Cold Case Files - I SURVIVED: I Remember the Fuselage Opening Like A Can

Episode Date: July 27, 2024

Keith and Marc’s plane crash-lands during a routine drug surveillance mission over the Colombian jungle and they are immediately captured by FARC guerrillas who hold them hostage for five years. Progressive: Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Prolon: Go to ProLonLife.com/Survived to get 15% off your 5-day nutrition program! Rosetta Stone: Don’t put off learning that language - there’s no better time than RIGHT NOW to get started! For a very limited time, I Survived listeners can get Rosetta Stone’s Lifetime Membership for 50% off! Visit rosettastone.com/survived  

This program contains subject matter that may be disturbing to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. I'm here, locked in my box, and there's bombs being dropped very close by, and I'm thinking, am I going to survive this one? Is this the one? Is this where I'm going to die? Real people. The rescue is extremely, extremely risky. It's just a radio on this guy's shoulder awaiting the older to come in and kill us like rats.

Who faced death. They actually had assigned each guard a hostage to shoot. So they were very organized in how they were going to go about killing us. And lived to tell how. These guys are serious. I mean, they're not even going to try to get us out. If there's any hint of a rescue, we're dead instantly. This is I Survived.

It's February 2003 in Bogota, Colombia. Keith and Mark work for a U.S. military contractor in Colombia. They fly aerial surveillance in the U.S.-backed anti-drug war. My duties were a mission commander. We were looking for counter-drug targets, some classified, some unclassified, that ranged from clandestine airstrips to clandestine laboratories. We worked on a Cessna Grand Caravan airplane.

It was painted white. It looked like a civilian airplane, but inside it was filled with a lot of surveillance equipment. My job was to operate some of the sensors in back of the airplane. Basically, they were video cameras and still image cameras. We would search for narco laboratories, cocaine laboratories, transshipment points, anything that drug cartels would use to produce or transport drugs. Colombia's drug trade is largely controlled

by the rebel group FARC. FARC, F-A-R-C, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia. The FARC were a communist group formed in 1964 that had begun to use the drug trade in their fight to overthrow the government. I knew that we were flying over basically enemy territory. I knew that we were surveilling cartels or drug traffickers, people that were producing narcotics, cocaine. We were in pretty risky areas, doing some pretty risky missions.

So we were always very far from any kind of support, far away from search and rescue, far away from any rescue efforts, and we were over hostile territory. Whether it was mountainous ranges, all jungle, or the Amazon basin, all jungle, if we went down, we were in the middle of nowhere. On February 13, 2003, Keith gathered his team at the airfield. Every morning before we take off, we have a representative of the Colombian government.

Could be the military, could be the intelligence side, we don't know, rides with us on the aircraft. And this morning, two Colombians showed up, and I told them, as a mission commander, that I only had room for one. So one guy went back home and the other guy went with us and this was his first mission. His name was Alcides Cruz. He was a sergeant. Besides our Colombian host nation writer, we had Mark, myself, and both of our pilots' first name were Tom. So it was Tom Janis and Tom Howes.

Tom Janis was the pilot and Tom Howes was the co-pilot. That morning was more one of our typical missions we were heading south and we had to cross the Andean Ridge which is a mountain ridge that divides North and South Columbia. I was sitting in the left backseat practicing practicing with with some of the equipment we had some new software that I was trying out and all of a sudden I just heard a loud bzzz sound. And I looked over to Keith and he about jumped out of his seat.

I hear the aircraft do what's called just a perfect spool down. It looked like, it just sounded like you just shut it down. It just made a whoosh and the prop came to a standstill. I'd never have an engine just cut off as quickly and as silently as that. My first question to Tom, the pilot in command,

I said, Tom, what's going on? And he said to me, that's an engine failure, sir. This airplane we were flying on had only one single engine. And so that meant we were a glider at that point. Now, we were over a mountain range and looking for a place to crash land. My first thought was of my kids and of my family. I looked at Mark and asked him to make the mayday calls.

