Annette Herfkens' Eight-Day Jungle Survival

In 1992, Dutch investment banker Annette Herfkens boarded Vietnam Airlines Flight 474 with her fiancé, and the plane crashed into a remote mountainside in the Vietnamese jungle, killing him and all 28 other passengers and crew. She survived the impact with 12 fractures in her hip, 2 in her leg, a broken jaw, and a collapsed lung, and lay stranded among the wreckage, unable to walk.

For eight days she endured pain, hunger, and tropical heat, drinking only rainwater that she collected in pieces of debris to stay alive. On the eighth day, a local officer finally came across the crash site, raised the alarm, and rescuers carried her out as the sole survivor of the disaster.

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