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

42 OUT OF CAPTIVITYcalled guerrillas, maybe it was our sick senses of humor, or maybe wewere all a product of watching too much American television as kids,but we all immediately thought that we were stuck in The Planet of theApes. I was thrust into the middle of a group whose language I didn’tspeak and I was being pushed around by a bunch of guys who wereabout my height but far more stout, and who were about as unrefineda bunch of people as I’d ever seen. Perhaps the most unnerving thingwas the staring. Many of them thought I was the most curious sightthat they’d ever seen, and every time we stopped, a few of them wouldcluster around looking at me, their eyes sizing me up like I was a circusattraction. I’ve always been an open-minded kind of guy, but I felt likeI was being backed into a corner and some of my worst impulses werecoming out. I could feel a visceral hatred for the FARC—not becauseof who they were, how they looked, or the language they spoke—butbecause of what they were doing to us: taking our freedom just becausethey could. I don’t know if Farid was clueless or cruel. Whenever Icouldn’t go on any more and needed to rest, or when I fell, he startedto get in my face and goad me, saying in Spanish, “You can’t go onbecause you are a pussy. I am strong. America is weak.”I’d just stare at him, faking like I couldn’t understand what he wassaying. He seemed to take more and more pleasure in my pain andweakness as we went along. He’d grab his crotch as he stood over meand point at me: “¡No tienes huevos!” He’d laugh and then add, “Cajonesgrandes” while pointing at himself and acting like some caricature of astreet thug from a B movie.Once we’d put a distance between ourselves and the others, Faridseemed to relax a bit—not in his pace, or in his abuse of me—but in hisposture. His body language shifted, and he grew more loose-limbed.His face lost some of the lines and creases of worry that had madehim appear older, and now he looked like the teenager I suspected hereally was. He also began to sing. At first I could only catch a word ortwo, but after a few hours of hiking and hearing this guy sing the same