Canadian hostage Joshua Boyle delivered his second son in the darkness, a flashlight in his mouth.

“Ta-da!” he writes to his parents. “The astonished captors were good and brought all our post-partum needs, so he is now fat and healthy, praise God.”

Boyle’s correspondence, delivered through intermediaries and written in his tiny, neat penmanship, gives a glimpse into his family’s life in captivity.

“We are trying to keep spirits high for the children and play Beautiful Life.”

Boyle’s parents believe this is a reference to the movie in which a father protects his son from the brutalities of a Nazi concentration camp by pretending it is just a game.

The writing is depressing, yet sometimes hopeful, sad but also self-deprecating or funny. There are Stompin’ Tom Connors lyrics and Mother Teresa quotes, references to the International Space Station and Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Merton.

Even when it’s dark or bittersweet, Boyle’s writing has brought the family more hope than a video released two weeks ago that warned they may be killed.

Boyle, 33, and his American wife Caitlan Coleman, 31, are being held by the Taliban. They were kidnapped near Kabul during a backpacking trip through Central Asia in October 2012. Coleman was five months pregnant at the time and gave birth to their son in custody. They had a second boy in 2015, after what Boyle tells his parents was a “7 ½ month surreptitious pregnancy.”

Boyle’s father, Patrick, and mother, Linda, shared his writings with the Toronto Star in part because Boyle asked them to. He mentions me by name, writing in that I am among those his family can trust. He writes, “Please try and speed things up, make a media storm in the West and East.”

Media operates with special considerations when reporting on kidnappings, mindful that what is written could hurt negotiations or risk the hostages’ safety. The Boyles have always been cautious of publicity, but also want to honour their son’s request. After nearly four years, they generally feel helpless and at a loss.

The video of Boyle and Coleman, uploaded directly to YouTube in August, was unlike past “proof of life” videos. This one contained a threat. Boyle, who appears to be reading from a script, said that if the Afghan government did not stop executing Taliban prisoners, the couple would be killed.

Afghanistan’s powerful Haqqani network, which has strong links and alliances with the Taliban, are skilled kidnappers and negotiators. The video’s release coincided with an August 29 Afghan court decision that ruled Anas Haqqani, the son of the group’s founder, would be executed for his role in helping raise funds for the network.

**

I was gambling in Havana

I took a little risk

Send lawyers, guns and money

Dad, get me out of this

— Lawyers, Guns and Money, Warren Zevon

“Dad Zevon was a poser,” Boyle writes to his father. Searching for meaning — and knowing their son’s sense of humour — the family assumes he is making a reference to Warren Zevon’s song.

It is not clear what Boyle knows about any efforts for his family’s release. But in the recent video, he says their lives depend on the help of the Canadian, American and Afghan governments. “They will execute us, women and children included, if the policies of the Afghan government are not overturned either by the Afghan government or by Canada, somehow, or the United States.”

The Haqqani network, with its close connection to the Taliban and influence both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, have been fighting alongside the Taliban to expel Americans from Afghanistan for years and hostages are part of their arsenal.

Their most high-profile kidnapping was of U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl, who was taken after leaving his base. Bergdahl was held for five years, and freed in May 2014 in exchange for five Taliban prisoners detained in Guantanamo Bay.

Last year, a former U.S. special forces officer testified that Coleman, Boyle and one other American and a Canadian hostage were to be freed with Bergdahl but that the deal collapsed due to bureaucratic infighting.

“I failed them. I exhausted all efforts and resources available to return them but I failed,” U.S. Army Special Forces Lt. Col. Jason Amerine told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in June 2015.

After Bergdahl’s release, USAID worker Warren Weinstein was accidentally killed by an American drone strike. Canadian hostage, Colin Rutherford, was freed in January, although details of his release are not known. Ottawa has only said that Qatar was involved in securing his freedom. The Taliban say it was a “humanitarian” gesture.

**

“He was very odd.”

Linda Boyle is sitting in her dining room, her son’s correspondence, along with cheese and crackers, spread out on the table. She is trying to explain her eldest son, Josh, and why he would decide to backpack in Afghanistan — a question often asked since the kidnapping became public in December 2012.

Boyle and Coleman clearly did not appreciate the danger. Their families — while emphasizing the couple’s idealism — do not dispute their naivete.

Linda Boyle uses the past tense when she talks about Josh — not because she has given up hope — but because she thinks he will return a different man. “He was a very, very proud person, which was definitely his biggest failing, and he knew it,” she says. “He had such high standards for everybody, but for himself, the highest standards of all.”

None of that pride and self-assurance is obvious in the videos or his writings.

Patrick believes his son would accept his mother’s characterization of him as “odd.” He notes that Josh tells him to read Robert Service’s poem, The Men That Don’t Fit In.

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,

A race that can’t stay still;

So they break the hearts of kith and kin,

And they roam the world at will.

