by Gary Brozek
This was just one of several instances we witnessed when the underlying tension between Milton and the guards started to boil to the surface. There was a definite crack being exposed and we moved to exploit it as best we could. Like us, a number of the FARC saw Milton for what he was—a simpleton and a petty tyrant. He wasn’t the only one obsessed with hunting, but he was the only one who seemed to think that the fewer supplies we had, the better. Every now and then the Front commander Efren would show up to find out what our group needed. Milton would reply, “Nothing.” When he did that we could see the low-level guys beginning to fume. There was a laundry list of necessities and extras they would have loved to have. Maybe Milton thought that traveling light was a good thing because the heat on us meant we were going to be on the move a lot. What he didn’t realize, or didn’t seem to care about, was that an army travels on its stomach. If he had kept his guys happy and better fed and outfitted, they would have been more loyal to him.
That said, there was never the potential for mass mutiny, but there were several occasions when a guerrilla opened up and said something that explicitly revealed the level of discontent among the ranks. At first, those complaints were just general remarks. One guerrilla explained his feelings by tapping his foot and saying, “Milton commands with his foot and not his head.” He meant that two ways: First, Milton had his boot up his guys’ asses all the time. He was a strict but random disciplinarian who played big-time favorites. That upset his guys more than anything else. Second, all these marches and temporary camps were getting to them. Rather than think strategically, Milton just seemed to have them and us running around all over. There may have been a strategy, but they couldn’t see it; and given the fact that he was not renowned for his intelligence, chances were he couldn’t see it, either. Grunts in every outfit feel like they’re not being told what is going on and the brass has no clue. If you’re a good leader and your guys respect and trust you, then that’s not much of an issue. There will always be a few malcontents no matter what. But as far as we could tell, there was widespread questioning of purpose and a dislike for this duty. On the forty-day jaunt after Caribe, we saw that the guerrillas didn’t like the forced marches any more than we did. Now that seed of discontent had blossomed.
Like all the rest of the older FARC leaders, Milton had a young woman as his partner. Natalia was a short and squat girl who seemed to do little except tend to Milton’s needs. A number of times guards grumbled to us and we overhead them complaining to one another: Natalia gets the best shampoo, candy, and clothes. Natalia does none of the work. She was the laziest. She got the best hours for guard duty. What the FARC grunts didn’t seem to understand—but what we picked up on immediately—was that the guy who was officially the number two man in these camps really wasn’t. It was always the leader’s woman who unofficially assumed the role. She was the one who handled most of the communications with the radio; she was the one who really managed the day-to-day operations of the camp’s cooking and provisioning. She had people under her, the economista, who did the work supplying the kitchen, and the racionista, who was in charge of distributing the food. Natalia oversaw those positions, and if nobody had respect for the boss, then they weren’t going to have respect for the boss’s girlfriend. Natalia didn’t help her cause by being a bitch with a nasty tongue and an I’m-cool-and-you’re-not attitude.
There were definite cliques among the guerrillas. Our “friendly” guards—the Plumber, Mono, and Alfonso—also had women and they were the power couples out there. At some points, morale deteriorated among the FARC to the point that those three talked openly with us about their plan to kill Natalia. They wanted to drown her and say that either she was bathing and drowned or that she wandered off and a big cat must have gotten her. As appalled as we were by the idea of murder (my one-less-is-a-good-thing principle still held even though I was appalled), we couldn’t believe that they were willing to tell us about it. They finally settled on a plan to drag her off to a deep part of the river and tie her up and put stones around her to keep her body from floating to the surface. We knew that the FARC had little regard for human life, and this murder plot just reinforced that idea in capital letters and underlined it.
More important, we also knew that we could exploit this rift to our advantage and we did. Sometimes, however, we did set aside strategic advantages in the name of humanity. Eliécer was one such case.
One day, he was sitting nearby on guard duty and he said to us: “You know, you guys, I’m not in agreement with this.”
We looked at him and said, “What?,” wondering if he was telling us ahead of time about some decision that had been handed down regarding our fate. Were we going to be shot or something?
He dug at the ground with the heel of his boot.
“I don’t believe that we should take hostages. I know this is wrong. I’m sorry. A number of the other guys, they also don’t believe in kidnapping, but there’s nothing any of us can do about it. We have no choice. If we dissent or do anything to oppose the orders from above, we’ll be killed.”
We paused for a moment to chew on his words. While guards often made passing remarks about not liking our imprisonment, they very rarely seemed as genuine as Eliécer. He didn’t say it, but we understood this much as well: He was willing to do whatever he could to help us as long as it didn’t get him killed or in trouble.
Eliécer broke the silence.