I wasn't scared at that time, and it's not bravado or macho, but you're trained over and over to respond to these emergency procedures, so that's switch one kicks on, and that's what I was doing. The whole way down, Keith and I were giving coordinates to our base, letting them know what was going on. We called in a Mayday. I remember looking at Mark and thinking, he's brand new, and he's just training as a mission commander,

and he's just got a handful of flights under his belt. I'm thinking, gosh, how fair is this? And then I look at Tommy up front in the pilot's seat, and he's just cold as ice doing his job. I said, Tommy, do that pilot. I want to go home. Suddenly, our pilot noticed a small patch of land. It was not flat, but it was clear of jungle,

and he decided to land us there. The trees had been cut down, but it was still really rough terrain and probably a 35 to 40 degree angle it was very quick within a few minutes we were about to impact i was sitting in my seat and i just had my seat belt on i just held on to the bottom of the seat like this and braced closed my eyes we kind of skidded and tore the aircraft off and oh boy this is going to hurt because i saw us kind of piling up into the into the mountainside and I remember the right side of the aircraft next to me the fuselage just opening up

like a can. It was like a split second but it was almost a surreal image that I still have in my head to see this thing split open and then fill and in with dirt and dust and just you know the sunlight where you can see the speckles of dust and then it's blocked out and then I look at my hands and my body and I'm still in one piece and like amazed that we survived the plane crash in my mind I think it was a miracle that we survived that crash sergeant Cruz and I were gonna get ourselves out of the aircraft and on this particular type of aircraft, right behind me was a cargo door that lifted open. And obviously the aircraft was bent to pieces, so it's not like we just turned the handle to get open. The door wouldn't open, so the two of them were kind of hammering, kicking at the door to force it open.

Our biggest danger with the aircraft, if you survive the crash, is do you survive the majority of the of the after crash fires. So my first thing was to extract the pilots. So as Mark was gathering the weapons and he was getting other radios and survival gear together, Sergeant Cruz and I managed to beat ourselves out of the aircraft by kicking on the door and forcing its way open. At that point is when we heard gunfire. Sergeant Cruz slid out first and he starts pointing and he was screaming, gorilla, gorilla, gorilla. As I slid out of the aircraft, I looked to where he was pointing, which was down the hill from us. And I saw a handful of gorillas coming up the mountainside to us, but then behind them, it looked like ants crawling everywhere, coming in all directions. I knew at that point we were in very bad shape.

The plane had crash-landed in an area held by FARC guerrillas. Number one concern on exiting the airplane was fire. Then when we exited the airplane and the guerrillas were there, things changed, and we weren't so worried about that fire anymore. We were worried about the fire coming from those guys. Some were shooting at us, some were kind of shooting in the air. I had our weapons, they weren't duffel bags, and I ran to cover at the front of the airplane

where Keith and our Colombian host nation rider were. By this time, the two pilots had come out and it was just moments before the guerrilla were there. I took the weapons and I threw them over the hill, and I said, guys, there's not gonna be a fight today. I said, we'll die in this fight. We were outnumbered overwhelmingly at that point. Sergeant Cruz, I remember tears in his eyes,

and it wasn't tears of fear so much as tears of frustration. And he looked at me and he says, please tell them I'm an American. Tell them I'm an american tell them i'm an american he knew there's a big difference between us and him and the way the gorilla are going to handle him and he knew at that point he believed he believed that he was going to die i could hear bullets whizzing by and i look over and i see these people who are, some of them dressed in camouflage uniforms, all of them with guns, shouting, shooting at us, shooting towards us. I look up and hear our three guerrillas with AK-47s and they're pointing at our face, yelling at us and asking us to put our hands up.

At that point I knew, I knew it was just, I had a very, very bad feeling in my stomach. We had threw our hands up in the air. We shouted, no armas, no armas, no weapons. My first thought was that we were going to die. My belief initially is that they would interrogate us and then execute us. They had these expressions on their faces that was stone cold, and they had their weapons and weapons vests, and they had, some of them had big machine guns, some of them had mortars, they had grenades all strapped on their bodies.

It was Tom, Hal, the co-pilot, Mark, and myself who were taken down the hill first. I looked back and I could see Tommy and Sergeant Cruz being shepherded by one gorilla left behind. They led us away from the airplane, and they marched us for about five minutes. And they had us take off all of our clothes. They stripped us down to nude, and they began to search us.

