by Gary Brozek
I told Botero about the diagram of my house that I drew on page thirteen of my journal and how each morning and each night I went into each room and said something to each of my family members as they went about their days in those rooms. If I didn’t survive, I wanted them to have a record of something that I did to keep them close to me, to know how they helped me keep going when things were very, very tough.
As much as I was guarded about the responses I gave Botero, it was difficult to factor in every part of the equation when answering his questions. We had so many different perspectives to consider. Ultimately, I hoped that two messages were clear: I wanted to live. I wanted to be back with my family. When it came time for me to address them directly in the video, I was glad that I had decided not to prepare any remarks. I wanted to speak from the heart, and when talking about them earlier in the Q&A session, I’d choked up quite a bit. Keith and Tom were always there to put a hand on my arm or around my shoulders, but I didn’t want them to have to do that. I wanted to do what my mother had said—to be strong. My mother’s words still hung in the air around me. I wanted to tell my mother how proud I was of her. I didn’t know how she did it, how she managed to record that video and get it into the right hands so that I could see it. The fact that her voice had penetrated that thick, humid, gloomy jungle amazed me and awed me.
In part, what I said was this:
“Mom, I got your message and I thank you for doing what you had to do to get that message to me. I love you, too. I want you to know that I am being strong. I’m not being hurt or tortured. I’m just waiting to come home.
“Shane. I love you. I’ve been waiting to tell you that I think about you every day. Just wait for me, baby.
“Joey, Cody, Destiney. I love you guys. I’m just waiting to come home. Just wait for me. I’m waiting to get back to you. I love you.
“That’s it.”
TOM
For nearly all of our captivity, I had been hoping to get news of any kind. For a while I had been saying that we had all been taken out of the information age and pushed back into the Stone Age. When we finally learned some news, it was nearly all bad. Learning that our country was at war with another group of terrorists was the best thing we’d heard. I didn’t want any Americans to die, but knowing that we were fighting against a regime that had done so much damage to the very people it was supposed to protect and had harbored terrorists, it was a necessary sacrifice. Given that we were being held by guerrillas had only hardened my stance against wiping out anyone who denied the rights and liberties of others.
When the POL activity was over, I had a chance to analyze everything that happened. I was pleased that we had had an opportunity to communicate messages to our families. I was glad that we’d gotten some reading materials and learned a few things about the outside world. I was hopeful, but as always, that hope had come with the caveat of bad news.
Death was very much on all our minds. I’d wanted to break out of the isolation we’d all been experiencing, but learning about the deaths of others was not what I had been hoping for. Receiving confirmation of Tommy J’s death was tough enough, but the additional deaths of Ralph, Tommy Schmidt, and Butch were bad. I’d been around long enough to know pilots and crew members who had died in aircraft accidents. That potential threat was always a part of the job, but this was the first time I’d experienced other people’s loss of life due to them trying to help me. That didn’t sit well with any of us. The irony that we were being videotaped to prove we were alive, only to learn of other people’s deaths, was a bitter pill to swallow. Add in the fact that someone whose intentions you suspected had been sticking a camera in your face to capture your reaction, and this hard situation became exponentially more difficult.
I didn’t want my family to worry about me, and who knew what Botero planned to do with the image of me learning that good friends had died. I sensed almost immediately that Botero or others would use our words to advance their agenda and set up another opportunity to propagandize. Weighing that knowledge against our desire to reassure our families created a lot of anxiety in us all.
After it was said and done, I also wasn’t certain that our POL would even reach our families. We’d been led to believe that an international journalist was going to be there, and instead this Colombian showed up. Botero didn’t have any credentials. He didn’t have a film crew with him. As far as we knew, he could have been some guy the FARC used to act as a journalist. Botero had told us that two journalists in Los Angeles were working to track down our families so that they could be provided with our messages, but that wasn’t the most precise answer to our questions about how the video would be used. Maybe they wanted to do the proof of life just to calm us all down, to make us think that our release was near. We all knew that happy prisoners were easier to control.
