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

Settling In 133We did it knowing that we had to get it out of our system. The FARCreceived their fair share of our anger along with the Colombian military.That said, Tom, Marc, and I understood that we had not been thefocus. We trusted that the Colombians did not know that we were in acamp nearby their targets.On one level, we understood the game. The FARC used the presenceof the secuestrado, the hostages, as a way to try to tie the hands of theColombian government. In that sense, we were human shields. TheFARC hoped that by holding hostages in various locations along withor nearby their units, the military wouldn’t attack for fear of killing orinjuring hostages. We’d just had close-up evidence that the Colombianmilitary wasn’t going to let the FARC employ that strategy with impunity.We understood that the government couldn’t let the FARC get theupper hand, couldn’t just freeze all their military action. If they stoppedbombing FARC targets, they wouldn’t be an effective fighting force andthe FARC insurgency would gain more traction.In the aftermath of the bombings, Tom said something that we allhad to agree with. We were on the back side of the power curve as hostages.We were being sacrificed. We had no idea how many casualtiesthey took as a result of that attack, but as a rule, when the FARC took ahit, we would take a hit, too. On this occasion, we were lucky. We hatedbeing bombed, but we took satisfaction in knowing that the FARC hadincurred damages and were on the losing side of this; even though itnearly cost us our lives, it was cause for celebration. We also hated theidea that simply by holding us as hostages, the FARC could claim somesort of victory. As hostages or prisoners, there wasn’t a lot that we coulddirectly do to defeat the FARC ourselves. There were things we coulddo in small ways—like not believing any of their Marxist propagandabullshit and by conducting ourselves in ways that countered their opinionof us as imperialist pigs.In the end, we chalked this one up as a victory—one that scared the