by Gary Brozek
February 14, 2003—February 24, 2003
KEITH
Believe it or not, getting awakened in the pitch-black two o’clock darkness of a Colombian mountain-highlands morning wasn’t a major shock to my system. In fact, during that first brief sleep, the opposite had taken place. The shock had worn off. When we’d been rousted to get back on the move, the alarm bells going off in my head weren’t enough to stir my body into action.
From my lower back to my right side, I felt an excruciating stiffness unlike anything I’d experienced before. Every breath was like someone had clamped a bench vise down on my chest and was cranking it tighter and tighter. The pain was tolerable, but I couldn’t deal with the thought of marching up and down the mountain slopes, each breath more arduous than the last. In the end, it didn’t matter what I could deal with. They simply pushed us onto our feet and we began to march through the shadows of the jungle.
In spite of the pain, I had to count my blessings. I always brought a fleece jacket with me on every flight, and when we got to higher altitudes, I’d put it on. I’d had the presence of mind to take it with me when we fled the plane, and on that first overnight march, I really needed it. Even while we were walking, it got ball-shatteringly cold, but with the fleece, I didn’t have it as bad as Marc and Tom did. The whole time they shivered uncontrollably, especially when we stopped for a rest.
At one point during a break, we were all sitting in a small cluster on the side of the mountain, trying to catch our breath. Planes were flying overhead, and in between shivers, I used my thumb to probe my side. Gritting my teeth and poking deep, I felt my second and third ribs shifting. I figured that the jagged bits of bone were catching on the cartilage and other soft tissue around them, causing the pain I experienced whenever my lungs filled with air.
One of the guards, a squat little guy named Uriel, was sitting next to me with his girlfriend perched on his lap, and they were looking at me like I was some kind of zoo animal they’d never seen before. I looked away because their staring bothered me, and if I focused on it I might lose control. Tom and Marc were huddled together shivering, and between my pained breaths, I couldn’t help but think how uncanny this whole scene was. The night had become crystal-clear, the moonlight was dripping over everything like cake icing, and here we all were clustered up like a pack of monkeys.
Uriel whacked me on the shoulder with the back of his hand and pointed at Marc and Tom. I thought he was going to make some wiseass remark about the two of them trying to keep warm, and I thought of flipping him off, until I saw him wrap his arms around himself, making the signal for “cold.” I nodded my head, thinking, Thatta boy, Einstein, you figured out they’re cold. Move on to the bonus round. Then he did something unexpected: Uriel reached into his backpack and pulled out a sheet. Tom and Marc had zonked out by this time, and Uriel took the sheet and gently wrapped it around the two of them like a mother tucking in her kids. After seeing that, I didn’t know what to think. I was in the middle of hell, surrounded by a bunch of people who’d been treating us like animals and could kill me at any moment. Suddenly this guy does something like that. It all seemed like one big contradiction.
That rest stop turned out to be the last one for the night. Pretty soon everybody but the guard on duty and I were all asleep. Though I was exhausted in every way, I couldn’t fall asleep. Instead, I was lying there on the hard ground, trying to figure out a plan. As civilian contractors, we didn’t have strict rules of engagement or the clear-cut demands of the Uniform Code of Military Justice to guide our actions. If we were still active-duty military, our first obligation would have been to escape, but we weren’t military, we were civilians. As such, our objective was survival. Whereas escape might get us killed, so far, being calm and cooperative seemed to satisfy our number one objective of staying alive.
I had my eyes closed and was faking sleep. Every now and then, I’d open one eye, and that guard would be looking right at me, his glare pretty much saying, “Don’t think I’m falling asleep.” Pretty soon after that, I crashed.
Something must have woken me up, because I remember coming back to reality. I blinked my vision clear, and right in front of my face, in a tiny shaft of moonlight, was a white flower. It was no more than six inches in front of me, so small it looked like a mere detail from an Ansel Adams photograph. At first I thought I was hallucinating. We’d been marching most of the last twenty-four hours, and I’d spent a good part of it looking down. All I saw then was dirt, rock, and dried up leaves. Where the hell did this flower come from?
