The Tampa Tribune / TBO.com
Military News
TAMPA — On her 93rd night as a captive of Somali pirates, American aid worker Jessica Buchanan did what she taught herself to do to stay sane in the dark.
She pulled her mat from under a tree and tried to go to sleep.
It was Jan. 25, 2012, and Buchanan, 32 at the time, was ill, malnourished and losing hope of rescue from the drugged-out men with AK-47s who were holding her.
“We had to lay out in the open at night,” Buchanan told a small audience Wednesday night during a fund-raiser for the Tampa Bay Frogman Swim, a charity event for the Navy SEAL Foundation. “Unbeknownst to them, it was their No. 1 biggest mistake, if you get my drift. There was no protection and we were very visual, even at night.”
Moments later, there was a commotion.
“One of the pirates was sleeping very close to me,” Buchanan said. “I hear him jump up, then I hear him whisper-screaming to the other guys in Somali, basically the message was, ‘Get up, get up, we are not alone, get up.’ I pull a blanket down from my face and I look at him and his face is just terrified and then the entire night just erupts into gunfire,”
Buchanan covered her face with the blanket. She tried to get as low to the ground as she could.
“I am so afraid that I am going to get caught in some kind of crossfire,” she said. “And I also think to myself that, this is it, I am never going to survive. I am not going to make it out of this alive. I don’t have the energy. I don’t have the health to learn another group. I am probably going to get sold to Al-Shabab and be taken out of Somalia. I am an American woman.”
Her voice grew softer, but more intense.
“I’m dead,” she said. “I’m dead.”
In summer 2006, Buchanan, now living in northern Virginia, followed her dream and moved to Africa.
Three years later, she met and married Erik Landemalm, a Swede helping build a legal system in East Africa. She left her teaching position and the couple moved to Hargeisa, Somaliland, where she became regional education adviser for the Danish Demining Group, a mine action unit of the Danish Refugee Council.
Her job was to help train staff to go into villages in Somaliland, Somalia, Uganda and South Sudan to teach about land mine safety, firearms safety and conflict reduction.
On October 25, 2011, while on a routine field mission in Somalia, Buchanan and fellow aid worker Poul Thisted were abducted at gunpoint.
As she suffered at the hands of the pirates, her husband worked feverishly behind the scenes. And despite her isolation in the Somali desert, Buchanan said, she knew that instinctively.
“I was sitting there and I kept telling Poul, ‘Erik is a bulldog, he is a bulldog. I know he is pounding on every nail, he is knocking on every door. He really was instrumental in getting the FBI very, very heavily invested, and if not for Matt Espenshade, the lead agent on the case, I would not be here.”
The story of what happened during those three tense months became the subject of “Impossible Odds: The Kidnapping of Jessica Buchanan and Her Dramatic Rescue by SEAL Team Six,” a 2013 book the couple wrote with author Anthony Flacco.
Her Tampa speech came a week after Army Master Sgt. Josh Wheeler, a member of Delta Force, was killed on a mission to rescue hostages from the so-called Islamic State Sunni jihadi group. Wheeler’s death highlighted the danger of missions like the one that rescued Buchanan.
“I am hearing the most horrific sounds around me,” Buchanan told the rapt crowd. “I hear men being shot. I hear them dropping to the ground. I hear them breathing their last breaths. And then I feel someone grab my arms and my legs and start shaking me. And I think, ‘OK, I’m not going down without a fight, so I start kicking my arms and my legs back and forth.”
Then somebody pulled the blanket from Buchanan’s face.
It was a dark, moonless night and she couldn’t see anything.
Except a man in a dark mask.
“I hear this young American voice. He sounded just like my 26-year-old brother.”
Her voice lowers to a whisper,
“And he said, ‘It’s OK. It’s OK, honey, we’re here.”
Still unable to see anything, Buchanan was confused.
“I said, ‘You’re American? You’re American? How? What? When? Why? What?’”
The young American knelt down and took off his mask.