“Keith, I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Marc and I looked at each other to confirm that we were thinking the same thing. This guy wasn’t talking about deserting; he was talking about offing himself. Here was one of the only decent humans in this place and he was talking about killing himself. That was what the FARC did to its own, that was its gift to its members. If you had a conscience, it seemed your only option out of the madness was to end it all. Eliécer had a strong enough sense of self to know that what they were doing was wrong. He recognized that he was being abused and asked to do inhumane things to others. Unfortunately for him, he was also smart enough to realize that there were few choices left for him. He’d been trapped for so long, he could no longer fathom the idea of freedom. What made things worse was that he’d probably never even known it to begin with. He was essentially a slave, and the fact that he’d realized this made his life that much harder.
My one-less-is-a-good-thing rule was completely out the window at that point. I walked to the fence.
“What are you talking about? Look at us. I mean, look at our future and what it holds for us. You’ll never see us want to give up living.”
Hearing yourself saying words out loud that you didn’t even want to think was tough—that he had a better chance of getting out of there than we did, that he just had to make the choice to go. We were worried about him, and for the next few nights we listened to hear if he was in a bad way. A few days later, he was on duty to bring us our morning coffee and food. He looked like shit. His eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed like he’d been on a two-day alcohol bender, and the bags under his eyes seemed big enough to pull his entire body down.
The next time we got a chance to speak, he said a lot of the same things. He was tired of being worked like a dog. He just wanted to be released or sent to a farm where he could do work that didn’t kill him. He just couldn’t take it anymore. For the rest of our stay there, it went like that. With each day that passed, we worried even more about the guy. He didn’t get much better, but he was at least able to keep slogging away. I hoped he would be able to hold out until some other option presented itself.
Another guy whom we connected with over Milton’s oppressiveness was Cereal Boy. He was one of the more educated guys out there. He could read and write and he taught some of the others the same skills. Of all the FARC we dealt with, he was the most inquisitive. One morning he was on guard duty and sat reading a Spanish-language magazine called Most Interesting. He started asking us about the U.S. space program and in particular about the Apollo m
issions. As we talked, it came out that he didn’t believe that the U.S. had sent men to the moon. I had been raised in South Florida and Tom lived near Cape Canaveral. We tried to explain to Cereal Boy what a rocket was, how large the ones used for moon missions were, what kind of fuel they used as a propellant, how satellites worked and helped to transmit signals, as well as all the things you could see at the museum there. I told him that I’d seen actual rocks from the moon, and he just stared at me in disbelief, saying I couldn’t have.
Marc, Tom, and I must have talked for close to an hour, with all three of us trying to get him to understand the basic ideas behind the space program. He was completely blown away. To his credit, he was trying to learn. He loved listening to the radio and kept a notebook with him and took notes all the time. He liked history and would write down all kinds of dates and trivia. He would come up to us and ask questions like, “Is it true Theodore Roosevelt wrote a book on naval history when he was in college?” or “Did you know John F. Kennedy swam twice a day in a pool in the White House?”
I’d try to think of topics related to his questions, and it was good for me to exercise my brain in that way. Trying to remember other details and facts was like lifting mental weights. We were talking about diplomacy one day, and thinking of his question about Roosevelt, I told him about America’s Great White Fleet. I detailed the story of how Roosevelt issued an order sending a United States Navy battle fleet—four battleships and their escorts—around the world. Their hulls were painted white to show our neutrality, but it also demonstrated to everyone our growing American military power and blue-water navy capability. Roosevelt wanted to let other nations know that we would stay out of their business, but if someone crossed a line, we could be there.
With this story, the class switched from history to current events, as Cereal Boy started talking about how we were interventionists. Just as it was easier for him to say we didn’t go to the moon, it was easier for him to believe what had been pumped into his head by the FARC. I tried to explain to him that the world was a lot more complicated than that, and while I couldn’t undo all of the FARC’s hard work with my facts, at least Cereal Boy was willing to acknowledge a point of view that was different from the FARC’s. That was more than you could say for most of our guards.
One reason why some of the guerrillas felt more comfortable than ever before in talking to us was that we were farther away from their camp than normal. A fairly steep little ravine separated us—it was about fourteen feet deep and the FARC had to build a small log bridge to span it. We were a few hundred yards away from them, so you really had to look long and hard to see into our camp and vice versa. This was just another example of Milton’s stupidity and the FARC’s overall laziness and lack of oversight.
In spite of the distance, our growing associations with the guards didn’t go unnoticed by Milton himself. A few months into our stay at this camp—what we called the Exercise Camp—Mono came up to me and said, “I just want you to know that if I ever said anything bad about you, I did it because I had to.”
With a little bit of information from the other guards, we were able to figure out that Milton had held a meeting with his crew to discuss the prisoner situation. He accused some of his guys of respecting us more than they did him. We knew that a small number of them did and that even those who didn’t respect us more had little respect for their leader. In order to cover their asses, these guys had to say bad things about us in the meeting. Some of our camp intel channels closed up for a bit, but at least no one ratted us out about the radio the Plumber had given us back at the original birdcage. They all seemed to be happy to believe that the thick six-gauge wire we had running around our beds, out the roof of our hooch, and around our little “yard” was really just clothesline—red, insulated copper-wire clothesline.
