Still
Alive!
As told to Ron Arias, People, 5/15/2006
More than 30 years after a plane crash left him
and his rugby team stranded in the Andes, Nando Parrado recalls their
72-day ordeal-and how far they went to survive
A little past 8 a.m. on Oct. 12,
1972, my team, the Old Christians Rugby
Club of Uruguay, took off from Montevideo to play a match in Santiago,
Chile. There were 45 people aboard the twin-engine F-227, most of them friends
and family-like my mother, Eugenia, and 19-year-old sister, Susy. It was
supposed to be a 3 1/2-hour flight, but bad weather forced us to layover in the
Argentine city of Mendoza. We took off again the next day, and through the fog
I could see the snow-capped Andes rising as high as 22,000 feet. Everyone
seemed in a lively mood. Somebody threw me a rugby
ball-I passed it forward. Some people played cards with the plane's
steward-until he shouted, "Please take your seats!"
I felt four sharp bumps. Across the
aisle my mother and sister looked worried-they were holding hands. As the
engines screamed and the plane shook violently, our eyes met. Then I heard the
wrenching sound of tearing metal. The last thing I remember was the roof
opening like a sardine can; an icy wind lashed my face and tore my seat from
the floor. The fuselage broke apart, spilling people into the air, then came
down, tobogganing until it smashed against piled snow and ice. Amid the
screams, tangled bodies, seats and luggage, I was unconscious (with four skull
fractures). They thought I was a goner and laid me in the snow with the dead.
I lay three days at the crash site
then woke up-very slowly. I asked, "Where's my mother? Where's Susy?"
There was no room for niceties. Another survivor said, "Your mother is
dead and your sister is near death. She's lying at the front of the
fuselage." Despite my grief, a voice in my head said not to cry because
I'd lose salt and water.
In conditions like that, you're
transformed, like an animal in the wild. I crawled over to Susy. I didn't even
know if she was aware of me. I rubbed her frozen feet, put snow to her lips.
For two days I held her; then her breathing stopped. She was still. I cried her
name, gave her mouth-to-mouth. It was too late. I held her all night, then
buried her next to my mother in the snow. I have never felt so alone.
Now the main thing was to survive
that sub-zero hell. We huddled inside the fuselage, going outside only in the
few hours when sunshine warmed the metal of the aircraft-which we used to melt
snow for water. We tried to keep our spirits up by telling stories. But in the
days after the crash, it was obvious we would starve. There was no life on the
glacier. No birds, grass, nothing. We'd eaten all the snacks and candy in the
wreckage. I remember my last bit of food, a chocolate peanut. I sucked on it
for hours. We even tried eating strips of leather from the luggage. Then my
mind crossed the line. Staring at a boy's leg wound I felt my appetite
growing-I could taste the crust of dried blood at the edges. I'd actually
looked at human flesh as food. I whispered to my friend Carlitos Paez,
"Our friends don't need their bodies anymore." "God help
us," Carlitos said, "I've been thinking the same thing."
So had some of the others. For an
afternoon, we debated. Roberto Canessa, a medical student, said we'd die
without protein. With broken glass, several of us sliced strips of frozen flesh
off the bodies. The rest of us didn't know whom we ate, though out of kindness,
no one touched my mother or sister. When I ate my first piece, it had no taste.
I forced myself to swallow-without guilt. I was eating to live.
Eleven days after the crash, through
the static of a battered transistor, a voice declared that authorities had
canceled the search for us. We were stunned; some of us wept or screamed. Then
a few days later, on the night of Oct. 29-disaster: An avalanche thundered down
on the fuselage. Of 29 people inside, 27 of us were trapped, buried so deeply
we were suffocating. Furiously, the guys who could move worked to uncover the
guys next to them. I was the last one. I couldn't breathe. I knew I'd be dead
in seconds, but felt oddly calm. I didn't see tunnels of light, no angels. Then
I felt a hand scratch my face. "Nando! It's me!"
Eight men had died. Their flesh
sustained us for eight weeks, but I knew we were doomed. I looked west and knew
our only hope was to climb down into Chile for help. I asked Roberto to come
with me. He was one of the strongest of us. "All right," he said,
"we've done so much together-let's die together."
We left Dec. 12 and started to climb
slowly toward the west, carrying strips of flesh to eat. At the summit, I
expected to see the green valleys of Chile below; all I saw were snow-covered
peaks in every direction. We were dead. But Roberto said, "Yes, but let's
die going west." For days we inched up rock faces, sometimes stumbling
down, hip-deep in snow. We found shelter on mountain ledges. It was
excruciating; temperatures were easily 30 below. Eventually, we got low enough
to see trees. We came to a narrow river, saw the rusty lid of a can, then piles
of cow dung. Signs of life! When we camped our spirits were high. On the
morning of Dec. 21, we saw three men across the river, sitting by a fire. I
screamed to them; one man threw over a paper and pencil, tied to a rock. I
wrote, saying who we were, and threw it back. Later that day a shepherd
appeared on a mule. He gave us bread and cheese, brought us to his shack, fed
us stew and laughed as we kept refilling our plates. We fell onto cots and
slept.
The next day the alpine rescuers
arrived. They couldn't believe we had crossed the Andes over 60 or 70 miles of
the most extreme terrain in the world. Within hours I guided the first of two
helicopters to the crash site where my 14 joyous friends were saved. At the
hospital in Santiago I embraced my father and sister Graciela, all of us in
tears. When I told them about Mother and Susy, I felt my father's shoulders
sag. He asked how we survived, what did we eat, and I told him the truth. He
said, "You did what you had to do."
I spent months at loose ends,
clubbing, dating. I was recognized everywhere, and attracted beautiful women I
couldn't have before. An auto racing fanatic, I enrolled at England's top
driving school and became a professional, but stopped when I married my wife,
Veronique, a TV anchor, in 1979. We have two grown daughters.
Today we produce and host five TV
shows-on travel, car racing, current events and nature. I have a mission. I
know death. I saw it in the mountains. My duty now is to urge people to live
every moment. Don't waste a breath.