Miraculously, everyone got out, but it was a final reminder of the power of Mother Nature and just how narrowly they had all escaped disaster.
Back at the Pong Pha Sub District Office, Narongsak Osatanakorn was in full swing. The operation had been a role model for the world—this truly global effort, which in the end had included some 10,000 people, including a hundred divers, had succeeded. They had made ‘Mission Impossible’ possible, he said.
After eighteen days, it was done.
Wednesday, 11 July, dawned like any other in Mae Sai. It was mid-summer, warm, and the threat of rain hung heavy in the air. But it was no ordinary day in this sleepy border town in the far north of Thailand.
Overnight, as the thirteen Wild Boars were re-united in Chiang Rai Hospital and the rescuers gathered to celebrate, praise from both world leaders and ordinary citizens, all over the world, had poured out on social media. Cartoons, photos, videos and memes were shared as people celebrated their delight that the boys had been saved.
Iceland’s prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, was the first world leader to offer her congratulations: ‘Today, hope, compassion, and courage has won. Warmest wishes for a speedy recovery to all of you brave boys from your friends in Iceland.’
Donald Trump got in on the action, too: ‘On behalf of the United States, congratulations to the Thai Navy SEALs and all on the successful rescue of the twelve boys and their coach from the treacherous cave in Thailand. Such a beautiful moment—all freed, great job.’
The Spanish royal family and Bhutan’s prime minister, Tshering Tobgay, joined the rush to fete the boys and their rescuers.
And that Tuesday evening Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called the Australian team on the ground and told them they had ‘inspired the world, you’ve inspired the nation’. He singled out Dr Richard Harris as one of the heroes of Tham Luang cave.
But Harris, in trademark fashion, deflected the praise: ‘The big heroes in this are the children and the Thai Navy SEALs who were looking after them. They were the toughest blokes and kids I’ve ever had the privilege to meet.
‘They were the ones responsible for their own morale and really their own safety and without them being in the state they were in, we couldn’t have done anything. So that’s where all the credit lies, really.’
Turnbull also offered Harris his condolences on behalf of the nation. Tragically, on Tuesday evening, as the doctor had emerged from the cave for the last time, his father had died at home, thousands of kilometres away in Adelaide. Of course, those private moments between Turnbull and the Australian team didn’t last long; soon after, the prime minister posted a video recording of the Skype chat to Twitter.
For the Thai military junta, struggling to unite a divided nation after the most recent military coup, the PR value of the rescue was priceless.
And of course the Thai SEALs chimed in again on their Facebook page:
Appreciate great help from all teams—divers from all over the world, medic teams, several ex-SEALs, supporting teams, Kruba Boonchum and other spiritual teams, great kitchen teams, oxygen refuelling team, water management team, electricity team, mountain climbing team … Mae Sai people, and people from all corners of the world.
Today the united force of humanity is at work. The world will never forget this rescue mission.
The SEALs had summed it up better than any politician could.
But away from the cameras and the attention-seeking politicians, desperate to bask in the reflected glory of the successful rescue mission, the Boars were still in hospital. Later that morning an official from Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health gave another update on the condition of the boys.
It was more good news. The final five Boars, including their coach, were fine; physically and mentally, they were in good shape. The doctors were no longer concerned about the health of the boys who had shown signs of pneumonia on the first day of the rescue; antibiotics would take care of any lingering symptoms.
The first four Boars had now been reunited with their families, and the second group of four—the authorities had still not released their names—would see their parents later that day.
Also on Wednesday, at a press conference held by rescue mission chief Narongsak Osatanakorn and medical officers, Thai authorities released footage of Ek and the twelve boys in their beds in the Chiang Rai Hospital. The video drove home the impact of those eighteen days in the cave on the boys and their families, who had waited and hoped against all the odds that they would see their sons again. While all the boys were becoming stronger, some still looked painfully thin. With green surgical masks covering their mouths and noses, the boys can be seen talking to doctors and nurses, and making short statements that begin with ‘Wai’, the traditional Thai greeting, their hands pressed together as if in prayer. A couple of the boys make the ‘V for victory’ sign, and Bew, joking, raises his fists in victory. Slow-cooked pork with steamed rice, crispy fried pork, steak and KFC are among the foods the boys want to eat, they tell an off-camera questioner while their mothers and fathers, watching through the glass, wave at their sons and cry.
