by Gary Brozek
Tom and I had been around aircraft for so long that we had fine-tuned our hearing to the sound of them. From the distinctive whup whup of the rotors, I could tell that they were UH 1s—Colombian military helos on a rescue mission for us. This is when we knew it was going to get dangerous. We all stood up, knowing that it was time to pop smoke and get the hell out of there.
TOM
I couldn’t hear the helos far off in the distance myself, but when Keith mentioned them, it was as if someone had taken a cloth and wiped clean the fog that had been clouding my mind since the crash. Even though I was operating at less than full capacity, I knew we were in a tough spot. I was simply relieved that we’d survived the crash and I tried to keep that thought foremost in my mind. But the sound of those helos coming in and the urgency with which the FARC responded made me realize that though we had lived through the crash, we weren’t anywhere close to safe yet.
We were on a hill opposite the crash site in a tiny space that was surrounded by thickly wooded and steeply sloped terrain. Below us was the small ramshackle building near where we’d been stripped and searched. To our left, down another ravine and up on another high point, was an open-area ranch building. The building appeared to have been built into the side of the mountain. Between that larger clearing was another small one with a trail joining them. As we moved toward this building, the helos passed right over us. Marc and Keith were a few yards ahead of me, escorted by a couple of FARC guerrillas. I couldn’t move as fast as they were moving, and soon the distance between us increased. I didn’t like being separated from them, but I also figured a larger cluster of us made for an easier target.
The helo banked into a turn and then circled us again, this time with its weapons firing. The Colombian military was taking aim at the FARC who were on the perimeter. I was still close enough to hear Marc shout to Keith about what was going on. Keith told him that the helo’s gunner was firing a minigun. I could hear rounds zinging through the trees above our heads. I continued to stumble and run, aiming for the path that led from the small clearing to the large one where the building sat. The FARC guarding me pushed me to the side off of the trail and into some denser vegetation and trees. Keith and Marc were right there with their guards, and the hills surrounding us were being peppered with rounds from the minigun.
Marc said to Keith, “Fuck me, I’m getting out of this shit. This is our chance.”
“That thing’s spitting out two thousand rounds a minute. We’ve got to consider another option, Marc.”
We all knew that the best time for escape was within the first few minutes of being taken, before our captors could get fully organized. This was a pretty chaotic scene and in that sense a good opportunity to flee, but now, with all that gunfire landing right where we wanted to go, it was better to stay put.
Keith was standing and he extended his arm to brace himself against the trunk of a tree. Sunlight reflected off the dial of his wristwatch and caught my eye. It must have also caught the attention of one of the guerrillas near Keith. “Deme su reloj,” the guy said.
Keith stared at the guy in disbelief and began to unclasp his Seiko diver’s watch.
“Here, take the thing,” Keith said. “Just let’s get the fuck out of here before we get killed.”
That theft was just another of the absurdities of the day. Why hadn’t they taken it before? Why would a FARC guerrilla choose to steal it during the middle of a firefight? We’d eventually come to the understanding that the FARC didn’t operate by anything resembling the logic or values we did.
We stood there for a few minutes, and across the large clearing, I could see a small campesino house the FARC were hoping to get us to. By the word clearing, I mean a typical Colombian jungle slash-and-burn type of clearing. Clumps of vegetation, tree stumps, and deadfall lay scattered around the nearly five hundred feet to the structure. While the canopy above us was open, the field itself was the tangled nest of an obstacle course. Sprinting across it would be the equivalent of doing a combination of a high hurdle race mixed in with the long jump, the high jump, and the triple jump—all on a steeply sloped patch of ground.