I’m not the most sentimental guy, but seeing that flower did something to me. I thought about my family and what they would do without me. I told myself that I was going to make it out of there—there was no other option. I’d lost my mom when I was fourteen. I knew what losing a parent at a young age was like. I didn’t want my two kids to feel the same anguish of parental loss. That flower gave me the energy I needed to get up that morning. In fact, I felt so much relief that I actually started to question my sanity. What tangible reason, other than this flower, did I have to be so hopeful? I wish that I had picked it and carried it with me, but in a way I did. From then on, I’d always find a way to return to that spot on the ground where, for a brief moment, I’d realized that I would survive.
An hour or so later, just as the sky was showing the first trace of light in the east, we were all back on our feet. Southern Colombia is a mountainous place where the steep cliffs and high valleys are covered in rain-forest vegetation. I knew the geography fairly well from the time I’d spent in-country and the surveillance work I’d done. As nearly as I could surmise, we were in the mountains somewhere between Neiva on the west side and Florencia on the eastern side of the Cordillera Oriental. It was bad, but not as bad as it could have been. The three parallel north/south sets of Cordillera mountain ranges (east, west, and central) are all part of the Andes. I suppose we should have been grateful that our targets for February 13 took us primarily south. If we’d gone farther west in the Cordilleria Central, where the tallest peaks were more than seventeen thousand feet and the lowest passes between them at ten thousand feet, our march, as epic and hellish as it was, would have been even harder.
Given our injuries—Marc was battling a similar back and hip problem to mine, while Tom most likely had a concussion to go along with his head lacerations and broken tooth—even if we had been fully acclimated to the altitude, it still would have been tough going. Add a healthy bit of hunger, lack of real sleep, the enormous stress, and we weren’t exactly the von Trapp kids tromping around singing about the hills being alive with the sound of music. Instead, our sound track was the alternating but relentless crunch of feet on the hardpack, the slurp-suck sound of the mud, and the heaving gasps of our breaths. This was no picnic, and even when we were on the downhill, our knees, legs, and feet throbbed with pain.
As if walking and breathing weren’t hard enough, we were seriously underequipped for the hike at hand. Tom was wearing a pair of cargo pants, a T-shirt, and a pair of nondescript low-cut sneakers. Marc and I had similar clothes on, a pair of chino-type pants and polo shirts. During the day, the clothes weren’t a big deal, but as we’d all discovered the night before, the temperature could drop pretty quickly at night. Suddenly having only a short sleeve T-shirt made you realize just how dire the situation was.
Bad as the clothes were, the real problem was footwear. While Tom was wearing a pair of sneakers and I had on some Timberland trail shoes, Marc had on a pair of leather boots that were not the kind of shoes you’d want to go traipsing around the jungle in. They were what Marc called his “mall walking” boots. Slick-as-snot soles without a single bit of tread. Marc was being guarded by Farid, a really young, fit kid who hadn’t even grown a full FARC mustache yet, just some faint caterpillar fuzz. He was no caterpillar or butterfly, though. He was a brute, and every time Marc slipped and fell, Farid would grab him by the arm to pull him upright. Farid wasn’t polite about it, either; the
slower Marc was to get up, the farther he dragged him along.
No matter what we had on our feet, it was as if they were being napalmed with every step. In no time, they were sweaty, and as the grade of the hill changed, our feet slid around inside the shoes—bubbling up blisters, jamming our toes into the tips of the shoe, blackening our nails.
Meanwhile the FARC was clomping along in these rubber rain boots, a black version of the boots the little girl on the Morton Salt label wears. They came to mid calf, and none of the FARC had shoes on underneath them. You could hear this rubbery singing sound as the boots hit their legs and a drumbeat of their heels slapping the soles. After a few hours that second day, we would all have gladly exchanged our footwear for theirs. Not only were their boots waterproof, but they had decent grip, even in the mud. The FARC didn’t seem to be slip-sliding nearly as much as we were. Instead they just seemed to watch us as we slid all over the jungle. Marching was hard enough, but having to pick up your own sorry ass after you spilled into the brush of the jungle was even more exhausting.
