B009G3EPMQ EBOK (32 page)

Somebody brought more coffee, and then somehow, running on adrenaline and repeated doses of caffeine, I sustained eight straight hours of interviews. We drew up a complete list of the
kidnappers, including names, physical characteristics, personality traits, and personal strengths and weaknesses.

Once the FBI and the doctors were finally convinced they had learned everything they were going to get from me and the doctors had tested everything there was to test, they finally released me to go get some sleep. Poul and I ran into each other in the clinic hallway, and all I could do was put my head on his shoulder and weep. He just stood there and quietly hugged me back.

I got my first sleep on the plane, at last, twelve hours after arriving in Djibouti. I lay down wrapped in a thick sleeping bag and strapped into a canvas medical stretcher on the biggest cargo plane I’ve ever seen, this one bound for a U.S. military base in Italy. I was soon oblivious and slept soundly for most of the trip, unperturbed by the noise of the engines or the other people around me. It was my first safe sleep in months, and that narrow little stretcher was a beautiful luxury. The sense of peace and safety was so strong, a deep slumber held me in its grip throughout the flight.

Erik arrived in Italy to learn that the authorities wouldn’t allow him to see Jessica yet and required him to wait until the following day. The psychologists with the hostage reintegration program had long experience in working with hostage returnees and believed even five minutes together might be too much for reunited loved ones. Their experience showed them how immersion back into one’s life needs to be slow and careful, like climbing into a steaming hot tub.

Jessica remained in a private room with the first real bed she’d been on since her capture. The staff traded her ragged clothing for fresh, warm winter items and the first shoes she had felt in months. She was surprised by how strange it felt to have real shoes on her feet.

The next day she paced the floor in her room with the door cracked open a few inches while she waited for Erik to arrive for their first brief session together. She gasped when she saw his fingers reach around the edge of the door and pull it open. A moment later, there he was for her and there she was for him, and they fell into each other’s arms, both of them openly sobbing.

“Jess,” Erik struggled to speak, “before we say anything, I want you to know your family has been so strong—all of us are much
closer because of this—and they feel the same as I do. We’ll do anything we need to, in order to get you one hundred percent back to your life. I want you to know that whatever happened to you, Jess, I don’t care. I love you. I’ll always love you. If you need time away from me, just tell me. Please. I’ll give you all the room you want.”

“Stop,” she quietly told him. “Stop. I don’t need time alone and we aren’t splitting up.”

“Jess, as long as we’re together, I can do anything. I want you to know I’ll do whatever you need me to do. Anything you need.”

“Listen,” she whispered into his ear. “Listen to me. We’re not splitting up. You aren’t going anywhere. I’m not leaving you. Erik, I never thought I’d see you again. It was the thought of us together that kept me alive. “She leaned back and looked into his eyes. “But we’re going to have to do things differently, now.”

“Okay.”

“More time together. No more workaholic hours.”

“Yes. Okay. Good.”

She smiled at him. “And I want us to go right back to starting our family. I want a baby.”

He threw his arms around her again and suddenly neither of them had much more to say except to assure each other that no damage to their love and devotion had taken place. They spent most of that first session holding each other and murmuring terms of endearment.

Before they knew it their scheduled hour was over. They made arrangements to meet for lunch the following day for a longer session under doctor’s supervision, for more detailed conversation and the million questions each one had. By the time Erik left her there after that first encounter, not even her happiness and gratitude could escape the exhaustion gripping her.

They met the next day for a much longer session. The
emotions were powerful, but by the time their second day’s meeting was over, Jessica and Erik knew their relationship had survived. They went through the rest of their family reunions as a dedicated couple, amazed at their good fortune and determined not to waste this second chance at life.

For John Buchanan, as well as Jessica’s brother and sister, the final payoff came when they all united in Portland, Oregon, to spend a week together and do nothing but work on reconnecting with one another. His steadfast patience and faith in the eventual outcome had brought him back to a full reunion with all three of his children.

