And then there was the mental game. Every time the pair entered a section of the cave where they could stop, surface and take a breath, would they find thirteen thin, emaciated Boars?
Or when they followed the same tried and true formula: surface, shout, smell. Was this the moment? And if it was, would they be dead or alive?
Failure, once again. The men returned empty-handed on 1 July, but their progress to the T-junction indicated that there might be better diving days ahead. There had to be. The three large pumps brought north by Panom had been operating for about 24 hours now, and while they may not have reduced the water level by much yet, they were playing a part in stabilising the water levels in the cave.
It had been nearly nine days since the Boars had gone missing. They were running out of time.
2–6 JULY: INSIDE
Found
‘How many of you?’
Thirteen.’
‘Thirteen?’
‘Ya, thirteen.’
‘Brilliant.’
‘Ya, ya.’
Volanthen’s voice echoed deep inside the cave, his voice, with its British cadences, stretched a bit thin after hours of diving in the thick, murky waters. It was an exchange that rocked the world. After ten days trapped in Tham Luang cave, the Wild Boars had been found at 9.38 pm local time on Monday, 2 July.1 Narongsak would break the extraordinary news to the world within a couple of hours. Halfway across the world, Brazil was playing Mexico in the round of 16 of the World Cup—a game the young Wild Boars soccer team may well have been watching if they were not trapped in Tham Luang.
Incredibly, Stanton and Volanthen—who had finally reached Nern Nom Sao, or chamber 9 as it would become known, after hours of diving—had had the presence of mind to film it.
The halting conversation continued, with Adul asking if they will be ‘going out today’.
‘No, not today … There’s two of us, you have to dive. We are coming, it’s okay. Many people are coming. Many, many people. We are the first. Many people come.’
‘What day is it?’ one boy asks.
‘Monday,’ comes the reply from Volanthen.
Stanton, off to the side, can be heard echoing some of his responses in the background: ‘You have been here ten days … You are very strong, very strong.’
Huddled on the sand, red T-shirts pulled over their knees, the boys continue to speak in faltering English.
‘We are hungry.’
‘I know, I know, I understand,’ Volanthen responds, offering hope that they will be back tomorrow, and that the Thai Navy SEALs will come. They offer more light to the boys, who have been carefully saving the batteries in their torches for days on end.
The Brits have to ask the boys to move back up the sandy bank to make some room for them. The boys, amazed by their foreign visitors who had appeared out of the blackness after so long, had descended the bank towards their would-be rescuers. And who could blame them? At this point, the vision starts to go awry. Confusion reigns for a moment or two amid a babble of excited voices and hurried translations.
Even as it trails off to the cave walls while the divers grapple with their lights and clamber onto the bank, the sounds of those extraordinary moments echo through Nern Nam Sao—and soon enough, reverberate around the world.
The end comes soon enough. Or the beginning of the end, at least.
‘I am very happy.’
‘We are happy, too,’ the diver replies.
‘Thank you so much,’ one of the boys manages.
‘Okay.’
‘So, where you come from?’ the divers are asked.
‘England, UK.’
‘Ohh!’ comes a chorused response.
The arrival of Stanton and Volanthen raised the Boars’ hopes that their ordeal was about to end the next day. As Adul later put it, ‘I only thought, tomorrow I will get out’2—but they were in for some bad news.
An hour later, the British pair emerged from the cave and shared their extraordinary news. Word spread rapidly—among the rescue workers, the Thai Navy SEALs, the Thai authorities, and then to the families. It was scarcely believable. The boys had been found, and they were alive.
In the hours ahead the news spread like wildfire through Mae Sai, Chiang Rai and all over Thailand. But it didn’t stop there. News wires and press agencies around the world reported the good news: a single sentence on a cable news ticker at first, then BREAKING NEWS, as reports began to filter through.
Foreign correspondents from around the world dropped everything and hopped on the next plane to Thailand. Where was Mae Sai? What was the nearest airport? Just get there. The boys are alive.
The moments leading up to the rescue had been entirely unremarkable and offered no hint as to what was about to happen. Stanton and Volanthen had begun their dive late on Monday, 2 July. They would press on, and go further than they had the day before—ducking their heads, squeezing through cracks and crevices, manoeuvring around stalactites. They were path-finding again, patiently laying guide ropes through the caves, through the same sections they had explored on Sunday and then into the unknown. Following the same formula—surfacing, shouting, smelling.
They passed Pattaya Beach, widely speculated to be the place the Boars might have sought refuge, but there was still no sign of the boys.
As Stanton would later recall in an interview,3 the pair were swimming along with their heads above the surface, talking to each other about the fact that they were about to run out of line. Stanton was sniffing the air, and he smelled the Wild Boars first.
The boys had heard Volanthen and Stanton talking, and had already switched on their torch and started walking down the slope in Nern Nom Sao where they had sought refuge.
‘We actually saw their lights, they weren’t really in view, then they started coming down the slope one by one … I was counting them one at a time until I got to thirteen.’