Making matters worse was that a lot of our marching was in rivers and runoff streams. The algae that clung to those rocks was even slicker than the wet leaves of the jungle, and the water was fast-moving and cold. If any of us had fantasies about falling in and floating away, they were quickly shut down. We were so exhausted we would have drowned. Even if we hadn’t been so tired, the streams were so choked with rubble, rocks, deadfall, and other vegetation that we wouldn’t have been able to get very far. At a few points, we could hear the sound of what was either a waterfall or a series of rapids. We would not have been able to negotiate either of those. And even if we did manage to slip away from the FARC guerrillas guarding us, we had no idea where we were or what direction to go to find any friendlies—or even if any existed. For the three of us, just putting one foot in front of the other was about the best we could do.
I’m not sure if knowing our destination and for how long we’d be marching would have made things any easier, but we asked the FARC constantly about when we were going to get “there” and where “there” was. Their typical responses were “un rato más,” and “we’re taking you to rest.” This pattern of vague responses infuriated us, but we were quickly learning that our FARC guards were little more than pack animals or slaves to the FARC hierarchy. They were at the very bottom of the information food chain by design. If they couldn’t tell us how far or where we were going, it was because they didn’t know themselves. Even after a couple of days, we began to doubt that Sonia, the mobile-column leader, was fully aware of where she was taking us. In a way, I guess I should have been flattered by that. As Americans, we were big fish that they’d caught, and we had to be handled with care and the orders had to come from the higher-ups, not from the soldiers on the ground.
The entire time we marched, Sonia was in constant radio communication with the muckety-mucks in the upper ranks of the FARC. What they didn’t realize was that each time they switched on the radio, they were threatening to expose our position. The FARC were right to be concerned that U.S. intelligence agencies were listening to them, but they weren’t sophisticated enough to understand the different ways those agencies could eavesdrop. While U.S. agencies didn’t have a satellite capable of picking up the FARC’s actual conversations, they did have the ability to intercept their radio communications. The whole reason we were hightailing it away from the crash site was to put some distance between the army and us, but the Colombian military could track us by intercepting radio communications. Every time Sonia keyed in her FM radio to get additional orders or to report on our status, it was like she was leaving fluorescent blazes along our trail.
To give credit where it’s due, as much as it seemed to me that we were just hauling our asses aimlessly around in the jungle, the FARC knew their way around fairly well. Every stream we crossed, and there were a lot of them, and every section of jungle pretty much looked alike. Yet they kept moving, relentlessly pushing to some destination that we couldn’t see or hear. I consider myself a decent Boy Scout type of guy, but during those first twenty-four hours, I lost all sense of what direction we were going in. The only thing I knew about our location was that we were climbing higher into the mountains.
The fact that the FARC were jungle rats, expertly navigating a maze of their own making, did not help our hopes for a quick rescue. If some troops were on the ground trailing after us, I had to trust that they were the stealthiest the Colombian Army had. If the FARC detected them, or even if they didn’t and we were caught in an ambush, I didn’t think our chances of living were good. If any U.S. Special Forces units had been deployed, then I would have increased our odds exponentially, but they still would not have had the sense of the land that the FARC clearly did. I tried not to think of the advantage that any guerrilla operation has over their enemy—local knowledge of the terrain and hideouts.
As we marched we heard several references to someone whose name sent a chill up our spines. I knew that one of our targets that day had been a lab that the FARC used to take the raw coca leaves and process them into the paste that would eventually become rock or powder cocaine. We also knew that the lab was under the control of a high-ranking member of the FARC whose nom de guerre was Mono JoJoy. Mono JoJoy, whose real name was Victor Julio Suárez Rojas, aka Jorge Briceño Suárez, commanded the FARC’s Eastern Bloc. Each of the members of the FARC had adopted an alias, and they also had nicknames they used with one another, on top of the code names we assigned them. If it weren’t for the nature of the work we were doing, we wouldn’t have known what Mono JoJoy’s real name was, and with most of the low-ranking guerrillas we’d come into contact with so far, all we knew them by was their alias.
