by Gary Brozek
Stepping into this new situation meant that we had to tread carefully with our fellow prisoners and with the guards. Like we had done with Milton’s group, we assessed how we could use our relationships with the guards to our best advantage. As it turned out, we didn’t have a whole lot to discuss. This FARC group was far more professional and less likely to interact with us on any level but the most superficial. This was most obvious in our trading for goods. With Milton’s nicotine fiends, we were able to work deals with them directly. Though the currency remained the same in the Reunion Camp, the method of exchange was completely different. We had to go through Arteaga to trade cigarettes for what we needed. Arteaga in particular had more supplies—batteries for the radios, bags of powdered milk, sleeves of crackers—than he really needed. That didn’t stop him from wanting to accumulate more. He used his role as a go-between to his full advantage. He wasn’t greedy; he was bored and needed some form of excitement.
Our fellow prisoners weren’t the only ones who seemed to have a surplus of gear and food. The FARC in this First Front were the best-equipped group we’d seen. They had portable DVD players, and one of the first nights in that camp, we watched a Jackie Chan movie. We were mesmerized. After so long without seeing a moving image on a screen, the effect was almost hypnotic. They could have shown a movie with cows grazing for an hour and a half and we would have watched it. The FARC powered most of their electronics—laptop computers, DVD players, and communications radios—with motorcycle batteries wired in a series or a Honda portable gas-powered generator. In addition they used a solar panel to recharge their batteries. Since we were no longer in the mountains shrouded in foliage, they could set the panels up in a clearing and get direct sunlight for a few hours a day.
As always, that increase in sunlight seemed to power us up a bit, too. We enjoyed the coolness in the deeper jungle, but having bright light seemed to lift our spirits. We became extremely optimistic that our groups being put together meant something. Why would we have been separated for so long if they were only going to put us together for no reason? A day or so into our stay, we turned on the radio. Enrique had loaned us his multibanda radio and for the first time in years we had access to AM-FM and shortwave frequencies. The three of us were sitting together with a few of the others listening to the news. I was half paying attention when I heard the word despeje. I looked over to Keith and Marc.
“Am I hearing things?”
They both had huge grins on their faces.
“No, sir, you are not. Uribe just announced that he’s approved a despeje. He wants the FARC back at the bargaining table, so he gave them their DMZ.” Keith clapped his hands and stomped his feet.
“Thank you, God.” Marc leaned back, looked to the sky, and heaved an enormous sigh.
“We could be home for Thanksgiving. I could be strapping on the Stansell feedbag. How awesome would that be?”
Everyone started talking. The other prisoners were grasping one another’s arms, shaking hands, and patting one another on the back. They had all shed years right before my eyes. I sometimes forgot that most of the Colombians there had been captured when they were in their early twenties. They’d spent a majority of what should have been the most enjoyable and productive parts of their lives in captivity. The news that the hard-liner Uribe was willing to grant the FARC a demilitarized zone in exchange for peaceful negotiations made kids of us all.
After that announcement, we stayed glued to the radio. The country was in a complete uproar; Uribe had taken such a firm stance against the FARC for so long that the conservatives couldn’t believe that he was caving in to their demands. Moderates were hopeful that a negotiated peace process could bring an end to the fighting, and the leftists were claiming a huge victory for the FARC. At that point, politics was the furthest thing from my mind. I was going home to see my son and my wife and that was all that mattered.
We spent another two days at the Reunion Camp before we got the order to move out. I was so confident we were on our way to being released that I gave away a bit of the junk I’d accumulated over the years. We marched for a couple of days, setting up temporary camps along the way. On the third day, Enrique came up to me and said, “This is something, isn’t it? I walk up to this camp and I see three smiling Americans. You guys are getting along good. You get along good with the others. Very nice.”
I didn’t know Enrique that well, but I could sense that he was looser and more relaxed than I’d seen him before. He was barely able to contain his huge grin.
“Do you know anything more about the despeje than we do?” I asked him.
