Out of Captivity : Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

94 OUT OF CAPTIVITYlikely to try an escape. If Sombra thought he was adopting a soothing,buddy-buddy manner, he was way off base. His high-pitched squeakyvoice put us all on edge and contrasted sharply to his Porky Pig looks.He sounded like a cross between Mickey Mouse and someone who hadbeen sucking helium out of a balloon. He told us to grab our chairsbecause we were moving out.We loaded ourselves and our chairs into the back of another pickup,where we sat with three guards. The truck drove off and wound itsway through a series of unmanned guard stations. Though we wereno longer marching, our digestive distress hadn’t ended and we hadSombra pull over so we could head into a field to do our business.When we came back, Sombra and a guard who’d been introduced to usas Milton were sitting in our chairs in the middle of the road, smokingcigarettes, taking great big drags on them with every breath like theywere racing.They finished and Sombra managed to get back onto his feet like apregnant woman pushing herself up off a couch.“I’m going to give you new names,” he said, looking us over. Hepointed to me and told me my name was Antonio. Tom was Andrés.We couldn’t understand what name he was assigning Marc, so Marcsaid, “I’m Enrique.” And so we were the newly christened three amigos.We saw through the bullshit of trying to give us new identities,but we decided to put up with it for now. It was all so transparent andstupid, but essentially harmless since we knew what they were tryingto accomplish. If they could break down one small part of our reality—our names—they figured it was going to be easier for them to manipulateus. We ended up flipping that scheme, coming up with our owncode names for many of them. That way, if we were talking about themin English, they wouldn’t hear any of their names and know they werebeing talked about. From hour one on, Martín Sombra was Fat Man.As we drove on, we saw a pile of eighty-pound propane cylindersstacked together. We’d heard that the FARC made them into weapons