Copiapo, Chile (CNN) -- Richard Villaroel holds up a red plastic bottle cap no bigger around than two of his fingers. Three-quarters full of canned tuna or salmon -- that's how little he ate every day in the Chilean mine that caved.
And the mine water he drank tasted like machine oil.
In the dark inferno of Earth's belly, he and 32 other miners resigned themselves to die but battled for life.
"We were waiting for death because our own bodies were eating themselves. I was afraid I would never meet my son," Villaroel says.
Now, at a field hospital in the middle of the Atacama Desert, where all 33 rescued miners were brought for care, Villaroel manages to slip a half smile. In his dark, protective goggles and a crisp white T-shirt, he is finally amid joy, unburdened of 69 days of wretched uncertainty.
Husbands in hospital beds kiss their wives. Fathers clasp their children. They relay their 69-day ordeal with the pragmatism of men who have proved their mettle to the entire world.
Villaroel, 27, had been employed two years as a mechanic at the San Jose gold and copper mine in northern Chile. But he never told his mother he was working a half mile under the Earth's surface.
That early August day, everything began shaking. Everything collapsed.
CNN