The guerrillas were gesturing with guns and making it obvious that they wanted us to take off across the clearing. One of them held his gun in the firing position to show us that even though they were letting us run free, we were still going to have their weapons trained on us. What they were also telling us was that they weren’t about to go out into that clearing and expose themselves to weapons fire. Finally, one of the FARC grabbed Marc and another grabbed me. They gave us a shove into the slash-and-burn. We took off running and jumping and dodging as best we could. Fortunately for us, the helo was upslope of us and we safely reached a point about halfway between Keith’s position and the structure. We crouched down near a stump. From my vantage point, I could see another guard at the house waving at us to come the rest of the way.
At that moment, for some reason, I remembered a conversation I had with my wife, Mariana, a week or so before the crash. She and I were talking about the risks of my job and we were both wondering whether it was worth it. I was making good money, and we both ultimately decided that I should stick it out a bit longer—at least through what was left of that rotation. Funny how the mind works and why that thought would come to me just then. I was worried about her feeling guilty if I didn’t make it. Worried that she might think she unduly influenced me.
I didn’t have much time to contemplate things. Marc looked at me and nodded, and the two of us headed for the house. It was like we were playing a deadly version of the video game Frogger. We’d hear the helos coming our way, so we’d take cover behind whatever we could. One helo would move off, and we’d zig and zag our way to another bit of cover. After what seemed like twenty minutes or more, we had covered the 500 feet of the clearing and made it into the shelter the house provided. We turned back and saw that the helo was heading our way. Keith was about at the midpoint of where we had stopped, and blade wash was kicking up dirt, ashes, and dead vegetation. He had his hand up in front of his face to keep his vision clear and the FARC were yelling at him to run. The helo couldn’t have been more than seventy-five feet above Keith. In the open door of the cabin, we could all see the gunner. The pilot had briefly brought the helo to a near hover, a bold move given that there were FARC with grenade launchers close by. It was such a strange sight. We could see Keith looking up at the helo, and we could see the gunner looking down at Keith. The gunner finally just shrugged his shoulders and then the helo lurched forward and resumed doing orbits around Keith.
A minute later, Keith was by our side and the FARC had hustled us into a tiny space between the campesino house and the hillside. We stayed wedged in there between the side of the house and the mountainside until the helos cleared the area. The FARC guards dislodged us from our hiding place and led us to the front of the building. On the porch, a woman sat on the ground crying. Her husband stood stiffly off to the side. He had his arms folded and he was rocking back on his heels, eyeing the three of us with disgust and fear. I noticed he was more careful about how he looked at the FARC. He let the disgust drip from his mouth when he spit and left the fear on display.
We could hear gunfire echoing around the hills, and from inside the house the squealing of pigs. One of the guards, a young kid of maybe fifteen, was carrying a .30-caliber Galil, and his face was disfigured by a scar running diagonally from his forehead to his chin. He was fingering a wood-bead necklace and smiling this shit-eating grin like what he was in the middle of was the coolest thing ever.
A few moments later, the helos returned. One was doing orbits directly above the house and we had a classic Mexican standoff. The Colombian military couldn’t open fire on our position because they would have killed us. The FARC didn’t try to shoot the helo down because the gunner would have returned fire on them. So we were all standing there looking up at them, and they were looking down at us as they hovered overhead.
We were squatting alongside the
house, and I could see that there were small openings dug into the slope. Inside of each, a pair of beady eyes stared back at us. Chickens. The Colombian couple who ran the place used the hillside as a chicken coop, and we were playing our own game of chicken right then and there. Who was going to flinch?
The FARC made the next move, pushing us away from one end of the house to the other, where a few bedraggled grapevines clung to a rotting arbor. Each of us had a FARC guard at his side. They led us off, using us as human shields. Once we passed the arbor, we entered a patch of immature coffee plants, about three feet high, and our guards forced us down on our knees and then our bellies with their bodies still interlocked with ours. We crawled among the coffee plants, making our way to the jungle. After a few minutes of crawling, we heard the helos heading off. They didn’t return.
