by Gary Brozek
The next sound I heard was the voice of one of the young kids. He was screaming.
“¡Duber se mató! ¡Duber se mató!”
We couldn’t believe that one of those young kids had shot himself. The three of them were the picture of innocence, or at least as innocent as a FARC guerrilla could be. Over all the shouting, we heard the Plumber, who was on guard duty, asking, “Who, who?” Then we heard the words that we’d been dreading for almost a year:
“¡Eliécer se mató! ¡Eliécer se mató!”
My heart jumped into my throat. I knew immediately that Eliécer had made good on the suicide he’d threatened so many months before.
The guerrillas assembled and we were told to remain where we were. After a few minutes of conversation, we heard the FARC moving around. I heard the sound of a single spade turning up the dirt and thumping it on the ground just a few yards from where we lay. This quiet rhythm went on until it was interrupted by something heavy being dragged out of the hooch next to ours.
I lay there thinking of Eliécer and how just a few hours before, he’d fed us coconut. Cutting up the coconut for us was a simple gesture, but it demonstrated the kindness we’d come to know in Eliécer. As every one of his fellow FARC members was enjoying their food, reveling in the meal, he was thinking that we were captives, we were trapped. We were unable to enjoy the food without the right tools. The coconut had been exactly the kind of offering that we expected from him.
Just a few months before this, Eliécer had come to us shortly after midnight on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, our third in captivity. All of us had our thoughts very much on family and friends and the enormous gulf between us and them. Just as he had done the year before, Eliécer was the only one of the FARC to reach across the darkness to shake our hands and give us his best wishes.
The shoveling stopped for just a moment and we heard a heavy thump as Eliécer’s body was tossed into his shallow grave. Then the shoveling continued, an unbroken heartbeat that matched our own.
The next morning, we moved out. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to spend standing over the patch of ground that Milton’s men had covered over with leaves and branches so that it wouldn’t betray our having been there. It didn’t matter to me that they did that; I knew that Eliécer had been there. I was wearing a shirt that he’d literally given me off his back. My legs were powered by the food that he’d given me the night before, just as he had shared his meager supplies with us so many other times. That morning, I wished I knew his real name. I told myself that if I had the chance when we got back home, I would contact his family. I wanted them to know that their son, their brother, their friend, had found himself taking part in some fucked-up shit, but his generosity of spirit and human kindness were never casualties. Weeks before, I’d told Marc and Tom that when we were free, if I got the chance, I’d figure out some way to get Eliécer out of Colombia. I’d have been happy to have that big old country boy with the shit-eating grin come and live with me. I’d take real pleasure in breaking bread with him, sharing a cold one, or pouring him a stiff shot of whatever. I knew plenty of other folks who would have welcomed him and enjoyed being around such a good-hearted person.
As we walked away from that camp, I was about as broken down as I’d been in captivity. I had a lump the size of a fist squeezing my throat, and a coal-furnace fire heating my anger. I could live with the sad, but I had to get rid of the angry. It was easier than I thought. I just thought of Eliécer and all he’d done for the three of us. He had died, but what he represented marched on with us. We all renewed the vow we’d made early on. No matter what the FARC threw at us, we’d never stoop to their level. We were tested that very same day when Milton came up to tell us that he’d lost one of his guys, telling us Eliécer’s pistol accidentally discharged while he was cleaning it at two in the morning in the pitch black of a jungle night.
Darkness comes in many forms, and what shadowed Eliécer, what finally chased him over the edge, I’ll never know. Perhaps it all became too much. Perhaps seeing Pidinolo’s kids all lined up and eager just reminded him of how vicious the FARC cycle really was. In the end, though, the reason didn’t matter; all that mattered was the light he had shined for Marc, Tom, and me. Like us, Eliécer had chosen, in life and in death, to do the good hard thing.