My skepticism was reinforced when the taping was wrapped up and we were waiting to return to our bunk room. I found a piece of paper on the floor. I looked it over and saw that it was a letter from a hostage—not one of of us—and it was addressed to his family. I didn’t feel comfortable reading it, so I didn’t, but it made me angry to think that one of the many FARC upper-echelon guys who’d been there with us, or even Botero, had likely failed to deliver on a promise to another prisoner. That could easily have been a letter from me to Mariana.
I was proud of us and how we’d conducted ourselves throughout the day. We’d refuted every one of their bogus claims about what our mission had been. Whenever any of us got choked by emotion, the others stepped up and offered support and comfort. We all spoke from the heart and stuck to our plan to be as reassuring as possible. I had been given a pair of reading glasses to use temporarily. I made it appear as though I’d been administered a miracle cure. I could now read, whereas before I was nearly blind. I hoped the FARC got the message via word and action. I needed glasses.
When it came time for us to speak to our families, I tried to be as thoughtful and deliberate as I could. I was glad that I’d been able to hear Keith’s words. He said a lot of what I wanted to say, particularly when he was asked what he missed. He was pretty choked up, and seeing him that way got to me.
“I’m kind of a hard-ass. I apologize,” he’d said in his statement. “The two things that get me in the heart are my two children and my fiancée. When I feel sometimes like not going on, I think in my mind of my eleven-year-old son, Kyle—I’m sorry I missed your birthday—and my fourteen-year-old daughter, Lauren, and Malia, my fiancée. And I think of what they’d want me to do. And I think what they’d most want me to do is to come home.”
Keith went on to talk about his mother dying when he was fourteen and how bad he felt about not being there for his family. I was forty-three years old when I had my son, Tommy, with Mariana. The thought of him having to grow up without a father was too much to bear. I wasn’t sure why, but he and I had an incredible bond. From the moment he was out of the womb, he was a daddy’s boy. I reveled in our special connection but worried about how he was doing in my absence. My stepson, Santiago, was old enough that I knew that he’d be okay. The littlest ones always suffered the most. Like Keith, I’d also lost my mother when I was a teen. I knew something about grieving and getting on. I, too, could identify with Keith’s statements to his kids during his proof of life:
“If I can come home, that’s great. If not, keep living. Keep your chin up. Keep going.” Keith’s twins had to weigh heavily on his mind.
When it was my turn, I expressed similar sentiments. I stuck with the plan of letting my family know that I was in good shape physically and that I was being treated well. I let my wife know that I loved her and missed her. I told Tommy and my stepson, Santiago, that I would be back and was eager to see them. Everything I said felt anticlimactic. I was so burned out mentally that I wanted to keep things brief and to the point. I hoped that whatever images of me they saw would convey what I was feeling. Seeing was believing; if it was proof that I was still alive that the FARC wanted m
e to provide, then that was what I was going to give them—little more. The less the FARC had to use to help them, the better.
Making sense was not the order of the day, obviously, and at times I struggled with accomplishing that simple task. Like Marc, I had an epic headache that day. On one of the breaks, I was given some ibuprofen, but that didn’t help. The fan in the room was supposed to cool the room but it just pushed the stale air around, buzzing incessantly until it was in my head.
That night, as I replayed the day’s events over in my head, I wished that I’d had a chance to clarify at least one point. When I was asked about my response to the word rescue, I wanted to make a distinction clear. I was afraid that after everything I’d seen that day, the message would get muddled. I wanted to be able to come out and say clearly that while I thought there was a danger to a rescue attempt, my feelings only applied to a Colombian military rescue. In my mind, when I heard the word rescue I thought of freedom and America. When I heard the word rescate I thought of massacre and death. At that point, I didn’t really trust that the Colombian military had sufficient training in hostage rescue operations. I couldn’t really say all that on the video since by saying it, I would have frightened my wife and kids. I knew that the U.S. military had far more experience in hostage rescue operations, had far more advanced intelligence systems, weaponry, and tactics to rescue us. I didn’t want to leave whoever saw Botero’s video with the impression that we were against being rescued. Lying there that night in our little room propped up on our sawhorse bed, I wondered about just how flimsy the whole event had really been.
