My 35-year wait to meet the resurrection man

Yesterday we described how Irish Examiner rugby analyst Donal Lenihan travelled to South America for the meeting of a lifetime with Nando Parrado, a defiant survivor of the Uruguayan rugby team which crashed in the Andes 35 years ago this week.

Today, in the second part of our compelling series, Parrado details his experience to Lenihan, the inspiration that rugby has provided, his family, and his philosophy on life.

Breakfast at the Emperiador:

I MADE contact by phone with Nando after months of research into his story. In an earlier email, I had recounted how his former teacher had arranged for my school to pray for the survival of the team lost in the Andes.

Thankfully, as a former second row forward, Nando had heard of me and we agreed to meet when I travelled to Argentina for Ireland’s tour in May.

Breakfast lasted for 90 minutes but I failed to eat one morsel. The experience was even greater than I had anticipated. Rarely can a man be so at ease with himself despite the horrors that had been visited upon him at such a tender age.

Nando has unbridled passion for the game of rugby. Interviewing him four days after Ireland’s opening test defeat to Argentina in Santa Fe, he was all questions about the match, having watched it on television at home. Given that Uruguay is not exactly a hotbed of rugby, I was impressed with how up to date he was on the global state of the game.

Only weeks earlier, Portugal had deprived the Uruguayan national team of a place in the World Cup when they beat them by an aggregate of one point over two legs to secure the last qualification spot. This was still a source of some disappointment to Nando, who went on to win three caps for Uruguay four years after his death-defying Andes experience.

Ironically the most recent international that he saw live was in the Stade de France, when a late try by French number 8 Elvis Vermeulin cost Ireland the Six Nations title.

“I was recently at the France v Scotland game in the Six Nations. It was a very good game. Do you know how I got a ticket? I was travelling with my wife launching my book in Paris and I saw on the newspaper that this game was on. ‘Oh my God’, I said ‘I would love to be at that game.’

“I got on to Ticketmaster and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get one ticket. So I called the concierge of the hotel and there was no way he can get me a ticket. I called my publishing company in France and I spoke with the editor and asked if he knew anybody in the French Rugby Federation.

“He called me back 15 minutes later and said ‘They are waiting for you.’ They said ‘a living God of the spirit of rugby is here.’ They took me in to the official box and I sat next the presidents of the Scottish and French unions. I didn’t have a ticket and they took me in.”

His love of a game — that is the poor relation of sport in his country and was the seed that launched an unforgettable period in his life — is infectious.

I wondered aloud: “Did you not blame rugby for putting you on that mountain in the first place?”

Nando answered: “I praise rugby for helping us survive. The plane accident was due to pilot error, it was nothing to do with rugby. We were always looking forward to that trip at the end of the year. It was to be my second visit. Rugby was central to our survival on the mountain. Over the years it allowed us to form a personality, character and a friendship that goes beyond the game. I don’t think it happens with soccer or tennis or baseball.”

In truth, fate conspired against the tour party from the off. The original plan was to fly direct from Montevideo to the Chilean capital Santiago, a journey of three and a half hours, but bad weather forced an overnight stop in the Argentine city of Mendoza.

While Nando’s mother, Eugenia Parrado, took the opportunity to do some shopping, buying a pair of red baby shoes for her other daughter, Graciela’s newly-born son, Nando and the lads enjoyed a night on the town. Despite serious weather concerns, the plane took off the following morning.

Isn’t it remarkable, given the passage of time and their ordeal in 1972, that all 16 survivors are still hail and hearty today? “Yes, all 16 are still alive. It must be strange looking from the outside but 15 of the 16 survivors, we live in the same city, one lives here in Buenos Aires. Eight or nine live in the same neighbourhood and our sons go to the same school we went to.

“Uruguay is a small country; you tend to stay in the same neighbourhood. I knew most of these guys since I was seven or eight years old. We went to school together, we played rugby together, we crashed together and now we live as neighbours.”

How frequently do ye meet?

“A few of them, Gustavo, Roberto, Coches, I see them weekly, they are my friends. We meet on December 22, the anniversary of our rescue, the 16 survivors, wives, sons or daughters, grandsons or granddaughters. We started with the 16 survivors plus two girlfriends in the first year, and now there is 86 or 87.”

So you have all grown together?

“I guess so”.

And your father Seler, your inspiration on the mountain?

“Yes he is alive, he is 90 years of age.”

When you came home after the crash, your father said not to let that experience be the biggest thing to happen in your life. It must have been very difficult to achieve that?

