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

¿Quién Sabe?61took Keith seriously. We were in a vulnerable location, where we couldbe easily spotted from the air, but despite that, they set up a tent for thethree of us. We were all shivering so violently that they built a fire, butwe were too exhausted to even crawl out of the tent to sit by it.The only reason we woke up the next morning was that Johnnyreturned with an IV fluid drip for Keith. I was a little worried about thisjungle medic jabbing Keith with a needle, but he seemed to know whathe was doing, although it strangely took him another couple of daysto stitch up Tom’s head wound. After an hour or so of Keith’s IV treatment,the bag was empty and we were on the move again with Keithstill dangling between two guerrillas in the hammock.By Tom’s count, we had been on this march for eleven days sincethe plane went down. We still had no idea of where we were going orwhether there was a point to this march other than getting us as faraway from the Colombian Army as possible. Even if we hadn’t beensurviving on only a few hours of sleep, those days would have blurredone into another. Our exhaustion was so all-consuming that anytimewe stopped marching, even if it was for just a few minutes, we immediatelyfell asleep. We were all experiencing a kind of vertigo; every imageseemed to dance in front of us with dizzying intensity, as if we wereviewing everything through troubled water.Though the FARC continued to provide Keith with IV feedings,beyond that they didn’t seem to care much about our mental or physicalstate. They pushed us relentlessly during the next two weeks, andas they did, our hopes rose and fell. Their answers to our questionsabout where we were going or when we would be able to rest rangedfrom “a little while longer” to “pretty soon” to “¿Quién sabe?” or “Whoknows?”This last one became more frequent and more frustrating as thedays passed. On what would eventually become a twenty-four daymarch, ¿Quién sabe? was a tool the FARC wielded almost as frequentlyas the machetes they used to clear the jungle, with each tool producing