by Gary Brozek
Each of us believed that freedom and a return to our way of life was the most powerful motivation we had when the going seemed impossible. Wanting to be out from under the thumb of people who oppressed us and denied us our rights was the most basic desire we had. It was an almost primal urge, ingrained in us after years and years of being able to do just that—exert our free will. That’s what we wanted for ourselves and that’s what we as a country wanted for other people as well. Many of the FARC asked us what the U.S. was like, and when we told them that the United States was about freedom, they couldn’t believe that our answer could be that simple. The guerrillas took a lot from us, but they could never get their minds or their hands around the idea that what we valued most was our freedom. As long as we were capable of drawing on what it was we had in our hearts and memories, we would endure.
KEITH
It was a good thing that after thirty-nine days of hell, the FARC loaded the eight of us into a boat. By that time I was sick and tired of seeing that fat son of a bitch Sombra walking without an equipo while his latest mama, Spider Woman, busted her hump like the rest of us. Whenever we stopped, a couple of other female guerrillas would flutter around him, making sure he had water, that his boots were free of stones, and that his blubbery thighs weren’t chafing too badly. I imagined the last of those, just as I imagined those flabby thighs creating enough friction to barbecue his balls. At one rest point, the Fat Man’s minions rushed to set up a little bench for him so he wouldn’t have to put his lard ass on the ground and they did their usual ministering to his needs. I sat nearby staring at him, thinking of Animal Farm and the pig Napoleon saying, “All animals are equal, some animals are more equal than others.” I would have loved to be able to treat Sombra with an equal amount of cruelty he dished out to us.
Before we got on the boat, we sat alongside a river, all of us drifting off into a semisleep. From a distance, the sound of cantina music and a few disco songs carried downriver. I knew I wasn’t dreaming because I’d never let a note of disco penetrate my consciousness. Later, when darkness fell, we finally began our boat trip. We cruised past that bar. It was little more than a few rectangles of light on the shore that slid down at odd angles and reflected on the river, but we hadn’t seen a sign of civilization like that since the proof of life more than a year earlier. Cigarettes glowing in our hands, we cruised upriver under a night sky freckled with stars, and when we were all out of smokes, we huddled together under a sheet of black plastic, trying to contain our collective warmth.
Shortly after first light we pulled up to shore near a rotted walkway that led from the water to a clearing. In that clearing an old FARC camp stood like a crumbling skeleton. One of the buildings had been bombed and several other of the wooden structures were being reclaimed by the jungle. In the midst of this was an actual concrete building with a tin roof. We were led inside, and as we walked on the dirty cement floors and past two small surgical suites, we realized that we were in the remains of an old hospital. All around us tables still sat flanked by monitors and other equipment. Everything was covered in several years’ worth of dust. Whoever had occupied this hospital was long gone, but we didn’t have time to speculate about what had happened to them. It seemed like gravity’s pull was much stronger inside those walls, and we were all asleep before we hit the floor.
For the next week, we rested and ate. We had beef, carrots, beets, and other vegetables for the first time in more than a year. Our bodies were so unused to having anything solid or substantial in them that they treated the food like an invader and shot it out almost as fast as we could put it in. When we weren’t eating we were lying down or sleeping. Only rarely were we allowed to wander outside the hollowed-out hospital. We counted it a treat to be allowed to walk escorted by guards through the half-dozen rooms that made up the small medical site. In my mind, the place seemed haunted by the patients long gone. Like so many things about the landscape there, you just had to accept this wreckage without question. Whoever had made this hospital a priority had long since moved on. Now all that was left were a handful of old pieces of equipment and our voices bouncing off the walls.
About halfway through the week, the five remaining military guys were told to pack up and were led off by Ferney. We were sorry to see them go, but we wouldn’t miss the Frenchman a bit. Milton, the guy we had assumed was Sombra’s pet or mascot, was left in charge of us. The guards seemed far more relaxed than they had been. I think they were as grateful as we were that the madness of the forty-day march was over.