TWELVE
Running on Empty
May 2006–September 2006
MARC
Our departure from the Chess Camp in May of 2006 began months of a gypsylike existence, going from temporary camp to temporary camp. With the supply and communication chains still in flux because of Plan Patriota, it was often unclear if there was, in fact, any destination at all.
The longer we wandered aimlessly with Milton, the thinner our supplies got. We nearly ran out of soap completely, and toilet paper became just a memory. To that point, Ernesto’s promise that better days were ahead had proven untrue. We’d become masters of frugality; we were able to make a tube of toothpaste last six months or longer, and whenever we could steal something from the FARC, we didn’t hesitate. They’d taken so much from us that a bit of kitchen soap to bathe with seemed inconsequential. We had hoped that by leaving the mountains and heading into the flatlands, our supplies would increase, but like so many times before, these inflated hopes were grounded by harsh reality. This FARC column was barely managing to scrape by.
Every so often we had mirrors for shaving. The FARC frequently confiscated these because they could be used to signal aircraft, and each time I got a new one, I was shocked to see how much I’d deteriorated. Like Tom and Keith, I’d taken on the sunken-eyed and hollow-cheeked appearance of the destitute. We knew that we weren’t getting enough fruit and vegetables in our diet and calcium was practically nonexistent. Without much calcium and vitamin D, my teeth were weakened to the point that I constantly chipped them. My nails grew brittle as well, and as they grew they were dotted with tiny holes.
We didn’t enjoy the tough times, but we seemed better able to deal with them. One of the things we did to keep ourselves going was talk about what we’d do when we were finally home. I had always had a passionate affair with motorcycles. The night before I left for Colombia to begin my last rotation before the crash, I had taken my bike out for a last ride. The kids were in bed, and I kissed Shane good-bye and took off at about nine-thirty at night. I headed up US 1 and crossed the Seven-Mile Bridge and stopped at Marathon Key. The weather was warm and the breeze felt cool as I whipped along. At that hour, the traffic was relatively light. On my return trip, I decided to open it up a bit. My bike was a Yamaha R-6, what some people refer to as a crotch rocket. While I didn’t blast through the atmosphere and into outer space, I did watch as the speedometer’s readout climbed past 100, then 110, and by the time I backed off the throttle, I’d hit 137. The incredible bladder-tingling sensation of moving that fast, experiencing that kind of freedom, was something I often returned to while slogging through a march or enduring a long day in an enclosure like the barbed-wire cage.
Tom was also into motorcycles. He had a couple of English bikes; a BSA Golden Flash was among his favorites. I’d never heard of BSA bikes. By the time I was riding, the company had gone out of business, but Tom described what the bike looked like and how the old tried-and-true technology of carburetion and magneto-fired ignition could be temperamental but a joy to someone who enjoyed tinkering and diagnosing and repairing almost as much as he liked riding. We endlessly debated what bike we would each buy when we got out—used Honda Rebels, Shadows, or Nighthawks when we were being realistic, and Harley-Davidsons when we were dreaming.
Gradually our talk shifted to a ride the three of us would take—what we called the Freedom Ride. Like our ambitions about what bikes we might ride, the Freedom Ride started out small. We’d tour Florida. We’d take all back roads, and Keith insisted we hit all the mom-and-pop restaurants and every barbecue joint and greasy-spoon diner we could find. Tom talked about his desire to keep it local and have his wife
ride along behind him—just being out and able to throw a leg over a bike anytime he wanted to was freedom enough.
In time, as our liberty and our chances of being released faded, we all expanded our ideas of the Freedom Ride. Forget the cheap bikes, let’s go all-out, maybe pick up some used Harleys and tour the Southeast U.S. As our deprivation increased, and we needed even grander dreams to offset it, we thought we could walk into a Harley-Davidson dealership, tell them our story of being held captive, and get a sweet deal on three brand-spanking-new bikes. We’d hit the road and go coast-to-coast.
