Kidnap Survivor Jess Buchanan On Her Captivity With Somali Pirates, Rescue By Seal Team 6, & Why You ALWAYS Have A Choice

How much control do any of us really ever have…over anything? Kidnapping survivor Jess Buchanan has some thoughts.... Is it more important to be safe in body or in mind? What does safety even mean? Jessica Buchanan had 93 days to consider questions like this while she was held captive in 2011 somewhere deep in the Somali desert. A 32 year old American schoolteacher who was working with a Danish aid organization helping teach children how to avoid being blown up by leftover landmines in rural areas….Jess had just finished up a meeting and was prepping to fly back home when the car carrying her and a coworker was ambushed by armed gunman who she would later learn were tipped off my their security for only $100,000.

 

Driven into the desert and forced to participate in a mock execution, she and her coworker soon realized her kidnappers were Somali pirates demanding $45 million dollars for her release. The good news was that she was worth more to them alive than dead; the bad news was that she spent the next 93 days entirely outdoors being moved around in the Somali desert by a gang of pirates, men who would routinely berate her, threaten to sell her to AlShabab, and hold a gun to her head. Most days she ate a tin of tuna and perhaps some canned pineapple. But the constant threat of assault paled in comparison to the fear of losing her own mind, which she realized then was the single most important thing she had ever had. 

 

Through a miscarriage she never mentioned to her captors, to the months of taking stock of every life choice she had made until the day of her kidnapping…to the night when she was saved but none other than SEAL TEAM 6 (on the direct orders of President Obama)…Jess Buchanan could never shake her belief that this was not the end.  Not only did she manage to connect with her kidnappers in ways that are now taught in classes…but she empathized with them and reach the conclusion that in fact…her kidnapping was just not personal. And thanks to a kidney infection that triggered her rescue and a husband who NEVER stopped fighting for her…she managed to do what the seals told her was the most impressive part; she survived. 

 

Life is a classroom, she says. And today she gets to live that lesson and impart it to her two children alongside the husband who helped save her…in the warmth of a life which she knows, better than any of us, was NEVER guaranteed.