•  •  •

President Barack Obama addressed the press about the rescue in Somalia by SEAL Team Six on January 25, 2012, saying, “The United States will not tolerate the abduction of our people, and will spare no effort to secure the safety of our citizens and to bring their captors to justice.”

Back in Somalia, at the ruined campsite outside “The International City of Adado,” there was no room for doubt about the truth of the president’s statement for the ones hauling away the bodies of the felled captors. The folly of attracting military attention by kidnapping innocent civilians will undoubtedly be discussed in the lairs of future kidnappers. One of them will undoubtedly be Jabreel himself.

Dan Hardy showed Erik a text message he sent to Jabreel’s phone after the rescue. Though Jabreel was lucky enough to have been absent from the camp that night, he surely felt less fortunate when the message arrived. Nobody on the case was forgetting how Jabreel had toyed with them over long months of negotiations. Nor were they forgetting about his personal torments of
Jessica throughout that time, which now were known by everyone involved. The message contained only three simple words, sent for him to consider while he looked back on the experience, as he would surely do.

“You’re next, motherf**ker.”

Jabreel’s cell phone account immediately went dead.

The statement was hardly mere bravado, as Jabreel and the surviving kidnappers now know from experience. Matt Espenshade confirmed that in spite of the deaths of so many of the kidnappers, many more are still at large, including their leaders. Those men might hope to be forgotten; they are not. The FBI has continued its investigative interest in those involved with the kidnapping. The leaders, especially, are of prime interest to the Bureau. And now the considerable unseen assets in that region are steadily feeding back information on these targeted individuals to learn their operational methods and their locations and hunt them down.

The surviving kidnappers and their colleagues are welcome to sneer at the danger. It may help them pass the time, just as it did for Bin Laden’s henchmen to chuckle at the idea of payback. If the men nobody sees coming are dispatched to capture or kill them, the surviving kidnappers will find themselves dealing with a force of air, sea, and land fighters so obsessed with the work they do that they have trained themselves into the physical and mental toughness of world-class athletes. They will carry the latest in weapons, armor, visual systems, and communication devices. Whether they are Navy SEAL fighters, DEVGRU warriors, Army Delta Force soldiers, Green Berets, or any of the elite soldiers under United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), they will share the elite warriors’ determination to achieve success in their mission assignment.

The news that they are coming for you is the worst you could receive. But nobody gets advance warning from these men. They consider themselves born for this. They have fought like panthers
to be part of their team. For most of them, there is a strong sense of pride in succeeding at missions nobody else can get done; in lethal challenges. They actually prefer levels of difficulty so high it seems only a sucker would seek them, the sorts of situations seen more and more often these days. Impossible odds.

Erik:

I was especially moved by prayer groups that steadfastly remained active on behalf of Jess and her colleague, Poul Thisted, because they did this without inquiring whether Jess or Poul held their beliefs. In today’s divisive climate, how often is such acceptance shown?

Before anyone gets caught up in useless debates about religion, there is the simple question of whether one feels a sense of spirituality in the experience of being alive. Either we do or we don’t. All dogma aside, it seems to me that the perception of a benevolent source of order to our existence is all that’s necessary to truthfully claim a spiritual life.

And I can say no matter what forces kept Jess alive and protected from murder or rape by ideologues or by thugs, those forces worked magnificently well and beyond any practical explanation. She was somehow protected from the worst, in a time and place where the worst was very likely to occur.

Our family’s love was the primary source of our endurance. It steadied me when the terrible time came to make sure the entire
command chain knew when the three requirements were met for ordering an armed attack, but it also helped me stand firm against taking violent action if there was any chance at all for a peaceful resolution. They helped me shoulder the responsibility of instigating the military action that I knew might get Jess killed.

Those many expressions of love are what propelled our end of this miracle, really. I say this knowing it will cause a certain rolling of the eyes among some. Coming from my nonreligious background, I understand all the arguments behind the eye-rolling.

