Edible Survivors

Edible Survivors

Last night I went to hear some old guys talking about having eaten their friends.

I had met one of them, but it was the first time I had seen the others in the flesh, and flesh has a big part to play in this story.

The 1972 plane crash in the Andes of a Uruguayan rugby team, carrying 45 team members, families and friends has been told many times. The 1974 account by Piers Paul Read, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors brought it to a very wide audience.

The turbo prop plane crashed into a mountain, instantly changing them from airline passengers into a shattered platoon of dead, dying, injured and traumatised waifs abandoned on a treacherous glacier, alone in the high mountains, bleeding and freezing to death.

16 young men who survived by eating the bodies of their friends. Every one of them knew they were potential survivors and potential fuel, on which their friends could feast. “Take, eat, this is my body”. Soul or not, humans are heat machines.

It is one of the better-known survival stories, and will shortly be even better known to a new generation when the Neflix movie directed by J.A.Bayona is released later this year.

Five of them were onstage last night, on the 50^th anniversary year of their Fall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571

All disasters are natural experiments. A selection of people are subjected to terrible events, and the rest of us later pick over the pieces, looking for heroes and villains, and imagining what we might have done, in armchair comfort and with the benefit of hindsight.

Pablo Vierci. La Sociedad de la Nieve. Planeta, 2008, 2022.

What stories do we want to hear? That in adversity it is “every man for himself”? That in this awful situation whatever happens is truer and more profound than everyday life can ever be? That you “don’t know what is in the teabag till you put it in hot water”? That modern man cannot survive primitive circumstances, and that conventional intelligence counts for very little? That everyone becomes religious in adversity?

One of the survivors, Roberto Canessa, described the crash as a sinister laboratory experiment designed by a mad scientist to test not guinea pigs but a group of young men. He made everything as awful as possible for as long as possible, just to see how much they could take.

Why are people interested in this particular tragedy, when there are so many instances of human suffering? The reason may be the taboo about eating human flesh, the almost supernatural courage and resourcefulness shown by the survivors, and the eternal doubt about what we ourselves would have done in such circumstances.

What was required of survivors in this situation? Everything, one might assume.

Roberto Canessa summed up the essentials:

Team spirit, persistence, sympathy for others, intelligence and, above all, hope.

Their situation was parlous. They were in this dreadful situation because of pilot error. The navigator was at the back of the plane playing cards, the pilots were over-confident, and did not bother to check the one instrument which would could have saved them: their wristwatches. Had they done so they would have realized they were turning North far too soon, and had not allowed for the headwinds against them. They had not yet gone far enough West, were not yet out of the Andes, and mistakenly descended North into the high mountain peaks. After hitting a mountain which tore off the wings, the fuselage careered down a glacier and slammed into snow.

They had many dead, and many injured they had to care for. It was reasonable to believe that planes would come to search for them, and some of those planes could be heard and seen overhead for the next 8 days of search, though they found nothing. Temperatures went down to -30 Centigrade at night, so to keep from freezing to death was essential. Body warmth was their sole source of heat as they huddled together in the remains of the fuselage. Most of them had never seen snow, and had no idea how to survive in high altitudes.

Some days later, when a small group ventured out into the snowy desolation, they all suffered from the bitter cold, one went snow blind, and the lack of implements to help them through the snow showed how helpless they were. Not encouraging. Staying put and waiting for rescue seemed better.

How to survive?

Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do. (Carl Bereiter).

To provide drinking water, Fito Strauch worked out that snow collected in an aluminium shell would catch the sun’s rays and provide a trickle of meltwater, which they shared in very small gulps. He also designed improvised sun glasses to combat snow blindness. They used seat covers as protective clothing and footwear.

Roy Harley improvised an antenna so that a transistor radio they found hidden in a seat could provide them with news, the first being that the search had been abandoned. He also tried to get the batteries and remains of the radio receiver to build a transmitter, a task which understandably proved impossible. The batteries they found were of the wrong voltage to power the available equipment, even if they had been able to assemble it.

The survivors who had found the rear of the fuselage came up with an idea to use insulation foam from the rear of the fuselage, sewed together with copper wire, and waterproof fabric that covered the air conditioning of the plane to fashion a sleeping bag. Nando Parrado and Carlos Paez led the work on this.

Those with medical knowledge did a triage of the wounded, including removing a shaft of metal from a person’s intestines.

In short, when they did not know what to do, they improvised, and innovated. Such knowledge as they had of medicine, mechanics, navigation and engineering was put to good purpose.

