33 Men by Jonathan Franklin Page A

group of miners gathered sticks of dynamite to detonate the charges in a brief yet distinctive explosion that would, it was hoped, be heard by rescue workers. Other men began to scour the new configuration of the mine to find pockets of air.
    Urzúa, a trained topographer, began to sketch a map, a crude attempt to take the dimensions of his new reality. Commandeering a white pickup as his office, Urzúa began his mapmaking in earnest.
    While some men still respected his leadership, there were notable exceptions. Juan Illanes, a fifty-two-year-old subcontractor, emboldened by his experience as a soldier in Patagonia, where he had spent nearly two years in a foxhole, considered himself exempt from Urzúa’s chain of command. Illanes and four other workers hired to maintain and operate vehicles inside the mine were not mine employees. This meant that in the norms of a Chilean mine, Illanes and his group were second-class citizens. A tribe apart.
    Without light, there was no day. Or night. Every routine was destroyed, eliminated or radically altered. As their head lamps began to run out of battery power, the men used them sparingly. They entered the fragile world of sensory deprivation. Add in the emotional overload from a near-death experience and it makes sense that the miners lost all notion of time. The veteran miners understood immediately the technical challenges of drilling and hacking through hundreds of feet of solid rock. For them, the rescue—if it ever came—was a complicated and uncertain operation.
    Psychologists understand that in such circumstances, the individual survival instinct trumps the common good. Adrenaline pumps into the brain and survival chemicals flood the body, enabling remarkable feats of physical strength but also a single-mindedness that blinds the miners to the value of stopping for a moment and making a plan. As those first hours passed, the thirty-three miners began to act like a roaming band of hungry animals, haphazardly shitting and urinating throughout their reduced world. Ignoring calls for group unity, they set up disparate caves in random corners of the tunnel. Few of the men slept that first night.
    DAY 1: FRIDAY, AUGUST 6
    Having huddled through the night on cardboard strips, in an attempt to stay dry and to blunt the sharp rocks, the miners arose wet and anxious. José Henríquez sought to begin the new day with a dose of hope: a collective prayer. The round-faced, cheery fifty-four-year-old worked in the mine as a jumbero , an operator of heavy machinery, which was among the highest-paid jobs in the mine. But that was his day job. Henríquez’s passion was preaching the miraculous powers of Jesus Christ to his congregation in the southern Chilean city of Talca. Gathering the men in the refuge, Henríquez gave a brief prayer—enough, it seemed, to relax the men and allow Lucho Urzúa and Mario Sepúlveda to organize a mission. Claudio Yañez had a Casio wristwatch, allowing the men to reorient their schedule and day. “I didn’t need a watch down there,” said Sepúlveda. “You know what works as a clock? My stomach. I could tell what time it was by what I wanted to eat. Your body does not react the same to the idea of a steak at seven in the morning as it does at seven at night.”
    Many of the miners were convinced that they should remain in the shelter and await a rescue. Sep ú lveda summed up his thoughts on that strategy in a very public, very loud and succinct opinion: that’s suicide. Sep ú lveda wanted, needed and demanded action. His entire character was a whirl of energy and proactive survival. From childhood on, his life had been a fight to survive. His mother had died giving birth to him and he had been abandoned by his father. Young Mario grew up sharing a bed with six other siblings. At times he slept in the barn alongside the livestock, even eating the animals’ food to survive. “I was very,