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

32 OUT OF CAPTIVITYsheet and gently wrapped it around the two of them like a mother tuckingin her kids. After seeing that, I didn’t know what to think. I was inthe middle of hell, surrounded by a bunch of people who’d been treatingus like animals and could kill me at any moment. Suddenly thisguy does something like that. It all seemed like one big contradiction.That rest stop turned out to be the last one for the night. Pretty sooneverybody but the guard on duty and I were all asleep. Though I wasexhausted in every way, I couldn’t fall asleep. Instead, I was lying thereon the hard ground, trying to figure out a plan. As civilian contractors,we didn’t have strict rules of engagement or the clear-cut demands ofthe Uniform Code of Military Justice to guide our actions. If we werestill active-duty military, our first obligation would have been to escape,but we weren’t military, we were civilians. As such, our objective wassurvival. Whereas escape might get us killed, so far, being calm andcooperative seemed to satisfy our number one objective of stayingalive.I had my eyes closed and was faking sleep. Every now and then, I’dopen one eye, and that guard would be looking right at me, his glarepretty much saying, “Don’t think I’m falling asleep.” Pretty soon afterthat, I crashed.Something must have woken me up, because I remember comingback to reality. I blinked my vision clear, and right in front of my face,in a tiny shaft of moonlight, was a white flower. It was no more thansix inches in front of me, so small it looked like a mere detail from anAnsel Adams photograph. At first I thought I was hallucinating. We’dbeen marching most of the last twenty-four hours, and I’d spent a goodpart of it looking down. All I saw then was dirt, rock, and dried upleaves. Where the hell did this flower come from?I’m not the most sentimental guy, but seeing that flower did somethingto me. I thought about my family and what they would do withoutme. I told myself that I was going to make it out of there—there wasno other option. I’d lost my mom when I was fourteen. I knew what