Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

You defend your humanity with patience and determination, by making your voice heard to those who judge you a lesser being for your timeworn clothes, your callused hands, and your sunburned skin.

We aren’t the best men, but Lord, have pity on us,” Henríquez begins. It’s a simple statement, but it strikes several of the men hard.

It seems silly to Franklin for his fellow miners to think of themselves as national heroes when all they’ve done is gotten themselves trapped in a place where only the desperate and the hard up for cash go to suffer and toil. They are famous now, yes, but that heady sense of fullness that fame gives you, that sense of being at the center of everything, will disappear quicker than they could possibly imagine. Franklin tries to speak this truth to his fellow miners, but he does so halfheartedly, because he knows the only way to learn it is to live it.

You see, Francisco, a warrior isn’t just someone who slays dragons—or Englishmen, like Mel Gibson does in our favorite movie, Braveheart. A warrior can also be a man who takes apart an engine to make soup and then serves it to his brothers, keeping up their spirits with the rising inflections of his voice.

If you can sit here and talk to a person you don’t know very well, and talk about all these things you’ve been through—that’s something. That’s courage. It’s knowing yourself.

Omar realizes that the improbable fact of their survival also carries a hint of the divine. To be alive in this hole, against all odds, speaks to Omar of the existence of a higher power with some sort of plan for these still-living men.

We have to recognize that we’re nothing, the Pastor says. In the surface world, when they returned from the mine and showered and entered their homes, they were princes, kings, spoiled sons, well-fed fathers, Romeos. They believed their private worlds of home and family spun thanks to their labor, and that as workingmen and breadwinners they had every right to expect their world to revolve around their needs. Now the heart of the mountain has collapsed on top of them, and they are trapped by a block of stone, an object whose newness and perfection suggest, to some, a divine judgment.

If you’re working, it’s the best therapy for posttraumatic stress,” Juan says. Studies have shown that the gravity of posttraumatic stress is directly proportional to the length of time one lives with the threat of death, and Juan slowly unwinds the trauma of the sixty-nine days he lived inside a thundering mountain by going to work, fixing machines, then going back home, and then returning to work again.

Chile was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to legalize divorce,

The desert around the mine was covered with flowers, after a rare shower a few days earlier. The Vegas remember the songs they sang that night, including the one that Roberto wrote about “El Pato” Alex and his seventy-year-old father entering the mountain to search for him.

If you make a man a symbol of things that are bigger than any one person can possibly be, you risk stripping that man of his sense of who he really is.

The devil is present in the mine, taking form in all the greed, the misunderstanding, the envy, and the betrayals among the men. He believes that the devil has come from the surface, attaching himself to those letters, the offers of money and fame, to pit them against one another.

artisan miners whose culture shaped the childhood and family life of several of the thirty-three men.

We made a small place where people could go and let go of their pain, where they could pray for the miners, and start to forget that they might be dead,” Carmen says.

importa,” she says. It doesn’t matter.

Go, Minister, give it all you’ve got. We trust you.

All those bastards are alive! Alive! All of them!” ¡Están todos los huevones vivos!