Narongsak said the boys were neither heroes nor villains—the real heroes were the rescuers. ‘They are children being children, it was an accident.’
The Wild Boars, who had been offered free tickets to the World Cup final by the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA), would not be able to fly to Russia. In any case, coach Ek and three of the boys were stateless and had no passport. And they couldn’t even watch the game live because it was broadcast quite late in Thailand and the doctors were determined they should have plenty of rest.
Some of the divers involved in the rescue came to the hospital to meet the boys whom they had saved. Dozens of the world game’s biggest stars had tweeted their congratulations, and now invitations to visit clubs as illustrious as Manchester United and FC Barcelona flooded in. There was even talk of movie deals.
Meanwhile, the medical checks, tests and vaccinations would continue for the boys for a month or so longer. As they were gradually re-introduced to ‘real’ food, they slowly regained their strength. They wouldn’t be allowed to leave the hospital for another week, as the doctors—and the Thai regime—were terrified that something would still go wrong.
On 18 July, a week and a day after coach Ek and the last four boys had been rescued, the Wild Boars appeared before the cameras for the first time since that second, short video of them in hospital had emerged after they had left the cave. It was a carefully controlled event: all the questions had been submitted to the government beforehand and then screened by psychologists.
They would be able to go home in a week. Then on 25 July, eleven of the twelve boys (Adul is a Christian) would be ordained as Buddhist novices—a common practice in Thailand—for eleven days. Coach Ek would resume the life of a monk for three months. It was a way of showing thanks, and of honouring the memory of Sergeant Saman Gunan.
As Ek put it, ‘the only thing we could do [to acknowledge Saman’s sacrifice] was to enter the monkhood. Becoming a monk was to repay [the] kindness and sacrifice from everyone in this operation.’
As they all filed on stage, wearing new, freshly pressed Wild Boar uniforms, the contrast with their physical appearance even a week before was stark. Their cheeks were plumper, their faces wreathed in smiles, and they all sported fresh haircuts. After mugging for the cameras with some footballs, the boys sat down with two child psychologists, and with Dr Pak and the three SEALs who had been in the cave with them, to respond to questions the world wanted answered.
Among the hundreds of people in the audience, many of the boys’ school friends cheered them on as they continued to charm the world. One by one, they introduced themselves again.
‘Hi, my name is Ek.’
‘Hi, my name is Tee.’
‘Hi, my name is Adul.’
And so on.
Slowly, they recounted the moment they went into the cave. How they had survived
by drinking the dripping water, tried to dig their way out of Nern Nom Sao, and how they had grown weaker each day, all the while continuing to urge each other on until the dramatic turning point when the two British divers arrived, and they had conversed with them in clipped English.
Ek and Adul, two of the more confident members of the team, answered most of the questions. Young Mark revealed how scared he had felt when they couldn’t go home—and how worried he was that his mother would scold him. Bew recalled how, whenever one of them felt down and started to feel their situation was hopeless, he had told his brother Boars to keep fighting.
‘I think we felt like we are the same family, because the Navy SEALs have taken care of us as if we were in their family. We ate together, we slept together,’ Ek said.
‘I felt like he is my father, because he called us sons,’ Mark added, referring to Dr Pak.
As the event wrapped up, one by one the boys shared their dreams for the future. Most said they wanted to be professional footballers, or Thai Navy SEALs, or both. A couple of the older boys added they also wanted to go to university and get a good education. All of them wanted to make their parents proud.
EPILOGUE
The seven Brits looked like any other group of middle-aged holiday-makers returning from a warmer climate. Wearing shorts and T-shirts and looking tired, the returning divers spoke to reporters at London’s Heathrow Airport as jets roared overhead.
Rick Stanton, as always, led off. The divers, he said, weren’t heroes. ‘This was completely uncharted, unprecedented territory and nothing like this has been done [before]. So, of course there were doubts. I knew that we had a good team, with good support from the Thai authorities, the caving community and rescue organisations, so we had the best we could to make a plan work.
‘There was a lot of chaos but we were so task oriented that we blanked that out and carried on with the task at hand until we achieved success.
‘Are we heroes? No, we are just using a very unique skill set which we normally use for our own interests and sometimes we give back to the community.’ This was Stanton, who famously disliked talking to the media, to a tee—brusque, modest, brushing aside questions about the details of the boys’ sedation.
