Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell, and Tom Howes with Gary Brozek OUT OF CAPTIVI TY Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle For Tommy Janis, who made the ultimate sacrifice: Your skill and courage under fire saved all our lives. Your actions brought honor to you, your family, and your country. For Sergeant Luis Alcedes Cruz, who didn’t make it out. For our families, who were waiting for us when we did. For the thousands still held in captivity in Colombia and elsewhere around the world. None of you are forgotten. Contents Author’s Note vi Selected FARC Guerrillas 2003–2008 viii Prologue: A Place to Crash x 1 Choices and Challenges 1 2 Changes in Altitude 30 3 ¿Quién Sabe? 60 4 The Transition 82 5 Settling In 115 6 Proof of Life 141 7 Caribe 167 8 Broken Bones and Broken Bonds 197 Photographic Insert 9 Ruin and Recovery 230 10 Getting Healthy 255 11 Dead 281 12 Running on Empty 298 13 Reunited 321 v Contents 14 The Swamp 345 15 Politics and Pawns 372 16 Fat Camp 399 17 Freedom 413 18 Homecoming 430 Acknowledgments 453 About the Authors Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher Authors’ Note This story is not over. At the very moment that you are reading this, an- other world exists deep inside the vast jungles of Colombia. Hundreds of hostages are still held there, twenty-eight of them are our compan- ions. They are chained, they are starving, and all they want is to go home. Let them not be forgotten: Civilians Alan Jara (captive since July 15, 2001) Sigifredo López (April 11, 2002) Police and Military Prisoners Pablo Emilio Moncayo Cabrera (December 20, 1997) Libio José Martínez Estrada (December 20, 1997) Luis Arturo García (March 3, 1998) Luis Alfonso Beltrán (March 3, 1998) William Donato Gómez (March 8, 1998) Robinson Salcedo Guarín (March 8, 1998) Luis Alfredo Moreno (March 8, 1998) Arbey Delgado Argote (March 8, 1998) Luis Herlindo Mendieta (January 11, 1998) Enrique Murillo Sánchez (January 11, 1998) César Augusto Lasso Monsalve (January 11, 1998) vii Authors’ Note Jorge Humberto Romero (June 10, 1999) José Libardo Forero (June 10, 1999) Jorge Trujillo Solarte (June 10, 1999) Carlos José Duarte (June 10, 1999) Wilson Rojas Medina (June 10, 1999) Álvaro Moreno (December 9, 1999) Elkin Hernández Rivas (October 14, 1998) Edgar Yezid Duarte Valero (October 14, 1998) Guillermo Javier Solózano (June 4, 2007) William Yovani Domínguez Castro (January 20, 2007) Salin Antonio San Miguel Valderrama (May 23, 2008) Juan Fernando Galicio Uribe (June 9, 2007) José Walter Lozano (June 9, 2007) Alexis Torres Zapata (June 9, 2007) Luis Alberto Erazo Maya (December 9, 1999) Selected FARC Guerrillas 2003–2008 Teófilo Forero Mobile Column Sonia Farid Uriel Johnny 27th Front Milton Ferney (The Frenchman) Rojelio Mono The Plumber Eliécer Cereal Boy 2.5 Smiley Vanessa Songster Tatiana Mona Alfonso Costeño Pidinolo ix Selected FARC Guerrillas 2003–2008 1st Front Enrique Jair Moster Asprilla LJ Mario Tula the dog FARC Leaders 2003–2008 Manuel Marulanda Raul Reyes Mono Jojoy Fabian Ramirez Burujo Iván Rios Sombra (Fat Man) Ernesto Alfredo Cesár Alfonso Cano Joaquin Gomez PROLOGUE A Place to Crash KEITH “That, sir, is an engine failure.” From our pilot Tommy Janis’s tone, you wouldn’t have known that anything serious was wrong. He had f lown all kinds of aircraft all around the world. Tommy J. was a real larger-than-life guy with more stories to tell than I have hairs on my head—and I’ve as full and thick a mane as anybody. His response wasn’t borderline sarcastic; it came from a place about as deep into irony country as we were into Colombia. The “that” he was referring to wasn’t so much a thing as it was an absence of a thing—the steady throbbing pulse of the single 675- horsepower Pratt and Whitney turboprop engine that until a few sec- onds before had been powering our Cessna Grand Caravan. It didn’t take someone like me, a guy who’d been in avionics and aircraft main- xi OUT OF CAPTIVITY tenance for all his adult life, to recognize that the relative silence in the cabin was not a good thing. I closed the biography of Che Guevara I’d been reading and looked over at my buddy and coworker Marc Gonsalves. He’d been busy at his station, practicing with the camera gear and the computer. I wasn’t sure if he’d been so involved in what he was doing