The Great Cave Rescue

by James Massola

  Ek told his young charges to drink the water that dripped down from the stalactites hanging from the roof. Filtered by the ground above, it tasted fine, but it was a poor substitute for food; it filled their stomachs, but didn’t satisfy them.

  Hours, and then days, ticked by, with no sign of rescue. Was anyone coming to get them?

  23–25 JUNE: OUTSIDE

  Sound the alarm

  During the first hours of the search Songpol Kanthawong’s decision not to join his team mates in the cave would prove critical. He and his team mate Thaweechai Nameng, along with the rest of the world, would end up watching as a massive rescue operation was mounted to save their young team mates.

  It wasn’t until about 6 pm, when the boys inside the cave were scampering towards higher ground, that Kanthawong’s uncle, Nopparat ‘Nop’ Kanthawong, checked his phone for the first time in hours. There were more than a dozen missed calls from concerned parents.

  He started ringing around to the missing members of the team, trying to find out what had happened to them. Eventually his nephew put him on the right track. The team had gone to the cave after practice earlier in the day, young Songpol told his uncle. Nop started to spread the word that they were missing.

  Coach Nop, as he is affectionately known, has worked at the Wild Boars Academy for nearly five years. His own under-19 Boars team had a game at 7 pm that night. After it ended, Nop looked for the missing boys at the Boars’ training ground, which is not much more than a couple of ovals overlooked by a small, tired old grandstand.

  When there was still no sign of them, Nop didn’t hesitate. He went straight to the cave, taking the parents of two of the boys with him. Fortuitously, on the road to the cave, the three of them ran into some Thai soldiers, who accompanied them to the entrance, where forest rangers were already in possession of the bags and bikes the boys had left behind. The parents recognised their sons’ belongings. There was no doubt about it anymore—the boys were in Tham Luang, either lost or trapped.

  Nop called Go Lhong, the president of Wild Boars Academy and the headman of the village in the Tham Luang area. Luckily a village meeting was underway and some senior local government officials came down to the cave as quickly as they could.

  Two local officials, two forest rangers and two soldiers then headed into the cave. They were the first search party to head into the cave to look for the boys, at 9 pm on the Saturday evening. As the world would learn in the days and weeks to come, they were woefully underprepared.

  That first six-person search team emerged from the cave around midnight. Floodwater had prevented them from going any further than the T-junction. According to a member of this search party, the sound of the water surging through the tunnels and caverns of the cave was so loud it was terrifying. They couldn’t know it at the time but the boys and coach Ek were only a few hundred metres away, on the other side of the T-junction.

  Outside, even as the driving rain continued to fall, a second team of rescuers arrived. They too were able to make little progress as they were neither rescue divers, nor equipped for getting through such confined spaces.

  At midnight, Narongsak Osatanakorn, the Governor of Chiang Rai Province, was notified that a group of boys was missing at Tham Luang. By 2 am, as those first fumbling rescue efforts were underway, he was at the cave. At first, Narongsak thought it was ‘just a normal case of missing children’; little did he know just how difficult this rescue would prove to be. A hands-on technocrat, he would become the face of the rescue effort in the days and weeks ahead, briefing the world—even after he was supposed to have commenced his governorship of another province.

  At the cave entrance, Narongsak found some of the parents crying, pleading with rescue workers to get their boys out. But the first responders were forced to admit they couldn’t reach the boys, trapped as they were past the T-junction. A third rescue team was sent in soon afterwards but the water levels were now rising so rapidly that they returned in about 80 minutes—they couldn’t even reach the T-junction, and water was now seeping into chamber 1, the closest to the entrance.

  Five dive rescue teams were then called in from nearby Chiang Rai, and another from Chiang Mai. Narongsak also summoned a team of Thai Navy SEALs, who would enter the cave for the first time early on Monday morning and play a key role in the rescue.