At the end of those seven days, we took a brief boat trip and then a truck ride into the Macarena Mountains. Along the way, we came to a decent-size town, Santo Domingo, that consisted of maybe eighty buildings or so, and immediately we all grew incredibly excited. A few days before we headed out of the hospital, two guards, Rogelio and Costeño, told us that they’d heard a rumor that a ransom was being paid for us and we were going to be released. This information fit in with what we’d heard on the forty-day march—that the Colombian government had unilaterally released forty-five prisoners. We figured this might have something to do with us. Why would the Colombians after all this time let their FARC prisoners go if they weren’t sure that the other side would reciprocate? Now that we were in an actual town, the pieces seemed to be falling into place. Why else would we be near a town, in the population, unless we were being released? Towns meant roads and transportation, telephones and electricity to power their laptops, easier communications with their Front and bloc leaders.
Another possibility came from something else we’d heard. The Colombian military had captured two FARC leaders—Simón Trinidad and a woman named Sonia (not our first captor but another woman with the same name). Trinidad was the son of wealthy traditional landowners who’d gone bad. His parents were leftists themselves, but Trinidad had gone really far left. He was captured in Ecuador in January of 2004 and had been extradited to Colombia almost immediately. While we’d been with the politcals, we’d heard that the U.S. was hoping to get him extradited to the States to stand trial there. Marc, Tom, and I agreed that this wouldn’t be a good thing for us—it would piss off the FARC and maybe they’d take their anger out on Americans—but it was a good thing for our country and the world to have this guy put away. We knew that the U.S. government didn’t negotiate with terrorists. As much as it sucked to know that, we also understood it was a good policy. We briefly considered a scenario in which the U.S. government would trade Trinidad or Sonia or both for us, but we knew that was just big pie-in-the-sky-thinking.
All of our optimism disappeared when our truck didn’t even stop in Santo Domingo. Instead we simply headed up into the mountains. We were packed in the back of a Land Cruiser pickup, twenty of us crammed into a canvas-covered six-foot truck bed. With each rut we rocked over, a little more of our collective hope leaked out of me. Marc and I looked over at each other. We’d each been sandwiched between female guards; one of them, Tatiana, had fallen asleep with her head on my shoulder and the other, Mona, had done the same on Marc’s. We both wished that we could have rested that easily, but with visions of our release growing smaller, this strange physical proximity to our enemy sickened me.
We spent three weeks at a temporary camp in the mountains. We were still near enough to Santo Domingo that we were adequately resupplied—we even had foam mattresses. We received new boots, new toldillo or bug nets, and some new clothes. The fattening up process continued, and Milton even started hunting for food to supplement our rations. One day we saw him walking through camp dragging two monkeys by their tails–one of which was still breathing, while the other had a live baby clinging to her. We looked away in disgust. For most of my life I’d been around hunting. I knew a humane kill from an inhumane one, but Milton didn’t seem to care. Later that night, when we ate fried marimba, those thoughts about the ethics of hunting were swallowed up along with a healthy portion of monkey meat. No matter where it came from, it was still meat that we needed.
Taking the moral high ground in that situation made no sense, and only Marc seemed to have any qualms about eating it. A few days later, Milton took down a deer. Marc and I had had a series of discussions about hunting, and he was in the Bambi camp—that the cute and fluffy deserved to live free and fearless. That was before he found out that cute and fluffy can be tasty and nutritious. His look of trepidation turned into glee when he bit into his first hunk of venison cooked over an open flame.
Milton seemed far more interested in hunting than he did in monitoring things around camp. Back on the march, the military prisoners had told us that we’d be lucky if we ever had Milton as our commandante. We only knew Milton for his blank stare and his lackey demeanor. They said he was basically a decent, simple guy who liked being out in the jungle. There were two things Milton seemed to know how to do—hunt and beg for cigarettes. If you talked to him about the weather, how the streams ran downhill, or about hunting, he was right there with you. Vary from that script and Milton didn’t stammer or make shit up. He’d just go quiet and then walk away.
