Holding out for a hero
Buenos Aires May 30 2007: 7.00am.
THE alarm clock went at the allotted time. I didn’t need it. I had been waking every hour, as tends to happen when the day offers something special.
For me, today is a journey into the unknown. In a journalistic sense, I have never interviewed anyone in my life. But this man is a hero of mine. He is someone that I have known, but never met, for 35 years. I am anxious, apprehensive, and excited.
This man is Nando Parrado, the Uruguayan, who with his rugby team mates and their friends and supporters, was stranded on the frozen Andes, the second highest mountain range on the planet, for 72 days. Every living moment brought with it an invitation to die. Miraculously, he and 15 others survived. And now I am to meet him for breakfast at the Emperador Hotel in Buenos Aires at 8.30am.
Nothing was to be left to chance. Two Dictaphones had been packed, checked and rechecked. Additional batteries were purchased the night before. The short taxi ride would take 10 minutes said the concierge. I insisted that the car pick me up 35 minutes early for one of the most important and anticipated meetings of my life.
As I paced the lobby I ran through the tips and scraps of advice I had gleaned from experienced journalists on how to conduct an interview, some of them gained from the press corps following Ireland’s trip to Argentina.
But I had to be discreet, my enquiries cloaked under the guise of general curiosity. I didn’t want to answer the question: “Why is Lenihan learning how to do interviews?” I couldn’t alert anyone to the fact that someone of Nando’s standing and reputation was in town. This was my exclusive. I wanted to keep it that way.
One person in the know was the Irish Examiner’s excellent correspondent and columnist, Michael Moynihan. In the weeks before leaving for South America and my secret rendezvous, Michael had been coaching me ... “do plenty of research ... prepare your questions in advance ... structure your interview, but be prepared to change it.”
“It’s an early morning interview,” said Michael. “Nando might be under time constraints. Take your watch off. Do nothing that might remind him that time is slipping by.” I followed that advice and even added a refinement of my own, wearing a shirt with the sleeves right down to the knuckles. Not only no watch, but not even a hint of where a watch might have been. I am going to make every second count.
Off the Avenida 9 de Julio, Buenos Aires, May 30, 2007: 8.00am.
We’re in heavy traffic and my taxi driver is stopping to buy a morning newspaper. He has no English. I have no Spanish. But I ask him if he understands that the Irish Examiner has been persuaded to send me all this way because of the promise of something more than coverage of Ireland’s two-test series against Argentina.
He stares at me. I scowl at him. We’re not talking, but we are communicating. He’s back behind the wheel.
Fifteen minutes later, I am ensconced in the foyer overlooking the breakfast bar, but without an appetite, and waiting for my man.
And there, suddenly, he is. Emerging from a lift in blue jeans, striped blue shirt and woollen fleece top and instantly recognisable from the pictures in his book. Looking well at 57 years of age; six feet two inches tall, and an imposing figure. In that moment, it was easy to understand why, at a time of extreme need, his friends turned to him for leadership and direction. He’s a man who when Googled, brings back 93,000 references.
To my delight and relief, he spotted me and approached, hand outstretched. We went for breakfast and I sat down opposite the man I had waited more than three decades to meet. And a man for whose survival I had once prayed.
October, 1972: Christian Brothers College, Cork.
Nando’s story is one that has fascinated me since the day in October 1972 when my CBC school principal Brother John (Dicey) O’Reilly (not to be confused with Brother Phil (Rabble/Rugby) O’Reilly) summoned our class to pray for the missing victims of a plane that had disappeared on the border between Argentina and Chile with a Uruguayan rugby team on board.
The majority of the players had been pupils of Brother O’Reilly when he taught at the Stella Maris School in Montevideo. The school was founded by the Christian Brothers in 1955 who then introduced rugby to its pupils in an effort to promote teamwork and discipline.
I was in my second month at CBC and was being inducted into the finer arts of the game, having previously only played hurling and Gaelic football with Brian Dillons and at Saint Patrick’s National School.
By December, the astonishing news came through that 16 of the original 45 passengers and crew had survived an incredible ordeal in the mountains for over two months. We again gathered to pray, this time in thanks.
That story of survival was recounted in the book “Alive” by Piers Paul Read in 1974. But most people remember the even more graphic film of the same name from 1993, where the role of Nando Parrado was played by Ethan Hawke and which was narrated by John Malkovich.
October 13, 1972: Glaciar de las Lágrimas (Glacier of Tears) on the border between Chile and Argentina:
Nando (the name is a diminutive of Fernando) Parrado “celebrated” his 22nd birthday on the mountain. Not only did he lose close friends in the crash, he also lost his mother Eugenia and sister Susy. That he survived at all was fate.
Seated by the window next to his best friend, Ponchito Abal, a winger with pace to burn, he had a superb view of the snow-capped mountains. Complaining, as all backs tend to do, Ponchito moaned that he was missing a bird’s eye view of nature at its best. For a bit of peace, Nando agreed to swap seats. Ponchito was killed instantly during impact.
Everybody seated behind Nando lost their lives when the tail section of the plane broke off after clipping the rock face.
Nando received such severe head injuries that he was unconscious for the first three days of their ordeal. That he cheated death a second time was also down to fortune and the alertness of one of the medical students in the group, Diego Storm.
Thinking that Nando was dead, the survivors removed his body from the broken fuselage on the first night along with all the other victims in order to make space for those who were left and to seal the gaping hole with luggage in an attempt to ward off the freezing conditions on the mountainside. Eight were missing from the tail section and five more were dead. Another five died by morning. Twenty six were left, many with broken limbs and other injuries. All were Catholic.
Before the fuselage was sealed Diego Storm sensed a sign of life in Nando and his body was dragged back to the warmest place, in the middle of the plane. For the second time in 12 hours, his life was spared.
