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

Out of Captivity is a remarkable first-person account of living through something worse than a horrible nightmare. Yet the story is told with care, concern, and humanity in a way that will move your heart.

Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell, and Tom Howes were on a routine surveillance mission to locate drug crops for a civilian contractor when their single-engine plane lost power over the mountains of Colombia in South America. A few seconds later, they crash landed in the worst possible place . . . near a group of FARC rebels who lived off "taxes" paid by drug cartels. In a few moments, they were captives . . . and hostages.

Bonded by their harsh treatment and dangerous circumstances, the three men did their best to survive and to help other hostages, many of whom they met over the next five and a half years before they were rescued. In many cases, fellow hostages were as unsettling and dangerous to them as the hostage takers were. They lived in fear that they would be executed during a rescue mission. Malnourished, putting up with very poor living conditions, carrying heavy loads and sometimes with chains sometimes around their necks, they kept going somehow. Under the primitive conditions, death and disease were constant threats as they scrambled to new hiding places under the jungle's canopy.

Occasional access to radios comprised their main means of knowing what was going on with their families and the efforts to free them. Hopes would soar . . . only to be almost instantly dashed. As bad as the physical conditions were, the psychological conditions were even worse. The men were also haunted by realizing that they had serious family responsibilities that they weren't meeting. Guilt alternated with fear to plague their days and nights.

But they emerged as better men than when they entered the Colombian jungle. Their hardships were like a refining fire that cleansed them of much that they came to see as undesirable about themselves. They seldom faltered in their commitment to one another and to doing the right thing.

We can only read this book and wonder if we would have survived . . . or done nearly as well. I don't think so in my case. My hat is off to these three men and to the inner strength they exhibited.

We should all pray for the release of the remaining hostages that are being held by the FARC.

The book is told in alternating first person by each of them men, picking up in the story line where the last one left off. That makes the story more intense and interesting.

I was particularly impressed by their insights into the psychology of their captors, other hostages, and themselves. They may not have degrees in psychology, but I think they know more than the equivalent of a doctorate in hostage-captor fears, attitudes, behaviors, and emotions. You'll be fascinated with what they have to share . . . especially how some of the captors were in more dangerous and depressed circumstances than the hostages.

It was a very good and interesting book. It shows the horrible work of kidnapping in Colombia from a first hand experience with the psychological insight on how people react individually, with a group and in a community trying to survive. Also give insights on how terrorists groups such as FARC abuse and exploit its young members.

I would like to start by saying how sorry I am for the horrific ordeal that these three guys had to endure. Even after reading the book, I don't think one can fully comprehend the pain and suffering, both physical and psychological, they had to put up with during their 5 1/2 years as hostages in the Colombian jungle. I am happy they made it out alive and I feel sad that despite what they had to put up with, all three came home to realise their marriages had broken down as a result of their long separation from their wives.

The book is slightly drawn out for my liking and while I understand the difficulty of including the account of three individuals over a 5 1/2 year period, I feel the book would have benefited from being 80 pages or so shorter. The account itself is written decent enough although, half-way through, one cannot help but feel that a more talented editor could have made the reading process a lot more enjoyable.

My main criticism, however, is the attitude of the authors and their somewhat shocking lack of balanced analysis of the circumstances surrounding their capture and captivity. The three seem so ignorant of the oftentimes complex issues, suggesting the world is black and white and can easily be divided into good (all things US) and evil (FARC, drugs, Iraq).

First, they try to present themselves as "innocent civilians" or "innocent contract workers", almost implying they were like some backpacking students on their gap year travelling through Colombia or some civil engineers building childrens hospitals in the jungle for Colombia's poorest who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. In reality, they were providing intelligence on behalf of the US Ministry of Defense on drug labs in the Colombian jungle which intelligence was then shared with a number of US agencies such as the CIA or the DEA and also the Colombian government and military. In that sense, they were not "innocent civilians" but foreigners who took sides in a civil-war like setting. The fact that this made them the enemy of the FARC guerrillas that held them hostage later seems to have eluded them completely.

"We are just fighting against the drugs coming to the US." Yes, drugs are bad but isn't is also worth asking whether efforts should be undertaken to fight the circumstances in the US that lead to such an enormous demand for drugs? And would it not make more sense if the US helped the poor Colombian campesinos to make a decent living without having to resort to the production of drugs which, after all, is pretty much the only thing that lets them survive instead of sending Keith, Marc and Tom to provide intelligence that more often than not would be used by the Colombian government to fight a civil war?

The three rightly criticise the hollow and often contradictory FARC propaganda uttered endlessly by their brainwashed FARC captors but the simplistic, one-sided view of the three captives on many issues isn't much better at times. In one section, Keith describes how elated he felt at hearing the news of the US invasion of Iraq - completely oblivious to the facts surrounding the legality and justification of a US-led invasion of a sovereign state (not to mention the lack of evidence of any WMD or "harbouring terrorists", let alone the fact that in any war thousands of innocent civilians will lose their life). Again, I am no fan of Saddam's but the issue is so much more complex than good vs evil - too complex for an educated Western person to understand (at least upon his return to the US)?

Lastly, the three keep banging on about how their human rights were abused by FARC and how they couldn't wait to return to "freedom and liberty" in the US. No mention of the fact that hundreds of people were being denied human rights (and worse) by the US government in Abu Greib, Bagram and Guantanamo. To be clear, I am not saying everyone held there is innocent (although some of them clearly were) but in some of these cases the US government (their indirect employer no less) did not behave that differently from the FARC.

While I understand it may be too much to ask for someone held captive in the Colombian jungle by a bunch of uneducated, brutal guerrillas to reflect on these things in any rational way, I think with hindsight (and the book was obviously written after their return to the US), they (of all people) really ought to have asked certain questions and come to a more balanced view.