They took away all of our personal belongings. I asked to keep a picture that I had of my son and my family that was in my wallet, and they wouldn't let me keep the picture. They began to comb through our hair, look between our fingers and our toes. They were looking for a microchip, what they called a microchip. They thought it was something that could be used

to track our location. What we didn't understand was how afraid of our technology they were. They actually believed that as Americans we had microchips in our blood and that satellites could hear our conversations. After we were strip searched, we heard the sound of helicopters coming down the valley and everybody knew that this was a rescue. You hear that classic old Huey, wop, wop, wop, just like out of any Vietnam movie coming down the valley and everybody knew that this was a rescue. You hear that classic old Huey whop, whop, whop, just like out of any Vietnam movie coming down the valley. I'm thinking, gosh, now we're really in this. They're coming to get this, get us. It's like a movie.

These surely were the helicopters that were there directed by the coordinates. We were feeding them as we were going down to pick us up and rescue us. Colombian military helicopters were responding to the crew's mayday call. Immediately there was gunfire and another battle ensued between the terrorists on the ground and these helicopters overhead. As this crossfire is going on and you can hear shots raining all around us, I had a gorilla holding my arm intertwined on each side of me, so we were human shields.

So the FARC couldn't shoot the helicopter, because obviously the helicopter would kill us with its minigun, and the helicopter couldn't shoot at them because they'd hit us. I remember vividly looking at the pilot and the gunner as they hovered down to about 50 feet over me, and the gunner shrugs his shoulders, letting me know there's nothing we can do. I think it was very heartbreaking for that crew, too,

to be so close, looking we could see each other's faces and not be able to rescue us. The helicopter followed us right up to the jungle side where we went into tall, triple canopy jungle. There's nothing they could do. Once we reached the jungle, we basically just dissolved. We disappeared.

Every step is with pain. We're away from the helicopters now, and I'm starting to think about what's going to happen next, and I'm waiting for the next thing. Are we going to be brought to some of the leaders of these terrorists? Are they going to torture and interrogate us? How painful is it going to be? And so I was very concerned about all of this. The guerrilla, the FARC terrorists marched us throughout the entire first day into the night.

At night we're sitting down and we've been on the run all day and the sun's going down. And all I'm hoping as we stop is that we're going to see Sergeant Cruz and Tom behind us. This guerrilla leader, which was a woman who was about 28 or 29 years old, her name was Sonia. She came up to me and was proud to exclaim that she had executed Tom and Sergeant Cruz. This is a tough part because Tommy was my mentor for years in this program. And I had flown many times with him. I never really got the chance, except in a light way next to the aircraft, to tell him, thank you for saving our lives. And it's a loss that I'll always carry with me.

As the jungle got dark, I thought that we would stop and rest at one point or another. But the terrorists continued to march us, that we would stop and rest at one point or another. But the terrorists continued to march us, and we marched throughout the entire night. They were very careful to not use any lights or anything. And that's when I discovered how the jungle, the Amazon, is not really a place meant for humans. A lot of these trees are filled with thorns and spines. There would be vines to trip my ankles.

There would be vines hanging overhead to catch my throat. There's young terrorists in front of me and behind me. One of them has his rifle on me in case I try to run. He's going to shoot me. I'm listening to them also as they're talking, and I don't understand Spanish. I can understand a couple of words, but not enough to really get everything clearly. I understand one of them to say to the other, what do you think is going to happen? Are we going to kill them? According to the CDC, 74% of the U.S. is overweight.

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you would get dizzy and pass out from exhaustion. We would get to some place and they would have us lay down in the mud for a couple of hours and then continue marching. To avoid leaving tracks, their captors made the men wear the same boots as they did. Because of my shoe size, they could not get rubber boots to fit me. So their simple answer to this was just to cut the front of the boots off and leave my feet exposed. But when you march through the mountains for two weeks two and a half weeks with your feet exposed at the end of march i only had one toenail left i remember one or two the best way for them to manage us was to have us confused hurt hungry

in a difficult situation and that's where exactly they had us we were in a tough spot the staple of the gorilla is panela water, which is just brown sugar and water, or Kool-Aid, or just straight sugar mixed with powdered milk. It's energy. It's just sugar that you eat all day long while you're marching. It was normal for them to give us a leaf filled with rice and bugs all in it. And so it was a very slow process to get used to not picking the bugs out or just, you know, eating what they gave us. That was just part of the jungle.

