The man who was captured by the Taliban and survived
SEATTLE -- Imagine being taken captive by America's fiercest enemy.
That's what happened to Jere Van Dyk, a journalist and author from Vancouver, Washington. He survived 45 days in a mud cell while being held by the Taliban, and has now written a book about his experience.
Van Dyk grew up in Vancouver with his younger sister and brother. He ran track for the University of Oregon and went through basic training at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
He worked for the late Sen. Henry Jackson and called the experience "a wonderful grad school." It was in his office that Van Dyk became interested in world politics.
"Scoop Jackson introduced me to the world of international affairs," he said.
As a young man, he told the story of being in Germany with his brother. They called their mother and asked if they could buy an old Volkswagen and drive to Asia.
"Neither one of us understands to this day why she said, 'Yes!'" he said.
The Van Dyk brothers ran out of money when they got to Afghanistan. Jere Van Dyk fell in love with the country which he described as "peaceful, exotic and exciting."
He first learned about the ancient tribal code, which dictates that you always "protect your guest." It's that code he believes eventually saved his life.
Van Dyk went back to Afghanistan in 1981, as a correspondent for The New York Times. He traveled with the Mujahideen, trying to understand the fighters battling the Soviet Union. He developed contacts and knowledge that he thought would help him when he went back in 2008.
"I wanted to do the same thing with the Taliban, but it was also my own way of searching for who they really were. I began to think maybe, just maybe, I can cross that border. I can go and find out, using the contacts I had in this world that Americans don't understand.
"I would go to the very heart of al-Qaida and the Taliban to find out what others couldn't do. I didn't register at the U.S. Embassy. I didn't talk to other journalists. I would eat in Afghan restaurants. I was completely trying to pass as an Afghan, deep in that culture, in order to win them over to find the information I didn't think anyone else could get."
Van Dyk, his translator and body guards had been hiking for eight hours, deep in the mountains toward the border with Pakistan, when he was taken captive, the terror of which he describes in his book. He knew he was in trouble when he spotted a small movement of black. It was the turban of a Taliban fighter.
"It was the Taliban. They came swarming down the mountain, spreading out, shouting, 'Kenna, kenna!' 'Get down, get down!' holding their rifles and rocket launchers high. 'I'm dead, 'I said to myself. 'I'm dead."'
Blindfolded, Van Dyk and the three others were taken to a dark mud cell, just 12 feet wide and 12 feet long. They were held for 45 days and let out for three minutes a day.
"When I got into the room, the first thing I looked for when they untied my blindfold was blood on the walls to see if it was a torture chamber. And I saw chains on the floor, and I knew I was in a Taliban prison deep in the mountains of Pakistan where no one could find me. No American soldiers could come. I was done for.
"The room was all baked mud, dirt floor, wood cots with rope mattresses and a straw roof. And total darkness. I could make someone out if they were close, but another few feet - I couldn't make that person out. It was pitch black."
Van Dyk thought of Danny Pearl, the American journalist beheaded by terrorists in Pakistan just six years earlier. Van Dyk's captors also forced him to speak on camera and insisted he convert to Islam.
"You can't escape so you go deep deep into yourself, and you think about things you've never thought before. For me, it was, 'Would I rather be beheaded or shot? How do I want to die? Did I live my life as I wished? Could I have done things differently?"'
As Van Dyk's nightmare grew darker, his family, including his sister in Lynnwood, waited helplessly for word. M'ylss Fruehling says she was most worried about the possibility of torture. Even death, she said, would be easier to take.
"He had such a passion for this area. It was his life," she said. "If he died, that was tolerable because he was doing what he loved, and he was where he wanted to be. But if he was tortured - I couldn't cope with that."
That worry for his siblings and their families causes Van Dyk to get very emotional. Through tears he said, "I think the hard part is you think of yourself as selfish. You have pride, but you put your family at risk and you make your family worry."
In the darkness of his cell, Van Dyk was finally given a lantern and a pencil and paper on which he wrote about the terror and uncertainty of not knowing if his captors would kill him. In the cell, he grew to mistrust the other men and fought for turf. He said they walked back and forth, like bears in a cave, and he always tried to win the favor of his jailers.
"You try to not be a coward, but never show you're proud. I would always give them the power, but it was fine line between being a supplicant and a coward, because they would never respect a coward," he said.
To this day, he and his family don't know why the Taliban commander released him.
"He came in and sat three feet away from me. And his eyes are like cats eyes, gleaming staring at me and he said, 'Congratulations on escaping death,'" said Van Dyk.
His captors blindfolded him again, put him in a car and drove until they started walking. He became exhausted as they walked for hours.
"I could barely walk. I couldn't keep it up any longer, and they said, 'We're going to release you.' They said, 'Do not say anything to your government. We know where your family is. We will kill you."'
Finally they crossed a river and he met a man who worked for CBS, where Van Dyk had been working.
"A man came out of the darkness and handed me a CBS manager's card, and I knew then I might be OK," Van Dyk said through tears.
Van Dyk was brought to the U.S. Embassy, where the FBI took over.
"Within a day I was out of the country and on a plane. And the FBI brought me to New York and I thought, 'oh, the city is the same. People are living their lives.' They brought me back to my apartment, and I thought, 'Oh, it's still the same. But I'm different now."'
