginning, we developed a shorthand way of checking in with one another to see what mental state we were each in on any particular day. If you were in your bubble, that was a good thing. You were safe, secured, and protected. If you were out of the bubble, you were agitated and anxious. I liked the metaphor because I visualized it as a level—the tool a carpenter uses to measure if a board or an entire wall of building was plumb—straight up and down—or level on the horizontal plane. If a small air bubble suspended in liquid is between two lines on the small cylinder, then whatever you are checking is level either vertically or horizontally. I liked that image because it allowed for the individual difference among the three of us. When I was flat on my back, that meant I was in my bubble. If Tom and Marc were up and around and busy with their walking or their cleaning, it meant they were in their bubbles.
We hadn’t forgotten about Smiley’s revelation, but a few days had passed since our conversation with the Frenchman about our future. Tom followed up briefly with the Frenchman and asked him that if the order was given for our release, how long would it take until we were actually let go?
“Eight days” was his only response.
When Tom reported that information back to us, we were all puzzled and impressed. Why eight days? Why not a week? Did the guy have it down to that exact number because a plan was already in place? The Frenchman’s precise answer combined with the continued increase in aircraft activity upped our anticipation level. We could hear a plane—we weren’t sure if it was Grand Caravan like we’d flown (and thus our sister ship from California Microwave) or if it was a King Air run by another group out of Bogotá. The planes were essentially boxing in our location, flying in a pattern similar to what we did over our target zones and narrowing it down through a series of turns.
That was a good thing and a bad thing. We knew that a recon plane would be looking for us on the ground. The jungles of Colombia are vast, and our small clearing could easily blend into the surrounding vegetation. We weren’t just a needle in jungle haystack, we were the eye of the needle—a tiny empty space in a vast carpet of green and therefore very easy to miss. The comfort in all of this was that the presence of these aircraft near our location verified our assumption that we were being tracked and people were looking for us.
The bad news was that the thought of rescue still troubled us big-time. The one-thousand-liter plastic cistern the FARC used for water was a veritable bull’s-eye of a target. It was about ten feet wide, black, and was raised off the ground about twelve feet so that gravity could feed the water out a valve. Our planes were equipped with infrared sensors, so the water in that tank would be like a flashing light signaling any intelligence airplane that flew overhead. If the aerial guys were able to pin down our location, it meant the Colombian military could come in and attempt an ambush rescue operation. We were convinced we could easily die in that kind of action—especially at night, when we would be in our boxes and easy to gun down. We’d talked about what we would do in case of such a rescue attempt, but our success at getting out of there was d
ependent on being out of the boxes, which meant during daylight hours. Any successful raid would likely come at night and that wasn’t good for the home team.
A week after Smiley gave us the word and about sixty-fifty days into our stay in the New Camp, we were all locked up for the night when we heard a new sound: jet engines coming in low and fast. And I mean low, just barely over the tops of the trees. I couldn’t be sure if they were U.S.-made A-37s or Israeli-manufactured Kfirs, but it didn’t matter—they were fighter jets and their low approach meant only one thing—we were going to get rained on in the form of high explosives. Marc and I both started to yell at the guards to get us out of those boxes. We did not want to be sitting ducks. I hit the deck, trying to take whatever cover I could for what I knew was coming.
The terror was unlike anything I’d felt before. We had no place to run to, nothing of any substance to get under or behind to protect ourselves, and we were about to be strafed by bombs and bullets. The FARC might have just as well staked us out spread-eagle in the clearing in chains with giant arrows pointing to us. Their only response was “Don’t worry. Everything is fine.”
When the jets circled back not a minute later, the first bomb hit. The initial impact sounded like thunder, and it was followed by a split second of silence. All the ambient jungle noise that was so incessant—the sound of insects, birds, monkeys—stopped for the briefest of moments. And then the concussion from the explosion came rippling through the leaves of the trees and underbrush like a giant creature tearing through the underbrush. The bombs were hitting within a kilometer of us, and the thunderous crump of their impact with the ground could be heard and felt.