He wagged his head from side to side, looking like a bobble-head toy, raised one eyebrow, and squinted at me.
“All I know is this. I have my orders here. I’m here with you guys waiting for the Catalinas to come. That’s all I know.”
“Catalinas, flying in here? Where will they take us?”
Enrique held up his hands to ward off any more questions. “If I get the order to put you on a Catalina, that’s what I will do.”
As hard as it was to believe what he was saying, Enrique’s words led me to peel layers off of the cynicism and distrust that had callused my hope for so long. This was the real deal—none of Milton’s nonsense. Enrique was in direct contact with the higher-ups in the FARC. We didn’t have a long track record with him, but to that point everything he’d told us he would do for us he’d done. I didn’t think that anyone could be such a good actor as to make us wholeheartedly believe that our release was only days, and maybe even hours, away.
Now, marching with Enrique and everyone else, we all felt lighter, food tasted more flavorful, the jungle scenery seemed more lush and vivid. We were going home. The words seemed difficult to form in my mind and on my lips. Every day, as we marched along, we’d catch one another’s eye and smile and shake our heads. Every task took on new meaning. One day the three of us were in camp, breaking things down after a night in the jungle. I noticed that Marc was done well before I was. That hadn’t always been the case. So I said to him, “You’ve gotten pretty damn good at this.”
“Had a lot of practice.” Marc hefted his equipo on one shoulder and then shrugged the other arm through the remaining strap.
“You don’t even need help with that,” I said.
“I’m traveling light today, Tom,” was Marc’s reply.
We both were.
KEITH
For a while before the news of the despeje, I’d been shedding some things I either no longer needed or no longer had value to me. Among them was any hope that my relationship with my fiancée was still viable. At the Reunion Camp, I’d heard references to Patricia and me a couple of times on the radio. I was the gringo hostage who was the father of the two kids with the Colombian woman. I couldn’t imagine that this was easy for Malia to hear, if she was hearing anything at all. When I did get messages—from my kids, from my mom and dad, my brother, and even my ex-wife—no one ever even mentioned Malia’s name. We’d been together for six years when Tom, Marc, and I were taken hostage and it was at about half that amount of time into captivity that I began to shed some of those memories and thoughts of what our future life together might be.
The heaviest thing, the most burdensome thing, the thing that was so difficult to strap on my equipo and haul comfortably, was the house Malia and I had planned on building. I’d listened to Tom talk about his new house and all the things he wanted to do with it. I didn’t say much about my dream house since it wasn’t anything more substantial than a hope and a catalog of images—furniture I liked, a big screen TV to settle down in front of. The funny thing was, when news of the despeje came through and I found out how close I was to getting home, all the things I’d dreamed of—the house, the furniture, the TV, the motorcycles, the fishing boat—were as easy to pitch out as the old razors, T-shirts worn to rags, and the rest of the crap we all got rid of when we knew we were waiting on a plane to get us the hell out of there.
I was
n’t a pack rat by any means, but instead of just ditching everything, I started thinking about replacing a few of those “back home” items. A few days into our stay at the Reunion Camp, I was again able to hear one of Patricia’s radio messages with my own ears. She must have developed a good relationship with the radio stations, because they let her just pour out her heart. She told me how much she missed me and reiterated how much the boys needed me to be around to be their father. She ended by saying that I was el hombre de su vida, the man of her life.
That translation doesn’t do justice to what these words mean to a Colombian. It comes across a little too clichéd, a little too romance-novel cheesy, but I knew how powerful they were. What was more, actually listening to Patricia’s voice carried even greater significance. It was one thing when Juancho had paraphrased her thoughts, but it was quite another to hear her utter them herself. Listening to her, I could sense the genuine care and legitimate concern in her voice. Suddenly I began to shed some layers of my skepticism about her motives and about our future.