After marching continuously for two weeks, the three men were near a breaking point. I sat down at a point where I couldn't march anymore. I had diarrhea, I was vomiting, I hadn't eaten in over a week. I just laid down in a fetal position. Well, the gorilla had no part of that. They sent six of these guys and they just took a hammock and strung it between two poles. And they loaded me into this hammock

and carried me up a mountain. We were just merchandising in no way, shape or form, unless they had to, were they gonna lose us. After 40 days, the men arrived at a FARC camp hidden deep in the jungle. They put Mark and Tom at first outside, and they left me inside because I was still very, very sick, and I was vomiting, and I had diarrhea. I'm in a pair of underwear laying on plastic because I had just dirtied all of what little bit of clothing I had and we kept having to wash it. So it just kept me just in underwear and nothing else. And what I would do is I would just watch the roaches. They could smell me

and they would come out of the floor and they would just crawl to me. And I would pass the day watching the roaches crawling to me and I would kill them as they got to me. When Keith recovered, he was moved outside with Mark and Tom. It was a fenced-in enclosure, and there were three boxes, each one for each one of us. We are not allowed to speak to each other or to anybody, and they took each one of us and locked us inside each one of those boxes. The box was about a six by six foot cube. It didn't have any windows. It just had a door. And that's where they would keep us at night. They would lock us in there at night and let us out during the daytime. Even though we weren't allowed to speak, we were able to see each other. We also had toilet paper that the guerrilla had given us, and we had pens.

And so we began to write little notes on the toilet paper to each other. Just, you know, remember our family is still waiting for us. There's people that are looking for us. We will not be forgotten. As negotiations to free the men stalled, the Colombian army continued to fight the rebels. After four months in captivity, one night Mark heard aircraft overhead. I hear the sound of what sounds like two jets come rushing in and they just fly right overhead. And I heard the first bombs hit.

And it was just, they were very close, and it was just a kaboom. You could hear the shrapnel and debris flying through the trees close by. So we thought, gosh, okay, it's nighttime, they're bombing. Just a little miscue, they could be a few hundred meters off and they're gonna hit us. I had survived the plane crash. I had survived the abduction, the march.

And now I'm here locked in my box and there's bombs being dropped very close by. And I'm thinking, am I going to survive this one? Is this the one? Is this where I'm going to die? Is it with these bombs? After the last bomb was dropped, the airplane flew away and I just stayed on the floor until I woke up the next morning. After the bombing, we're moved to another camp, which becomes another long-term camp that they build new. The three men had now spent eight months as hostages. We were now in this camp that's in the mud. And when I say mud, it was thick. It was almost up to your knees. And so it was very gruesome living for the three of us. We were literally, we're living in the mud.

And then suddenly the leader of the guard group comes to us and he brings new camouflage uniforms. They're gonna make a proof of life of us. And that they're gonna bring us someplace where we would meet an international journalist and we would be allowed to send messages home to our families. I'm 31 years old. I'm a systems analyst. My name is Keith Donald Stancil. I'm 38 years old.

I'm an American. I'm a systems analyst. Mark, he's lucky enough that he gets a video of his mother, who was a huge voice for us at the time, making a lot of noise. How much more can my son endure? How much more can I endure? And how much more can all the hostages endure? Here, he's basically been in a box for eight months,

and he's gonna be filmed with his first connection with his family. Disgusting, inhumane behavior, and he's going to be filmed with his first connection with his family. Disgusting, inhumane behavior, and it was a sad moment for all of us. They want to use our suffering on camera to incite something against the government to force them to negotiate. During a break in the interview, Mark approached the translator. I just basically said, hey, look, what do you think is going to happen with the three of us? Are we going to make it out of here? And she said, depends on what your government does. If they try to rescue you, we're going to kill you. Then she began to tell us about another group of hostages that had been executed. And they were executed because the army came to rescue them.

