Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban [Hardcover]

Jere Van Dyk (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 22, 2010

An American reporter's chilling account of being kidnapped and imprisoned by the Taliban, in the no-man's-land between Afghanistan and Pakistan

Jere Van Dyk was on the wrong side of the border. He and three Afghan guides had crossed into the tribal areas of Pakistan, where no Westerner had ventured for years, hoping to reach the home of a local chieftain by nightfall. But then a dozen armed men in black turbans appeared over the crest of a hill.

Captive is Van Dyk's searing account of his forty-five days in a Taliban prison, and it is gripping and terrifying in the tradition of the best prison literature. The main action takes place in a single room, cut off from the outside world, where Van Dyk feels he can trust nobody—not his jailers, not his guides (who he fears may have betrayed him), and certainly not the charismatic Taliban leader whose fleeting appearances carry the hope of redemption as well as the prospect of immediate, violent death.

Van Dyk went to the tribal areas to investigate the challenges facing America there. His story is of a deeper, more personal challenge, an unforgettable tale of human endurance.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An American journalist exploring the war zone on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border reports unwanted lessons in its perils in this harrowing memoir. Having traveled with the freedom fighters in the '80s, Van Dyk thought he had the connections and knowledge to navigate the tribal lands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, but he was captured by a fractious band of Taliban fighters in 2008. Van Dyk (In Afghanistan: An American Odyssey) and his Afghan guides spent 44 days in a dark cell. Well-fed but terrified, he felt a nightmare of helplessness and disorientation. Dependent on a jailer who mixed solicitude with jocular death threats and a ruthless Taliban commander who could free or kill him on a whim, the author performed Muslim prayers in an attempt to appease his captors; wary of murky conspiracies involving his cellmates, he was afraid of everybody, including the children. Van Dyk's claustrophobic narrative jettisons journalistic detachment and views his ordeal through the distorting emotions of fear, shame, and self-pity. But in telling his story this way, he brings us viscerally into the mental universe of the Taliban, where paranoia and fanaticism reign, and survival requires currying favor with powerful men. The result is a gripping tale of endurance and a vivid evocation of Afghanistan's grim realities. 1 map. (June 22)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“If you want to read an amazing book, check out Captive, by Jere Van Dyk. . . . What this reporter lived through is, I think, pretty much the most frightening thing a journalist could be subjected to. He wrote a phenomenal book about it that I consumed in about a day. Please read it.”--Sebastian Junger, author of War

“Rich and revealing. . . . Offers a rare and complicated portrait of the Taliban mentality seen through discerning Western eyes.”--The Washington Post

“A vivid portrait of a man under stress and pressure, producing the equivalent of war’s high tension and terror. . . . Some of [Van Dyk’s] passages inevitably will become part of the canon.”--The Boston Globe

“A gripping tale of endurance and a vivid evocation of Afghanistan's grim realities.”--Publishers Weekly

“A harrowing survival story.”--Kirkus Reviews

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Times Books; First Edition edition (June 22, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080508827X
• ISBN-13: 978-0805088274
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #858,465 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jere Van Dyk is the author of In Afghanistan: An American Odyssey, an account of his travels with the mujahideen in the 1980s, during their struggle against the Soviet Union. Since then, he has covered stories all over the world, mainly for The New York Times, CBS News, and National Geographic, which have required him to visit places where few Western reporters had ventured before. He lives in New York City.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 58 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Vivid and Powerful Story of Desperate Times June 22, 2010

By David C. Isby

Format:Hardcover

I know Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands. I've been there many times over the past 30 years and have just written my fourth book (AFGHANISTAN: GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES, published by Pegasus) about that area. So I have encountered Jere Van Dyk, whose expertise goes back many decades, and many of the same people, places and hazards that he did. I can vouch for the accuracy and authenticity of what he has written about. This is all the way it actually is out there. I can also attest to the vivid and compelling way in which he has told his story. This is the real high-stakes world. Unlike the embedded reporters with US and NATO forces, there was no one to call for a rescue helicopter or provide back-up. If anything counts as "extreme reporting" it was what Jere Van Dyk was doing.