“I’ve never looked back, I have to look forward. We cannot nullify what happened, so for 25 years I never spoke a word about the Andes. I had started working, playing sports, having a family, walking my dogs.

“Too many people keep living in the past; dwelling on the past, why did this happen to me? What a horrible life. I’ve had a fantastic life; I want a life so I never spoke about the Andes for 25 years.

“I became a businessman and started working in television, and I belonged to an organisation called YPO (Young Persons Organisation). It is worldwide; you have to be a president of your company before you can join. It is a business network all over the world.”

Are there people in Ireland in that?

“Yes, it is very low-key but you have the most powerful people, it is a network of business relationships, we are like brothers. It’s a fantastic organisation. You have to leave when you’re 50, so I am gone now. It was a family organisation. Working in business is not only about one person; you work for your family.”

Throughout his ordeal in the Andes, Nando’s drive to survive was fuelled by the thought of his father at home mourning the loss of his wife and two of his children. He thought that if he could return it would provide a fresh reason for his father to rebuild his life. He recalled a story told to him repeatedly by his father, one of Uruguay’s top rowers, about a race he won against a strong Argentine competitor.

With a few hundred metres to go in a race, he was shattered. About to throw in the towel, he noticed the face of his opponent who was in similar distress. “Do not quit,” he thought, “suffer a little longer.” He won his race by inches.

Nando was five years old when he first heard that story and his father’s words reverberated in his brain. When his sister Suzy died on the mountainside (his mother had already been killed in the crash) it was all he could think of. He made a vow to his father: “I will not die here, I will come home”.

That moment when you saw your father in the hospital for the first time after the rescue; that must stay with you forever?

“That was a very special moment. You must remember that was 35 years ago. There were no cell phones, communications were poor, there was no internet. Now the world is a small place. You can communicate instantly. However I was in the middle of a valley being rescued by a peasant so when he first saw us he had to go to a town for help and come back one day later. It takes him a day. On his return, my name and that of Roberto were sent by radio to military headquarters in Santiago and they sent two names to Uruguay.

“When my father heard on the radio that I was alive, I was still on the mountain. It was night in Uruguay, so the next morning my father went to the airport with friends and took the first plane to Santiago. While he was flying to Santiago, I was on the helicopter going back to rescue the remaining 14 people.

“It was a slow process. It’s not like now when you dial 911 and the rescue helicopters come.”

“We took the other guys out and then the helicopter took us to the hospital in San Fernando. My father had already arrived in Santiago and took a car to drive two and half hours south so he arrived in the hospital only one hour after me. I was in my bedroom relaxing and I heard that my father was coming down the corridor.”

Given your experiences, it is remarkable the amount of flying you now undertake on an annual basis. Do you ever worry getting on a plane?

“I never worry about anything; I don’t have any more stress. I only worry about my family; I worry about things happening to my daughters, illnesses. I should have been dead 35 years ago. There is no way I should be here speaking with you. I shouldn’t be here.

“It was very strange to go through these two and a half months knowing that you are dead, that there is no way out.

“I see that on the minds of people. They think that we went through that entire ordeal knowing that we would survive. That was not the case. I didn’t know that I was going to survive until the last second of that 72nd day. That pressure is huge.”

You had three or four near death experiences with the crash, the avalanche, when you got the bang on the head and flying back to the crash site on the helicopter. What goes through your mind in those moments?

“It just happens. It’s very philosophical to believe that you think about something. It’s simpler than you might think. You die and you don’t notice.”

When you came home, you noticed that life just goes on?

“You die and nothing happens. That’s a really enlightening experience. I was resurrected. When I came home, my clothes were not there. There were pictures of my mother, my sister and myself in black and white on the fireplace. We were dead and came back and I see what happens after you die. People will still be here. You think you are the centre of the universe but you die and outside the effect on your family, nothing happens. Ireland will still play Argentina next Saturday.”

Have you had any repercussions from your serious head injury?

“No, only last year a very well-known doctor here in Argentina, he wrote on a presentation to a medical conference in Switzerland about how nature helped me heal my complete trauma and coma for injury in the same way that medicine is doing it now.

“Thirty five years ago nature did what high-tech medicine is doing now. If you have a very bad concussion or fracture in your head, they apply a lot of ice in order to drop the temperature. When you are beyond help and on the brink of dying they cut your skull off and they put a freezing helmet on your skull.

“Therefore it was the cold that saved me. My head was in the snow. The doctor took scans of my head and my fractures and he presented that. It was a miracle that I survived that. He explained that nature did what he would have done. I was in the right place. In a warmer climate, I would have died”.

And when he took the scans, what did it reveal?

“It was broken badly, the shape is a little distorted but everything is okay.”

