9 Months of Captivity, Then Freedom : Colombia: American entrepreneur intended to start a business in the badlands controlled by two rebel bands. He was kidnaped by one group because he planned to hire the other.

June 3, 1993, is a day Dick Daugherty will remember. He could actually sleep in a bed, wear clean clothes, take a shower and have a decent meal.

There would be no more cockroaches and chiggers and flies. No more diarrhea and chills and fever and swollen gums. No more armed guards monitoring his every twitch.

It had been 272 days since he had been able to flick on a light and sit down in a chair and have a roof over his head.

He was free at last--a hostage no more.

Daugherty, who spent his formative years in Colorado and Oregon, is a coal-mining entrepreneur. He saw a promising business opportunity in the badlands of northern Colombia, a region dominated by rolling hills, wrenching poverty and leftist guerrillas.

Last Sept. 5, while heading for a meeting in the company of his Venezuelan translator, Daugherty was stopped by members of the National Liberation Army. It was shortly before 3 p.m.

“We have an order from the executive committee to take you prisoner,” he was told.

For the next 272 days his life would be transformed in ways that demonstrated his extraordinary capacity to survive.

Daugherty was a hostage. His Venezuelan companion also was taken, but Daugherty was the real target.

He was not a celebrity hostage like Terry Anderson or Terry Waite or Thomas Sutherland or the others who became household words during their imprisonment in Lebanon a few years ago.

There were no presidential pronouncements on his behalf or large-scale international campaigns for his release. Daugherty was for the most part an anonymous captive, a fellow who took what he thought was an acceptable risk but miscalculated.

The 54-year-old husband and father of three girls talked about his travails to a reporter soon after he was set free.

Last year, he said, he had been assured it was safe to open a coal-mining operation despite the presence of two determined guerrilla groups that control the area.

Daugherty envisioned 500 mining jobs. The FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, by its Spanish initials) guerrillas had the inside track for these jobs, causing resentment among the National Liberation Army, or ELN, rebels.

The ELN wanted a piece of the action and kidnaped Daugherty.

His captors offered to free him for $500,000 ransom, then lowered it to $100,000 when he refused. A small businessman, Daugherty considered those amounts beyond his means.

As Daugherty spoke, it was hard to tell which of his experiences were the most trying. Perhaps it was the food, which was cooked in the morning and by nightfall was infested with cockroaches and flies. Or perhaps it was his health problems--fever and diarrhea that he was unable to shake for the entire nine months. He was a 200-pounder when seized, but life as a captive shriveled him at one point to 120 pounds.

The most difficult single incident occurred after he tried to escape on “Day 51” last October but was hunted down after 2 1/2 days. On the long walk back to camp, he was under constant assault from mosquitoes, chiggers and ticks but could not fend them off because his captors had tied his arms.

The trail was muddy, and each step required considerable exertion. The resulting suction in his boots was such that many nails literally were sucked off his toes.

His escape attempt earned him the nickname “zorro blanco” (“white fox”). But after his recapture, his guerrilla companions made sure he would never try to flee again.

“I had four to six guys with me at all times. They never got more than 10 feet away from me afterward,” he said.

To fight boredom, he would spend part of each morning killing flies. “My record for two hours was 525,” he said. In January, he was given writing material for the first time and started keeping a diary. His meals almost always consisted of rice, potatoes, spaghetti or yucca. His clothing: two shirts and one pair of pants. As for news from the outside world, he received word only of President Clinton’s election and the political upheavals in neighboring Venezuela.

To escape potential capture by Army counterinsurgency forces, his guerrilla companions moved frequently, camping at 27 different locations while they held him. All 272 days were spent outdoors, with a hammock for a bed, except for three nights he spent inside “structures.” During the entire period, the only time he saw a light bulb was when a power generator was brought in briefly at Christmastime.

His ordeal ended unexpectedly on June 3 when the guerrilla commander told him he was being freed. He was taken to a farmhouse not far from the spot where he was picked up nine months earlier. Three days later, he left Colombia.