When Nando Parrado, Roberto Canessa anid Antonio Vizintin set off on their final rescue mission, they had no technical gear or clothing, no compass, and no climbing experience. Vizintin went back after 3 days, because there was not enough food.

As a matter of painful observation, and guidance from the few who had medical knowledge about the Krebs cycle (the body can convert protein into sugar, and fat into protein, so that on a meat only diet they could survive without malnutrition), it was obvious to the starving survivors that they needed to eat energy rich protein to survive.  In ordinary conditions, warm temperatures at sea level, 2000 calories of food would be sufficient.   Under sedentary conditions in the cold high glacier, 3,600 to 4,300 calories would be needed.  For highly strenuous work in the cold, like climbing up a mountain, 4,200 to 5,000 calories would be required. (British soldiers training in Norway get 5000 calories, and an officer told me “You have to stand over them at breakfast to make sure they eat it”).

The fact that the world had abandoned them within a few days made them better able to feel justified in abandoning the taboo about not eating human flesh. Initially they spoke about this in whispers, then in small group deniable hypotheticals, then finally in open discussion. Not all agreed, though the lack of any rescue plans was an eventual clincher for most. For everyone’s protection, a small group made the first cut in the actual bodies, and gave it to others to further cut and dry the flesh strips in the sun, so that all could eat without knowing whose flesh it was.

So, survivors needed to solve an existential calculus: they could live only on the bodies of the dead, their only source of fuel (and protein). In order to just wait for rescue, and to do the daily tasks on which their immediate survival depended, they needed about 4000 calories each. They had to count the bodies, count the survivors, and count the days. When there were more survivors, before the avalanche which killed 8, each body supplied food for three days. (One survivor was 85 kilos before the crash, and below 38 Kilos when rescued, a typical drop in body mass).  To complicate matters, the escape party needed 5000 calories each per day of travel, extra clothing taken from others, and relief from doing daily tasks as they built up their strength.

Every day of preparation depleted combustibles, but every day they waited reduced the chance of snow falls, and improved conditions for the escape party. One survivor had said that it never snowed in December, but in the early days of that month there was a massive snowstorm, which did not seem a good omen. Canessa argued for a postponement of another week. There were 16 alive and 27 dead when the three-person team set off on 12 December.

At all stages, the group tried to reason their way out of the life and death puzzle box in which they were incarcerated. For example, they selected those they though most likely to survive the journey, (based on physique and, crucially, strength of character) and altered the selection as circumstances changed during preparations.  

If you, dear reader, have better ideas, go back to 1972 to implement them. No mobile phones, no GPS location equipment, no technical clothing to protect against wind and cold, no food, no torches, no nothing. By the way, if you could time-travel to be on that plane your early chance of survival would have been 62%, and that quickly went down to 36%, so you probably wouldn’t have had a chance to pass on your wisdom anyway.

Many audiences, apart from wanting to know what human meat tastes like (like any other meat, perhaps closer to pork) often ask why they did not walk downhill. First, that was very perilous across a glacier, and anywhere the snow fell steeply downwards. Second, the dying pilot incorrectly told them they “had passed Curico” (a town in Chile) and on that basis, looking at his flight charts, they believed that salvation was Westwards, just over the mountain range. Going down had been almost fatal, so going up seemed the best bet, with sunny fields and Chilean women awaiting them on the other side.

What could I have taught them in 1972? Nothing of value. I did not know (did you?) that since they had access to the front landing tyre they might have been able to set it alight on a calm day, thus causing a fire big enough to be seen from the air. It might have worked.

I knew how to assemble the components of a very basic crystal radio receiver, but not how to build a transmitter. I would not have been able to make a compass from scratch, nor known how to establish my latitude by observing the midday sun, or how to accurately describe the plane’s location from the observation of mountain peaks. What do you know about survival in an environment you have never experienced before, and must survive in with what you have in your pockets right now?

What about those stories we may have wanted to hear?

That in adversity it is “every man for himself”?

No, they were more together and more helpful than they had ever been before. Roberto Canessa says with a smile that the moment they knew that they had escaped, survived, and were offered some food, all that changed.

That in this awful situation whatever happens is truer and more profound than everyday life can ever be?

In some ways yes. Carlitos Paez says he had done nothing much with his life, and he was changed for the better thereafter. The survivors were more profound in their reflections, whilst being very much focussed on the vivid present during their daily tasks of survival.