Milton’s official number two was Rogelio, who was also disliked by the other guards and whom the three of us decided was just nuts. One of the more volatile personalities we had to contend with, Rogelio was the racionista, so if you wanted anything, you had to ask him for it. There was no pattern to his behavior and no reliable pattern of logic for which requests he would grant and which he would deny. One week you might ask him if it was possible to have more noodles at dinner and you’d be met with the response: “No. Starve. I don’t care.” The next day a cow might have been slaughtered, and before lunchtime, Rogelio would bring you big steaks that he’d cooked himself.
If the fact that he acted bat-shit crazy most of the time wasn’t enough, he was also hard to communicate with in general. He talked about 250 words a minute in the most garbled Spanish any of us had ever heard and he had the annoying habit of sucking his teeth all the time. Combine the three—talking way too fast, being a mush mouth, and sucking his teeth—and you’ve got somebody who’s hard to talk to in any language. Throw into that mix eyes like a windup toy dog and a high-pitched screech of a laugh and you’ve got one seriously messed-up dude to deal with.
Marc and Tom would split every time Rogelio came around, so it was left to me to deal with him. I figured the guy was the number two, he was the one who provided us with whatever it was we needed, so it was worth putting up with him. In a lot of ways, it was like being nice to the weird kid in school and letting him sit at your lunch table one time.
In the aftermath of his crackdown on the guards for talking to us, Milton instituted a policy whereby a guard had to escort us to wherever we wanted to go outside of our enclosure—including to the bathroom trenches. Nobody liked the policy, including the FARC. It meant that one of them had to trek the couple of hundred yards to their camp and back. Rogelio was the one most responsible for us, so he was always nearby whenever we had to answer one of nature’s calls.
It wasn’t anyone’s ideal, but we tolerated it. Just one more bit of insanity that we had to put up with if we wanted to keep our security level status quo. We’d made too many inroads to have everything shut down completely, so we did what we could to avoid kicking up too much dust.
MARC
After we left the barbed-wire birdcage and were heading toward our current camp, we had to walk along another of the winding mountain roads that the FARC had gouged into the countryside. All along this particular road, we saw junk scattered at various intervals. Most of the piles had been there for quite a while—they were dust-covered and anything organic had rotted and decayed. Down below the piles the jungle thickened and the paths that led into that particular section of vegetation and trees disappeared in the dense foliage.
Tom named this particular route the Road of Misery. He pointed out that each pile was likely left from a FARC camp that once held hostages like us. Or it was from a drug lab. Or kidnap victims had been held there just before Mono or someone like him ended those captives’ lives. It was hard not to feel sad, especially when we thought of the hundreds and hundreds of hostages in Colombia. We knew we weren’t the only ones on the march on that day or at that hour. It was a sobering thought, but it also made us want to do whatever we could to be sure that we didn’t end up discarded and mourned.
As we’d shown during the helo incidents in Caribe and at the birdcage, if we were going to escape the FARC or survive a rescue and the FARC’s deadly response to it, we had to have the mental and physical strength to execute our own plan for surviving. Planning was the one aspect of escape and survival that we felt confident of. We knew that circumstances and the way other people responded to them were for the most part out of our control. What we could control, and what we needed to have command of, was our minds and bodies. We needed the physical strength to be able to move quickly and possibly defend ourselves. We never considered overpowering the guards as a group, but if we were in a situation in which we had to engage one of them in order to escape or avoid execution, it was best to be prepared. Also, if we did manage to escape on our own or in the middle of a rescue, we would have to survive in the jungle and be as strong as possible physically to get to someplace where we could then b
e rescued.
With this in mind, we branded our current camp the Exercise Camp. When we arrived there, we were in better shape than we had been immediately after the forty-day march, but that wasn’t saying much. We had been so depleted during that bit of hell that even the relatively small amount of exercise we were able to do in the barbed-wire cage had improved our fitness level. We were nowhere near where we wanted to be or needed to be.
To compensate, we set up our own little jungle gym—carrying over some of the basic ideas we’d had at the barbed-wire cage. Creating a pull-up bar was always the easiest task. All we needed was a piece of wood long enough to span two trees with low branches. We could also put a branch between two parts of the hooch that would support our weight. With the help of guards who were willing to give us the tools and supplies we needed, we also built a double-step that we could walk or run up and down on to improve our cardiovascular fitness. Milton was going nutty complaining about us wearing a path that could be detected, so our walking regimen had to be curtailed a little bit. The stepper was a tougher workout, and Tom and I both had knee pain, so stairs weren’t the best thing for us—at least at the beginning.
I found that the more I used the stepper and the stronger the muscles in my legs became, the less my knees hurt. I also used the physical training as a way to give structure to the day, to pass some time, and to relieve stress. We all talked about how after exercise we experienced the rush of endorphins that some people refer to as the runner’s high.