‘One came back’

The patrician man with a flowing silver mane, moustache and beard quipped from across the round table, “For which paper are you writing, young man?” Noting it was an icon of Philippine journalism who was asking, I muttered with deference the name of the newspaper I was writing for straight out of college.

“Oh, is that a newspaper?!” Nestor Mata blurted out with a chuckle, referring to the oldest Philippine daily, then and now. It was a welcome cloaked in good humor, obviously intended to make me feel at ease among his contemporaries who had been journalists longer than I had been alive.

Mata, who died in 2018, survived what no one else did — the 1957 plane crash that killed President Ramon Magsaysay and everyone else on board.

It was one of the deadliest air crashes in Philippine history until another tragedy in 1963 took the lives of 24 Filipino Boy Scouts and scouting officials whose plane bound for the 11th World Scout Jamboree in Greece crashed into the waters off India. The boys live on in some Quezon City street names (Scout Borromeo, Scout Limbaga, Scout Tuason).

Now, news of the recent Air India crash, where only one survived out of nearly 250 passengers, brought that moment with Mata back to mind. There’s something haunting about the phrase “sole survivor.” It wraps horror, miracle and isolation into one. We tend to forget that the survivor is left to carry the story.

Mata recounted being awoken not by the impact, but by the pain. He came to, he said, lying near the burning wreckage, broken and burned. He remembered shouting: “Mr. President! Mr. President!” Then, “Pabling! Pabling!” — calling out for fellow journalist Pablo Bautista of Liwayway.

No response. No other voice. Just the howling of a dog somewhere in the distance — the only sign of life. Farmers eventually found Mata, and 18 hours later, wrapped in gauze and agony, he had a nurse type a chilling wire dispatch: “President Magsaysay is dead…”

We often wonder what it’s like to survive. Less asked is: what burden comes with it? Mata bore that weight with an unmatched sense of duty. He co-authored One Came Back with Vicente Villafranca and kept writing for decades.

As his contemporaries aged, retired, and faded into silence, Mata soldiered on — from one paper to another, through martial law, People Power, and beyond. The man wrote, at least as far as I’d read, like someone who knew every word might be his last.

True enough, studies show that air travel is far safer than land. But when things go wrong up there, they almost never go halfway. The scale of an air disaster is biblical — fire, altitude, velocity, and the terrifying finality of silence hurtling down from 35,000 feet.

On one presidential flight from Europe, we encountered turbulence so severe that, as I clutched the armrest, Magsaysay’s doomed flight entered my mind. What followed then was the sweetest of touchdowns.

When we fly, we land most of the time, and we forget how dangerous it can be. But sometimes — on a mountain in Cebu or a building in India — history reminds us: not all who fly return.

And yet, every so often, someone does. Burned, broken, bewildered — but alive. And bearing witness. A walking miracle.