That you “don’t know what is in the teabag till you put it in hot water”?

To some extent, yes. People showed surprising talents, particularly of helpfulness, dedication, and courage. Adversity brought out the best of them. They confess that when they returned to ordinary life they found it hard to adjust at first, that they lost their sense of community spirit and turned to their own advancement plans in their work and lives. Some retreated, gave no interviews, and gave minimal accounts to their families. Many felt a profound sense of shame about having eaten the bodies, and their families were often astounded and aghast at what they learned. A gap cracked open between them. In that neighbourhood they were always meeting the families of those who died. For that reason, among many, they felt most comfortable together, where all knew what they had been through.

Overall, survirors seem to have made a good adjustment, and a success of their lives, though some admit they are still adjusting to ordinary life after 50 years.  One father told his returning son that he had to decide whether the tragedy would define his life, or whether he would make his life himself in the way he had originally intended.

That modern man cannot survive primitive circumstances and conventional intelligence counts for very little?

Not really. A real survival test would have been to ask them to prepare for an expedition to the Andes, with some equipment and knowledge, as would be the case in any culture, and then see how they fared. Killing many, injuring many, putting them into a new world without preparation or warning was a very severe test. A mad experimenter test, not a fair measure. Despite all that, they used their intelligence. In terms of background, they were mostly the children of professionals and business people, so they were likely to be capable. They improvised well, given limited resources. Some were more inventive than others, and had more impact on survival, particularly the two who went out into the frozen wilderness to seek help. Retrospectively we can all give them advice. Prospectively the real test is how we would survive in harsh new circumstances.

That everyone becomes religious in adversity?

Many did. It was relevant that most of them were at a Roman Catholic school, and all were Christians.  Laura, Canessa’s girlfriend (who had always been convinced he was alive) went to see him in hospital “expecting a reunion made in Hollywood” and found a strange emaciated bearded prophet talking continually about God. Canessa himself speaks of his numinous sense of a beneficent god in the rising sun on the snowy wasteland (not the censorious god his religious teachers had inculcated in him) but, being Canessa, admits that vision might have been helped by the bottle of rum they had found in the tail of the plane, and kept reserved for this final trek to salvation.

Many others talked about their closeness to God, and one of his sadness that on a return to the crash location, God was no longer there for him. Parrado says it had nothing to do with gods: “We walked out ourselves, and saved ourselves”. All of them questioned the “Miracle of the Andes” saying the real miracle would have been that they all survived.

What did not happen? As far as we know, they did not attack each other, though they argued, and still do. Even yesterday they politely disagreed with each other: about when they decided they had to strike out on their own, about the role of religion, about whether those with a Rugby background had a particular advantage in team work, whether being Uruguayan was any advantage, and about whether there was any purpose in continuing to talk about the terrible event.

On that point, they were particularly interesting. Not all of them had talked about their experiences, and some had never attended reunions till the 40^th anniversary.

Asked what had made them change, those present all agreed: Disney.

In 1993 Disney made a film about the crash called Alive, which did reasonably well at the box office. Somehow this public attention made survivors talk to their own families in more detail. Sometimes publicity can be beneficial.

As a footnote, as part of the Disney deal, there was funding for a low key, more detailed documentary film, interviewing the survivors. I had already established a UK national referral clinic for post-traumatic stress disorder, and had interviewed men and women tortured in South America, survivors of plane crashes, people held hostage in planes, wounded in plane shootouts, passengers who had been caught in underground train fires, passengers whose pleasure cruiser was cut in half, casting them into the Thames and killing half of them, and sundry other disasters.

I was approached to do the interviewing, and it was the perfect offer: Anglo Uruguayan psychologist interviews survivors of the most famous Uruguayan disaster. Reluctantly, I turned it down, because I was doing trauma work with survivors, and the 13 weeks involved was more than I could justify. A great pity in retrospect, but it made sense at the time.

The Disney film created a renewed interest, and many survivors started giving talks abroad. They were astounded by the interest shown, and by the way the audience drew sustenance from what they heard. One survivor had said that he regarded it absurd and improper to talk about the event in public, and had talked only to his family. He asked his mother what she felt about the fact that he was never in present in the documentaries and reunions, and she said she felt very sorry that he appeared to have turned in his back on the companionship of the Society of the Snow. He now gives talks abroad.

