FOR MORE THAN TWO DAYS I'd languished in a coma, and I was waking to a nightmare. On Friday the 13th of October, 1972, our plane had smashed into a ridge somewhere in the Argentinian Andes and fallen onto a barren glacier. The twin-engine Fairchild turboprop had been chartered by my rugby team, the Old Christians of Montevideo, Uruguay, to take us to an exhibition match in Santiago, Chile. There were 45 of us on board, including the crew, the team's supporters, and my fellow Old Christians, most of whom I'd played rugby with since we were boys at Catholic school. Now only 28 remained. My two best friends, Guido Magri and Francisco "Panchito" Abal, were dead. Worse, my mother, Eugenia, and my 19-year-old sister, Susy, had been traveling with us; now, as I lay parched and injured, I learned that my mother had not survived and that Susy was near death.

When I look back, I cannot say why the losses did not destroy me. Grief and panic exploded in my heart with such violence that I feared I would go mad. But then a thought formed, in a voice so lucid and detached it could have been someone whispering in my ear. The voice said, Do not cry. Tears waste salt. You will need the salt to survive.

I was astounded at the calmness of this thought and the cold-bloodedness of the voice that spoke it. Not cry for my mother? I am stranded in the Andes, freezing; my sister may be dying; my skull is in pieces! I should not cry?

Do not cry.

In those first days, I rarely left my sister's side, rubbing her frozen feet, talking to her, giving her sips of snow melted in my hands. I was never sure if she was aware of my presence.

"Don't worry," I would tell her, "they will find us. They will bring us home."

How badly I needed my father's strength, his wisdom. Seler Parrado was a deeply practical man who had sacrificed much to build a chain of hardware stores out of nothing, to give his family the life of security and leisure I so casually took for granted. I knew he would not allow himself the luxury of false hope. To survive a crash in the Andes? In winter? Impossible. I saw him clearly now, tossing in his bed back in Montevideo, staggered by his unimaginable loss, and my heart broke for him.

"I am alive," I whispered to him. "I am alive."

Late in the afternoon of the eighth day, I was lying with my arms around Susy when suddenly I felt her change. The worried look faded from her face. The tension eased from her body. Then her breathing stopped, and she was still.

"Susy?" I cried. "Oh, God, Susy, please, no!"

I scrambled to my knees and began to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I wasn't even sure how to do this, but I was desperate, and I worked at it until I fell exhausted to the floor. Others tried, too, but it was no use—she was gone. I held her all night, and in the morning I buried her, beside my mother, in the snow.

Never had I felt so terribly alone. I was 22 years old. My mother was dead. My sister was dead. My best friends had been sucked from the plane in flight, or were buried outside. Most of us were untested young men between the ages of 18 and 21, lost in the wilderness, hungry, injured, and freezing. With stinging clarity I felt the brute power of the mountains, saw the complete absence of warmth or mercy or softness in the landscape, and for the first time, I knew with certainty that I would die.

But then I thought of my father again, and as I stared out at those ragged peaks, I felt my love for him tugging at me like a lifeline, drawing me toward those merciless slopes. I will come home, I vowed to him. I promise you, I will not die here!