Surviving a Hostage Situation | No Man Left Behind

It's hard to describe what was going on. There is total, not panic, but chaos. Pandemonium. I don't know that anybody was ready for Anita to shoot me. I wasn't. After the shot, it was a throbbing, burning pain, and I immediately became concerned about the blood. You know, if you get shot, you gotta stop the bleeding. I'm thinking that this is it; this is wrong. One guy, right here in the front seat of this crummy car.

So, as I pull myself up a little bit in the front seat, he fires again. A round enters my right shoulder and makes a thud on the top of my shoulder. As I come back up, he's again standing there, the gun at my head. Although here is a big click, the gun didn't fire. That was like the green light for me to take off and do something. I didn't; I was gonna be killed right there.

But, basically, what drives you in that situation is the desire to survive. It's amazing what you can do, what the body can do when you get into survival mode. You can do a lot more than you think you can. So, you know, I've been shot twice now. I'm coming, “Hey Randy, you want to get my hands on everything else?”

This was all happening in split seconds, and I had a whole lot of time to do a lot of philosophical thinking about my family. Oh, it's strictly in survival. You can “what if” the situation forever. Normally, in a hostage situation, the sooner you take evasive action, the better your chances of survival. We didn't see the opportunity to escape; we didn't see that they were actually going to kill us.

I look back, and I'm very critical of myself about some of those things that may have changed the outcome. They may have avoided those situations, but one never knows. The bottom line is we both survived.