Even when we stopped for a five-minute rest and could sense that we were dragging or our spirits were down, one of us would say something like, “I heard about this one road in Tennessee. They call it the Tail of the Dragon. Three hundred and eighteen curves in eleven miles. We’re going to ride that thing.” I would spend the next part of the march there on that road, taking each and every one of those curves. How much we relied on that fantasy and the extent to which we expanded it grew in proportion to the length of time we were held and the degree to which our hope of getting out of there diminished.
When we were in the jungle and supplies were at their lowest, the FARC always seemed to be able to find something to kill and to slaughter. They always served the lousiest cuts of meat right after the kill. They said that meat rots closest to the bone first. In a lot of ways that was true for our mental states during our months of wandering after the Chess Camp. Maybe it was because we were so frequently out of radio contact or maybe it was because the times when we did have access to radios we missed the messages, but we began to despair over the fact that at that point we had been gone for more than three years. In that time, each of us had received fewer than three or four messages from our wives, and in Keith’s case and my case, we’d heard only once from Malia and Shane respectively.
Keith and I both worried and fretted over that. In the vacuum created by an absence of information, all kinds of negative thoughts rushed in. If we looked at things realistically, we understood that the likelihood of them having moved on and met someone else was great. We didn’t like that idea, but we understood. We also understood that as much as we were starving for information from our spouses, they were likely just as torn up knowing little about what had happened to us. Fair or unfair, we thought that with all the responsibilities that had been dumped in their laps as a result of our absence, life in one sense was easier for them—at least their minds were more easily occupied than ours were. They had fewer hours in the day during which they would think about all the what-if scenarios we churned out with assembly-line-like frequency.
For Keith, it was worse, since he had two “families” to worry about. As a father of two toddlers living in Colombia, and two other children in the States, his concerns were spread over continents. I continued to wonder about Ingrid and the other politicals, and hoped that Clara and Emanuel were doing all right.
Just as our motorcycle dreams expanded in a positive direction, our optimism for a return to the family life we’d left behind diminished. Getting back home likely meant discovering that our lives were going to be very different from what they’d been when we left. How altered, and how much worse than what they were before, we couldn’t really know. On the bad days, when even the Freedom Ride couldn’t penetrate our gloom, thoughts of how our lives had been fractured were consuming. I was eventually able to leave those thoughts behind, drown them out in the rush of wind and the high-pitched screaming exhaust note of my mental motorcycle.
In between daydreams and waking nightmares, Ernesto’s promised land of supplies proved perpetually elusive for the FARC. Just about the only thing we had going for us in those blurry months after the Chess Camp was that we were being treated better without Milton overseeing us. At one camp, Ernesto gave us radios. At another temporary camp, he loaned us machetes. The three of us were setting up our coletas, our little tentlike sites to sleep in, when Ernesto handed the large blades to us.
We all looked at them like he’d handed us the keys to a new motorcycle.
“Well, go cut a tree down.” Ernesto put his hands on his hips and shook his head slowly like he couldn’t believe how we were behaving.
We each edged a few feet into the jungle and looked over at him as if asking, “Is it okay that we’re this far away?” Guards were around us and they had their weapons.
Ernesto let out a heavy sigh. “What’s wrong with you guys?” He pointed away from our site, where more promising stake material was growing some thirty or forty yards away. We all walked in that direction, eyeing the guards but still experiencing a thrilling sense, if not of freedom, then of openness.
“Can you believe it?” Keith asked incredulously as we walked farther away from camp with our new blades. “We can’t even walk a few yards now without thinking somebody’s got to give us the okay. Man, this shit creeps up on you.”
Until that point, none of us had realized just how much incarceration had affected us psychologically. We’d come to accept things in this life as “normal” that we’d have never stood for in our other lives. Having someone dictate when we could bathe, when we could eat, where we would go, and when we would start and stop marching had invisibly worked on us. As much as we’d thought about the physical effects of our being held captive, that incident with the machetes served as an important reminder: Like the butchered animals, we would rot from the inside out. We needed to be as vigilant as we could be for any other signs of mental imprisonment.