In the film Castaway, when Tom Hanks returned home, he appreciates the irony of the candle lighter and wondered at how valuable that would have been for his attempts to light a fire on a remote island. Are there everyday things that you look at and wonder, if I only had that on the mountain?

“There are a lot of things. I try not to think constantly about it, but when I go to a supermarket and I look at the shelves and I think how much better we would have survived with only a little bit of the food on that shelf.”

You describe in your book how you nursed a solitary chocolate peanut for a day?

“Sometimes I think about that. I think of how grateful I am to sleep on a bed, to have breakfast. When you lose everything and then have it back, you know how to appreciate things. I lost my life, my family, my friends.”

Was your sister Suzy’s death the worst time for you?

“That was one of the most difficult times. It is such a rollercoaster of bad things. There was just nothing good happening. I had to bury my mother, my sister, my friends. Then the radio tells you that you are abandoned. Then the avalanche comes, you face a climb of 18,000ft and at the peak you see that there is no hope and you walk for miles. It’s just several degrees of badness.”

When it emerged after the rescue that your only means of survival was to eat the flesh of your dead colleagues, several difficult questions were asked. How difficult was it in the first place when reality dawned on the survivors that that was your only hope of sustaining life?

“It was just another thing, like fighting with the cold or the thirst. When you are at that altitude you dehydrate five times faster than at sea level. You have a thirst like being in the middle of the Sahara Desert. You had the cold, thirst, it was unbearable and you had no more options. At 14,000 feet there is no life, nothing.

“We were so advanced at that stage (12-13 days after the crash) and we had heard on the radio that we’d been abandoned, so your mind goes on a different level, on a completely different wavelength. It is impossible to recreate those thoughts because you don’t have the needs. You don’t have the pressure, the fear.

“Remember the youngest player was only 17, the average age was 18/19 and we came to a decision ‘if I die, use me’ so at least one of us can get out of here.

“Society now does the same thing. How many people now donate their organs for a son or a daughter, or a friend or donate blood? That is how I rationalise it. You do anything to sustain life.”

When you came home how did the families of those who had died react?

“They supported us 100% because we were a very close group and community and they understood. What would have changed if instead of the 16 that came back, there were four others, it would have been the same thing so they understood that.

“Within two weeks of coming home they sent letters to the newspapers and television stations saying that we are so lucky that there were 45 people on board so that we could have 16 sons come back.”

Some tabloid papers even tried to suggest that the avalanche never happened?

“Yes there were yellow journalists who were trying to be sensationalist, but it’s impossible to even think about that.”

Having done everything that you and Roberto (Canessa, who climbed out of the valley with Parrado) did to be rescued, risking your life by going back to the crash site on the helicopter to save your team-mates must have been frightening?

“It was horrible. It was horrific. I didn’t have time to react. The rescue services said you must come with us on the helicopter. I was already saved. I was there and they grabbed me and said come on let’s go.

“I didn’t have time to make a decision or anything like that. They just sat me on the helicopter and they strapped me on. They put on a helmet and a microphone and two minutes later I was flying over the mountains. That helicopter was shaking with turbulence and I thought I am going to get killed on this chopper.”

While waiting for fog to lift, the two helicopter pilots unfurled a detailed map in front of Nando and Roberto and asked them to point out where precisely the fuselage was situated. Carefully retracing their steps, Nando located the spot. The pilots looked at each other in disbelief. “That’s Argentina” one said, “the High Andes, over 70 miles from here. You couldn’t have crossed the Andes on foot. It is impossible”.

Clearly doubting the assertions of the two emaciated victims, the pilots would need one of them to fly with them.

“They said one of you has to go and Roberto was on the ground being taken away, he was in very bad shape and when all the eyes looked at me you know you are the chosen one. You have to go. I had no choice, everything happened in a matter of seconds.”

En route, the helicopter struggled to cope with the altitude, and when faced with the mountain that

Nando and Roberto had scaled (Nando had christened it Mount Seler, after his father) the pilot exclaimed: “Mother of God, you didn’t come down this!”

The aircraft, struggling in the thin air, shook violently as it was pushed to its limits.

Nando recalled in the book: “I had seen this kind of chaos before, in the moments just before the plane slammed into the ridge, and seeing it again, I felt a panic rising in my throat like vomit.”

Eventually by opting to fly around the mountain, the fuselage was located and the remaining 14 were saved. Nando was sure however that the helicopter was going to crash and that all his efforts would be in vain.

It must have been ironic, all the work and effort that it took both you and Roberto over the 10 days to reach that point and within 20 minutes on the chopper, you were at the crash site?

