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careful calculations.) For all intents and purposes you no longer have any will of your own. In our case our lives and wills were quite simply held in abeyance -- held captive by these fanaticized, inexperienced, idealistic, often cruel, often immensely kind, sometimes crazy young men. Already two Americans, Ronald Homberger and Robert Moran, were known to be dead; they were killed in trying to make contact with these very "boys." One was most probably an innocent scholar, the other probably a Vietnam veteran bent on revenge. We really never knew everything.
    And sometimes it was simply better not to think too far ahead. I called the waiter and asked for another sandwich and beer. And after four hours they came for us.
    ***
    Twenty-nine persons stood up, slim profiles thrown against the sky, with packs on their backs and machine guns thrown casually over their shoulders.
    "The compañera is ready," one of the boys joked. "I'm calling her compañera already." Compañera -- the Spanish term for female comrade. It seemed I was accepted.
    The group fell into line. There was one group of armed guerrillas in the front, another behind, and our "unit" in the center. "Follow the person directly in front of you," they told us. "Make no sound. And show no lights."
    It would have been a splendid idea to follow the person in front of you if you could have seen the person in front of you. But it was midnight and the sliver of a moon was sliding rapidly behind the trees. Somewhat to our surprise -- and soon to our horror -- we found that the guerrillas used no paths or roads. Their idea of going up a mountain was simply going up a mountain. Up the rocks, over the bushes, through the thorns, down into the canyons!
    As absurd as it sounds now, I had on only flat walking shoes. I wore brown pants and a light blouse with a patterned sweater over it. Most of the time I looked simply terrible, and every once in a while I had to creep away and vomit, while Henry, who was very proper about manners, would look at me with an expression that was a mixture of reproachfulness and "I-told-you-so" embarrassment. I was not embarrassed. I was just intent upon getting through the whole thing. But the final absurdity was my black purse. I have always carried a certain type of good, practical black purse with pockets in the sides where I can put my various notebooks and cards. Of course I carried this black purse to the mountains. It was a friendly, familiar thing in this strange new world.
    For the next four hours we staggered, we fell into ditches, we dragged through creeks, we climbed huge rocks and generally suffered for what seemed an eternity. "We had thought of taking you farther into the montaña," Cesar said to me once, with a distinctly ironic twist on his lips, "but we decided the walk would be too hard for you." It struck me that I'd never heard a wiser decision. At 4:00 A.M., just as I was wondering whether I could go any farther, Cesar declared, "All right, we'll stop and sleep here." He motioned toward a grassy place on the side of the mountain; it seemed to bother him not a whit that it was sloped at a forty-five-degree angle.
    He curled up in a checkered blanket with his machine gun in his arms and promptly fell asleep next to Henry. Henry complained later that Cesar's machine gun dug into his ribs all night. I complained that every time I tried to relax on the slope, I began sliding down -- and that directly beneath me was a sixty-foot drop into a canyon with a waterfall. When morning came two hours later, all around my feet were gullies where I had dug into the mountain to keep myself from sliding off of it.
    The next three days that we spent with the FAR were among the strangest of my life. I felt totally suspended in time -- I no longer was sure what or where I was. We spent our days sitting around in the sunlight chattering endlessly in Spanish. Henry took pictures of guerrillas jumping, guerrillas talking, guerrillas posed for