  About 2 am on Sunday morning, less than twelve hours after the boys went missing, a call was made to Vernon Unsworth, a 63-year-old British cave enthusiast who for much of the year lives in nearby Chiang Rai, asking him to come down to the cave and help. About four hours later, he in turn called his friend, Kamol Khunngarmkuamdee, otherwise known as Mr Lak, a former ranger in the Tham Luang–Khun Nam Nang Non Forest Park as well as a security guard at the Mae Sai Prasitsart school, which six of the Wild Boars attend. His boss at the forest park had already informed Lak about the missing boys but as soon as Unsworth called him, he knew they must be in serious trouble.

  For six years Unsworth and Lak had explored the caves and the surrounding park on long weekly hikes together. At first they were accompanied by a colleague, but after three months he dropped out. As Lak tells it, the pair developed a firm friendship on those long, exploratory walks as well as a detailed knowledge of the local topography that would be invaluable in the early days of the search for the Boars. Although neither man has any expertise in cave diving, both are expert cave explorers; in fact, Unsworth has 40 years’ experience under his belt.

  The two men hoped the team would have found dry ground in the Pattaya Beach chamber, about 2 kilometres into the cave. When the boys were eventually found, they couldn’t believe they had reached Nern Nom Sao, 2.25 kilometres from the entrance, which came to be known as chamber 9.

  After the boys went missing, Lak spent every day at the cave helping out wherever he could. ‘I don’t care about anything except their safety, I just keep focusing on the kids. I can’t help search for them [in the cave] but I [do] all I can to support and talk to their parents. I try to make them feel better by encouraging them,’ he recalls.

  Unsworth had been planning his own expedition for that Sunday morning, 24 June; with the cut-off point for the rainy season, 1 July, fast approaching, he had wanted to see what the water levels in the cave network were like.1 Instead, he and Lak teamed up in the early hours of Sunday, 24 June, outside the cave, for a very different type of expedition.

  They had no idea what awaited them.

  On the morning of Sunday, 24 June, while the rescue efforts began to ramp up outside the cave, the parents of the Wild Boars were growing increasingly frantic. Where were their boys? Helpless, they gathered outside the cave, hoping for a scrap of good news as the hours began to stretch before them. Those early days were some of the hardest; with the waters rising and the rain still thundering down, there was little they could do but wait.

  Kiang Kamluang learnt her 16-year-old son Tee was missing somewhere in the cave at about 1 am on Sunday morning: ‘His friend came and told us that Tee was trapped in the cave. He told me not to worry as they tried to help but there was a lot of water, and we had to wait. I couldn’t sleep.

  ‘Tee’s dad was working on the other side [over the border in Myanmar]. In the morning, he came back so Tee’s dad and I rushed to the cave.’

  She sums up her feelings in those early days, when the boys were lost, with one word—‘hopeless’. ‘I cried a lot every day. I couldn’t sleep well—I always woke up after 1 hour.’

  Many of the parents, including Mrs Kamluang, a domestic worker, stopped work while their boys were trapped inside the cave. Wracked by fear and anxiety, they would instead gather at what became known as the base camp of the operation, carefully separated from the hungry international press, who were constantly on high alert for any tidbit of news. The local community rallied to their cause, making donations of 500 to 1000 baht so these families would have some money for daily expenses while they had no income.2 Every little bit helped. The donations were just one manifestat
ion of the many ways the Mae Sai community, and Thais more broadly, pulled together to help as the fate of the boys and their coach hung in the balance.

  Most of the time, Mrs Kamluang—unable to do much else—would simply pray for her son’s safety. Implying that at times she feared the worst, she says now that she ‘just wanted to see him, whatever [his] condition. I did consult a medium who said that my son was safe. I made an offering to build a bamboo structure [a kind of spirit house] if Tee was to return safely. So, I built it with his dad and we placed it in front of the cave.’