For 11 days, those who were left awaited rescue. As Piers Paul Read famously recounted there were meagre supplies, and when these ran out, the group tried to eat leather from luggage and searched for straw from the seats, but found only upholstery foam. Then they decided, collectively, to eat the flesh of their dead friends. It was that, or die.
They intercepted a radio signal which told them that the search had been cancelled. Nando knew that the only hope lay with the survivors themselves. They would have to scale the cordillera and “head west for Chile”.
After two weeks on the mountains, nobody had died since the crash except for Nando’s sister Susy, who succumbed to her injuries on the eighth day. But on the night of October 29, an avalanche consumed the fuselage with such ferocity that eight more people suffocated under the weight of the snow including Diego Storm and the last surviving woman, Liliana Methol, whose husband Javier was eventually be rescued.
Nando was also entombed and couldn’t breathe. Subconsciously he felt this was the end. Mercifully, he was dug out within seconds of his last breath. He had cheated death once more and struggled to make sense of it all. Now they all appreciated that they would never be safe if they stayed where they were.
December 12, 1972: Glaciar de las Lágrimas
After 61 days at the crash site Nando, team mate and winger, Roberto Canissa, and Antonio “Tintin” Vizíntin set out. After three days, Nando reached the top of the mountain ahead of his two colleagues. What he saw stunned him. Stretching as far as his eyes could see were yet more mountain ranges. But he refused to give up. To conserve supplies, Vizintin was sent back to the wreckage. Nando and Canissa trekked on ... and found help with less than 48 hours left to live, instigating the rescue of the 14 other passengers who remained with the remnants of the plane.
Thirty four years later Nando Parrado told his story for the first time in his own words in his fascinating book “Miracle in the Andes.” As I read this riveting account on my holidays, I made a vow. I would travel to meet this remarkable man. And now I was with him.
* THE connection between Christian Brothers College in Cork and the Uruguayan alumni team which crashed in the Andes may seem confusing, but the common link is school principal Brother John (Dicey) O’Reilly who taught in Montevideo after the Stella Maris College was established there in 1955 by Irish priests.
At that time Uruguay had descended from a relatively prosperous Latin American country into an increasingly disaffected society with dangerous urban terror groups, who were to develop into one of the world’s most feared illegal organisations, the Tupamaros.
Catholic parents who became alarmed by the increasingly atheistic and anarchist tendencies among teachers in Uruguayan schools invited the Irish Province of the Christian Brothers to start a school in Montevideo.
They had one proviso... that the new school should not practice corporal punishment.
Five Irish lay brothers founded the Stella Maris College — a school for boys between the ages of nine and 16 — in the middle class suburb of Carrasco.
It was the old boys of that college whose rugby team chartered Flight 571 which crashed into the high Andes. And it was for that missing team that a young Donal Lenihan and his fellow rugby players were invited to pray in 1972.
Nando Parrado was later to say that it was the team spirit inculcated by the Christian Brothers educational techniques that allowed those who survived to work as a team... and saved their lives.
The school motto — Ad Astra (To The Stars) — continued to prosper even during the height of the Tupamaro terror in Uruguay in the ’60s and ’70s.
These days the Stella Maris College is rated among the best in the country and has very strong academic links with Cambridge University in England. It still has a reputation for producing strong and highly-disciplined students.
Alive: The story of the Andes Survivors. Written by Piers Paul Read. Published by J B Lippincott Company, 1974. Subsequently updated in Alive: The Miracle of the Andes in 1993 and Sixteen Men, Seventy-two Days, and Insurmountable Odds — The Classic Adventure of Survival in the Andes in 2005.
Miracle in the Andes: 72 days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home. By Nando Parrado and Vince Rause published by Harper and Orion Books in 2006.
Alive (1993): Directed and produced by husband and wife team, Spielberg collaborator Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy (producer of Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List). The part of Nando Parrado was portrayed by Ethan Hawke and the film was narrated by John Malkovich. It received differing critical acclaim. A companion documentary Alive: 20 Years Later, with commentary by Martin Sheen was also released.
Stella Maris College, Montevideo: www.stellamaris.edu.uy/
The commemorative website: www.viven.com.uy/571/eng/default.asp
National Geographic magazine’s reconstruction of what happened in the Andes (April, 2006): www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/alive/photo_gallery.html
Piers Paul Read: Read, 66, is a London- based writer whose account of the Andes disaster, Alive, is considered a modern classic. He spent 10 months interviewing the survivors, though some were disappointed with the book.
He wrote: “They felt that the faith and friendship which inspired them ... do not emerge from these pages. It was never my intention to underestimate these qualities, but perhaps it would be beyond the skill of any writer to express their own appreciation of what they lived through.”
Other non-fiction works include: The Train Robbers (1978); Quo Vadis? The Subversion of the Catholic Church (1991); Ablaze: The Story of Chernobyl (1993); the Most Powerful Military Order of the Crusades (1999); Alec Guinness. The Authorised Biography (2003)
Nando Parrado: After coming out of the Andes, Fernando Seler “Nando” Parrado gave up his agricultural studies. He took up professional car racing and also took over his father’s hardware business with his older sister and brother-in-law. He has since developed other businesses and become a television personality in Uruguay.
Nando, 57, is a motivational speaker on demand in the business conference circuit and uses his experience in the Andes to help others cope with psychological trauma. He is married with two daughters.
Donal Lenihan: Donal Lenihan is nine years younger than Nando Parrado. He is the rugby analyst of the Irish Examiner. After his education with the Christian Brothers and at University College Cork he went on to play for, and captain, his country; to appear in two World Cups; to lead Munster and to be selected for three Lions tours. He has been manager of both Ireland, and the British and Irish Lions. He was last capped against Wales in 1992.
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