The boat ride back to our previous camp was uneventful. Every one seemed much more relaxed. We didn’t have our blindfolds on for as much of the ride as we did on the way to the POL. We’d spent so much time rehashing everything we’d heard and learned that Marc, Keith, and I didn’t do a whole lot of talking, other than to point out some of the wildlife we spotted. I was particularly interested in the caimans after living in Florida for a while and hearing all kinds of stories about what pests gators could be. It felt good to be on the water and moving, though if I had my choice, I would have preferred to have been on a plane bound for home and not back to my tent top and a muddy patch of jungle.
When we arrived back at our camp, the change in attitude among our guards was noticeable. Everyone seemed a lot more jovial. The pressure was off, I suppose. Even the most serious guards, the ones who never smiled, waved at us and grinned as if we were movie stars. They all took pleasure in knowing that in even the smallest way, by being the guy who locked us up at night, for example, they’d contributed to the FARC’s success. That humanized them a bit—people everywhere like to attach themselves to a success regardless of how much they really contributed. Only when I reminded myself that these people who were holding us hostage had killed some of my friends did I resent our reception. Despite what Mono JoJoy contended, when it came down to it, the FARC were primarily killers.
With just a few more hours of separation from the event, I was able to process the POL experience in different ways. I was glad for the Colin Powell news, and I was glad that I’d heard some of the FARC discussing a possible UN intervention. How reasonable either of those two possibilities sounded to me varied by the hour. My interpretation of the events shifted with the sun, and I knew I wasn’t going to find lasting relief or true comfort. At that moment I chose to believe that these were positive signs.
The morning after we returned to what we called the Second Mud Camp, we all took a chance that our imposed silence was over. We gathered outside my hooch. With more time since the POL, our points of view had clarified.
“The thing I can’t get out of my mind is those other hostages being killed,” Marc said. “Can you imagine that? You hear a helo and the next thing you know you’re rounded up and shot dead like a dog?”
“We’ve got to be careful of helos. You’ve seen it before, though. We can pick up on them being in the area before these guys.” Keith reminded me that we did have that distinct advantage.
“Even a few minutes of head start are going to make a big difference,” I told Marc.
“Tom’s exactly right. If the execution order comes, we want to be as far away or in the best defensive position we can be in. The threat level has been upped, that’s for sure,” Keith said.
“I’m going to need your help a bit with this, guys,” I said. Marc and Keith nodded. They knew that after years of flying and being around running engines and the high-pitched wind noise, my hearing wasn’t as acute as theirs.
The proof of life had made one thing clear: In the event of a rescue, we needed to get ourselves as far away from the FARC as possible so they couldn’t gun us down. Having the three of us as early-warning devices—Keith had brought Marc up to speed so that he could detect the difference between a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter and a Huey UH-1 by this time—was a small but significant victory over the FARC, one of the few advantages we were able to hold over them. Most of them had never been airborne, so their ability to perform the kind of instant threat analysis that we were able to do was severely compromised. If any attack or rescue attempt came, we’d at least have a couple minutes head start on the FARC. It wasn’t much, but in what could potentially be a game of seconds, it was an edge. Gradually they learned that if the three of us had our eyes or our ears focused skyward, they should come to us and ask what was literally “up.” To maintain our control, we would respond by telling them things that suited our needs, and they never knew the difference between what was real and what we fabricated.
Since our arrival at the Second Mud Camp, the skies had been clear of aircraft. That unsettled us a bit. We liked the idea of aircraft being above us—especially the planes. Planes made us feel comfortable; their presence meant that someone was up there watching us or looking for us. We knew that the “they” up there weren’t the FARC. A week or so after the proof of life, as July turned into August, the planes returned. We hoped their arrival had something to do with the proof-of-life messages being delivered. In particular, we had one that did large orbits around us. We couldn’t ID it confidently, but we knew it was up there at high altitude, circling around our position at what seemed to be thirty-minute intervals. Pre–and post–proof of life, the equation was the same: Planes were good and helos were bad. For most of the time in the Second Mud Camp, the helos were not nearby.
