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

A Place to Crashxii“JIATF East, there are five.” I listed them and spelled each of thenames: Tom Janis, Tom Howes, Marc Gonsalves, Sergeant Luis AlcedesCruz, and myself—Keith Stansell.I kept calling out the coordinates to them as we descended fromtwelve thousand feet over the rugged Cordilleria Oriental Mountains,south of Bogotá. A few minutes later we reached Ed Trinidad, who wasa part of our Tactical Analysis Team back at the embassy in Bogotá.He was trying to stay cool and calm, but I could hear the stress in hisvoice.Breaking with usual radio transmission protocol, I said, “Ed, bro,we’re just looking for a place to crash. Make sure you tell all our familiesthat we love them.”Just saying those words made it hard for me to look at Marc, so Iglanced toward the cockpit, where Tommy J and Tom Howes were busyfiguring out how to save our asses—or at least keep them from beingscattered over a half mile of godforsaken mountain jungle.Through the cockpit window I could see we were lined up for ourlanding. I then focused on the two Tommys sitting there. Tommy J wasspot on, man. He showed no panic, just a precision to his every move.The ground was coming at us quick. Marc and I checked our strapsone more time. I took a quick look over Tom’s shoulder, then linkedmy arm with Marc’s. I’d been in communication with Ed pretty muchthroughout our roughly four-minute descent, and I said to him, “Hey,Ed, I’m going to have to get off. We’re about to crash.”At that point, I f lashed back to a conversation I’d had with one ofmy supervisors in the company. I’d been in the military and had hadsome basic survival training, but f lying with Northrop Grumman, Iwas supposed to take the next level up. I told this company guy thatI wouldn’t do it. When he asked why, all I said was, “With this pieceof-shitaircraft we’ve being asked to f ly in, there’s no way I’m going tosurvive a crash. A dead man doesn’t need to know how to survive.”