The Eastern Bloc was one of seven major geographic divisions the FARC used to organize their forces. The secretariat or secretariado was a seven-member leadership group immediately beneath the commander in chief, Manuel Marulanda. Also a member of the secretariado, Mono JoJoy was primarily responsible for their military operations. Since 1999, he’d been under indictment in the United States on charges of killing three Americans as well as for terrorism and narcotics trafficking—in addition to a laundry list of other charges. Basically, he was a bad dude, someone who had joined the FARC at age twelve and was in his forties at the time of our capture. In that time he must have swallowed so many tons of the radical indoctrination that the Marxist rebel crap spouted out of him at both ends.
The thought that we were potentially being taken to him, combined with the fact that his name was mentioned on our target sheets, put a scare into us. Though Marc had done his best to destroy our papers, there was no guarantee that the FARC hadn’t found something. If we were being brought to one of the FARC’s high commanders, things didn’t look so good for the home team. We’d likely be interrogated, and who knew what kind of torture methods they’d employ. Mono JoJoy was already down for three American deaths; what would three more mean to somebody who’d spent most of his life rising through the ranks of a terrorist organization?
As if the thought of Mono JoJoy weren’t enough, I was also troubled by the questions our captors kept asking us, mainly “Why are you working against us?”
We’d reply that we weren’t working against them; we were working against the drugs. I wasn’t just splitting hairs with them. We had no mission specifically against the FARC. We were there to do drug interdiction work. We never took any direct action against the FARC. When I asked them if they were involved in any way in the drug trafficking going on, some would say yes.
“Well,” I’d tell them, “if you’re working the drugs, we’re working against you. No drugs, no touch you.”
Then, one of the smarter, or maybe one of the more brainwashed, among them would say, “We don’t do anything with drugs. We just tax. We tax the people in the drug business.”
The more they delivered answers like this, the clearer the extent of their indoctrination became. It was like running into a wall, and I
was too exhausted to call them out on the obvious lies. A couple of the guerrillas with us were wearing Che T-shirts, and my mind kept returning to the biography of Che I’d been reading on the plane. To them, he was just a face emblazoned on a shirt, a revolutionary image to reinforce their cause. They knew little about who he was and what he actually represented. How they could honestly believe that they were carrying on the ideals of Che Guevara was baffling to me. This was a group that resorted to trafficking drugs, using land mines, recruiting kids, attacking and killing civilians, taking hostages, and demanding ransom for fund-raising and political leverage. A group whose activities had resulted in thousands of deaths and the displacement of many more civilians.
The story of how the FARC had devolved from an idealistic, if violent, organization interested in overturning Colombia’s small controlling elite into a group of thuggish terrorists made me sick. When I did ask one of them why they thought we could be legally held, he told me that we had violated their airspace. I couldn’t believe it. They were so deluded as to actually believe that they had some kind of sovereign status within Colombia, with actual borders and their own airspace.
It was true that in 1998, former Colombian president Andrés Pastrana had granted the FARC a limited demilitarized zone centered around San Vicente de Caguán—a safe haven of less than twenty thousand square miles in southern Colombia. For years, the FARC had insisted that they wouldn’t talk peace unless they had this safe haven, and Pastrana did what he did as an act of good faith, hoping to bring the FARC to the bargaining table to work out a peace accord. However, after receiving the safe haven, they only halfheartedly engaged in negotiations. Instead, they mostly used their demilitarized zone as a place to import arms, export drugs, recruit more minors, and replenish their troops and supplies.
By February of 2002, a full year before we were on the ground with the FARC, Pastrana had called off those talks, putting an end to the demilitarized zone. In fact, the zone we were in, and many other places where the FARC operated, were highly militarized. So their imagined status, as a nation with airspace, was even more of a mental apparition, but there was no way to explain any of that to these guys. I could only hope that when we met Mono JoJoy, he’d have a more reasonable explanation for what they were planning to do with us and how they could justify our capture.
