Captive: My Time As a Prisoner of the Taliban

I looked at the land and the canyons around us. Everything was rugged, rust-colored in the fading sun, starkly beautiful, jagged, and empty. The sun was behind us, almost gone now. We were walking easily. I looked ahead. We were in a valley. There was grass, and it was comforting. I wasn't tired. We walked on.

I looked up and saw a black turban appear from behind a rock on the hill in front of us. I froze. Oh, my God. Oh no. It's not possible. I stared in disbelief. A tall, lanky man came up running, shouting, jumping over another rock, holding a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and other men followed behind him. It was the Taliban.

They came swarming down the mountain, spreading out, shouting, "Kenna, kenna!"---Get down, get down!---holding their rifles and rocket launchers high, like Indians attacking in an old Western movie. I'm dead, I said to myself. I'm dead.

A small man was in the lead, holding a walkie-talkie and coming toward me. All my energy and strength disappeared. They stood around us, at least a dozen men with rifles and grenade launchers, all pointed at us. I didn't more. I was about to die. I felt weak, hopeless, frustrated, and trapped. I couldn't run. I couldn't do anything. I was dead. I was going to die.

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

In the summer of 2007, Jere Van Dyk, a journalist working with CBS News, arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan. Few reporters knew the region as he did: he had first gone to Afghanistan as a young man in the 1970s, and he traveled extensively with the mujahideen in the early 1980s as they fought against the Soviet Union. He was back this time to begin research on a book about the borderlands, particularly the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, which no Western reporters had been able to penetrate for years. The Taliban was reconstituting itself in that region, and al-Qaeda leaders---including Osama bin Laden---were said to be in hiding there as well. Van Dyk was determined to cross the border, one way or another, to get the story.

Six months later, in mid-February 2008, Van Dyk was on his way. He and three Afghan guides had crossed into the tribal areas, 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. It was the Taliban, and he was now their prisoner.

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.

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, that have required him to visit places where few Western reporters had ventured before. He lives in New York City.