WRITE A DESCRIPTIVE ESSAY ON YOUR EXPERIENCE AS THE SOLE SURVIVOR OF A PLANE CRASH.(250-350)
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Former Wall Street trader Annette Herfkens, 55, a Dutch native now living on New York’s Upper East Side, was the sole survivor of a horrifying 1992 plane crash in Vietnam. At the time, she was 31, living in Madrid, and engaged to her boyfriend of 13 years — who died in the accident, along with the 22 other passengers and six crew members. Herfkens’ extraordinary memoir, “Turbulence,” is out Tuesday. She tells The Post’s Jane Ridley her inspiring story of physical and psychological endurance.
My head is light. The plants around me are radiant. I do not feel the pain any longer. I am both out of my body and close to my body. I have left, but I am present.
Darkness is mixed with brightness, the day with the night. I feel as protected as I possibly can be. I have surrendered myself completely. To the trees, the leaves, the crickets, the ants, the centipedes, life. Or is it to death I have surrendered? I am within the moment. A timeless moment of ecstatic freedom. A moment that gives me peace, unity and joy.
That was my near-death experience on my penultimate day in the Vietnamese jungle — eight days after the plane I was on crashed into a remote mountain ridge. Although seriously injured, I was the only survivor. The other 29 passengers and crew, including my 36-year-old fiancé, Willem van der Pas, whom I called Pasje, all perished.
It was Saturday, Nov. 14, 1992, when Pasje and I boarded Vietnamese Airlines Flight VN474 from Ho Chi Minh City for a romantic five-day vacation in Nha Trang, a resort on the South China Sea.
The trip was a surprise for me — visiting from Madrid, where I was temporarily based with Santander Bank — and to provide much-needed respite for Pasje, who had moved to Vietnam six months earlier to set up two banking branches for his employer, ING.
We had been together for 13 years after meeting at Leiden University in our native Netherlands as students. We knew we were destined to get married from the fourth year of college. After school, we lived for a while in Amsterdam; later, because of our work as bankers, we lived together or apart in various financial capitals in South America and Europe.
When I arrived in Vietnam, it had been eight weeks since I’d seen Pasje. We were aching to be together. As usual, he met me at the airport, then took me on a whirlwind tour of the city before an intimate dinner at one of his favorite restaurants. We were blissfully happy. Neither of us could wait for the day when we could tie the knot and hopefully live somewhere like New York City and start a family.
I was excited for the surprise getaway. But I felt so claustrophobic, I shuddered as we boarded the cramped Vietnam Airlines plane. “Can’t we take a car instead?” I asked Pasje.
“The jungle is very dense, and the road is horrible,” he replied. “It would take days. By the time we get there, we would have to leave again.”
I sat down nervously. Fifty excruciating minutes later, we experienced a tremendous drop, and Pasje looked at me with fear. “Of course, a sh - - tty little toy plane drops like this!” I said, reaching for his hand. “It’s just an air pocket — don’t worry.”
But he was right to worry. We dropped again. Someone screamed. It went pitch-black. Seconds later, we made impact.
I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I guess I tumbled around in the cabin like a lonely piece of laundry in a clothes dryer, hitting my head and limbs against the ceiling and lockers. I may have been the only one not wearing a seat belt.
At some point I must have landed and slipped under a seat, legs first, and gotten stuck. This kept me in place for the second, bigger impact, which caused the plane to break up.
I awoke after four, maybe five hours. I saw Pasje across the aisle. He was lying in his seat, which had somehow flipped backward, and had a smile on his lips. A sweet little smile. But he was dead, his ribs crushed into his lungs by his seat belt.
Shock must have set in, because I don’t remember crawling out of the plane. Soon, I was sitting outside of the cabin, on a mountain slope, under the trees in dense undergrowth. Everything hurt and I couldn’t move. My wraparound skirt had been torn off and I could see four inches of bluish bone sticking out through layers of flesh on my shin.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my hips were fractured, I had a collapsed lung, and my jaw was hanging loose. As the days went on, gangrene set into my toes.
There was a weird, unreal reality. Everything was green. The more I listened to the jungle sounds, the louder they became. I could see dead bodies strewn below me and, although I didn’t see anyone, I could hear faint moans from people still inside the plane.