One psychological effect of captivity that we never experienced was Stockholm syndrome. We all knew what it was—when a prisoner begins to identify and sympathize with either the individuals holding him or her captive or their cause. By being aware of what it was, we were able to fight off its possible effects. In reality, the possibility of us experiencing anything like Stockholm syndrome was remote because the FARC treated us so horribly.
One sign that our hope was not as intense as it had been earlier was our diminished faith that someone would step forward to help us and claim the reward for that information. While in the Macarena Mountains, we’d heard rumors that someone was offering a reward for our release. Later, we saw pamphlets that had been dropped among the campesinos urging them to cooperate with the authorities in getting us rescued. At first, we thought the news was fantastic since it proved that even though we’d been gone for nearly two years, someone was still interested in getting us out of there. To offset that elation was the reality: We’d seen few campesinos and the guards had told us that before we’d moved through any populated areas, the FARC had threatened to execute anyone who laid eyes on us. We’d heard on the radio about a family of five who had been executed by the FARC. We remembered scrambling off the boats one night and running past a small shack along the river where a family of five was sitting minding their own business. The pieces of the story fit, adding to the death toll our presence had run up.
To top that off, the leaflets reminded us of just what simple lives the FARC and the majority of campesinos lived. The total reward was thirteen billion Colombian pesos or about $5 million. The government must have known this was such a mind-boggling figure that most of the campesinos couldn’t even begin to fathom its true value. In order to help with that, the creators of the leaflet added simple illustrations of jeeps, mules, and cows so that those contemplating cooperating could better understand the benefits.
The offer had also been broadcast on the radio, and our FARC guards heard it. The Plumber was one of the few who seemed to get it. He told us he thought of that reward every night. We’d tell him that all those things—cars, electronics, watches, and other fine jewelry—could easily be within his reach. He’d be able to live like a king on that kind of money. A few days later, he came to us and asked, “Could I get someone to manage this money for me? I don’t think I’d know how to use it wisely.”
We admired him for asking such a smart question, and were glad that one thing that rots people from the inside o
ut—greed—was at our disposal. Unfortunately, another corrupting influence got ahold of the Plumber. He was promoted to the position of officiale. This meant that instead of being a run-of-the-mill guard, he was in direct command of us. We’d always thought that in the world of the FARC, the Plumber was the one with celebrity potential. A good-looking guy, he became more conscious of his appearance after his promotion. He stopped wearing sweatpants and T-shirts and took to wearing his camo uniform all the time. He suddenly showed up with a silver necklace, an Arafat scarf, and notebook and pen. In the air force, we called keeping your appearance optimal being “squared away” and that was exactly what the Plumber had done.
During this wandering phase, we saw further evidence of the rot that had corrupted the FARC’s values. As we made our way out of the mountains and into the flatlands, we came across a far greater number of cultivated fields. That meant more coca-planting areas. We started spending many nights sleeping in temporarily abandoned drug labs. As the crop came in from one area, the FARC moved to that zone to gather and process, leaving behind the fields they had just harvested. While we didn’t see anyone doing the actual processing, the equipment and the sites were there.
Witnessing all of this firsthand simply reinforced much of what we’d been able to gather and deduce from the skies. We took as much satisfaction as we could from knowing that we had discovered what in our previous lives we called “ground truth.” That the round piles of waste we had witnessed from the air and in our photographs and video were indeed by-products of cocaine production. In addition, we could see that the identification process we used to mark young coca plants by their color—a nearly lime-green color, different from any other vegetation—was spot on. As we walked by these fields we could tell instantly that these plants had recently been put in the ground. They were thriving, but I hoped that someone had them in their target pack. I hoped that it was only a matter of time before they were pinpointed and removed. Hope, it seemed, was still there. I just needed more ground truth to make it real.