As elated as I was at the sound of the word despeje and at Patricia’s message, I knew I couldn’t just leave every part of the goddamn awful shit we’d been through. Those experiences were as much a part of me and who I was as anything that came before that engine failure. Every bit of it was going to be returning home with me to the States. It wasn’t going to weigh me down a bit because I thought we’d all done ourselves proud—Enrique’s words to Tom had confirmed what we’d thought all along. We’d conducted ourselves as honorably as we could under the circumstances. We’d endured and triumphed. As we marched for those five days after we left the Reunion Camp, I was feeling pretty good about being reunited with parts of myself I’d had to tuck away to protect during the long years of captivity. It was like seeing old friends, good friends, best friends I’d been absent from for a good long while.
On day five post–Reunion Camp, we’d exited a bit of dry jungle and crossed into a fairly large field of slash-and-burn. The FARC had just been through there, obviously getting it ready for drug-growing operations. The smell of burned vegetation and the tang of gasoline was on my tongue. I stopped and spat. Marc and Tom pulled up alongside me.
“Hey, Tom, it’s clear here; why don’t you flip that thing on?” Marc asked.
Tom took out the multibanda, pulled up the antennae, and did a few revolutions trying to get the best signal. He looked around; the FARC guards seemed content to let us have a brief break. When we finally got a signal, we could hear President Uribe’s voice, and the word that immediately jumped out at me was denuncie. That word did not bode well. It was clear that Uribe was wound up about something.
The day before, October 19, a car bomb had exploded outside a military training academy in Bogotá. Twenty-three people had been injured. Uribe was outraged. I looked over at Tom and Marc, and they looked like I felt, as if somebody had kicked me in the nuts—once so they could hurt me, a second time to remind me of what the pain was like, and then a third time so that I would never want to experience that torturous sensation again.
“Fucking FARC. Fucking Uribe. Fucking olive branch shoved up all our asses.”
Marc, Tom, and I sat down with our heads slumped. Minutes passed. The military guys came and joined us.
“You heard?” Marc asked.
They all nodded, every one of them looking as downcast as we were. Juancho sat next to me, and we briefly put our arms around each other’s shoulders.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
“Uribe was clear. No prisoner exchange now.”
Marc chewed at his lip. “I heard him, man. I heard him very clear. ‘The only option left is military rescue.’”
The specter of a botched Colombian military rescue or the FARC’s deadly response was our version of the Cross, circling and circling high above, feeding its intel and coordinates to them. Not for the first time, I said to Marc, “We’re fucked.”
Tom added, “Not just by the FARC. France. Switzerland. Spain. Uribe asked them to end their diplomatic efforts and replace their envoys with a military presence.”
Ingrid approached our sullen group and added her take.
“Then there is some hope. A unified effort. Perhaps the French will be able to reason with Uribe.”
“It was the U.S. that did it.” The voice came out of nowhere and it belonged to William Pérez. “I heard that the FARC are blaming you. They said that the U.S. did it so that they could take stronger military action against the FARC.”
I couldn’t believe it. I looked at Ingrid and Lucho and then at the military guys. None of them would look me in the eye. It was true that the FARC had not used car bombs before, but we’d heard rumors that they had contacts with other rebel groups and other terrorist organizations. I reminded everyone of what we’d heard regarding an explosion at a munitions camp that had killed a bunch of guerrillas. They weren’t messing with that warhead so that they could send a souvenir home.
Tom spoke up. “The FARC have never admitted to anything. Why would they admit to this? For God’s sake, we were in a camp where a guy deliberately shot himself in the head and the FARC told us it was a pistol cleaning accident. They don’t ever tell the truth.”
Eventually the guards got us moving again. The three of us went out ahead of the others.
“We’ve been here before,” Tom said.
I knew what he was saying, and it had nothing to do with our physical location.
“Tom’s right,” I said. “We’re Teflon guys. Nothing sticks to us. This absolutely bites big-time, but we’ve been here before.”
“Absolutely. Déjà vu all over again. The FARC or Uribe will come around again. They have to. This can’t keep going on.” Marc kicked at a clod of dirt.
“It’s like I’ve told you guys before,” Tom added. “Colombian politics are like the weather. If you don’t like what you’ve got, stick around for a day or two. It’s bound to change.”