That didn’t mean we stopped jumping out of our hooches at the first indication of air activity. I’d see the guerrillas standing in the clearing with their ears cocked looking a little bit like a couple of hunting dogs on point. We established an informal kind of threat-level assessment. If the Fantasmas—the gunships—were in the immediate area, we knew to get out of our hooches and to be prepared to run. If it was a fixed-wing intel bird, like our high-flying friend, we could relax.
Perhaps the most positive immediate impact of the POL was that it put an end to the rules regarding our communal silence. During the POL, we asked to be allowed to speak again, and while Ferney never made an official proclamation, the silence and separation rules were eased and then eliminated. The guards no longer harassed us to stop speaking, and even began to engage us in conversation more. The same was true of our restraints. We still had to wear them, but we no longer had to tie ourselves to a branch.
Freer to move about and to speak to one another, we spent a lot of our time at the Second Mud Camp obtaining an oftentimes painful education in botany, ornithology, and entomology. We were constantly being bitten by something. If it wasn’t the tábanos (horseflies), monta blancas (gnatlike pests), jejenes (no-see-ums with a vicious bite), it was the tarantulas and scorpions and their ant foot soldiers, the yanaves or congas. We began to refer to getting up in the night to urinate as Russian roulette. You never knew what was going to be in your boots when you put them on in the dark. In addition, wasps were a constant threat, and the worst was when you were being attacked and fled the path. If you lost your balance and put your hand out to
steady yourself on a tree trunk, you had better hope you didn’t have the misfortune of coming in contact with the barras santas (holy bar) tree and the stinging ants of the same name. Holy shit would have been a better name for that pair of irritants, whose stings were like electric shocks.
I would not have earned a very good grade in ornithology. The toucans, parrots, and macaws kept their distance, so it was difficult to enjoy them in detail. Marc’s descriptions and his ability to mimic all three species’ calls were amazing, right down to the clicking of their beaks as they closed their mouths at the end of the call. As sad as the toucan’s call was, the howler monkey and another type whose name we didn’t know made the toucan seem almost pleasant. If we didn’t know any better, we would have sworn that sumo wrestlers were sparring outside our camp.
Very few of the FARC took any interest in the natural world. It seemed as if they divided everything into opposing categories: edible/inedible, poisonous/not poisonous, very dangerous/deadly. Given their circumstances, those seemed to be important distinctions to make. Though by the time we left the Second Mud Camp, we had been with the FARC for nearly nine months, we were still amazed by some of their behaviors. When eating rice and beans, we sometimes offered them a spoon. They would shake their heads and continue to eat by hand. When they spouted their propaganda and told us that by taking over the country they would end corruption, we asked them how they could do that when they were stealing from one another all the time? Their version of a better Colombia was everyone having an apartment and a television. When we asked them how they would bring that about, what specific actions they would take, they fell silent.
Being able to talk again and becoming more savvy captives coincided. Having the reading materials we’d received at the POL certainly helped. We read and reread all that we had. We had also taken the copy of John Grisham’s The Street Lawyer with us as a gift from Botero. That was the only place, besides in our conversations with one another, that we were able to find any semblance of logic, anything that resembled the world that we had left behind, any kind of people with whom we could relate. Keith and Marc passed the book back and forth to devour over the course of the first few days we had it. Without reading glasses, I couldn’t read, so Keith and Marc took turns reading to me. Almost as soon as we’d finished the book, we started to read it again. It provided a nice escape from jungle life and we were able to immerse ourselves temporarily in the world of a high-powered Washington, D.C., law firm. We enjoyed reading about Michael Brock’s decision to drop out of the fast lane and work to help those with little or no money. I think we were all glad to add Michael Brock to our short list of people who could reason clearly, communicate effectively, and be trusted to do the right thing—even if he was a lawyer.