Original subtitles

You're alive and having this wonderful time and the situation changes like

It was hour after hour after hour of violent horror.

I remember it so clearly I could think there is

no good way out of this.

You want to die?

You want to die?

I imagine Africa's a lot of things for a lot of people.

But for me, it was a dream from when I was in grade school, certainly. My

crayon drawings and so forth were all of African wildlife.

It was home sweet home from the moment I stepped foot on that ground.

There isn't a thing out here that can out -hear you, out -see you, out -smell

you, out -run you, out -climb you, out -swim you, out -hide you, out -hunt you.

But I think that it's not an inherently dangerous place. It really isn't.

Without a doubt, there's more cruelty among people than there is among

Windy is a dramatic forest.

I mean, it's incredibly steep.

And you have these huge trees that burst out into the sky.

But when you step in, it is really instantaneously a different world.

It's almost like a movie set because it's so dramatic.

Rob and Susan were a guide's dream.

They loved being together.

They loved watching one another in a new environment and seeing how the other

reacted to it. And it was obvious that they were completely in love. And that's

always great to be around.

It was far more than a vacation or even an experience. It was a chance to delve

into a world so different from theirs.

And that takes courage.

They both had that in huge quantity.

The gorillas was going to be a highlight.

You've got approximately 650 mountain gorillas in the world.

There's always an enticement about uniqueness and rarity. That gets

included, really eager to be there.

You just can't believe those are actually mountain gorillas that close to

this setting.

And Susan and Rob were in heaven.

It doesn't fit even looking back on it that you can have an experience like

and 24 hours later you can just have this absolute hell of a lifetime.

The light was just slowly coming up.

Went out onto a little wooden veranda.

And it's always a special time for me because sometime just before dawn,

invariably all the birds start calling.

That dawn chorus was interrupted by what I thought was a tree cracking and

falling. And it was a splitting, tearing...

cracking sound. It wasn't like boom.

It was just like this as it actually went up the valley.

And then two or three more and I realized that it was gunfire.

My first thoughts were, you know, I need to get near my guest.

I came upon Rob

Go back inside. I'll find out what's going on. I told him, get back inside.

Don't come down.

I still thought it might have just been rangers testing weapons.

And this sort of ragtag kind of silhouette appears in front of me.

I hear the ground go over my shoulder and flap through the vegetation.

And boy, that stopped me running.

But I was certainly completely, blissfully unaware of where this was all

to head in the next 15, 20 minutes.

I'm actually thinking it's just a robbery.

I mean, that certainly has happened in other countries in East Africa.

Camps, lodges, vehicles have certainly been held up at gunpoint and even

tourists shot dead.

So I'm thinking, okay, I could be dead already.

But I'm actually thinking it's probably just an organized armed robbery.

He's gone into my pocket.

He tore off the watch.

And he's looking up at me and really keeping his eyes on me as he's searching

through me.

I've carried a knife since I was probably five or six years old.

I feel quite naked without it.

And that really made me boil.

But you can't do much about it, because all you're going to do is...

is bring down a world of hurt on yourself.

It is just the two of us coming down this dark tunnel, but all of a sudden it

wasn't just this bastard behind me and myself and the dark.

All of a sudden it was light, it was activity, and a whole lot of people.

There was all this activity.

There were all these guys.

There were all these weapons.

There was all this action going on.

Guys drinking beer and smashing things down and stealing boxes and stealing

clothes. Obviously wearing clothes that they've already taken from other

tourists. And they're taking a really sadistic pleasure in terrifying us, and

we're already really, really terrified.

But the first impression confirmed what I was surmising. This is just...

an armed robbery.

And then I saw Rob and Susan.

They were both very, very pale.

And Susan needed physical support.

She's a strong, strong woman. She's not a woman you're going to mess with.

So it was a little surprising to see her so caved in and dependent on sort of

Rob's support.

