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

Choices and Challenges11with the full cooperation and approval of the Colombian government.Some people’s perceptions of our work as subcontractors was that wewere like cowboys riding all over the range doing whatever we wanted.That’s just not true. Every flight we went on, a representative of theColombian government, either a military guy or a civilian, joined us.They were known as “host-nation riders.”The two Colombians said hello and introduced themselves. Theywere dressed in civilian clothes, even though one of them introducedhimself as Sergeant Luis Alcedes Cruz. Both seemed to be personableguys. Like most of the Colombians we worked with and knew, theyseemed eager to make a good impression.Because there wasn’t enough room in the plane and he was missioncommander, Keith let them know that only one of them could go upwith us. Tom, who’d done a lot of aviation work all over South Americaand the Caribbean, spoke Spanish, and he interpreted for Keith, relayingto us that Sergeant Cruz had stepped up and let the other guy havethe day off. Cruz sat in on our meeting, and with our broken Spanish,his broken English, and Tom’s capable translating, we let him knowwhat our target package was for the day. With that message communicated—asmuch a courtesy as anything else, since he really had no sayso at this level to alter our plan—we loaded up.As usual, during takeoff, we were pretty quiet and on task. Oncewe were airborne and on our way to the refueling point, the chatterbegan. I noticed that Tom could barely make it into the first half hourof the flight without dipping into his lunch. His wife, Mariana, was alegend—a Peruvian woman who was a marvelously good cook. Everyone of us would have admitted to needing to shed a few pounds, and Iknew that Tom was on meds for his high blood pressure, the cause ofwhich he attributed more to Mariana’s good cooking than to the stressof being a pilot.While I was busy checking the equipment, I could hear everybodycommunicating over the headsets. Tommy J reported that the dinner