The three of us were screaming to be let out of our boxes, and we heard only a single voice say, “Don’t worry. The Frenchman is asleep. You should be, too.” That was followed by the sound of a guard puking his guts out with fear.
I stood up and crept over to the edge of my hooch. The boards had a tiny gap in them, and I could see the Frenchman huddled right next to my hooch with a couple of other guards. They’d abandoned their camp, which was about twenty or so yards from ours, and taken cover behind our hooch. I couldn’t see the rest of the forty or so FARC who were nearby and assumed they’d either gotten hit or had fled into the jungle.
The jets did several bombing runs, and after they departed, we heard the sound of OV–10 Broncos. I’d flown in them in the Marine Corps and these Broncos were the workhorse of the Colombian Air Force. We could hear heavy machine-gun fire ranging from .30 caliber to .50 caliber peppering the area. That was accompanied by the sound of Fantasma gunships circling for a long time overhead, hoping to pick off any FARC stupid enough to show themselves. For the next half hour, we heard the drone of the engines and the sporadic sound of gunfire.
When they finally flew off, we filled our lungs with a deep breath and began a session of whining, screaming, and yelling. Having the good guys nearly take you out in a bombing run doesn’t make for happy campers. We vented our spleens all that night and into the next day. We did it knowing that we had to get it out of our system. The FARC received their fair share of our anger along with the Colombian military. That said, Tom, Marc, and I understood that we had not been the focus. We trusted that the Colombians did not know that we were in a camp nearby their targets.
On one level, we understood the game. The FARC used the presence of the secuestrado, the hostages, as a way to try to tie the hands of the Colombian government. In that sense, we were human shields. The FARC hoped that by holding hostages in various locations along with or nearby their units, the military wouldn’t attack for fear of killing or injuring hostages. We’d just had close-up evidence that the Colombian military wasn’t going to let the FARC employ that strategy with impunity. We understood that the government couldn’t let the FARC get the upper hand, couldn’t just freeze all their military action. If they stopped bombing FARC targets, they wouldn’t be an effective fighting force and the FARC insurgency would gain more traction.
In the aftermath of the bombings, Tom said something that we all had to agree with. We were on the back side of the power curve as hostages. We were being sacrificed. We had no idea how many casualties they took as a result of that attack, but as a rule, when the FARC took a hit, we would take a hit, too. On this occasion, we were lucky. We hated being bombed, but we took satisfaction in knowing that the FARC had incurred damages and were on the losing side of this; even though it nearly cost us our lives, it was cause for celebration. We also hated the idea that simply by holding us as hostages, the FARC could claim some sort of victory. As hostages or prisoners, there wasn’t a lot that we could directly do to defeat the FARC ourselves. There were things we could do in small ways—like not believing any of their Marxist propaganda bullshit and by conducting ourselves in ways that countered their opinion of us as imperialist pigs.
In the end, we chalked this one up as a victory—one that scared the bejesus out of us and pissed us off—but a victory nonetheless. Winning in captivity took on a new dimension, and understanding that was crucial to our adjustment.
MARC
Three days after the bombing raid, the Frenchman told us to pack our stuff. We were moving out. With the Frenchman’s request for our civilian clothes sizes still fresh in our minds, we figured our release was at hand. We’d been held captive for approximately thirteen weeks, and we’d crashed on the thirteenth of February. I wasn’t superstitious but noticed the coincidence in my journal. Keith had been saying that he wanted to be home for Kyle’s birthday on May 20, and as we gathered our things together Tom said to him, “It looks like you’re going to make that birthday celebration after all. Maybe a couple of days late, but close enough, considering.”
