The Green Beret Survival Guide by Brian M. Morris

Author:Brian M. Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510740761
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2019-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

ESCAPE MINDEDNESS

An Afghan journalist was held captive by the Taliban for more than seven months along with his colleague, an American New York Times reporter, until they were able to plan and execute a daring nighttime escape that included weeks of careful plotting, taking advantage of weary guards, and dropping down a twenty-foot wall with a rope. The Afghan journalist said that the early morning escape from the second floor of a Taliban compound in Pakistan’s northern tribal areas was a desperate attempt by two severely demoralized reporters who believed that the Taliban were not seriously negotiating and would hold them indefinitely or even possibly execute them in order to bolster recruitment and create propaganda. The two journalists along with their driver were abducted outside Kabul as they traveled to interview a Taliban commander for a book he was writing about Afghanistan. The three men were abducted on a road just a few minutes from where they planned to meet the Taliban commander, in the southeast of Kabul. One of the journalists had previously escorted two other foreign journalists to safe interviews with the commander, and during those meetings he made the mistake of assuming that the two had established a degree of trust. The journalists reported that once captured they were moved along with their driver multiple times by their captors to different safe houses until settling in their final location in the northern tribal area. The two men testified that they had been repeatedly threatened with death by their Taliban captors. The three months they spent in captivity were so “hopeless” that one of the men said that he considered committing suicide with a knife. As their captivity dragged on, the two men began plotting their escape by surveying the compound and its surroundings. One of the men stated that he faked illness to visit a doctor outside the complex. Other times he asked his captors if he could watch local cricket matches — a sport he pretended to adore—so that he could study potential escape routes. Still, it seemed impossible to escape from a town controlled by Taliban and foreign militants. The reporters were smart enough to realize that they needed to humanize themselves to their captors and establish some level of rapport if they were going to get them to become comfortable enough with them to let down their guard enough to create a window of opportunity for them to escape. One Friday evening, in a planned bid to keep their captors awake as late as possible to ensure that the men would eventually sleep soundly, one of the journalists challenged the militants who slept beside them in the same room to a local board game. When the games finally ended at midnight, the journalists waited for the militants to fall asleep. At 1 a.m., the journalists snuck out of the room. They made their way to the second floor, and got to the top of a five-foot-high wall. When they looked down, they said they were greeted by an unnerving view: a twenty-foot drop.

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