Does the Uruguayan public attitude differ from the reception given abroad? Yes, the survivors felt. At home many felt they already knew the story. No one is a prophet in their own country. Abroad, they understood its general application to the human condition. In Canessa’s phrase: “many people are climbing their own mountain range, and we are lending them the shoes that helped us escape the ambush”.

At home in Uruguay there was a tendency to see the survivors as wealthy kids from a posh neighbourhood. There was an assumption that farm hands would have saved themselves much faster. (Some of the passengers were not from that background, and it didn’t seem to make much difference). Farm workers might have survived better. We will have to wait for the next natural experiment.

What can we say, 50 years after the event? If ever there was a case for lived experience, this is it. The survivors seem in good shape, despite the horrors they endured. They had access to professional helpers, if they required them, but did not go in to therapy, though one had a period of drug misuse, which he overcame.  W H R Rivers, 1917, a pioneer who treated World War 1 soldiers (including  Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon) said of one soldier who had seen his best friend’s skull burst open in front of him, that getting him to talk about it more served no good purpose. Therapy has its limits, and one should confront what has happened with moderation.

Virtually all of the Andes survivors continued their university studies, married their childhood sweethearts, began their careers, and prospered. Several founded or ran large companies. Do we have comparable groups on which we can report? Although all disasters differ, they have substantial features in common. The best detailed long-term follow-up I can find is the 27 year study of the Alexander Kielland oil rig disaster, in which only 89 of 212 men survived, a survival rate of 42%, very comparable to the Andes crash, though the dreadful event was over in a few days.

Mental Health Outcomes 27 Years After a Major Disaster. Are Holen (2016).

https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-08359-9_119

 

The author reports:

“After 27 years, no significant difference in the general symptom severity or in the number of screened cases was found between the survivors and those from the comparison group when using inventories such as Post Traumatic stress scales and the General Health Questionnaire. The same was also found regarding the annual number of weeks in sick leave or disability pension; annually, there was a significant difference between the survivors and the comparison group during the first 12 years, but after that time the annual significant difference disappeared and did not return.”

So, very good news, apparently. They were not taking time off work because of psychological problems. However, in addition to the screening instruments they used a more detailed and probing Structural Clinical Interview and found the following:

“The risks were more than three times higher of survivors having one or more psychiatric diagnoses at that time than for those in the comparison group. The biggest difference was found for anxiety disorders, but depressive disorders also demonstrated significant differences. The most prevalent of the lifetime diagnoses was the depressive disorders, about one third of the survivors, while less than one fifth in the comparison group had faced this kind of mental health problems. Lifetime somatoform disorders (physical symptoms of probable psychological origin) were only found among the survivors. Lifetime substance misuse was significantly more prevalent among the survivors. About a quarter of the survivors had an early-onset PTSD, but the occurrence dwindled over the decades. Anxiety and depression seemed to become more common, rendering support to the suggestion that post-traumatic symptomatology in the long run may serve as a transitional psychopathology. Comorbidity was far more common among the survivors. Those reporting residual PTSD symptoms were more likely to experience reactivated PTSD later in the post-traumatic course. The reported post-traumatic growth after 27 years was highly correlated with the concurrent symptom severity, and not with higher levels of post-traumatic burden of the past. This indicates that self-reported post-traumatic growth may serve as a means of coping rather than an expression of richer and fuller lives.”

This is a gloomier view of the outcome, but given that it is a big sample (n=75) of a rare group, and the follow up is long, and detailed, it gives a rule of thumb as to the usual outcomes. It suggests that a detailed and probing interview finds important differences between survivors and a closely matched control group, even though those diagnoses do not lead to more time off work.  Until we get an even more detailed study (which I doubt will happen soon) this is the highest quality result. However, these oil rig men were skilled manual labourers, not academics, doctors and business people, so it would be predicted that they would have greater vulnerability. Usually, higher ability and socio-economic status is protective.

For example, if we think of stress as due to a sudden demand on mental reserves, then some people have more in the bank than others. People of higher ability will have advantages: they may be able to overcome some immediate problems by solving them, or mitigate their effects to some extent and, crucially, they may know that they can build up their emotional account with their future actions. They can look forward to more rewarding careers, and though they can never rub out bad memories, then can dilute their impact by generating positive new accomplishments which lead to new, good memories. Life can be unfair, and unfairest to those who have fewer resources.

Should psychiatry have the last word? I think not.

With the cold eye of survival, the real test is: Did the survivors propagate their genes?

As they announced last night, the 16 are now 140 people.

Very Uruguayan, very Alive.