The old calypso folk song, "The Sloop John B" has great resonance with anyone that has ever travelled through this part of the world, because of its heartfelt chorus "This is the worst trip I've ever been on". We've all thought we were on that trip on one time or other, but Jere Van Dyk, no fooling, found it. He ended up falling into the hands of some very evil guys and had no idea whether they were going to hack his head off with a blunt dinner knife as they did to Daniel Pearl, sell him to Al Qaeda, or use him to resolve generations of political and religious resentment in even more painful ways. That he not only endured but came through to write this book is a story both of endurance and a demonstration of what is at stake in the conflicts in the region.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The harrowing tale of a Taliban captive June 30, 2010

By N. B. Kennedy TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Captivity narratives are fascinating in the way a train wreck is fascinating. We don't want to look, but we have to look. We are stunned and horrified at what we see. We desperately want to return to the decisive moment when it all could have been averted. Yet we cannot go back.

Jere Van Dyk wanted to return to the Afghanistan he loved as a young man and the Afghanistan he came to know more deeply when he traveled undercover with the mujahideen in the 1980s, reporting on their armed struggle against the Soviet Union. Given his connections, he thought he could report on the Taliban from the fractious tribal borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan, which no journalist had successfully navigated in years.

Renewing old ties and forging new ones, he makes brief forays across the border, but ultimately he is captured. His first look at his cell hints at what might lie ahead: "I was in a small baked-mud room.... I looked behind me to see if there was any blood on the wall. Was this a torture chamber? I saw black marks and wasn't sure. I saw chains on the dirt floor on my right. They were tied to a steel stake." Was Mr. Van Dyk betrayed? He doesn't know for sure. In fact, there isn't much he can know for sure as he endures the degradations of imprisonment. Most chillingly, he isn't sure he will live.

Mr. Van Dyk doesn't pretend to be brave or heroic or otherworldly spiritual. He writes of his fear, his sickness of body and heart, his shame and his grief. He admits to a fascination with his captors and their Islamic rituals, even their way of life. Yet he also feels the pull of his childhood Christian faith. The nuanced way that he experiences psychological torture and physical deprivations makes this a more engrossing narrative than other captivity stories I've read, such as Buried Alive or Kabul 24.

In the end, Mr. Van Dyk didn't get the story he went after, but he found an even more compelling one. His harrowing personal experience probably tells us more about the Taliban than could have been told from a more removed stance. I deeply regret the soul-rending terror he was forced to endure, but I am grateful as a reader that he could craft such a valuable memoir from it.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Tough Experience - Hard Read January 21, 2011

By johnwalt

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Jere Van Dyk went through a harrowing ordeal that should be wished upon no one. This book intimately captures the raw emotions of a hostage that doesn't know what is going on, if he will live through the day, or if he will ever be released.

That said, it is a tough read. It comes as a surprise that Van Dyk is a writer, given his constant use of 3,4, and 5 word sentences. In the midst of these simple sentences come beautifully constructed full sentences that are wonderfully descriptive, so he knows how to write well when he wants to. A second complaint is his jarring and continual use of non-sequiturs by everyone he quotes - Afghan, Taliban, or American. But it's evidently how he thinks and writes. Together the short sentences and non-sequiturs make for hard reading.

From the beginning Van Dyk seems willfully ignorant of the extremely dangerous feat he's attempting. Didn't he know the fate of Danielle Mastrogiacomo, an Italian journalist taken hostage by the Taliban a year before? He certainly knows of Daniel Pearl, whom he mentions in the book.

Van Dyk is strangely naive in his belief that Pashtun cultural norms are absolute and can never be broken. He certainly deserves recognition for his deep knowledge of Afghan culture and past reporting from there, but he is shocked over and over again that Pashtuns do things he thought were forbidden by their culture. Perhaps because of this Van Dyk assigns his captors almost superhuman abilities of perception, believing that they could tell if he was genuine or not about his conversion to Islam.

He also goes native, for whatever reason, to the point of dressing like an Afghan and trying to speak the language (poorly, it turns out). Contrast Van Dyk's attempts with Paul Refsdal, a Norwegian filmmaker who spent time with the Taliban and was also held as a hostage for several days. Like Van Dyk, Refsdal had spent time with the mujahadden during the 1980s. Unlike Van Dyk, Refsdal didn't feel the need to pass as an Afghan.

Most disturbing is Van Dyk's begruding admiration for his captors and nearly univeral distrust of the Americans he interacts with on release. He even wonders where his captors spent the night after his release and if they were back in village where he was held. He is eager to prove his opposition to the U.S. efforts while in captivity and disdainful of the American Embassy compound after release. All together it makes him an unsympathetic victim.

Another reviewer is right - Roy Hallums book is better. I also recommend Danielle Mastrogiacomo's "Days of Fear" and "Out of Captivity" by Stansell, Howes and Gonsalves (held by the FARC in Colombia).