Let freedom ring: Former captive knows what it means to be free
Jul. 2—TRINITY — Gaye Willard will never forget the date she came to cherish her American freedom.
June 8, 1977.
"I remember stepping out of the airplane, and the United States smelled different," the 68-year-old Trinity woman says. "It smelled clean — it smelled free. I remember thinking, this is what freedom feels like."
To understand Willard's appreciation of freedom, you have to understand where she'd been. What she'd been through. What she'd survived.
For the previous 2 1/2 years, the young woman — only 23 at the time — had been living in the remote bush country of Zaire (now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo), a missionary some 6,500 miles from home. And for the past three months, she had been held captive there by heavily armed Angolan rebels intent on overthrowing the Zairian government.
Back here on American soil, Willard's family and friends knew only that she'd been captured. With no way of communicating with her, they didn't even know if she was still alive. They prayed without ceasing and pulled string after string trying to win her release, all to no avail.
Willard wondered whether she would ever see her family again. Rebels had already killed a fellow missionary, a dear friend, and she couldn't help but wonder if she might be next. She stared death in the face more than once during those three months, and she came within about 10 minutes of being bombed by Zairian forces.
So when Willard tells you she cherishes her freedom, it's not just some sappy platitude she pulls out for the Fourth of July. It's a first-person epiphany that ought to send chills down your spine.
Hostage in a primitive land
Willard left for Zaire in January 1975, four months after getting married, but it wasn't much of a honeymoon.
She and her first husband, Rick Radford, found themselves doing missionary work in Kapanga, a primitive village so remote that the nearest grocery store was 200 miles away. No electricity, no phones, no running water, no roads. The only way in and out was by plane, using the village's small airstrip.
They lived there among the Lunda, a tribe of about 20,000 people who ate off the land and lived in small, single-room huts made by drying mud into bricks.
"It was very primitive, like there had never been any progress there," Willard recalls.
The mission team's only means of communication was a short-wave radio, which Willard operated from the couple's small home in the village. Her husband was a pilot, flying short missions to other areas of the country.
On March 8, 1977 — during the third year of their four-year assignment — mercenaries from Angola invaded southern Zaire, where Kapanga was, as part of an attempt to overthrow Zaire's government. The rebels showed up at Willard's door with one of her fellow missionaries in their custody.
"He told me they wanted my radio," Willard says. "He told me to unlock my door and let them in the office where I kept the radio. They ripped the cords out of the wall and took the radio. I barely knew what had happened — I just knew that our only way to communicate was gone."
Willard's husband was flying back from a trip that day. If he'd landed at Kapanga, the rebels would've commandeered his plane — and him — but the missionaries found an old radio that hadn't worked in years and were able to get it working just long enough to warn him not to land at Kapanga.
Willard feared for her life.
"I was terrified," she says. "I had just found out I was expecting my first child. These guys were rebel soldiers. They'd been trained in Angola, and their weaponry was from Cuba. All of their propaganda was communist, very anti-American. They painted anti-American slogans on the walls of our mission hospital. Everything they told us to do was at gunpoint."
Because her husband wasn't there, Willard moved in with a missionary couple next door so she wouldn't be alone. The rebels held all of the missionaries under house arrest.
"There were always at least four soldiers on guard at the house," she says. "They came and went as they wanted to. If they wanted to come into your bedroom, they came into your bedroom. It was a very scary time."
To make matters worse, the Americans were surrounded by 200 miles of the African bush. Even if they could've escaped, where would they go?
Life-or-death crises
The longer the rebel forces stayed in Kapanga, the more agitated they grew, and the more suspicious they became of their hostages. On at least two occasions, Willard thought she might be killed.
"The one time I just knew I wasn't going to survive, they came and got all of us and lined us up outside and pointed guns at us," she says. "There was a plane flying overhead, just really, really high. They told us to get that plane to land, and if we didn't, they were going to shoot us."
The Americans tried to get the pilot's attention, but he was too high and kept flying. Willard's heart sank.
"I'm not going to make it out of this alive," she remembers thinking.
For whatever reason, though, the soldiers decided not to kill their captives.
Another time, a mercenary accused Willard of transmitting secret messages to Zairian leaders through a silver necklace she was wearing. The soldier's suspicions were aroused by a small, ball-shaped trinket on the necklace that had perfume in it.
When Willard denied sending messages, he pointed to the trinket and said, "There's your microphone."
She quickly unscrewed the cap, held it up to her accuser's nose and said, "See? This is not a microphone."
"And," she adds, "he didn't shoot me."
Another missionary, Glen Eschtruth, was not so fortunate. Like Willard, he was accused of espionage, but rather than spare him, the soldiers took him away from the village — under the pretense of taking him to trial — then shot him and left him in a ditch to die.
Willard escaped death again when the fighting between Zaire's army and the Angolan rebels neared the mission station.
"We could hear guns and explosions, and it just kept inching closer to where we were," Willard recalls. "The Zaire army, thinking there were no more missionaries present, had started bombing Kapanga. We would hear the planes coming — they were, like, right on top of the houses — and we would run and get in a closet and pray that we would be protected."
Finally, in late May, the rebels fled Kapanga, leaving their captives behind. That was good news, of course, except that Zaire's army was still bombing the area to make sure the rebels were gone.
"So we were just sitting ducks for their army," Willard says.
A nearby Catholic mission station faced the same danger, so one of the priests volunteered to ride a bicycle to the battlefront, waving a white flag, to tell army leaders the rebels had left and to stop dropping bombs.
"He went out to where they were at 7 in the morning," Willard recalls. "Had he been 10 minutes later, they would've bombed our mission station. That was their target for that morning."
When Zaire's president, Mobutu Sese Seko, learned of the missionaries' close call, he and an entourage flew to Kapanga and hosted a banquet for the Americans.
"You could see the look on his face, the enormity of almost killing these American missionaries," Willard says. "He was grateful we were alive."
He wasn't the only one.
Free at last
Back home in the Triad, Willard's family had been subsisting on prayer and rare snippets of information — some of them accurate, some not.
"We received a letter that she was pregnant with her first child," remembers Willard's sister, Janice Spainhour, also of Trinity. "Then a week later, we got word that she had been captured. We waited to hear from the mission organization, and we prayed. Everybody we knew prayed for her and the other missionaries."
When the news finally came that Willard was free, healthy and homeward bound, you can imagine the celebration that ensued.
"The day she came home, I believe everyone we ever had an acquaintance with showed up at the airport," Spainhour says. "It was a glorious day!"
That was June 8, 1977 — the day Willard realized how precious freedom can be.
She stepped from her plane at what is now Piedmont Triad International Airport, smiling as she inhaled huge gulps of American air. Then she stepped down onto the tarmac and into a sea of family members, friends and other well-wishers who had gathered there to welcome her home.
"I was just struck by the freedom that surrounded me," Willard says. "I'm still aware of that freedom, and I don't take it for granted, because I know how quickly it can disappear. Appreciating my freedom on that day is a memory that's precious to me, and I don't ever want to forget what that feels like."
jtomlin@hpenews.com — 336-888-3579