As calm and reality sank in, our thoughts turned immediately to our loved ones. We wondered what they would think when they heard the news of our crash. Suddenly so much seemed beyond our control. As a pilot who’d flown more than thirteen thousand hours in a large variety of aircraft, I was always someone who needed to be in control. To me, that’s an essential skill for any pilot. You have to tend to all the details, trust only to a certain degree those who maintain, equip, and build your aircraft. Over time, you do learn to let go a bit, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t run all the checks, keep all the possibilities in your mind, be able to recall at an instant what to do in case of an emergency.
Prompted by the FARC, we moved deeper into the jungle. Only about forty minutes had passed since we first made contact with Colombian soil, and only a few minutes more than that since our engines had fallen silent. I didn’t know where the FARC would take us, but I knew there was only so much that I could carry with me. Too many thoughts about the decisions that had led me to Colombia in the first place would weigh me down and make the journey ahead much more difficult. It was as if I was still flying in a damaged plane, and I had to throw out of the cabin anything that I could to lighten the load and conserve fuel. Hopefully I’d make it over the hump to a safe landing on the other side of the mountain. But to be sure, I safely stowed the things—memories of my wife and children—I held most valuable.
I did give myself one last chance to really look back before jettisoning all that baggage. I don’t really know why it was that I fell in love with flying. I was born on Cape Cod, loved the sea, and spent much of my time as a kid fishing. I took flying lessons. Given what happened, maybe I should have been a sailor instead. After my first visit to the Caribbean, I knew that was where I wanted to be. I worked all over flying a variety of aircraft, and then I fell in love again. After I visited Peru in the mid-eighties, I was deeply and completely smitten with the country. When I finally got a chance to fly for the U.S. State Department down in Lima in the late eighties, I jumped at it. That led to stints in Peru, Guatemala, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Bolivia, back to the U.S., moving from job to job in all kinds of capacities within the aviation industry, with a wife, a stepson, and eventually a second son as my tie-down points.
Something about South America seemed to draw me. I was attracted to nearly everything about it. My Spanish was good, if a bit too formal for the kind of backcountry Spanish most of the FARC spoke, but from the moment of the crash, it proved to be a great aid to our survival. Still I couldn’t help but wonder if my love of a place had put my family and me in jeopardy.
Moving toward the jungle, I found myself questioning if I could endure whatever was about to happen. I’d flown all kinds of planes to determine their suitability for different tasks. I sensed we were all about to enroll in the FARC finishing school, enter into a tear-down and rebuild phase of our lives. I wasn’t sure how well suited I was for the task of making it through.
The FARC regrouped about half a mile from the ranch building. Sonia, the woman who had been searching the plane, was clearly the leader of the FARC group. Marc, Keith, and I were about in the middle of their column. A guard separated each of us from the other. No one was talking. At first the only noises were our footfalls and the sharp sounds of us crashing through the undergrowth, punctuated by the metallic zing of a machete as it cut through the thick woody vines that hung like curtains from the treetop canopy above. After about twenty minutes, I began to tune in to the other sounds of the woods, hearing an orchestra of insects buzzing amid the incessant rustling of the ground vegetation.
Out of desire and necessity, I trained my eyes either at the ground or straight ahead. I was still feeling the effects of the crash. Every time I tilted my head back, the world would spin. Normally, I would have tried to keep track of the direction we were moving, but the mountain forest was so thick in some areas that little sunlight made it through. Not only did the absence of sun make it hard to determine the direction we were traveling, but we couldn’t tell what time it was. I didn’t know how many hours we had been marching, but my body was telling me it was quite a few. The FARC guards were constantly on us to keep moving. They wanted to put as many miles between the army and us as possible.
When we finally stopped to take a rest after what had to have been at least five hours of hard marching, Marc and Keith asked the question that had been on all our minds: Where were Sergeant Cruz and Tommy J? We asked the question among ourselves, until the FARC quieted us. Sonia came back to where we were resting. Keith asked her in English, “What happened to our pilot? Piloto?” Sonia stared at him blankly and then scratched at her armpit and spat.
