WHY? A Novel Inspired by a true story. On Christmas Eve, 1971, Flight 153 departed from Houston, Texas, carrying 140 people bound for Rio de Janeiro. Flight 153 never reached its destination. It seemed to vanish into thin air. The plane caught up in a large thunderstorm, is forced to veer hundreds of miles off course and crashes in the jungle approximately ten miles west of the Xingu River. The Xingu River is nine hundred mile long, infested with alligators, snakes, and blood sucking insects, man-eating fish and hostile Indians An Anthropologist, a female executive headhunter, a used car salesman, an embezzling lawyer, a young catholic nun, a Hispanic construction worker, a coffee bean salesman, a pilot, two elderly women and a US Marine just returning from the war in Vietnam, survived the crash. Their survival equipment consist of a rescue raft, a couple of machetes, a flair gun and simple first aid kit. Only the Marine, Billy Sunday, has experienced the jungle before. Billy who is suffering from survivor's guilt and flashback of the Vietnam War, would struggle to lead the group of misfit survivors out of the jungle alive.