Volanthen, who was even more reluctant to speak to the press than Stanton—the pair earned their reputation for being prickly customers with the media in the days after the boys were found—recalled the moment in an interview with the BBC: ‘We smelled the children before we actually saw them.’ After the camera was turned off, the divers got out of the water and spent some time with the boys. Neither man was in a rush to leave again; what the Boars needed more than anything else, after ten days of slowly starving to death in the dark of the cave, was human contact, comfort and hope.
Stanton and Volanthen, perhaps in their gruff way, did their best to boost the Wild Boars’ morale. At that point they had no food to share—they hadn’t expected to find the Boars that day—but they shared their torches and offered words of comfort.
Later, after the video was turned off, Volanthen promised the boys they would be back. He and Stanton kept that promise, delivering food after more lengthy dives in the following days. Both men knew, though, that the hard work was just beginning. Sure, the team had been found. But having dived though the treacherous, flooded passageways of Tham Luang cave, the British divers knew better than anyone just how hard it would be to get those boys out.
Nature was against them—the rainy season had started, and the dangerous conditions were unlikely to improve. The hard work was only just beginning. And there was every chance of casualties if they had to take the boys and their coach through the flooded passages and caverns. Quietly, both men wondered if all the Boars would survive.
For the boys, the moment Volanthen and Stanton rose out of the water at Nern Nom Sao may well have been difficult to comprehend. After ten days in the darkness, with no sign that they were about to be rescued and no knowledge of the rescue operation already underway outside, it would have come as a colossal shock.
Humans can survive for days and days without food. The body’s metabolism slows down as it adjusts, and when its glucose stores are depleted it feeds off glycogen and amino acids. Weight loss really only begins to set in after a few days, as fat stores are eaten away and then, when those st
ores are gone, muscles start to waste. But water makes it possible to survive for many days, even weeks, without food while the heart rate slows and weakness, abdominal pains and dizziness eventually lead to organ failure and death.
By the time the British divers reached the Wild Boars, the Boars had each lost several kilograms and were well and truly beginning to feel the effects of not having eaten for more than a week. The water they had access to from their perch in Nern Nom Sao had kept them alive, but it had not provided them with the energy their bodies needed. In their weakened state, when they must have been losing hope of ever being rescued, the contact with the outside world and the prospect of being saved would have seemed incredible.
Adul would later recall that, in the moment the divers arrived, he felt as if ‘my brain wasn’t working very quickly’, and that he had struggled to respond in English, let alone follow coach Ek’s instructions by translating for the rest of the group. In that moment, ‘… it was very magical, I was very surprised, I was very shocked. When [Volanthen] asked me a question it took me a while to respond. He asked me how I was and I said I was fine.’
Of course, the boys were not fine. Some were beginning to fall ill with lung infections from the cold and damp inside the cave. All of them were ravenous.
But now there was hope of escape. Soon the world would know they were alive. They could abandon their attempts to dig their way to freedom. Many people were coming; John Volanthen and Rick Stanton had told them.
The next morning, Tuesday, 3 July, the Thai Navy SEALs posted the British divers’ video to their Facebook page. It rocketed around the world, and just hours later, more than 20 million people had seen it. The Thai cave boys were alive and they would be out soon.
Or would they?
The families of the Wild Boars were jubilant. Day after painful day they had kept vigil outside the cave, praying and hoping for the safe return of their boys. As each day passed, the likelihood of finding them alive seemed to fade a little more—but not one of the families gave up hope. Instead, they watched and waited as the hours slowly ticked by. Some had taken leave from their jobs and were unable to sleep, perhaps blaming themselves for somehow failing to stop the boys from venturing into the cave—as if they could have known what the boys had secretly planned.
That the Boars had been found—and found alive, relatively healthy despite all they had been through—was incredible news. The joy of the families—jumping and shouting as the news began to filter out—was repeated in living rooms, coffee shops, street corners and offices all over Thailand as Governor Narongsak Osatanakorn made the announcement. ‘At the beginning, we had only hearts and manpower,’ Narongsak declared. But now the rescue workers—although exhausted, would have all the equipment they would need.
At Tham Luang, the elated rescue workers worked with a renewed sense of purpose and energy. But that elation was quickly replaced by a single, burning question: how would they get the boys out?
As Adul had said, he and his team mates assumed that, once they had been discovered by the British divers, they would be out the next day. Realisation gradually dawned that it could be quite a while longer before they were out. Time and again, the boys would gee each other up when one was down, urging their mates to fight back tears and feelings of hopelessness and keep going.
They would be rescued. It was just a matter of time.
The three things they had worried about the most, Ek would later recall, were the water, the darkness and their hunger. ‘First, the water kept rising. Second, the darkness meant we couldn’t find shelter. And then hunger was the major obstacle as it could make us fight with each other.’ They had done their best, though, to remain united—a team. And now food was on its way.
But the boys’ optimism meant nothing in the face of the weather and the geology of the Doi Nang Non mountain. Mother Nature had other plans.