From the proof in life, we're taken to another camp. We're going to be mixed with other hostages of the FARC. We get out of the boat and they march us up a hill and into the jungle and I can make out some buildings inside. They had these racks of chains, individual chains hanging from these racks and you could tell that they were chains for people and we didn't know what we were going to get into. It really looked like a Nazi concentration camp, but inside the jungle. There were guard towers every, I don't know, 50 yards or so that were elevated up with guards inside with their AK-47s looking in on the enclosure. And then I could see the people inside. It was like seeing

animals in the zoo, but these were humans being held like this. I said, how long have you been here? One guy said, six years. And I just thought, six years as hostages? We've only been hostages for eight months. In their new camp, the hostages were able to listen to a radio. In Colombia, there's such a culture of hostage-taking. There are certain radio stations that will kind of donate airtime to the hostages. And what they do is they set up like a hotline so that the family members of these hostages could call and leave a short voicemail. They play these recordings at night, usually like at midnight or two or three in the morning. And so as a hostage, you can listen to the radio and you might get a message

from home. It's almost like getting mail. A year into his captivity, Keith heard his 11-year-old son on the radio. I hear him, Dad, Dad, are you okay? We're okay. I love you and I miss you. I'm sorry for missing your birthday. I'm sorry for missing Thanksgiving. I'm sorry for missing Christmas. Now get this, my 11-year-old son is apologizing to me for my captivity.

I had an unbelievable rage inside of me. The radio was the hostages' only link with home. We knew if we were alive, if we were injured, if we were sick. Our families knew nothing. They knew nothing. And I think that the family suffered in that manner worse than we did because they had no idea of how we were. We wouldn't get messages very often. Typically, my mother, her voice would almost always come through. I would listen. I would concentrate. I would focus so much on every word, the sound of her voice, everything, that by the time the message was over, I wouldn't even have known what she'd said. It would just pass. So I'd always have to ask Keith or Tom or somebody else, well, what did she say? She said she loves you. She said, be strong.

She says, everybody is in a commotion about the three of you being held hostage. We want to get you home. Mark's mother, Jo, was outspoken about her son's long captivity. This has been going on for a year and a half. What is the progress? Any progress? Anything? You know, I'm sick and tired of hearing

we're doing everything we can. We're a year and a half down the road now. My son spent two birthdays in captivity. As the months passed, the hostages were frequently moved around the jungle. On average, we would spend about two months in a camp and then we would march. They would have us marching with wearing chains.

We would be chained up. And they would kind of march us as if a person would walk a dog. And I'm not talking a chain, a little small chain that you would buy at a pet shop to chain a dog up with. I'm talking a chain that somebody pulls off the back of a truck to hook up to a car to pull up on a tow truck. Big, thick chain link. By the end of their second year, the hostages were chained together all the time. You know, chained to somebody in a physical way that is more intimate than a human being should be. I mean, five meters of chain between you, chained together to sleep

on top of one each other. You have to bathe together. You smell each other's physical smells. You hear there's no break. It's tough. I'm apologizing to Mark on a marsh as I sleep above him, and I'm worried about getting gangrene because my feet are rotting. I'm sorry that you have to smell my feet rotting.

Not stinking from being dirty, but your feet rotting. Some things that a human being should not ever have to be put through. About three years, three and a half years into captivity, we were experiencing a really difficult time. We had this group of guards who was led by a guy who was just insane. And he took a lot of pleasure in being cruel to us. So he had built this birdcage on the side of a mountain and put us in it. And I was sitting in the mud inside this birdcage made out of barbed wire and I was looking out to the guard and he was whittling away on a piece of wood. Mark just decided, he said, you know, I'm gonna make a chess set.

And he begged a broken piece of machete from one of the gorillas just to borrow and some wood. And over months of time, he carved the most beautiful chess set you've ever seen. It was incredible because he'd never done anything like that in his life. Keith and I, we were chained together at the time. I had a big gauge, thick gauge chain around my neck, and it was chained with a padlock, and the other end of it was chained to Keith's neck.

And the two of us were sitting on the mud, in the mud, just Indian style, with the chessboard in between us, and the extra chain just kind of wound up right beside the chessboard. And we would be very careful not to move too much as to sway or swing the chain and knock over the pieces. And two of us, we would just be sitting there kind of like concentrating our chins resting on our fists. And the amazing thing was everything else around us

didn't exist anymore. The guards, the mosquitoes, the hunger, the mud, the rain, the wetness, all of that disappeared. And the only thing that mattered at that time was my queen killing Keith's queen. That's the only thing I cared about. So although we might be sitting on a piece of plastic in the middle of the jungle, chained to a tree, starving, we're playing chess and we're free and we're gone. It was a way for us to escape and it was thanks to Mark that he did something like that. It was like a three-legged crutch, the three of us, because whenever somebody needed something, luckily one of us was usually there and able to provide it. Each passing year was marked by a service for the men