She clearly didn’t understand English, so I stepped in.
“¿Qué pasó con los otros?”
Sonia answered, her voice expressionless. “¿El gringo? Lo maté yo mismo.”
I relayed to Marc and Keith that she claimed that she had killed Tommy J herself, and that she would kill us, too. I didn’t know whether to believe her or not.
Again, with a chill that we all found disturbing, she said, “Yo le mataré también.”
We couldn’t be sure that Sonia wasn’t simply posturing in front of her troops. We also thought she might be falsely adopting the macho attitude typical of Colombian men. It didn’t matter. Her telling us that she was going to kill us was enough to make us pause to consider again the possible outcome that had been on all our minds since the crash.
We didn’t have long to share our opinions with one another. A FARC guerrilla stepped into the tight circle we’d formed around Sonia. He had Marc’s survival vest in his hand, and we could tell he was agitated. One by one, he pulled the items out of the vest and held them up—binoculars, night-vision goggles, our handheld camera—before tossing them to the ground.
At the sight of all this gear, Sonia became seriously agitated. She started saying that we better explain what it all was. When they got to our locator beacon, a bright yellow bit of gear that we could have used to signal our location, we all looked at one another. If the guerrilla had messed with it and turned it on, our exact location was being tracked by folks back home. Even if it wasn’t on, if the FARC thought that we’d been transmitting emergency signals, they might execute us then and there. Fortunately, a guard named Farid had disabled the device by removing the batteries. We had a similar reaction when they got to our survival radio and what we called a PRC, which is a combination of a computing device and a transmitter.
If the FARC thought that we had chip implants and we were all being tracked, then this was ample evidence that their suspicions were correct. A contradictory set of emotions and thoughts descended on us like the gathering darkness. The radio, the beacon, and the PRC were our lifelines to the outside world. Without them, we were completely cut off. If we tried to use them in any way, we’d likely be shot immediately. Sonia hammered home that last possibility.
“If you have anything else, I will kill you.”
A few minutes later, the FARC had us back up and marching. We forded streams and rivers. The FARC pushed us, telling us we had to keep quiet or they’d kill us. Our feet throbbed and blistered. The moon ros
e high above the trees, and the temperature plummeted. We stumbled through the darkness without a single light. At one point several hours after full on nightfall, at the point of exhaustion, we stopped on a rocky riverbank. The sound of the running water nearly drowned out the insects and other wildlife. We all sat down and started to rinse our bloodied pulpy feet. The water was cold and it stung the flesh exposed by our blisters. A small group of guerrillas stripped and waded without hesitation into the river.
They urged us to join them. I was still covered in blood, and one of the guerrillas came to me with a tin cup filled with water and began to rinse my head and face. Even the sting of the water in the gash above my eye could barely penetrate my exhaustion. None of us could bring himself to get fully into the river. After a few minutes, they led us a few yards from the water. They pointed to a lean-to-type shack, what they called a coleta. It had a thatched roof but no sides. They had prepared a makeshift bed for the three of us. It was so cold and so cramped that we curled up together and fell into a deep collective sleep.
What seemed like only minutes later, the FARC were rousing us. “¡Vayamos! ¡Vayamos!”
It was still completely dark. They explained further, “Tenemos que salir. Los aviones están aquí.” They pointed to the sky. We could hear the distant sound of airplane motors. We stumbled out of the coleta and back down along the riverbank. Clouds had obscured the moon. I didn’t think it was possible but it seemed as if it was even darker than before. All of us were stumbling and falling. We were getting our first lesson in jungle threats. The jungle was filled with things that could bite, sting, and otherwise pierce our flesh. Every time we staggered and put a hand out to steady ourselves, we grabbed hold of a vine, tree, or bush that was armored with spines.
We were in enemy territory in every sense of the word.
TWO
Changes in Altitude