We had only forty-five minutes to pack. While at the New Camp, we’d been given a few more personal items—flashlights whose lenses we had to shroud with leaves to keep them from being too bright and working as signal devices, a nylon tent top, and all our toiletries and soap. We stowed our entire lives in the new backpacks we’d been issued. We marched out, retracing on foot the route we’d taken after we’d first arrived following the twenty-four-day march. We walked past the larger compound and saw Sombra sitting in a truck. We all hoped that, as bad a driver as Sombra was, he was taking us to some point where we’d be released. He looked at us and said, “Guys, you have to step in the same footprints as you cross this road. We can’t leave too many tracks.”
With that in mind, we marched off into the jungle. We were in a column of about forty guerrillas and we noticed their livestock was with them. Upon seeing the animals, we all realized that if we were being marched out with that many FARC and all of their supplies including livestock, the likelihood of our being led to a release point was not good at all. We spent that night sleeping on black plastic on the ground with our new tent tops suspended over us on short sticks. When we woke up in the morning I heard Tom and Keith talking and laughing.
“Would you look at that, Marc?” Tom said. He pointed to where Keith had been lying a few seconds before.
“Oh my God.” I stared down at the ground and saw that overnight, a swarm of termites had invaded Keith’s space—so many in fact that when Keith stood up, he left an empty space in the shape of his body with the rest of the surrounding ground covered in termites, the mere sight of which caused us to start laughing.
As it turned out, we all were going to need a sense of humor because we spent several weeks living in a dank, foggy mist. We’d been at this temporary camp for several days when the Frenchman came to speak with Tom. They walked off to one side, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I saw Tom’s shoulders slump and he raised his hands as if pleading, so I knew the news was not good. At first I thought we were in trouble for talking, but when Tom came and told us what was really going on, I was devastated. Orders had come in that we were to be placed in chains.
Being locked in the boxes at Monkey Village and the New Camp was horrible. Being told not to speak to one anoth
er was worse. Now the thought of having chains around our necks full time was an unimaginable blow to our new and fragile resolve to get through this experience. Our chains weren’t there yet, so in place of them the FARC used polyester cord. They fashioned a kind of harness that fit around our shoulders and then tied a choker knot on the loop that went around our necks. If they needed to, they could pull on the end of the cord to choke us. The first time that harness was placed on me, I had to just shut my eyes and pray to keep myself from violently shuddering and vomiting. To be treated like a dog or other animal was bad enough, but to have the FARC tell us that this was for our own good, that the Colombian military was around and would try to kill us, so we needed to be controlled better, and all that other shit just angered me even more.
With the introduction of these restraints, things had gone from brutal to inhumane. Sleeping on the ground with just one or two threadbare cotton sheets to keep us “warm,” a sheet of black plastic as a mattress, a bug net to keep the insects off of us, and a nylon tent top as the roof over our heads was barely tolerable. But to be tied up? After the first day of being tied while marching, we learned that it was going to be our life for a while. Eventually we stopped marching. We simply rough-camped in the bush. We didn’t make a clearing, we didn’t build any platform beds or any structures, we made do in the mud. Worse, our harnesses stayed on and the ends were tied off to a tree or bush or post. As a result, we spent most of our time in what passed for our beds, lying beneath our nylon camouflaged tent tops. The only time we were outside we sat in the rain tied to a post. Any thoughts of being released were buried in the mud along with everything we had to our names.
As much as we tried to keep to our routines, and stay positive, it simply wasn’t possible. Our nerves were frayed and now, without any real physical activity to speak of to help us blow off steam—Tom couldn’t walk his laps, I couldn’t spend hours cleaning things—we took out some of our frustration on one another. None of us was surprised by this. We had been together with very few exceptions from mid-February to May. I defy anyone to get along 100 percent of the time with anyone—not your wife, your twin sister or brother, your best friend—for that amount of time without there being some tension between you. Take three people who were, essentially, not strangers but coworkers, and put them in the situation we were in and under the conditions we existed in and see what happens.