“That trek was inhuman. I have been with great climbers in the United States Climbers Club in Boulder, Colorado. They invited me for a dinner. I was in Aspen with my family skiing and they knew I was there. Eight of the biggest modern day climbers invited me for dinner. I learned a lot from them that night. They said to me ‘what you have done is what we as climbers’ dream and we would never be able to do it.

“It’s not possible what you have done. You didn’t have gloves, you didn’t have crampons, you didn’t have rope, you didn’t have pitons or ice axes, and you didn’t have goggles.

“You didn’t have anything and you crossed 70 miles across the whole range of the Andes Mountains on foot over 10 days climbing 20,000ft at your weakest.’

“They say that when they attempt a climb, they train for weeks, they eat very well. You waste 13,000 calories a day.”

You and Roberto started your climb after you were exhausted and completely out of shape.

“I lost 45kgs (about 7 stone). You consume your muscles and your fat and then you die. I would have died two days later. Roberto was wasted; he started consuming his vocal chords.

“You are tired after a rugby match but this is like playing 100 rugby matches one after another. When we couldn’t move we walked for 10 more hours. I don’t understand how we kept going.

“People are different, different personalities, different characters and I have asked myself a lot of times how did I do what I did there? Roberto was also very stubborn which was good. We made a fantastic team.

“I look back now. I was not a great student, not a bad one; some Bs some Cs. I loved sport but I was not the leader of the class, two or three guys were always ahead of me. But I was a good athlete, I loved sports, I played tennis, soccer and other sports but I was a better rugby player. I loved rugby more than any other sport.”

Nando has been interviewed on a number of occasions, particularly since publishing his book, and I am sure he has been asked a lot of difficult questions. Yet for the first time I detected a sign of emotion when I asked what happened to the pair of red shoes his mother had bought for his nephew.

When he left the fuselage with Roberto to attempt a final rescue, his good friend Carlitos Paez, a person whose good humour had been invaluable throughout the ordeal, stepped forward. He was shattered.

Nando gave him one of the red shoes, looked at the graves of his mother and sister and promised his friend that they would be a pair again.

When Carlitos was finally rescued, he stumbled to Nando and threw his arms around him. “You made it.” He reached into his pocket and took out the little red shoe. They were a pair once again.

“Unluckily, I do not know where they are. When I was rescued they took me by helicopter to the hospital and they cut my clothes off. I hadn’t even changed my clothes in two and a half months. They were dirty, smelly and they just cut them off and threw them away.

“I regret that I did not keep those things. I was on another planet. I clearly remember one moment. I took a shower. They cleaned me and gave me a bath. They checked me out, gave me pyjamas, put me on a bed and I lay there. It was the first time that I relaxed my muscles and my teeth in 72 days. They were always clenched and I was fighting. The cold, the thirst, the pressure, the avalanche, the climb, the trek. You are fighting and I said ‘Jesus you are relaxed’ and I left myself go. I stopped clenching my teeth and I remember that moment especially. I can’t believe I am relaxing. For the first time in two and a half months, I am relaxed.”

I heard that you brought your two daughters back to the crash site last year?

“Yes, when they read the book, they wanted to go.”

Two years after the crash, a route, passable only in the summer months, was discovered and Nando and his father went back.

“It’s not easy. It’s a three and a half day expedition from the Argentine side. You travel by four-wheel drive and two days on horseback. It is beautiful because the scenery, you are so isolated.”

A grave site was built by members of the Chilean Air Force rescue team and the majority of the victims are buried there. It comprises a pile of stones and a small steel cross.

Silas Parrado brought his daughter Suzy’s favourite teddy bear that she always slept with back to the grave. He just glanced at the fuselage and imagined. All he said was “Nando, I understand.”

Nando felt no more fear, pain or suffering. The dead were at peace. They never thought for a moment to move the bodies. Neither could imagine a more majestic shrine.

“I have been back 11 times. My father has been there on 17 occasions. People go to the cemetery to put flowers on the graves of their dear ones, for us our cemetery is just further away.”

Then in a moment that brought tears to my eyes, Nando confessed “my father has requested that when he dies he wishes to be cremated and that his ashes be buried with his wife and daughter on the mountain.”

I found it entirely fitting that Nando is set to undertake at least one last visit to the site of his unbelievable ordeal to deliver the person to whom he dedicates his survival.

Despite his horrific experience, the overriding feeling from meeting Nando was a man at peace with the world. He was dead and came back to life. He lives for his family and friends and treats each day as a bonus. I found him inspiring. He has much to teach us. We all have much to learn.