I'll just ride this out. They're going to rob this place and loot us. Let's

let them do it and get away.

And then I see this French woman, and I think she's completely out of control.

She's yelling in French to these guys and gesticulating crazily.

She's got three teenage girls, and I'm sure that's what's got her wound up, and

I'm sure rape is a distinct possibility. But, boy, I'm thinking this lady is

going about this.

absolute wrong way

and I'm fairly fluent in

Kiswahili so I can hear them talking you know she's crazy just get rid of her

just kill her I was desperately trying to

think of something to do

but

I don't think there was any hope in hell of accomplishing anything.

Then she's taken away with these young girls, and that was another

sad escalation of the whole situation.

It was almost this arbitrary line drawn behind Rob and Susan.

And whether you stayed or whether you went was a fateful outcome of which you

had no choice.

He went up the road and started ascending a path and went back into the

jungle.

And boy, I thought this is just gone from a sprint to a marathon.

We are in this for a long, long time.

And I looked around and I was shocked to look down and realize, holy cow,

there are a lot of these guys here.

So no, I did not think it was a normal robbery, and that sort of rocked me

I think the disappearance of the French women perhaps had more impact on me than

I thought.

I felt myself slipping away, and it felt really good to slip

away. It was like scuba diving.

And everything is now in a slower motion.

And everything is muted.

And you can't hear.

I mean, you can sort of hear, but you don't really hear.

You still see color, but not much.

It's all gone gray.

And you feel very withdrawn from it. And unfortunately, it feels very, very good

to be withdrawn from it.

I was eventually jolted out of that, ironically, by one of the rebels.

The bastards put down these tape recorders and they were strutting around

waving their machine guns and they were going, dance, dance.

Others were already gone, almost completely checked out.

Almost like they were drugged, low, dancing to a very fast, hard, heavy

And I thought, come hell or high water, you're not going to get me to dance.

And it sounds really stupid, you know, now looking back on it, get killed

because you refuse to dance.

But I don't care.

I was that angry. I was that stupid.

I was that stubborn.

When

I refused

to dance, he just clubbed me across the lower back. And I tell you, it

absolutely paralyzed me.

But I think in a lot of ways, it's... That's me too. It gave me resolve. It

me purpose. And it certainly got me missile locked back on the present

situation.

I hadn't come up with any plan at that stage other than just try and stay alive

and keep Rob and Susan with me.

But it was really heartbreaking to watch Rob start to withdraw.

Rob's tremendous capacity for empathy and feeling also left him exposed to

being shocked emotionally into numbness.

And one of the horrid prices of that was that it left Susan alone.

An hour or two.

After we'd started cross -country, this commander came and said, in a

questioning way, you know, do you know who we are?

And he, to my surprise, and certainly to my alarm as well, came out and said,

we're into Rahamwe.

When he said that they were into Rahamwe, it was gut -level terrifying.

I was certainly scared. I was scared right down and through.

If you were part of that war, you are so inured to killing, to

hacking to death, to dismembering, to raping, that we're frighteningly

irrelevant in the scheme of things.

I had to continually stop myself from thinking we're just delaying the

inevitable.

some point we are going to be killed here.

I think I could have easily taken off on my own.

You know, I run marathons. I'm physically fit.

I knew where we were.

I knew which way to go.

But I don't think that was really an option because of Rob and Susan and the

others.

And I would have known I'd run, I'd know that for the rest of my life.

That's not a fair trade -off.

Almost the last three hours solid had been cross -country spring jumping.

And there is something to long, drawn -out hours of terror

that is different.

It's just off the charts in terms of what you are emotionally able to deal

Not so much the pain, but core fear at that level

is a very different thing. I've been stalked by lions that wanted to kill me.

And even that is hugely different.

It was hour after hour after hour.

of absolute terror.

Your body is trying so hard to just survive the situation that systems are

just shutting down.

Rob and Susan are moving it sort of one third time.

