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

Homecoming 441The first night that we were in the hospital, I’d taken my first hotshower in five-plus years. I couldn’t believe that I could actually turn aknob and hot, clean water would come out a showerhead. Actual soapand shampoo were there for me, and not laundry soap. Staying in thatsoothing stream of water for hours felt like the best way that I couldbegin to scrub off the layers of accumulated filth that had marked myexperience with the FARC.Sitting there with Patricia and my two boys made me feel like I’dbeen given another chance. I wasn’t going to squander that opportunityto be washed clean, to remove some of the layers of selfishness and egothat had been building up on me long before I’d crashed in Colombia.If I hadn’t gotten the message that giving of myself to others was a necessaryand beneficial thing that enabled us all to survive our captivity,then Patricia’s selfless devotion drove the point home so that even thisbig dumb country boy wouldn’t forget it.When I finally got back to Florida and started to set up a householdwith Patricia and my reconfigured family, it was a real joy. Being withPatricia and the kids confirmed what I’d long suspected in the jungle:Feeling safe and secure in a relationship beat the hell out of runningamok and trying to prove things to myself or other people that had noreal meaning to them or to me. I wasn’t about to sit down and recite along litany of my sins and atone for every one of them—there are onlytwenty-four hours in a day, after all—but our captivity had given metime to do some assessing. I didn’t talk about it much, but just as Tomhad sat and thought about his house and each of the rooms and all thethings he needed and wanted to do to them, I’d done the same with myown house, the self I’d lived with, and my whole life. I didn’t think thatI needed to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, but there wassome fundamental structural damage that needed to be addressed.In the jungle, I’d gone through an honest evaluation and admissionof who I was and what I’d done with my life to that point. By the timewe’d gotten to our final year in captivity, I’d filled notebook after note-