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

262 OUT OF CAPTIVITYity. Roosevelt wanted to let other nations know that we would stay outof their business, but if someone crossed a line, we could be there.With this story, the class switched from history to current events, asCereal Boy started talking about how we were interventionists. Just as itwas easier for him to say we didn’t go to the moon, it was easier for himto believe what had been pumped into his head by the FARC. I triedto explain to him that the world was a lot more complicated than that,and while I couldn’t undo all of the FARC’s hard work with my facts,at least Cereal Boy was willing to acknowledge a point of view that wasdifferent from the FARC’s. That was more than you could say for mostof our guards.One reason why some of the guerrillas felt more comfortable thanever before in talking to us was that we were farther away from theircamp than normal. A fairly steep little ravine separated us—it wasabout fourteen feet deep and the FARC had to build a small log bridgeto span it. We were a few hundred yards away from them, so you reallyhad to look long and hard to see into our camp and vice versa. This wasjust another example of Milton’s stupidity and the FARC’s overall lazinessand lack of oversight.In spite of the distance, our growing associations with the guardsdidn’t go unnoticed by Milton himself. A few months into our stay atthis camp—what we called the Exercise Camp—Mono came up to meand said, “I just want you to know that if I ever said anything bad aboutyou, I did it because I had to.”With a little bit of information from the other guards, we were ableto figure out that Milton had held a meeting with his crew to discussthe prisoner situation. He accused some of his guys of respecting usmore than they did him. We knew that a small number of them did andthat even those who didn’t respect us more had little respect for theirleader. In order to cover their asses, these guys had to say bad thingsabout us in the meeting. Some of our camp intel channels closed up fora bit, but at least no one ratted us out about the radio the Plumber had