It quickly became apparent that extracting the Boars from the cave was going to be much, much harder than anyone had previously anticipated. Although the pumps were now working, reducing the water levels somewhat, the cave was still flooded. The three main options for a rescue—swimming and diving the boys out, winching them out, or waiting out the rains and the flooding—would each require patience and time but also present major obstacles with which the rescue teams were only just starting to grapple.
While all the boys could swim, not all of them were strong swimmers, and none of them had experience in diving, let alone the sort of diving this mission would require. Despite all the searching, as yet not a single chimney or shaft had been found that would lead rescuers down to the boys from above. And waiting out the monsoon rains, an ever-present threat in summer, could leave the boys trapped in the cave for four or five months. Thousands of meals would have to be brought in, and there were no toilets, little light and likely not even a comfortable sleeping mat for each of them. And that’s before you even begin to consider the clear danger posed by the diminishing oxygen supply, and whether the water could be held back indefinitely. No one knew the maximum level water could reach at Nern Nom Sao.
These were just some of the questions challenging the rescue team as six members of the Thai Navy SEALs, along with a Thai Army doctor, suited up on Tuesday, 3 July, before heading back into the cave. They would bring Ek and the boys basic medicines and food in the form of energy gels—squeezable packets that were easy to transport and that would replace the glycogen and kilojoules they were burning in the cave. After so long without food, the boys’ stomachs had to be eased back into the process of eating ‘normal’ food.
Thai Army doctor Dr Pak Loharnshoon, nicknamed ‘Superman’, is something of a celebrity in Thailand, with more than 300,000 devoted followers on his personal Facebook page. Assigned to stay in the cave with the boys, come what may, with three of the SEALs, he joined the open-ended mission into the cave. The four men knew what they were getting into, even if they didn’t let on to their loved ones.
‘They called me, since I trained with the Navy SEALs. On the first day I went in the water level hadn’t decreased much, I needed to dive to chamber 3. It was difficult,’ Dr Pak recalls. Later, after the mission was concluded, he would reveal that when he told his wife about the assignment he had fudged the details of what lay ahead as he didn’t really know how long it would last. ‘I didn’t think about that but I thought it wouldn’t be so long after we found the kids. I thought it would be four to five days.
‘I told my wife that I’d go and “see” the kids for about one or two days.’
His wife, a medico widely known as ‘Dr First’, said she realised after two days that, when her husband hadn’t called and she couldn’t reach him on the phone, he would probably be gone until the rescue was completed. ‘I was not angry. I know him well and I understand that he’s [the] kind of guy who wants to do his best. He doesn’t think about himself and will go to any length[s] to help other people.
‘I just prayed. I couldn’t do anything. Staying in front of the cave wouldn’t help and I also [had] to take care of our son.’
Their son Power, she said, watched the drama unfolding on television and, though he is young, he understood that his Dad had gone to help some people.
The team of seven Thais successfully made their way into the cave, following the guide rope path completed by Volanthen and Stanton on the previous day. But while the British pair had taken five hours to get to Nern Nom Sao and back on the previous day, the Thai team struggled. In fact it’s estimated they took more than twice as long as Stanton and Volanthen to reach Nern Nom Sao and the boys, with the last 500 metres—which at times required a lengthy dive through narrow passages—proving particularly treacherous. And to add to their difficulties, each of the SEALs was also lugging four air cylinders.
Pak recalls the treacherous conditions and the flooding throughout much of the cave: ‘The stream on the way in was rapid. There were lots of narrow holes [to get through] before we could reach chamber 3. It was [a] different kind of d
iving [to what I had] practised as it wasn’t open water. We couldn’t emerge from the surface like diving in the sea.’
By the time they arrived at Nern Nom Sao they were all exhausted.
Among the rescue organisers, anxiety about the fate of the men was growing. Dr Pak and the SEALs had been gone for ten hours, and it wasn’t clear why the three divers assigned to do the round trip had not returned. Back in chamber 3—now the forward operating base and launching point for divers—communications with the dive team that had advanced all the way to Nern Nam Sao were difficult and unreliable at best. In the end, the trio of divers re-surfaced in chamber 3 more than twenty hours later, and related what had happened.
Exhausted, suffering from cramps and the cold after being submerged for so many hours, the team of seven had decided to stay with the boys on the first night so they could rest and regain their strength. Captain Anan Surawan would later reveal that the SEALs had each used three oxygen cylinders on the way in.4 Even if all seven members had wanted to return, they simply couldn’t—the risk of running out of air was too great. More than a week later, foreign divers would deliver extra air cylinders to Dr Pak and the three SEALs, who had remained with the boys, so they could effectively ‘self-rescue’ as the operation hurtled towards its conclusion.
If the rescue organisers did not already understand the inherent danger in reaching the boys—and rescuing them—the mission undertaken by Dr Pak and the Thai Navy SEALs had made it plain. It also underscored just how skilful Volanthen and Stanton were at cave-diving, given they had managed to get to Nern Nom Sao and back in just five hours.
Planning the rescue was now underway in earnest but it would not be the last time the organisers would assess the safest way to get the Boars out of the cave. It was far from clear what the path forward would be.
The Great Cave Rescue Page 7