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Accidental Savior
After escaping a plane crash that killed over 120 people, SEOL IK SOO returned to rescue survivors
By DONALD MACINTYRE

Self-preservation is the most powerful of instincts. No greater force unthinkingly moves living beings. To deny it is to fight nature itself. To do so in the cause of preserving another person's life demands a super-human willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice—to accept consciously that an untimely death is possible, probable, even inevitable.

Such was the unspeakable test confronting Seol Ik Soo last week. An Air China Boeing 767 passenger jet had turned the South Korean mountaintop where it smacked down into a wasteland of twisted metal, charred fuselage and shattered trees. Aboard was Seol, a 25-year-old trainee for a tour company helping to bring South Korean tourists home from Beijing. The first indication anything was wrong came just minutes before the plane was due to touch down at Kimhae Airport near the southern port city of Pusan. Sitting in his hospital bed three days after the crash, Seol recalls feeling the aircraft shudder twice, then hearing a crashing sound. The plane seemed to glide up the side of a mountain. The lights died and sparks flashed up and down the cabin. He looked to his right and saw that rows of seats had simply vanished. Passengers were screaming in the darkness. Seol's first thought was: "I'm dead." When he saw a hole with light showing through, he made his way toward it and crawled through. Only then did he realize he had survived.

Seol knew the sparks inside the cabin could trigger an explosion and thought, "I have to run." But the other passengers who had followed him out had collapsed beside the plane. He yelled at them to move, then hoisted a survivor onto his back and carried him down a treacherously muddy slope to a flat clearing. He remembers hauling at least three or four injured people to safety, maybe as many as 10. "I don't know where the energy came from," he said later, "but it felt like I wasn't carrying anything at all."

Seol took other burned and disoriented survivors by the hand and guided them down the slope. Once they were in the clearing, he pulled off his shirt and tore it into tourniquets for the wounded. He used his belt to bind up a man's badly bleeding leg. When he saw a victim with a hole in his skull, he remembered a trick he'd seen in a movie: pulling the foil out of a cigarette package, he wet it with saliva and stuck it to the wound. It wasn't until he sat down and lit a cigarette that he realized his own face was drenched in blood. "I can't believe it," he marvels. "I couldn't have done it in my right mind."

No, he did it because he has the right heart. As an accidental savior, Seol is perhaps the purest kind of hero. He is not motivated, say, by a premeditated desire to achieve greatness (though he has already accomplished that in the eyes of those he rescued). He is just an ordinary guy who did something extraordinary because it was the right thing to do. "I know Seol as cheerful and hardworking, but just a normal young man," says his boss at the Kirin Travel Agency, Kim Yu Seok. "Now I am very surprised. I have a new view of him. He is a remarkable person. We're all very proud."

The people closest to Seol aren't surprised he rose to the occasion. After his father lost his left arm in a motorcycle accident, Seol, who was six at the time, used to say he wanted to become a scientist so he could replace the missing limb, his mother Koo Ho Soon recalls. At university, Seol found a man injured in a motorcycle accident lying alone on the road. He picked him up, hailed a taxi and took him to hospital. He's embarrassed when his mother reminds him of the incident. Says Seol: "My parents always brought me up to believe people and life are very precious."

Seol may need plastic surgery to patch up some nasty cuts to his face. The emotional scars will be harder to heal. Since the crash he has needed pills to sleep. Every time he tries to close his eyes, he feels the terrible shaking of the crash and sees the anguished faces at the site of the wreckage, particularly one hysterical woman who lost her baby. Sitting in his hospital room with his wife of one month, he says he wants nothing more to do with the travel business. His only plan for now: get some rest.

>With reporting by Chisu Ko

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