## The Seat That Was Meant for Someone Else
The story of how Vesna Vulović came to be on Flight 367 — the name mix-up with another crew member called Vesna — has circulated widely enough to become one of the defining elements of the narrative. It is one of those details that seems almost too perfectly shaped for meaning: the specific randomness of a scheduling error, the tiny administrative confusion that placed one person on a flight instead of another, the thought that the other Vesna might have been in the fuselage section that survived.
The detail is her own account of a period before her amnesia began, reported in interviews given years after the fact. It may be precisely accurate. It may be a reconstruction of events that she was told about afterward, remembered now as her own memory of the pre-crash period. The boundary between genuine memory of events before the amnesia started and reconstructed memory built from what she was told is not one she can locate with precision, nor can external observers.
What is certain is that she was on the flight. Whatever sequence of scheduling decisions, administrative processes, and individual choices produced that outcome, the outcome was real: she was aboard JAT Flight 367 on January 26, 1972, doing the job she had joined JAT to do, looking forward to the Copenhagen stopover she had been pleased to get. She was in the right place, at the right moment, in the right seat — or rather, in whatever position within the aircraft she occupied when the bomb detonated — for the specific combination of factors that made her survival possible.