Jeff Woodke has released a memoir recounting more than six years in militant captivity after his 2016 kidnapping in Niger.
Woodke, 65, of McKinleyville, Northern California, published “All the Way Home” last week, detailing his abduction by a West African Al Qaeda-linked terror group and his eventual release in March 2023. The book traces his decades of aid work in vulnerable Nigerien communities, his violent capture, and his struggle to rebuild life with his wife, adult children and grandchildren after returning home.
The assault came in October 2016 when armed men stormed his home in the town of Abalak. Woodke tried to flee, but his attackers chased him down, striking him with rifle butts until a blow to his leg severed his Achilles tendon. “They just beat the stuffing out of me and drugged me, threw me in their vehicle,” he said in an interview with The Christian Post. The beating left indentations in his skull.
Stripped and driven into the desert, Woodke was sold between militant groups. “I was trafficked,” he said. “That’s what I was. I was kidnapped, and I was sold, and I was the property of another human being, or at least they thought I was.”
His captors moved him from Niger into neighboring Mali, where he spent much of his captivity in brutal conditions. His ankles were shackled, and he was forced to sleep on the ground in the scorching West African desert. During rainy periods, his captors left him outside as floodwaters swept through. His diet was limited to rice, dough, red sauce and occasional dried goat meat.
The psychological warfare proved as devastating as the physical deprivation. Woodke recalled being confined inside a cramped box measuring roughly four feet by four feet for about two months, unable to stand upright. “They would not even speak with me just to try and break me,” he told the outlet. “There was a psychological dissociation, complete dissociation. I basically went nuts for a while. Lost time. Lost a lot.”
The prolonged isolation and abuse eventually left him too physically weak to walk. At one point, he went on a hunger strike and prayed for God to kill him. “I kind of lost my religion, but I gained my faith,” he said. That struggle became a central thread of his memoir, which frames his experience as both profound suffering and testimony to the faith and hope he says sustained him.
Woodke feared his family might have died during the COVID-19 pandemic, cut off as he was from outside information. Relearning how to function after years as a hostage presented its own challenges, as did confronting PTSD and the lasting effects of isolation.
The Biden administration announced his release on March 20, 2023, after more than six years in captivity. A senior administration official said he was freed near the Mali-Burkina Faso area and emphasized there had been “no quid pro quo” with his captors. The official said the US government did not directly negotiate with a terrorist organization, pay a ransom or make any concession for his freedom. Woodke was handed to special forces from a third-party nation before transfer to US diplomatic personnel in Niamey, Niger.
Woodke has since become a vocal warning to Western missionaries considering dangerous regions of the Sahel. “If they go in there right now, they’re just going to get taken hostage again,” he said. Yet he maintains that extremism cannot be defeated through force of argument alone. “The only way we’re going to conquer it is not through politics and rhetoric and dogma and exclusion, but through love.”
Early readers have responded emotionally to the book. “I could not help but have tears in my eyes,” one wrote online. “This is not a light read and the author wrestles with heavy life and death questions.” Another reader highlighted what struck them most: “What impacted me most was Jeff’s choice to forgive his captors. In the midst of circumstances most of us could never even imagine surviving, he chose forgiveness.”
Woodke’s memoir is now available through major booksellers.