ERIC TUCKER
The Islamic extremists drove up to the American missionary’s home in Niger under the cover of evening, gunning down two guards who stood watch.
Jeff Woodke recalls seeing the muzzle blasts and hearing the screams before being thrown into a pickup truck that then sped away.
So began more than six years of captivity, a period in which he says he was beaten, locked in chains for hours a day and pressured repeatedly to convert to Islam and endured self-imposed hunger strikes.
“It was hell,” said Woodke, 62, who was released in March.
“I think the hardest part was knowing that my family, if they were alive, they were suffering too.”
As time progressed, he said, he began to feel that “it’s better for me to be dead than continue putting them through suffering. And that feeling grew and grew and grew. The last year I was there,
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