It’s just that I was there, that’s all. I saw the real-world effects of forces that cannot themselves be seen. I saw other people’s spiritual sense—not their religion, not their church attendance—keep them afloat and hold them steady. I saw this shared sense binding people together in mutual reinforcement instead of driving them apart with disputes and recriminations, as terrible stress can do.

Never, throughout this ordeal, did I hear anyone’s description of God. I didn’t hear anyone’s opinion of the validity of the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas. I still have no idea what those people visualize when they pray, or what they would tell me if I asked them why they pray at all.

And yet even though love itself is invisible, I saw the tracks of it everywhere along this bizarre journey, and they were just as real and clear as tracks along a safari trail. It finds a home in the common truth revealed by their shared actions, and that truth is profoundly simple: God is love.

Forget all the fine print. Forget the edicts, the authorities, the fear, the guilt. Forget all the shiny robes.

God is love. My acceptance of that simple but powerful idea is merely one of the jewels Jess has brought into my life. And the concept is part of what our son will hear from us when he grows older and it’s time to tell him this story. If he asks where God was to be found during this ordeal, he will be pointed toward that
invisible force. He will be able to follow the story and watch this force in action, moving all those people around to help his mom return home, so he could be born to us.

•  •  •

Jessica:

No matter how many doubts I had about this new future of mine, of ours, I felt them all overpowered by my determination to tell this story to my children one day, and to have happy and healthy children to tell it to. It was apparent this could only happen if I truly moved on. Enough trauma already.

I had plenty of personal fears about my recovery, but they got trumped by a deep yearning, heavy as a falling rock. That yearning blew through obstacles, pulled along by the gravitational force of the ones who matter the most to us. This yearning was so strong I couldn’t let myself buy into the official worries about whether I could handle the return. It just needed to be handled. It had to be handled.

The professionals around me were careful and kind, fortunately, but the need to get back to my life remained strong. I did my best to cooperate with all the interview and testing procedures in their hostage recovery program to keep things moving along and just kept smiling at everybody. Nothing wrong here, folks.

The official concern was that after having no control over any part of everyday life for so long, I wouldn’t know how to function in an ordinary manner out there in general society. I could certainly agree with their question about whether I would get myself past all this, but there was never one moment of those ninety-three days when I doubted that I wanted to be back with Erik. For me, with the rescue behind us, the simplest way to get back together was to let it happen. Let us be together.

It was only in the aftermath that I found myself able to grasp the scope of the operation executed by SEAL Team Six, and the apparent size of their extensive command and support operations on the ground. It forces an uncomfortable question: Am I worth it? Is anyone?

Well, I can tell you that on top of my many points of gratitude for the way this story played out, I am grateful most of all for the will of the American people as expressed in the policy of the United States, and for
any other nation
that will assert that yes, we are worth it—all of us. For now, let me just say how wonderful it is to be back in sync with a reality that is precious to me, so warm and intimate that I dare to grow bored from time to time. But even the boredom is good, because it is my own, it is my chosen use of that enchanted moment of a life I was never favored to regain.

People ask what I intend to do with my renewed life, and I can tell you nothing has softened my conviction that one of the world’s enduring obstacles to development is the issue of education for children. This basic right is accepted in the United States and Europe—but not always in Africa and the developing countries. I will continue working on the problem as best I can with caring and qualified people.

The overall effect of this experience has been to renew the spiritual sense in my life. I’d gone through a dark time after my mother’s death and felt so alone without her. I’m afraid I needed something to shake me out of my anger over losing her so early. It was the months in captivity that brought me back to the same sentiment I saw my father express in the middle of his grief over losing Mom, “God, I don’t understand you but I am choosing to trust you.” In his pain on that day, he gave me a gift I didn’t recognize until much later. I saw it out there while I was captive under the trees. I see it now.