I met Joshua Boyle while reporting on Omar Khadr, who was then held at Guantanamo Bay. Boyle had married Khadr’s sister, Zaynab, after volunteering to be a family spokesperson. The marriage ended in 2010, after just a year. U.S. officials discount any link between the previous family tie and his capture, the Associated Press reported.

We kept in touch because Boyle was incredibly bright and fascinating. We would go for coffee, or he would email me from his travels, encouraging me to keep covering Guantanamo — praising and criticizing my writing, sometimes in the same paragraph. “Classic Josh,” his mother says when I show them the emails.

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But I have come to know Boyle much better during his captivity through the stories of his friends and family.

Boyle, the second of five children, attended a Mennonite school but was active in his youth with both his mother’s Anglican church and his father’s Catholic faith. His father is a federal tax judge, his mother, a consummate homemaker.

In 2011, Boyle married Coleman, a longtime friend who he met online as a teenager through their mutual love of Star Wars.

That’s also how he met his friend Alex Edwards, who wrote in a blog after Boyle was kidnapped: “He was charismatic, principled, and passionate about his causes, whether they were political, intellectual, or personal … He had a deep insight into human nature, and a knack for finding loopholes. There’s nothing he loved more than standing up for what he believed in, especially if it gave him a chance to thumb his nose at authority.”

Boyle and Coleman spent six months backpacking through Central America after they were married, visiting remote villages, staying with local families, craving an authentic experience. The plan had been to then travel through Russia and Central Asia before settling in New Brunswick, where Boyle had bought a home.

They flew to Moscow from New York on July 4, 2012, and hiked through Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Postcards home chronicle their travels.

But — without telling their families — they went to Afghanistan. On Oct. 8, Boyle sent an email from an Internet café. The last withdrawal from their bank account was made Oct. 9 in Kabul. They had return plane tickets for December 2012.

Richard Cronin, a backpacker who met Boyle and Coleman in Kyrgyzstan, wrote on his blog that Boyle had been so passionate about Afghanistan that he convinced Cronin to go as well. “We started talking about Lawrence of Arabia and the explorer Richard Burton. (Boyle) asked me if I admired these explorers. Of course I did,” Cronin writes.

“He then gave other reasons for travelling to Afghanistan: When’s the next time you will be in Central Asia? And chiefly; the window is closing and the security situation will only deteriorate when the American troops leave.”

Cronin, a British citizen, crossed into Afghanistan with an American friend who spoke Dari before Boyle and Coleman, but the couples had exchanged numbers, hoping to meet up again. It wasn’t until November, after having the adventure Boyle had promised, and they were staying at a Kabul guest house with an Internet connection that they realized their friends were missing.

They were summoned to the American embassy the next day and were interviewed by the FBI. “Our adventure had suddenly turned serious; dangers that had been brushed aside now seemed real and immediate,” Cronin writes. “We wanted to leave Afghanistan as soon as Eid finished and we could get a taxi to take us to the border.”

They waited for Boyle and Coleman back at the Kyrgyzstan guest house until their visas ran out, hoping they would return.

Cronin wrote me in an email this week: “I hope Josh and his family get out safely. I have some questions I’d really like to ask them. I’m sure you do too.”

**

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!

— If, Rudyard Kipling

“Dad, know now that I’ve long surpassed Kipling’s 60 seconds. And I’ve learned from your mistakes and mine, the proper focus in life,” Boyle wrote.

It is difficult for Patrick Boyle to read this passage. The Boyles have spent four years trying to envision the couple’s life in captivity, but they also worry about the fate of their two grandchildren, whom they have never seen.

Linda has knitted the boys sweaters, socks and blankets. They have prepared rooms in anticipation of their release. Patrick wrote a letter to his son in August that he hopes might be delivered soon: “You and Cait sound like amazing parents, holding up each other and your boys, and protecting them from their horrible reality. I could only hope I would be able to do that in similar circumstances.”

Boyle writes of how the boys are being educated and boasts that his four-year-old knows about 100 words in both Latin and Arabic and has mastered sign language. He can do timetables up to 5x5 and also likes to play ISS with blankets.

ISS? His parents have to laugh —“it’s so Josh.” ISS stands for International Space Station.

Boyle asks one of his sisters to send non-fiction children’s books and bead-and-wire toys. “One of the guards is quite amicable, especially toward the children,” he writes. Past attempts to send care packages were unsuccessful.

His sign-off probably confused his captors, as it did the FBI.

It is from Stompin’ Tom Connors song Don Valley Jail, a favourite of Patrick’s that would loop endlessly from the tape deck during the family road trips.

“I still love you, little darlin’,” Boyle writes

“I’ll be waiting for your mail.”

Michelle Shephard is the Star’s National Security correspondent. Follow her on Twitter @shephardm.

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