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

Changes in Altitude47ing and drawing. Every time I came back from deployment, she had anew book to show me of colored drawings of various family scenes. Itreasured those books and it tore me apart to think about how muchtime might pass before she presented me with another one. Joey andCody shared a room, and I visualized them sitting on the floor on thegreen carpet with the outlines of streets and parking lots “driving” theirHot Wheels cars all around it. Joey’s birthday was coming up on thetwenty-eighth of February, and I worried about not being there for it.I’d gotten him the Spyder paintball gun he’d been dying to have. I lovedwandering around the field where I took the boys to play, and felt badthat we wouldn’t be able to try out Joey’s new gun.Everything came back to me in such vivid recollections it was almostas if I could feel the physical presence of them weighing me down. Itwasn’t that the thought of them was unpleasant; on the contrary, theywere the only joy I could find in that otherwise bleak setting. But thesethoughts of my kids and my wife made me feel guilty, like somehow Ihad let them down.That it appeared as if I’d been brought to this farmhouse to be killedadded to that weight. I was never going to see my family again. Not mymom, my dad, my brother. None of them. I’d see them all in heaven,of course, but that wouldn’t be for a long, long time. I knew that therewere FARC guerrillas near me, and I didn’t want to cry in front ofthem. I tried to hold it all in, but all at once it was as if that weightsqueezed everything out of me. I cried until I felt like my whole bodywas emptied of fluid. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head thatTommy J and Sergeant Cruz had been separated from us and that waspossibly the end of them. Sonia’s cold-blooded, matter-of-fact statementabout killing them played again in my head. I kept scanning theclearing, looking to the trailhead where Farid and I had emerged fromthe jungle. The sunlight was crawling up the ridge opposite me, butstill there was no sign of Keith or Tom.Just when you think you’ve hit absolute bottom, something comes