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

Reunited 339seeing anyone in chains, and the thought that another hostage wasresponsible for putting someone there sickened us all. After that, Istopped playing chess with William. He seemed to have slipped intoa black cycle and I wondered if maybe guilt had brought on his darkermood.Incidents like this made the ever-shifting dynamics of the hostagesdifficult to predict. Alliances changed, positions in hierarchies moved,and all the three of us could do was watch as the personalities ebbedand flowed. Of everyone, Jhon Pinchao seemed the least integrated intothe group. Like the other military and police guys, he’d been held since1998, but though we’d spent quite a bit of time with him, none ofus really knew much about him. As my language skills developed, Istruggled to find common ground with Jhon. I liked him and he was agood-hearted person, but it was still difficult to say that I, of any of thethree of us, formed a friendship with him. The one person he seemedto communicate with was Ingrid, and I thought it was great that shehad reached out to him.Jhon always seemed to be on the fringe of any group, and he had akind of intense expression that sometimes led you to think that he waseither thinking very deeply or not thinking at all. At one of our morepermanent camps during that spring of 2007, we had access to a deepsection of river where we could actually swim. Usually the rivers andstreams were too shallow, but the rainy season had flooded the banksof this particular river. Jhon didn’t know how to swim when he wasfirst taken, but with the help of other hostages, he started to learn, andthat spring he became obsessed with it. Out of all of us, Tom was probablythe most comfortable in the water, and watching him trying toteach Jhon, we couldn’t help but smile at Jhon’s thrashing and kicking,which he did with a ferocity that churned up water like crazy. He didn’tmove very far considering all the energy he was expending, but as Tompointed out, the guy just had an inefficient motor—lots of horsepowerbut no torque. That didn’t stop him from practicing, though. Like the