“‘I know you have been really sick,’” Buchanan quoted him saying. “‘We have medicine. We have clean water,’ and I just started shaking uncontrollably from the shock.”
Seconds later, another man said, “OK, right, you gotta go. Where are your shoes?’”
She was still stunned. “I couldn’t put a sentence together.”
Then the second man picked her up and threw her over his shoulder, “like a Hollywood movie. And we started running.”
A short distance away, they reached a rendezvous spot.
Her fellow captive was there and grabbed her hand. They hugged.
“At one point Poul leans over to me and says, ‘do you know who these guys are?’ And I said, ‘no I really don’t care.’”
Thisted told her.
“He said, ‘This is SEAL Team 6. These are the guys who got Osama bin Laden.’
“‘Great,’”she recalled replying. “‘Let’s get out of here.”
Despite the danger, at least one episode in the ordeal drew chuckles from the audience.
One of the SEALs offered to go back to the encampment “and God only knows what carnage” and get her shoes. It was still a hike over desert terrain to reach the helicopter landing zone.
She asked the SEAL if he could also grab a black powder bag that had sentimental value.
He agreed.
Two minutes later, he came back. With the shoes and a large piece of luggage.
“I’m like, ‘Ah, I hate to do this to you, but that’s not the right bag.’”
Her audience laughed.
“And he looks at me with familiarity. He has a wife at home who has sent him in to go get something and brought back the wrong thing. And God love him, he went back and got me my black powder bag.”
Still, they weren’t out of trouble.
“At one point, they don’t think the premises are completely safe and so they lay me down and then, three or so of them actually lay down on top of us, and then I just remember, laying there on the ground, shaking in such shock. I can see the back of the rest of them. They formed a shield, a barrier, because it was not over yet.”
Only in the helicopter, several hundred feet in the air, did Buchanan finally feel safe.
When they reached a U.S. base in the country of Djibouti, what happened finally dawned on her.
“One of the guys comes over to me and he gets down on his knees and he gives me a folded American flag. And he looks me right in the eye and he just says very simply, ‘Welcome home, Jessica.’”
Then the tears started to flow, “because it is the understanding of what it means to be an American and in a strange land and in a bad situation, what it means to belong to this great country has never been clearer to me. How fortunate I am, that these men would leave their families. Several of them had wives expecting babies at that very minute.”
The SEALs “jumped out of an airplane and trekked 12 miles in the dark in the middle of Somalia and come to get this little Ohio school teacher just out there trying to do some good.
“Because I matter. Because in America, we all matter.”
Since her rescue, Buchanan has traveled the country meeting SEALs and their families.
“Unfortunately, there a lot of widows out there,” she said. “A lot of fatherless children. A lot of parents grieving the loss of their sons. But because of what they did, my father doesn’t have to grieve. My children get to be here. I have a little 3-year-old boy, August, and an 11-month-old girl, Ebba Jane. They get to experience this beautiful world because of them.”
Grateful, she is touring the U.S. raising funds for the Navy SEAL Foundation, a non-profit created to provide support to the Naval Special Warfare community.
That’s what brought her to Tampa. She scheduled several speaking engagements, including Wednesday’s at the North Dale Mabry restaurant Grill 116, organized by former state Rep. Trey Traviesa.
Locally, those efforts are spearheaded through the Tampa Bay Frogman Swim. The 7th annual swim is scheduled Jan. 17.
Rory O’Connor, a former Navy SEAL and the swim’s development director, said the event raised about $275,000 last year and organizers hope to boost that to $500,000 this year.
Buchanan urged the small group of potential donors to help those who saved her life.
“I have come to the conclusion that the only way I can live out my gratitude to them is to live a life of service and to live a life of gratitude and positivity and to continue letting people like you know what they do.”
Editor’s Note: Updated Links Tampa Bay Frogman (2023), Navy SEAL Foundation (2023)
Original URL: http://www.tbo.com/list/military-news/rescued-by-seals-aid-worker-raising-money-for-them-20151029/
