Medford, Ore. — After heavily armed bandits in fatigues burst into an oilfield camp in the jungles of Ecuador in October and took Jason Weber captive with other foreign workers, Weber found himself thinking back to something his wife used to tell him.
"She said, 'You always look like you're mad at somebody and about to rip their head off,"' Weber told a news conference Saturday after his return home. "I didn't want to look like that. I tried to smile a lot."
Weber, 29, Arnie Alford, 41, and Steve Derry, 41, all of Gold Hill, and Dennis Corrin of Nelson, New Zealand, were among seven kidnapped oilfield workers freed this week after payment of a reported $13 million ransom to a group believed to be Colombian professional kidnappers.
Four of the former hostages returned to Oregon early Saturday on a private jet.
The men are employees of Erickson Air-Crane, a heavy-lift helicopter company based in Central Point. With their families sitting nearby, the men described their ordeal at a news conference at a country club.
A fifth American, David Bradley, was staying in Denver with family before returning home to Casper, Wyo. He worked for Tulsa, Okla.-based Helmerich & Payne Inc.
A Chilean and an Argentine also were freed.
Constantly under the muzzle of a gun and subsisting on rice, sardines and an occasional rat, the men said they kept up their spirits with thoughts of their families.
"We knew we had good families back home," said Weber, the scraggly beard he wore when he walked out of the jungle to freedom Thursday trimmed to a neat goatee. "That's what kept us all strong."
Alford said he was overwhelmed to drive through the little town of Gold Hill and see all the yellow ribbons tied there.
The men said that about 4 a.m. Oct. 12, bandits, heavily armed with a motley array of guns, pounded on the doors of their rooms and told them to pack a few clothes, then herded them down a trail to a helicopter.
They kept track of the days with a homemade calendar Weber made from a piece of paper and a pen he had in his pack. The bandits gave them a small magnetic chess set. For exercise, they worked out on a homemade gym devised by Alford from ropes strung in trees. Otherwise, they lay in their hammocks and talked while the bandits kept guard.
"I'm not sure what their agenda was, whether they were fighting for a cause or just looking for some money," Weber said. "To them, Americans were bad."
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