Impossible Odds

to see. He began to lay out his feelings. He revealed them freely in spite of hismasculine persona, and so much of what he expressed rang all the right notes. Before long, his combination of a poetic sense of romance and dogged persistence won me over. If I had known him better at that point I would have expected nothing else.
    This began a period of a year and a half of dating, and we became inseparable whenever Erik wasn’t out in the field somewhere. A few months after we met he was transferred to the city of Hargeisa, capital of the unrecognized State of Somaliland in northern Somalia, and we were reduced to spending only five or six days a month together. On most weekends he would fly down to Kenya to be with me, since his job paid better than mine. We struggled with all the usual joys and frustrations of a long-distance relationship and found the absence only increased our desire to be together. Christmas came, and we traveled back to the United States so my family could meet Erik, and his first trip to my home country spanned the gamut from New York City and Philadelphia, which we toured together first, to a trip to the heartland of Ohio to meet the folks.
    Here was where the cultural differences between our homes really came to the fore. Erik had never seen giant roadside billboards advertising faith in Jesus. We both got nervous about whether he would fit in with my straitlaced family. “No talking about religion,” I warned. “Also, nothing about politics.”
    “Right.” He smiled. We arrived at my family home, introduced everyone all around, then spent a lovely evening at dinner where the conversation was lively and pleasant. I could see my family coming around to my view of him, and I was overjoyed by that. After dinner we retired to the living room, where I lay on the sofa and took a little nap to sleep off some jet lag while the others kept on talking. I lay down with my head on my mom’s lap and drifted off, just as I had done when I was a little girl. It was beautiful.
    I woke up to hear him debating religion with my mom. What? It should have been a disaster—he was inviting bursts ofexasperation, storms of outrage, indignation! But again I failed to realize how much time he spends with people who don’t agree with whatever he is trying to tell them. Somehow, he was able to have the “forbidden” conversations with my folks and endear himself to them in the same moment. By the time we left I knew my family understood why I was in love with this man.
    In October 2008, he asked me to marry him and I accepted. We were married on the beach in Kenya on March 28, 2009, and I finished up my obligation to complete the spring and summer term at the Rosslyn Academy. On August 15 I moved from Nairobi, Kenya, to Hargeisa, a distance of almost nine hundred miles, to join Erik full-time and truly begin our married life together.
    We’d made it past the many obstacles to a successful relationship that can sprout up between two people with backgrounds that appear to be so different. It was a marriage designed to be an adventure for both of us, living and working in Africa together.
    The way ahead was all clear for smooth sailing . . .

Part Two

C ONCEALED UNDER O PEN S KY

CHAPTER EIGHT
    By the time Jessica Buchanan was kidnapped in Somalia on October 25, 2011, the twenty-four boys back in America who had been so young during the 1993 attack on the downed American aid support choppers in Mogadishu had since grown to manhood. Now they were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-five, and each one had become determined to qualify for the elite U.S. Navy unit called DEVGRU. After enlisting in the U.S. Navy and undergoing their essential basic training, every one of them endured the challenges of BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training, where the happy goal is to become “drownproofed” via what amounts to repeated semidrowning, while also learning dozens of ways to deliver explosive death and demolition. This was only the starting point.
    Once qualification was over and the candidates were sworn in, three-fourths of the qualified Navy SEALS who tried to also qualify for DEVGRU dropped out. Those super-warriors were overcome by the challenges, regardless of their peak physical condition and being in the prime of their lives. This happened because of the intensity of the training. Long study and practice went into developing a program specifically designed to seek out and expose any