The FARC had camped a ways downhill from us and they trekked uphill at intervals throughout the day to bring us food or to switch guard assignments. We got to know some of the guards better in this setup. Eliécer (Bird Man) was a decent guy in his midthirties. He took his FARC name, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, after a populist left-wing politician from the early to middle part of the twentieth century. He was assassinated in 1948 and his death led to la violencia, one of the bloodiest periods of political unrest in Colombian history.
The Eliécer we knew was anything but violent, but he was certainly a victim of it. He’d been with the FARC for quite a while, and we could tell that he had been brainwashed. When we first met him, he said, “All Americans are gangsters and criminals. We have been warned not to trust you. You have no morals.”
“Eliécer,” I said, “we’re the first Americans you’ve ever met. How do you know what we’re all like?”
“This is what I’ve been told and it’s what I believe. I’ve seen what your government has done to my people.”
Though we tried reasoning with him, he continued to resist our words. One night several months later, he came up to me and wanted to talk.
“I was wounded in a battle.” He rubbed the back of his head. “I was hit with a bullet here.”
“You’re a lucky man to be alive, Eliécer. Very lucky,” I said.
“It doesn’t feel lucky to me,” he said. “I would like to be one of you.”
“One of us?” Marc asked. “A hostage? Are you serious?”
“Not a hostage, but one of you. An American.”
“I thought we were all just a bunch of immoral cutthroats—losers, bad guys ruining Colombia.”
Eliécer’s expression was sheepish, but he looked me in the eye and said, “I was wrong. I believed what I was told, but now I believe what I see. You’re good men. I see how you treat one another. I don’t think you’d do some of the things we do to each other.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Eliécer looked away and blew out a sigh, “I no longer have a girlfriend. She is with someone else.”
“That’s a tough thing,” I said. “The women here can be pretty brutal.”
“Because of my injury”—he tapped his head—“I sometimes can’t—” He took his hand from his head and tapped his crotch. “No erection.”
I was surprised that he would make an admission like that but felt bad for him. I looked at Marc, who said, “Maybe if you exercised or something. Got rid of some of the stress.”
Eliécer shook his head. “It won’t do any good.” With that, he walked away.
I felt bad for him, because in that environment, with the guerrillas living in such close quarters, I knew that he was lying there at night, badly injured, feeling like shit about his manhood, and he had to hear his ex-girlfriend getting the wood laid to her by her new lover.
We’d heard someone in the camp making really strange noises at night, just screaming in agony. I knew then that was Eliécer. He said that particularly when there was a full moon, he couldn’t sleep and then the pain was the worst. The guy needed some medicine to control whatever was wrong with him as a result of his brain injury. The FARC wouldn’t get it to him all the time. In every other outfit in the world, a guy in Eliécer’s condition would have been released from active duty, but the FARC didn’t give a shit. He was in for life, and as a big guy, he had to carry a heavy mortar around on those marches. He was one of a group that Tom often referred to as the pack mules. We hated seeing those guys just getting abused.
Eliécer wasn’t the only guy who revealed things to us. Two of the guards who opened up to us quite a bit were young kids, Cereal Boy and the Plumber. The latter told us that the shots that we had heard fired when we were in the New Camp and the woman’s scream that followed were the result of a FARC guard’s suicide. He’d been the clown who laughed every time Marc fell down on our first march. The human in me felt bad that he found it necessary to inhale a round from his AK-47, but the hostage in me, the patriot in me, thought one fewer is not a bad thing.
The problem was, though, that for every one that was gone, there were still whole bunches around. In that temporary camp, we were plagued by ticks, tiny little bloodsuckers about the size of a pinhead. The ticks got in places on us that had never seen daylight. They worked their way into our skin, and if we had let them stay there long enough, they would have sucked the life out of us. They had one purpose and one purpose only in life. They were FARC bugs.