“We got nothing better to do than wait,” I said.
Marc was all ready there with the bandage. “I was thinking about the Freedom Ride. If we get back before Christmas, it’s going to be pretty damn cold. We’ll probably have to stay pretty far south to get to the West Coast.”
“I can’t think that far ahead, Marc,” I replied. “Halloween is in ten days and I’ve got trick or treat on the brain.”
October 20, 2006, may not have been a day that lived in infamy to the rest of the world, but it kicked our asses more than just a little bit. Our exchange of jungle repartee was our first attempt at restoring order. We knew we were running the risk of flying too high. That we’d nose-dived into the ground and then had to dig ourselves out was just a fact of life. We’d become accustomed to taking on that job; it didn’t mean we liked having to do it, but we knew what needed to be done. A day or so later, Uribe revealed that the Colombians had intercepted a phone message from Mono JoJoy that proved the FARC were involved in the bombing, and that mostly settled the issue of U.S. involvement.
Adding to our pile of misery was the fact that we also weren’t in a permanent camp. Now that the despeje had fallen through, we were back to where we were before the Reunion Camp—on the move, roving through the jungle, with no home in sight. To get ourselves back on our collective feet, we resumed as much of our normal routine as possible. The FARC built a temporary camp just a few kilometers from where we’d stopped and heard the bad news. They immediately cleared an area for a volleyball court. If the three of us had one thing in our favor, we were still in the honeymoon period with Enrique. We had been referring to him as Gaffas or “Glasses” because of the prominent specs he wore, and we thought he was one of the few FARC we’d been involved with who did have a pretty focused vision of how hostages should be treated.
Enrique’s group also provided us with tablas to sleep on. Marc was the only holdout among us when it came to hammock sleeping. His back just wouldn’t let him do it. He generally slept underneath the spot where I’d strung
my hammock. That preserved some space for everyone else in camp. We slept in two rows, with a walkway between us. Ingrid was always kept at one end of the camp and Lucho at the other. Their visiting hours were rigidly enforced and the four guards on duty at any one time made it almost impossible to speak with them.
Despite the fallout from the car bomb, we continued to pass the time much as we had at the Reunion Camp. We still tutored some of the military hostages in English. In some ways, we were as much a language-acquisition exchange program as we were hostages. Each of us had our own set of students and came up with our own methods of teaching. Because we were so immersed in Spanish, we had become proficient enough that we rarely had questions for the Colombians.
Along with tutoring, working out, reading, and playing chess and poker, the radio remained a vital part of our survival. Though we could understand the Spanish-language broadcasts on the radio, we always enjoyed listening to English-language stations. Enrique’s shortwave radio allowed us to pick up more English-language programming, and no matter how good we got at Spanish, it was still nice to hear our native language coming over the airwaves. With stations like the BBC and the Voice of America, we got a different perspective on world events. Throughout our captivity, we’d picked up bits and pieces of information about what was happening in the larger world, but it seemed that news about hostages in other parts of the world always grabbed our attention. We were horrified when we found out that an American businessman in Iraq, Nicholas Berg, had been beheaded. We remembered that before him, an American journalist had been kidnapped in Pakistan and suffered the same fate. As much as we were horrified by this loss of life, such events reminded us that our situation could have been much worse.
The radio often gave us small pieces of information that could spur conversation for hours—even days—at a time. We were shocked to learn that a barrel of crude oil had risen in price to $75. We took that tidbit and ran with it, expounding on our theories of geopolitics and oil and the plausibility of alternative fuels like ethanol, electricity, and hydrogen. We had seen ads for new Dell computers that at $850 were many times more powerful than what we’d paid nearly three times as much for. One of the radio programs we listened to had a technology report and from it we learned that there was this music device called an iPod. We heard one advertisement for a car dealership offering a free preprogrammed iPod with five thousand songs on it with the purchase of a new car. Based on that, we began listing the songs we would put on our iPod as an exercise to get through the day.