They're just almost like slow motion robots moving along.

It was obvious to me that Susan was just not going to be able to keep going.

She was stumbling more and more, holding up this entire massively long parade of

people. And it was obvious that something was going to have to be done

was going to stay alive.

And so that's when I started to come up with a plan to try and at least get

Susan out of there.

because there are no rules in a knife fight you don't know if any action you

do is going to save someone or end up killing the person you're trying to save

and you're trying to read the body language of

these people that you're with to see if as I reach for this person to help this

person even if it's over a log. Could that be construed that this person is

slow? You know what? We don't need her. Pow!

And you've killed her by showing the fact that she's slower.

And yet if you don't help her and she starts to fall behind, they'll kill her

because she's now holding up the entire escape of the rebel army.

And so I felt damned if I do and damned if I don't. And yeah, that's a horrible

place to be because you want to You want desperately to keep these people

alive, and yet the very things that you're trying to do to keep them alive

be their death sentence.

This isn't collapsing.

went down a number of times.

But sort of the last time she went down, you couldn't get her back up.

I held Susan's face in my hand.

I couldn't even get her to sort of look with her eyes. Her eyes were down and

just... I couldn't even physically get a response.

You know, she couldn't breathe. She just, she physically was incapable of

going farther.

I've never seen someone have a heart attack, but it looked like it could be,

this is what it must be like.

I thought, well, hey, you know, maybe if I just tell her, look, she's got a

heart condition, just let her go, just let her go, you know.

Maybe that'll work.

I don't think Susan was frightened, as silly as that may sound.

I don't believe she was frightened. I think she was way past that. She's gone

beyond that.

But I was probably more fearful at this point than I had been the entire day.

Because I thought they were going to kill Susan at any...

Second.

the commander came back down the line.

And I thought, God Almighty, that's that.

I spoke to him in Kiswahili and

said, you know, she's just got a bad heart.

Can we please just, you know, can we let her go back? Can we let her go back?

But we have to move on.

I didn't think they'd ever go for it.

But he did.

Susan, get up.

Get up. You can go home.

Get up.

Go back.

You're going to get up.

Don't let your stick keep going down.

So I started telling Susan again and again and again, downhill.

Just always go downhill and you'll eventually come out. But I'm not sure

If anything registered.

And she didn't walk off. We ended up walking off and leaving her there.

And I was surprised that she didn't watch us disappear.

She was just sort of standing there looking across the valley, and I don't

she was aware that we were moving away from her. I don't think she was aware

that Rob was moving away from her.

I thought there'd be an emotional or a tearful...

you know, goodbye or farewell between Rob and Susan. And it was really a non

-event.

And that's still really heartbreaking.

Because that was, as it turned out, that was their final goodbye.

And it just looked away.

There was no way of knowing what was going to happen with the rest of us.

But, golly, you know, at least Susan was out of there, and that was a fantastic

start.

There were a number of people now between me and Rob, and I could look

see Rob, and it looked like he was getting worse.

And yet...

I couldn't come up with any way to help him regain an awareness of where he was

and what was going on or who he was with.

And then they brought us to a stop.

You could tell there was dissent

among the rebel. I thought perhaps they were lost.

The fact that the rebels now weren't sure where they were going for me was

good news.

And we were stopped there for probably 20 minutes. So they were obviously

of what to do. And that's going to probably roll downhill onto us.

I thought, you know, if we got Susan out of here, maybe I could get Rob out of

here.

Might as well try and grab a rifle from someone and get this thing started.

Thinking like that was irrational and would have been suicidal looking back.

I think it's hard sitting here.

to realize how desperate it was then, there.

And then they sort of come back and up on your feet, on your feet, up, up, up.

We didn't realize what was going on. We didn't realize we were being split.

And as I came by Rob, I tried to hook Rob.

Not knowing what was going on, but just whining him.

with me again.

But the rebels stopped me, and it was a violent blow.