  Namhom Boonpiam, the mother of 13-year-old ‘Mark’, was, if anything, in a worse state than Mrs Kamluang. She would wait outside the cave each day for news of her son’s rescue. Sometimes it simply became too much for her: ‘I went to hospital three times because I often fainted. I was weak. I hardly ate and couldn’t sleep at night,’ she remembers.

  In the weeks ahead, the parents and other relatives of the boys would never break their long, lonely vigil outside the cave, waiting and hoping for good news about their sons. As the rain fell, day after day, and as rescue workers tried to find a way into the cave, there was no guarantee the parents would ever see their sons again.

  News of the missing boys was filtering out by word of mouth into the wider Mae Sai community. The first local and international media reports were also emerging, about a team of boys lost in a far-flung cave complex that few people beyond northern Thailand had ever heard of. Outside the Tham Luang cave, the rescue effort was ramping up. But few would have anticipated that, in the days and weeks ahead, the saga of the Thai soccer team would capture the attention of the world.

  While the first groups of local divers, forest park rangers and then Thai Navy SEALs began to assemble on site at Tham Luang to plot the rescue, Unsworth and Lak also arrived. It may not have been apparent at the time, but their contribution in those early days of the rescue effort was crucial, and the two men would remain on site until the rescue’s conclusion, eighteen days later.

  Initially, Unsworth and Lak thought the kids might be lost a relatively short distance into the cave. While forest rangers did not typically venture in too far, the two men had been deep inside, towards the end of the system, many, many times, according to Lak. But it was Unsworth, known to have referred to Tham Luang cave as his ‘second home’, who was able to deduce where the boys might have found safety—assuming they were still alive. The veteran cave explorer was genuinely surprised at how early, and how fiercely, the waters inside the cave had risen on that June day. It was just a case of wrong place, wrong time, he said—and really bad luck.

  In fact, so detailed was Unsworth’s knowledge of the cave network that the Wild Boars were eventually found about 200 metres away from where he thought they could be—‘Probably around about the best place they could have been,’ he later told CNN.3

  On Sunday, 24 June, the first full day of rescue operations, a team of about ten local rescuers equipped for diving were on site, as well as about twenty members of the military. The awful conditions would only worsen over the following days as the water levels inside Tham Luang rose. In fact, such were the conditions inside the cave that the local divers could not even get past the T-junction.

  ‘At around 1.5 or 2 kilometres in we saw water. At that time our instincts told us there’s something not normal and at the T-junction, the water, it’s full. This means thirteen of them were trapped inside of the cave. So after that we walked back to the entrance of the cave and start[ed] planning,’ Lak says.

  Later that Sunday afternoon, at the first meeting led by Narongsak, Lak was one of several people who told the provincial governor that specialist cave divers were needed for this particular mission. Narongsak was business-like from that first meeting onwards: What equipment do we have at the cave? What manpower? What diving gear? What else do we need? The governor agreed to call in more rescuers, and the first team of twenty Thai Navy SEALs, led by Captain Anan Surawan, was due to arrive at the cave in the early hours of Monday, 25 June.

  Monday dawned without any sign of the missing Wild Boars. By 5 or 6 am that morning, the Thai Navy SEALs were attempting their first dives into the cave. Rescue workers continued to arrive on site but, if anything, conditions on the ground were worsening.

  Cherdchoo Poongpanya is the deputy principal of the Mae Sai Prasitsart school, which Tle, Pong, Dom, Note, Night and Mick attend. The school, home to about 2500 students across all age levels, is about five minutes from the centre of Mae Sai, on the left-hand side of the road as you drive north into the town. It is not a wealthy school but it welcomes students from all over the area, both Thai kids and stateless ones from across the border. Its ageing concrete buildings are painted a faded teal green, and a pair of basketball courts, which double as a school assembly area, are cracked and in need of a good scrub. But the school does offer specialist programs in Chinese and English language; the classrooms are neat, air-conditioned and comfortable; and its teachers carry themselves with pride and a sense of purpose.