held at the embassy in Bogota. We always knew that our former colleagues would never forget us. We're gonna be looked for, and it's not that we're important, we're just Americans and we won't be left behind. That was a piece of faith that I always had to keep and remember whenever I felt like,

oh gosh, it's been four years now. Does anybody know we're still here? Yes, they do. They're looking for us right now. In their fourth year of captivity, the hostages were again filmed by their captors. They give you a fresh haircut right before the proof of life, give you clean clothes,

let you shave. They try to dress you up, but there was no dressing us up at this point. We were in bad shape. I decided I wasn't going to be manipulated anymore. So when they brought the camera, I didn't say any words. And a number of other hostages did the same thing. Because we don't want to be there, we're just starving for freedom, and we want to be with our families. We wanted a rescue, but we wanted a rescue in the sense that it would be well done. Everybody in this camp knows that a rescue is extremely,

extremely, extremely risky. About two months later, we heard the sound of helicopters again. And this was the terror of all of us because this meant that the army was coming. And this was a signal for the guerrilla to be prepared to either run and execute us first or to take us out. They actually had assigned each guard a hostage to shoot. So they were very organized in how they were going to go about killing us. It's just a radio on this guy's shoulder awaiting the older to come in and kill us like rats. It was terror, anger, rage, fear. just a radio on this guy's shoulder awaiting the older to come in and kill us like rats. It was terror, anger, rage, fear. I mean, everything, humiliation, frustration, stress in a giant ball. But that night was when we knew, hey, these guys are serious. I mean,

they're not even going to try to get us out. If there's any hint of a rescue, we're dead instantly. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Hey, I Survived listeners, whether you love true crime or comedies, celebrity interviews, news, or even motivational speakers, you call the shots on what's in your podcast queue, right? And guess what? Now you can call the shots on your auto insurance too. Enter the Name Your Price tool from Progressive. The Name Your Price tool puts you in charge of your auto insurance by working just the way it sounds. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance. Then they'll show you a variety of coverages that fit within your budget, giving you options. Now that's something you'll want to press play on.

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they slept in such a safe community. To give a new perspective on the devastation crimes can cause. It was shocking for something like this to happen in our little town. Featuring cases from quiet towns to bustling cities and interviewing the people closest to the case. My first thought was that it's an unusual location for us to have a homicide. Listen to the true crime podcast,

City Confidential, and step beyond the yellow tape to learn just how far a crime can reach. There are certain cases in the history of Boston that I think sort of define the city. I think this is one of them. New episodes of the City Confidential podcast are available every Thursday, available wherever you get your podcasts. Deep in the Colombian jungle, Keith, Mark and Tom are being held hostage by FARC. The three men have been in captivity for more than five years. Years had gone by. Nobody knew for sure if we were dead or alive.

I started to worry that I was forgotten. And that's a tremendous fear, to be forgotten. We had been in captivity for almost five and a half years. And then a drastic change. They were giving us clothing, letting us go in and get as much coffee as we want or cook as much beans and extra food, so this was totally different.

The terrorists began to pump us up with food, and it was kind of odd for them to do that. We knew something was afoot. Well, in the news, we began to hear on the radio that the Colombian government, President Uribe, was going to allow a group of workers, led by the French, to have access to us in the jungle.

Maybe bring first aid, medical care, assess our conditions. Hey, maybe even we have messages for our families or we can send messages out. So everybody's excited because we're going to have contact with the outside world. Now, a lot of things have happened in this five years. I know that I have two twin boys that I've never seen in my life. It's a big thing for us to try to condense down what we want to put out and what we're going to say. But the big thing is that we know that something's happening.

And then all of a sudden, we're brought together in a camp with the other hostages. So 15 in total from a few different groups. As the hostages were marched to a clearing, they could hear helicopters approaching. The helicopters are getting closer, and soon I can see them. And it's two huge helicopters painted white and red and flying really low. And there is a big perimeter of gorillas all dressed up in brand new uniforms and they've got their weapons all shined up and they've made a perimeter around this field and one of the helicopters lands in the field. One of these people that comes out of the helicopter is carrying a news camera.

