Nate Berkus and Anneli


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From the rooftop, Nate realized that he could not stay there. "I remember thinking, 'I have to climb back into this. If I want to survive and find [Fernando], I have to climb back in.'" So Nate lowered himself off the roof and "got into the water with bodies, with animals, with glass, barbed wire and everything and I had to walk about 150 feet back towards the direction where I thought our hotel was."

At that point, Nate ran into Anneli, a Swedish guest at the same hotel where he and Fernando were staying. Anneli told Nate that another big wave was sure to come, and that they needed to get to higher ground. They ended up staying on this hill with other survivors, stranded, for about a day.

When rescue helicopters finally arrived, Nate was unsure what he needed to do. "I had a minute where I just didn't know what the right thing to do was," he says. "Should I actually leave, or should I continue looking [for Fernando]? I was hurt, we were running out of food, we were running out of water. Some of the water we were drinking we thought was contaminated. I just didn't know at that moment what the right thing to do was. And Phil [Squire, another survivor] said to me, 'It's the right thing to do. Get on the helicopter because you can't do anything for him here.'"

Read more about the people Nate met during this tragedy - who he calls his Band of Brothers.