that he noticed anything at all. The poor guy had only been f lying with us for just a few missions and now we had a damn engine failure to deal with. I knew that Tommy Janis and our copilot Tom Howes would instantly f lip the switch to figure out if we were going to be able to get this bird over the mountains and to the airport at Larandia, where we were scheduled to refuel. In my twenty-plus years of f lying, I’d had all kinds of training in a variety of different military and civilian aircraft. I’d been in tight spots before and now I slipped easily into a don’t-panic-just-focus mindset. “Marc,” I told him, “make the mayday call.” “I’m too new to make a call this important,” Marc said. “I think you better do it.” I couldn’t blame the guy for not wanting to make that initial call. I immediately got on the SATCOM radio to relay our location to the guys back at the base. The first thing I needed to do to was to let our com- mand posts know our location coordinates. “Magic Worker, this is Mutt 01, do you read me?” I waited but got no response. I tried them again. Silence. This was not good. Magic Worker was responsible for our com- mand and control. Normally, they responded almost instantly every time we called in at our appointed half-hour intervals. The thought of possibly going in on an emergency landing without anyone knowing we had a mayday was not something any of us wanted to do. I made another call to a Department of Defense group based in Florida called JIATF East. “Mutt 01. This is JIATF East. How many souls on board?” A Place to Crash xii “JIATF East, there are five.” I listed them and spelled each of the names: Tom Janis, Tom Howes, Marc Gonsalves, Sergeant Luis Alcedes Cruz, and myself—Keith Stansell. I kept calling out the coordinates to them as we descended from twelve thousand feet over the rugged Cordilleria Oriental Mountains, south of Bogotá. A few minutes later we reached Ed Trinidad, who was a part of our Tactical Analysis Team back at the embassy in Bogotá. He was trying to stay cool and calm, but I could hear the stress in his voice. Breaking with usual radio transmission protocol, I said, “Ed, bro, we’re just looking for a place to crash. Make sure you tell all our fami- lies that we love them.” Just saying those words made it hard for me to look at Marc, so I glanced toward the cockpit, where Tommy J and Tom Howes were busy figuring out how to save our asses—or at least keep them from being scattered over a half mile of godforsaken mountain jungle. Through the cockpit window I could see we were lined up for our landing. I then focused on the two Tommys sitting there. Tommy J was spot on, man. He showed no panic, just a precision to his every move. The ground was coming at us quick. Marc and I checked our straps one more time. I took a quick look over Tom’s shoulder, then linked my arm with Marc’s. I’d been in communication with Ed pretty much throughout our roughly four-minute descent, and I said to him, “Hey, Ed, I’m going to have to get off. We’re about to crash.” At that point, I f lashed back to a conversation I’d had with one of my supervisors in the company. I’d been in the military and had had some basic survival training, but f lying with Northrop Grumman, I was supposed to take the next level up. I told this company guy that I wouldn’t do it. When he asked why, all I said was, “With this piece- of-shit aircraft we’ve being asked to f ly in, there’s no way I’m going to survive a crash. A dead man doesn’t need to know how to survive.” xiii OUT OF CAPTIVITY TOM When I heard the engine spooling down, I immediately looked at the instruments and then scrutinized the terrain for an emergency land- ing spot. I didn’t see anything close to suitable, so I reached for a map. I was barely aware of the ambient noise in the cabin. I knew Keith was on the radio, but the sound of his voice in my headphones and the pres- ence of the three men behind me were definitely on the periphery of my consciousness. Our altitude was a little more than twelve thousand feet and I needed to determine if we could make the glide, clear the mountains, and land at our refueling site, Larandia. I looked over at the gauges to find out what our current airspeed, altitude, and rate of descent were. From the map, I plotted a point ap- proximating our location and our destination.