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

Running on Empty 303life as “normal” that we’d have never stood for in our other lives. Havingsomeone dictate when we could bathe, when we could eat, wherewe would go, and when we would start and stop marching had invisiblyworked on us. As much as we’d thought about the physical effects ofour being held captive, that incident with the machetes served as animportant reminder: Like the butchered animals, we would rot fromthe inside out. We needed to be as vigilant as we could be for any othersigns of mental imprisonment.One psychological effect of captivity that we never experienced wasStockholm syndrome. We all knew what it was—when a prisoner beginsto identify and sympathize with either the individuals holding himor her captive or their cause. By being aware of what it was, we wereable to fight off its possible effects. In reality, the possibility of us experiencinganything like Stockholm syndrome was remote because theFARC treated us so horribly.One sign that our hope was not as intense as it had been earlier wasour diminished faith that someone would step forward to help us andclaim the reward for that information. While in the Macarena Mountains,we’d heard rumors that someone was offering a reward for ourrelease. Later, we saw pamphlets that had been dropped among thecampesinos urging them to cooperate with the authorities in getting usrescued. At first, we thought the news was fantastic since it proved thateven though we’d been gone for nearly two years, someone was stillinterested in getting us out of there. To offset that elation was the reality:We’d seen few campesinos and the guards had told us that beforewe’d moved through any populated areas, the FARC had threatened toexecute anyone who laid eyes on us. We’d heard on the radio about afamily of five who had been executed by the FARC. We rememberedscrambling off the boats one night and running past a small shackalong the river where a family of five was sitting minding their ownbusiness. The pieces of the story fit, adding to the death toll our presencehad run up.