As Christmas Day 2004 rolled around, we didn’t have a whole lot to celebrate except having one another on our side in this battle. Christmas Eve 2004 we found ourselves sitting on a hillside in Colombia talking about what the day should have been like while we heard the FARC having a little celebration of their own. The wind was up and whipping us that night, and we all sat hugging our own legs to keep warm.
We heard footsteps behind us, and turned around to find Eliécer standing there.
“Why aren’t you at the party?” I asked.
“I was there. I just wanted to come to wish you all a good Christmas.”
He stepped in front of us and offered his hand. I extended mine, and Eliécer took it in both of his large callused hands. He nodded formally and said, “Merry Christmas, Keith. I’m sorry that you won’t be with your family.”
I thanked him and asked him about his own.
“I don’t want to think about them tonight. I want to choose to think about other things.”
He continued down the line, wishing Marc and Tom well just as he had me.
“Eliécer’s a smart guy,” I said as we watched him walk away. “He’s figured out what freedom means out here. I’m glad he realizes he has some choice about what to think about.”
MARC
In addition to overseeing our imprisonment, Milton was also responsible for managing a work detail. Ever since we’d arrived at this temporary camp, we’d heard the sound of chain saws in the distance. We saw FARC guards carrying what looked like building supplies from as far away as a quarter of a mile. Whatever it was that they were building, we had a feeling we’d be heading there soon.
After our second Christmas in captivity and New Year’s 2005 had come and gone, the camp that Milton’s group had been working on was finally ready for its inhabitants. As we walked uphill toward our new space, a dry wind was blowing and leaves skittered along the steeply sloped terrain. The sun was warm but the air cool. To rid myself of my post-Christmas blues, I closed my eyes, and I was back in Connecticut enjoying an Indian-summer day in New England. In my imagination, I could smell the twin scents of leafy decay and a distant fire. Destiney was squealing with delight as she sat in a pile of leaves and tossed them skyward. They tumbled back down, and rested on the pink hood that covered her curly hair. She smiled and revealed a gap in her top row of teeth, a reminder to Shane and me that the tooth fairy needed to make a stop. Joey
and Cody stood nearby, bunches of leaves in their hands, ready to attack their mom and me. I licked my lips and I could taste the last bit of sweetness from the caramel apple I’d just eaten.
That vision, pleasant as it was, was not enough to hold off the reality that stood before us: Perched on the hillside was what appeared to be a very large birdcage constructed out of a few posts supporting a cube of barbed wire. If Camp Caribe had a prisoner-of-war detention-camp aura, then this rustic wood-and-wire hooch was something out of a Halloween house of horrors. I knew, but did not want to believe, that anyone could expect a single human being, let alone three of them, to live in that figment of someone’s demented imagination brought to life on a scarred patch of land in Colombia. I thought of the fact that we were in the Macarena Mountains and the silly dance craze of the same name that briefly had America’s in its grasp—this thing had to be someone’s idea of a joke.
Milton escorted us to the gate, and when we refused to go in, he nudged us inside with the butt of his AK-47. It was approximately eighteen by eighteen by eight, topped with barbed wire and black plastic sheeting. The guards set our foam mattresses down. We kept our equipos on our backs, not so subtly signaling our intention to, as Keith would say, “beat feet” out of there. We asked Milton what the deal was, and at first, instead of saying anything, he bared his teeth and made a clawing motion.
“Tigres,” he said. He went on to explain that big jungle cats could climb over most any fence. “They come in. They eat you.”
Keith and Tom started laughing at him. Milton grew furious and stormed out. We knew that there were jungle cats in Colombia—the FARC had even killed a jaguar that had invaded one of our camps during the forty-day march. But to claim that predators were the reason they built this torture chamber was just ridiculous.
