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

18 OUT OF CAPTIVITYhis needs, I guess. Worse was the fact that I had a photo in my wallet ofmy son, just a tiny little snapshot. I indicated that I wanted to keep that,but they wouldn’t let me. They did the same to Tom and Marc, takingall their personal possessions except their clothes.“I guess this is better than being dead,” Tom said.Marc shook his head and added, “What is this? Look at these guys.What a motley crew. They look more like a bunch of kids dressed up forHalloween than soldiers. And the cow that was mooing at us when wefirst got out of the plane? How surreal.”With everything else going on, I had almost forgotten about the cow,which had made a chaotic setting that much stranger. They may havelooked like a bunch of kids at Halloween, but they’d been firing somehigh-power weapons not too long ago. Those rounds were real andcould do serious damage to any one of us. But things were about to geteven weirder.Each of us had a guerrilla come back to search us again, this timeprobing our hair and our underarms, between our toes. Another FARCmember separated himself from the group and stepped forward andsaid something in vehement Spanish. I understood only two words—chip and mato. Tom translated for us: “He says that if he finds a microchipon us, he’s going to kill us.” I didn’t like hearing those words, butI was glad that Tom was finally getting more of his wits about him. Theblow to his head could have been a hell of a lot worse, but now that hewas able to speak in both languages and process thoughts more completely,I was relieved. We needed Tom’s input and knowing that he wason his way back to full strength was a good thing.A few hours later, when we all had our first chance to really speakto one another, we agreed that of all the bizarre moments we experiencedthe day of the crash, this comment about the microchip wasthe most puzzling. These people actually thought that we had microchipsembedded in our bodies. They assumed that, as Americans, wehad some kind of tracking system that enabled our people back in the