  Stand in the right spot at the school and you can catch a glimpse of the Doi Nang Non mountain range, home to the Tham Luang cave complex—and to six of the school’s students on that Monday morning—just a few kilometres further down the road.

  Poongpanya had been informed by Mr Lak on Sunday morning, at 5 am, that some of his students were missing in the cave. By 7 am he was at the entrance to inspect the scene; he was shocked by what he saw. Small teams of rescue workers—including the military, forest rangers and local rescuers—were working to find the boys, but it didn’t look promising.

  ‘The conditions were not good,’ he recalls. ‘There was a lot of water and rain everywhere. I was informed by Mr Lak that they had found rope and footprints that showed they [the Boars] had headed to left side of the cave [towards Pattaya Beach and Nern Nom Sao].’

  On the Monday morning, Poongpanya had to tell the school community that some of their classmates were missing. It was a task he had been dreading. Soon after 8 am, as the sun shone down on the students assembled on the school’s basketball courts, he stepped up to the microphone with a heavy heart to share the shocking news.

  ‘Six of your classmates are missing,’ he told the boys and girls of the Mae Sai Prasitsart school, ‘trapped in the Tham Luang cave.’ Poongpanya assured them that a rescue effort was underway, then ended on a hopeful note, that the boys would be found alive and well.

  After the announcement, no one spoke. While some of the students, friends of the trapped boys, were already aware their friends were missing, the news came as a massive shock to most members of the tight-knit school community.

  In the days and weeks ahead, students from the school—some of them close friends of the boys—would begin volunteering a few kilometres down the road at the Pong Pha Sub District Administration Offices, home to the local government, which had become a rallying point for the rescue effort. The school would also organise daily prayer and meditation sessions for the missing team, sessions that were also designed to help the students cope with the fact that their friends were in extreme danger.

  In a documentary, Captain Surawan would later recall that it took the SEALs about an hour to reach chamber 3 on that first mission.4 As they pushed on towards the T-junction, they found one section under more than 2 metres of water; the next day some of the higher sections of the cave were flooded to the ceiling. The noise of the water flooding into the cave from multiple directions was deafening. It was a hostile environment in which to operate and, with the waters continuing to rise, it would only become more dangerous.

  On the 25th, the SEALs were able to set up in chamber 3 and use it as a forward operating base from which they could launch their rescue mission. But their initial efforts only underscored how difficult it would prove to be. The SEALs were not cave divers, and their training had not prepared them for an operation of this complexity and magnitude.

  In those first three days of the rescue mission, Unsworth and Lak were in and
out of the cave regularly, on hand as the SEALs made their initial dives, guiding them to chamber 3 and the dive point that had so far stymied rescuers. The SEALs had some early success—on the Monday they managed to get past the T-junction and find the safety rope that coach Ek had used as he tried to find a way out of the cave system. They also discovered hand- and footprints that confirmed the boys had turned left at the T-junction, towards Pattaya Beach and Nern Nom Sao. But they didn’t have the necessary diving gear to proceed further than about 200 metres past the T-junction. Another choke point lay in their way, Lak recalls, and in some cases they couldn’t even see what lay ahead of them as they attempted time and time again to dive deep in the murky waters of the cave. They needed to work out how they could get further into the cave.

  To make matters worse, the water was still rising inside the cave. ‘They tried to dive further but the water pushed them back, it was like they were diving backwards and the water was rising up more and more,’ Lak says. More SEALs were on their way, but all the manpower in the world was to no avail if the rescuers couldn’t get past the T-junction and through those narrow pinch points to find the boys.‘That’s when Vern made the decision that we needed three cave-diving specialists from the UK.’

  Conditions were even worse on the 26th, with chamber 3 beginning to flood and the SEALs pushed further back. Unsworth was blunt with Narongsak, forcibly making the case for British cave-diving experts to be called out immediately. As he knew, most of the world’s top cave divers were British. He also contacted the Minister of Tourism and Sports in Thailand, Weerasak Kowsurat, to make the case for calling the British divers to Thailand.