They start to interview the leaders of the FARC. And we had two fairly high-level leaders there. One of them was the front commander, which would be like, he's like a leader for that region. And then the other was the leader of our guard group. And so they lead us to the helicopter. And as we're walking through the coca field, some of the aid workers stop us and they say, listen, before you get on the helicopter,

we have to tie your hands and feet. And on hearing that, that's when I realized that they're not tying us up to set us free. This is something much worse than that. This is really bad. These people are basically aligned with the terrorists. They're probably going to move us by helicopter somewhere where we can never be rescued or found.

Well, at that point, everybody's mad. Everybody says, we're not getting on the helicopter, and you're not putting these restraints on us. We're already in chains. I'm standing there, and my hands are still free, and one of the aid workers walks up to Keith and I, and he starts to talk to us in English. He goes, do you want to go home and see your family? We said, yeah. He goes, please, trust me. He asked us, please. He goes, I'm taking you home. Please get on this helicopter. He was almost at the point he's begging. He said, I'm taking you home.

I looked at Tom. I said, Tom, let's get on the damn helicopter. I don't care. So they put the restraints on us. And Tom and I were the first headed to the helicopter. We're getting on. We don't care. The hostages and two guerrilla leaders followed the aid workers onto the helicopter. As soon as the helicopter lifts off the ground, I see a bunch of chaos. It's the only way I can describe it. Bodies, fists, everything flying. And somebody grabs me, puts me into a bear hug, and just forces me backwards into my seat. And he looks at me,

and he says in Spanish, we're the army. The aid workers scream, Colombian army, Colombian army, Colombian army. And we jump on top of the guerrillas that are there. And I remember moving over toward the front commander and punching him in the face as the guy who had thrown me on the ground starts to beat on him and choke him. Seeing one of my capturers on the ground and being tied up, that's when I finally hit me. I am free. It was an amazing thing. My hands had been cut free.

Then my feet were cut loose. Everybody, all the other hostages had been cut free and were kind of dancing and singing and screaming for joy. And it's euphoria and we're, wow, we're out. We're out. And I remember we just fly away. And it was just like that. I don't think any of us expected it. This amazing trick that the Colombian army had just played on the terrorists. Colombian military intelligence had infiltrated FARC's radio communications. Army officers disguised as aid workers pretended to be taking the hostages to a new camp. In my mind, it's the most perfect rescue in all of military history.

They didn't, not a shot was fired. Nobody was killed. Everybody was rescued with life. It was perfect. After 1,967 days in captivity, the rescued hostages began their journey home. As I stepped out the door, the first thing I remember is Americans on the ground, part of the security team. And I saw that flag. I thought, we're done, we're out.

One of our American SF guys, I can't tell you which one, but it was one of our guys. I just ran up to him and I jumped on him. I hugged him and I said, damn, glad to see you, son of a bitch. I just want to go home. He goes, we're going home. We're going home.

And, but just to see one of my own guys there, you know, and it's over. A day after being rescued, the men touched down in the United States. Because of our rescue, there are fellow hostages that are still there. Some have 10 years. Right this minute, right this minute, they're in chains, looking for food, and they're on the run. Their families haven't seen them for 10 years.

And it's you here in the U.S. especially that have a voice that can speak for them. So if you say anything today in that report, you can talk about how blessed the three of us are, but please remember the hostages that are left behind. I never cease to think about freedom, about coming home. And when it finally came, it's just the greatest gift I could have ever imagined. After a private reunion with their families, the freed hostages

gave a press conference. There was a time that when I slept, I would dream that I was free. That time was only a few days ago. It feels so good to be free here now with all of you. Words cannot express my utmost respect and appreciation to the government and armed forces of Colombia. Their heroic this, I thank them. To my country, this doesn't run. Who never forgot me, never. I survived because I was determined to see freedom again, to see my kids again, and to just go home. I also survived because the hand of God was

with us and He does amazing things. I saw a number of miracles while I was captive. Our rescue being one of the greatest. For me the reason I survived is not long nor very complicated. Number one, the love of my family. That brought me through. Number two, the way I was raised. And then number three, my belief in my country and what we're about. I'm a pretty nationalistic guy, and I believe we are better.

That's my belief system, and after five and a half years, guess what? It worked for me. You know, you can look at my story. I hope you get something from it, but we're blessed here and we're blessed to be Americans. And if I had to sacrifice five and a half years to get home doing something for my country, then you know what? So be it. I'm on the long list of a lot of guys that did the same thing. And hey, I'm fortunate. I'm home. I'm alive. I'm fortunate.

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