SANTIAGO, Chile — They were five companies of conscripts, 485 young men from a Chilean city called Los Angeles, in the shadow of the winter-white Andes.
Their orders were simple: Hike into the snow on an 18-mile training march around the base of the massive Antuco volcano. Their commander, Maj. Patricio Cereceda, may have been unaware of or unconcerned about the storm warning issued by Chile's meteorological service.
Only one of the five companies that set off Wednesday in a steady rain was outfitted with mountain survival gear. Over the next several hours, as the rain turned into curtains of snow, groups of men became lost in what one Chilean army officer called a "white tsunami." At least 26 soldiers would die of exposure.
On Monday, 19 soldiers were still missing and feared dead in the worst peacetime disaster in Chilean military history.
Most of the soldiers were teenagers who were drafted into the army less than two months ago. The tragedy is leading many here to call for the abolition of the draft and the creation of an all-volunteer army.
"Only a miracle will allow us to find any survivors," Gen. Juan Emilio Cheyre, commander in chief of the army, said Monday.
A preliminary investigation has found the tragedy to have been entirely preventable, the result of a series of errors by Cereceda and his superiors in the Los Angeles-based 17th Mountain Regiment. And one company of about 100 soldiers may have saved themselves because they mutinied against their commanding officers at the height of the blizzard.
"I survived only by following the shouts of the people in front of me," one solider told La Tercera newspaper, recalling the desperation of one company that became lost in the snow.
The five companies set off Wednesday morning from a mountain base called Los Barros, heading for another base called La Cortina.
Five hours into the march, a winter storm came rushing in, just as meteorologists in Los Angeles and Santiago had predicted. The temperature dropped rapidly, with wind gusts of up to 50 mph. The windchill factor was 2 degrees.
"At first, everything was fine," another teenager told the newspaper El Mercurio. "Then the snow came and it turned dark. We couldn't see our hands in front of us.... It was cold, very cold, and I could only think about my mother and pray to God to escape."
One company was outfitted with winter gear, but the other four had little more than parkas and wool caps.