It was a blow so violent that days later I was still passing blood from it.

I turned and looked back at Rob, and we looked at each other very clearly, and

I think we both

knew that that was the end.

I think Rob looked very resigned to me. He didn't

make any motions or shrug. It was just complete resignation and sadness.

I think there was something in both of us that knew that was the last time we

would see each other.

And we didn't have any choice in that.

And then I was forced to keep moving.

But it was undeniable that that was a major turning point, and that was a

turning point for the worse.

We're in this huge jungle and now we're down to just us.

We were over 30 people.

Now there's me and five people and all five of us fit into a space that's 15

feet or 10 feet long.

I've never ever entered my mind that someone would come after us.

You can't see through that canopy.

You could fly right over it and not see us directly underneath you.

But if we were worthless at that point, we'd already been dead.

So there was some reason that they hadn't killed us.

And the commander, when he next came by, which was actually on that steep

section of trail, He mentioned American policy and that we'd ignored the

situation in Rwanda and so forth. But then it dawned on me, okay, we can

that message for him. And I suggest, why don't you put down what you want to

say, and I will get it to the hands of the U .S. ambassador.

But he just turned around and walked back up the line.

And then...

I mean, I remember it so clearly, I could think there is no good way out of

this.

I didn't think about life or death.

I mean, maybe I did.

But at one point, I was startled to hear all the birds call. The great blue

taracos started calling, and the yellow spotted barbets.

And I felt two things. I was surprised.

that the forest was still functioning, that I remember listening to calls and

appreciating the calls, and actually just almost automatically naming the

of the birds that were calling, like it was just a very little safari, and then

feeling guilty for doing that.

You know, people are living or dying now, and here you are off, still

like a safari guide.

It was a risky thing to talk too much, but I said basically,

you know, fuck it, this is it.

We stay together, we die together, but that's it. This is all we are.

We stick together.

I don't mean 15 feet apart. I don't mean 10 feet apart. I don't mean 5 feet

apart. We stick together from now on.

There's no hope.

Thanks, Mark.

What's your name? And we tightened up. And in a way, we almost said, you know,

stuff these rebels. If we came to a log and someone needed help, we stopped, we

turned, we reached out, and we helped one another, regardless of the fact that

we were sort of breaking all the rules that we'd abided by earlier.

being quiet, not talking, not helping, more or less doing what we were told. We

weren't doing that anymore.

And right at that point, one of the rebels came from behind,

and I had no idea where he'd come from or what he had been doing.

And it was unbelievably steep. And I just wanted him away from us.

And so I reached out my hand for him, you know, just to get him past us and

and gone.

And that was the last I saw of him.

And, of course, at that time I had no idea. The fresh blood that was still on

him and smeared on me was from people he'd just

hacked to death.

I don't think the others knew that we were rapidly reaching a point of no

return.

They were just trying to keep moving along,

unaware of the significance of this ridge that we were approaching.

I was quite fearful that we were approaching the Congo border, and

I knew things would have to change.

when we got to the border.

And then all of a sudden, we were at the Congo.

And it was startling and it was certainly alarming because now here we

And there are all these rebels fanned around

waiting for us.

70, 80, 100 rebels sort of jammed into the base anticipating our

arrival there.

I sort of only came up with two possibilities with what would happen

when we got to the Congo.

There was no good answer for sure.

One answer was, they've got out of there, kill us.

You know, they don't want anyone identifying, so just kill them. That's

another six out of 800 ,000.

And the other answer is, keep us alive because they need the labor to do

laundry, to do cooking, to work the fields, to become soldiers, to be

prostitutes.

Obviously, you know, it's not the letter of too evil, but it's just too evil.

Listen to me.

I know who these people are.

The others in the group, I don't want to terrify them, but I want them to be

somewhat prepared.

The Marines are homeward. They've already killed a million people.

Now, if this thing turns into a free fall, just remember what I told you.