Van Dyk says the FBI negotiations for his release remain a mystery. His captors initially demanded $1.5 million and the release of three prisoners from Guantanamo. He doesn't know if those demands were ever met. He still gets threatening messages on his home phone. But he is finally coming out of a dark state of paranoia and isolation.
He was kidnapped in 2008, but Van Dyk says the FBI asked him to keep quiet about his release until now. His book is called "Captive, My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban."
http://www.komonews.com/news/local/99605434.html
Nice timing for a book called "Captive, My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban", no?
And the somewhat inexplicable "mystery" surrounding the "sailors" miles and miles away from their base:
Seattle sailor mourned amid mystery of fatal excursion
On July 23, Petty Officer 3rd Class Jarod Newlove, of Seattle, and Petty Officer 2nd Class Justin McNeley, of Colorado, got into an armored SUV and left the crowded roadways of Kabul for a 60-mile drive to a Taliban stronghold in Logar province.
The two sailors never returned, and why they decided to make that hazardous trip — without a protective convoy — remains a mystery.
McNeley's body was recovered in Logar on Sunday, the same day Taliban officials claimed to be holding a U.S. serviceman captive; on Wednesday evening, Newlove's body was recovered from a river, Afghan officials say.
"This is like a puzzle," said Abdul Wali, deputy head of the governing council in Logar.
The sailors were part of the international forces under NATO, which will lead the investigation into what happened. Though serving as trainers for Afghan forces, these were not front-line fighters but junior enlisted men in what were supposed to be noncombat jobs.
Officials at the NATO-led coalition headquarters in Kabul have not offered an explanation as to why the two ventured so far from their base at Camp Julien, a training facility on the western edge of the city.
A NATO official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the case was under investigation, told The Associated Press it was unclear whether they were on official business.
At the Pentagon on Thursday, a senior defense official told McClatchy News that the sailors' actions "appear to be outside of the normal bounds of operation. And now we may never know why they left."
The official statement released by the Defense Department said only that Newlove's body was recovered by coalition forces, and made no reference to the circumstances around his disappearance or how he might have been killed.
From interviews with Afghan officials in Logar province, it appears that McNeley died in the initial ambush. But it is unclear whether Newlove died from wounds he suffered in that attack or from other wounds he sustained later.
Samer Gul, chief of Logar's Charkh district, said the two sailors, in a four-wheel-drive armored SUV, were seen Friday by a guard working for the district chief's office. The guard tried to flag down the vehicle, but it kept going, Gul told The Associated Press.
"They stopped in the main bazaar of Charkh district. The Taliban saw them in the bazaar," Gul said. "They didn't touch them in the bazaar, but notified other Taliban that a four-wheel-drive vehicle was coming their way."
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The second group of Taliban tried to stop the vehicle. When it didn't stop, insurgents opened fire and the occupants in the vehicle shot back, Gul said. A NATO official confirmed that the vehicle had been shot up.
Gul said there is a well-paved road that leads into the Taliban area and suggested the Americans may have mistaken that for the main highway — which is much older and more dilapidated.
Wali, the deputy head of the governing council in Logar, said the incident was not a plot by the Taliban. Initially, the insurgents didn't know if they should claim responsibility or not, he said.
"The Taliban were just joking around with each other and they suddenly saw a big armored vehicle coming toward them," Wali said. "They thought it might be a trick — that if it got too close, there might be an airstrike against them — so they opened fire."
Din Mohammed Darwesh, spokesman for the provincial governor of Logar, said the governor's office was upset because the two Americans left their base without notifying Afghan security forces in Logar, which is the normal protocol. He called their presence in Logar an "abnormal situation."
After the sailors' disappearance, the international force quickly launched a massive search, setting up checkpoints and distributing hundreds of fliers, with reprinted photos of the two missing men. The fliers offered a $20,000 reward for information about their whereabouts.
The Taliban did not claim responsibility for the missing sailors until more than 48 hours after the ambush. A message posted on their website late Sunday — the day McNeley's body was recovered — claimed one American service member had been kidnapped in Logar and another was killed in a shootout.
On Thursday, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told The Associated Press that the Taliban, on Tuesday, left the "body of a dead American soldier for the U.S. forces" to recover.
Darwesh, the provincial spokesman, said Newlove had been shot once in the head and twice in the torso. But U.S. officials cautioned that this information had not been confirmed.
Mohammad Rahim Amin, local government chief in Baraki Barak, said villagers in the district called to report the body of a foreigner, clad in a uniform, in the river. He said coalition forces recovered it about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday. He speculated the body could have floated downstream because the river was swollen by rain Tuesday night.
Amin said that in recent days security tightened around the Taliban, who were under pressure from Afghan forces, intelligence officials and coalition troops converging on the area in the massive search for the missing service member.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/l ... or30m.html
Dudes and dudes have been dying in Afghanistan for quite some time now. Why these strange stories, of all times, now? Is this the limited hang-out everybody always talks about? Does any of this media magnification have anything to do with the wikileaks "revelations"? Were the leaks part of the plot, to then seed with these stories? Is this a response to the leaks? Or is this all happenstance? Ya got me. Weirdness about the handling of the Afghan "War" sure are seeming to get stranger by the day though.
I wonder what's up. . .
