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

310 OUT OF CAPTIVITYFrom the time Sonia and her crew had captured us to this pointnearly three and a half years later, no one had ever said that to me. Justknowing that I could take a break when I needed to and not pay a pricefor it made it a lot easier to keep pushing on. The FARC were alsocarrying a lot of the gear Marc and I had in order to lighten our loads.With Milton’s bunch, it had been just the opposite; we constantly hadto help them out by carrying extra food and other essentials in ourequipos.When we reached a resupply point, we were given new boots andclothes. The food was more plentiful than before, but it came at oddhours and with no rhyme or reason. We weren’t about to object, butgetting beer and bread at 8 A.M. did seem strange. If we’d learned onething in the jungle, it was don’t question too much. We just took whateverfood or supplies we were given because you could never predictwhen you might get those things again.While we were there, César also showed up. He seemed to like tojoke around and keep things light. Before he moved off into the junglewith another cadre of FARC, he told us not to worry and that we’d nowbe better taken care of. He said that we’d be watching movies, reading,and when we got to our destination, there would be radios waiting forus. We were taking a wait-and-see attitude on that, but so far these guysdefinitely had lived up to their promises. We spent a few days at theresupply depot with Jair’s group, where we learned that one of the reasonswe’d been hightailing it was that our new group had come underfire from an air attack just a couple of days before they picked us up.They wouldn’t talk about casualties, but it was clear they wanted out ofthe hot zone as quickly as possible.With all of us heavily loaded again—Marc and I had to carry all ourown stuff again because the FARC were carrying all the food and othermaterials they needed—we kept up that same intense pace for a fewdays. We finally slowed down and came to a camp on the edge of awide, fast-moving river. Across the river from us we saw César and his