Downhill, downhill, downhill.

It's the only way out.

And so I tell them, keep running no matter what. And all the guns in hell

going off simultaneously, and you were still able to run downhill.

Keep running downhill.

If it's downhill, you can't go wrong.

And then this one rebel grabs Danny and says, she's coming with me.

You're coming with me? And nobody...

Stopped it.

Boy, I thought, what a life in the Congo for a woman in a rebel camp.

And I decided to not let that happen. And if we died in the process,

okay.

It wasn't sort of a panic impulse.

but it was, I have got to get this girl away from this guy now because these

guys call all the shots.

Well, I grabbed Annie.

And thank God she collapses backwards and she falls backwards and the rebel

can't hang on to her.

I step over her and over her legs and just stand

there.

I'm

sure

I'm scared and I'm furious and I'm all out of options.

Now there are no cards left to play. Now there's no subtlety left. It is now

time to call it.

Someone took my knife.

I want my knife back.

Someone took my knife and I want my knife back.

I want my knife back.

There was this massive pregnant pause among everybody.

And I looked at the commander and I can remember all these faces turned to see

what he was going to do about this.

And I thought, now they kill us.

Okay, they kill us.

We're not going on from this point. This is it. We're at the Congo. We've got no

use to these guys. They are going to have to make a decision about our lives,

about Danny's life.

And I thought, okay, they kill us. There's nothing we can do about it.

But nobody moved. Nobody did anything.

Everybody just kind of stayed there.

What else do you want from us?

Why are we here?

You robbed us.

You're humiliated.

And on top of that, somebody took my knife, and I want my knife back.

Who's got my knife?

I don't think a cricket squeaked.

And I looked at the commander, and he looked at me, and he just

kind of smiled.

And then, almost right away, paper and pen

were produced.

And he writes all this stuff down.

He hands it to me and says, Here, read it.

All of Africa's at war.

When we come back, no talk, no negotiating,

no hostages.

We kill everyone on the spot.

I reiterated my promise that I would personally put it in the hands of the U

ambassador, and I put it in my pocket.

And then they turned and walked off, and we were totally alone.

No rebels, no nothing.

Just us.

I don't think any of us knew quite what to do right away. It was so total and so

fast a change.

And then it was, you know, we have got to go. We have got to get out of here.

But it's not a joyous, loud...

a raucous occasion.

It's surprisingly somber, but we had hours of difficult

hiking ahead of us.

Just as it got dark, we were at the top of a steep descent, and I looked down,

and I could see bodies on the right side of the trail.

It was all I could do to not just run away.

And I immediately turned to the others and said, you know, wait here, stay

And I went on down the trail to the bodies that were down below.

They were the bodies of three women.

The one closest to the trail,

was Susan.

I just couldn't believe that Susan hadn't made it back.

She hadn't gone anywhere.

This was the spot where they had said she could go, but she'd never gone

anywhere.

And for me, I suddenly flashed back on the guy that I had helped across the

steep and slippery and I realized that this guy must have been the guy or

one of the guys that killed Susan and the other two women that I didn't know.

And I am acutely aware of the

fact that my attempt to get Susan released got

Susan murdered.

In the end, a few of us lived, a lot died, a tremendous number of lives were

ruined, and the rebels that captured us disappeared over the ridge and were

gone.

For what?

I don't think I feel responsible for what took place.

I think I live under the burden of...

responsibility and inability to do all that I would have liked to have

done once it all started.

I'm continually plagued, even at this point years later, what could I have

differently? What decision did I make that was wrong?

And you try not to ask the question, but the questions never stop.

repeating, repeating, repeating, and you replay the chess game.

And it goes nowhere because you still feel the tremendous weight and

hollowness of the unchangeable sadness, and those that died are

still dead.

Next week, Kidnapped Abroad tells the story of a British couple captured in

Chechnya. Details coming up in just a moment.

Next tonight, the five movie is Wall Street.