Chris Jewell allowed himself a little more emotion as he spoke of the extremely challenging conditions in which they had worked, and of the awful burden of being responsible for saving the life of another human being. ‘We are delighted for the successful outcome. We played a part in an international effort.’
Despite their protestations that they were not heroes, on 24 July they attended a reception at 10 Downing Street hosted by the British prime minister, Theresa May.
Back in Thailand, on the same day, Thai authorities promised that the four stateless Boars—coach Ek, Mark, Adul and Tee—would be given legal assistance to secure Thai citizenship. The process would be finished within six months, they said. Narongsak Osatanakorn had predicted the four stateless Boars would grow up to be great Thai citizens, but now cautioned that everything would have to proceed according to the laws of the land.
Of course, the process was fast-tracked; by 8 August, the four stateless Boars had been granted citizenship of Thailand. The whole episode had highlighted, if only for a moment, the plight of the hundreds of thousands of other stateless people who live in the border regions of Thailand, Myanmar and Laos.
Life began to return to normal for the boys. After their time living as novice monks, they went back to school. The teachers instructed the boys’ friends to treat them as if nothing had changed, and not to ask them about what had happened in the cave. But of course that was never going to happen.
Seventeen-year-old Auttaporn Khamheng, a friend of Dom’s who had volunteered for the rescue effort, was delighted to have his buddy back. ‘I don’t ask anything about that because many people ask him. I don’t want to bother him at all. Also, there are some people that are jealous and gossip about him. I do worry that Dom might get annoyed because so many people ask about the cave. That’s why I don’t ask anything.’
Football was still on hold for the Boars, however. They had more than a month of schoolwork to catch up on, and that took priority.
The cave rescue had shone a light on the tiny little Mae Sai Prasitsart school, too. Ordinarily, the bigger schools in Chiang Rai Province are the first to be offered the chance to take their sports players on overseas football trips. This year, Auttaporn says, Mae Sai Prasitsart was invited to take some of its footballers on an exchange trip to Japan.
In the Mae Sai district, farmers who had seen their crops destroyed when millions of litres of water from the Tham Luang cave flooded their fields were beginning to pick up the pieces again. Thai authorities had offered the farmers financial compensation, which would make a difference but, even so, local men and women like Noy Kerdkaew felt no bitterness about the loss of their crops as long as it helped get the boys out.
‘I can always grow again, but life cannot,’ Kerdkew said in an interview a couple of days after the boys were rescued.1 Like generations before her, she knows the story of the Princess and the cave very well. Whether she completely believes the legend or not, it still has meaning for her and the other locals who live in the shadow of Doi Nang Non. The water that had flowed from the cave onto her farmland, destroying her crops, was the blood of the Princess. And although she had taken Saman Gunan from them, the Princess had let those thirteen boys go.
Finally, Richard ‘Harry’ Harris was heading home. It was Friday, 13 July, and he was sitting in an RAAF C-17 alongside his great mate Craig Challen and Australian police and army divers who had worked to save the Wild Boars in Tham Luang cave. Acclaimed as one of the heroes of the rescue mission, since then the Australian anaesthetist and cave diver had barely had a moment to himself, even to grieve for his father who had died three days before. Two days earlier, while police divers and foreign affairs officials buzzed around outside Mae Sai’s Wang Thong Hotel, off Phahonyothin Road, highfiving and congratulating each other, the Adelaide-based doctor, looking exhausted and lost, had hung back in the face of all the adulation and gratitude of the Thai people and, indeed, the world. Harry’s dive buddy, Craig Challen, hovered calmly nearby, frequently grinning. The pair were being positioned for photos, but Harris was lost in his own thoughts, grieving for his father, and wary of all the attention.
Left slightly, now right, now go.
Cameras snapped again and again as different groups arrayed themselves; first, the entire Australian team, then Harris alone; the police and army divers, then Harris and Challen with the foreign affairs staff.
Snap, snap, snap, smartphones at the ready.
DFAT staff, who moments earlier had been snapping selfies, stepped in to try and stop the handful of journalists from taking photos of Harris and Challen. The anaesthetist could not have failed to notice the huge amount of global interest in him, or his part in the incredible story of the Great Cave Rescue. Social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook were awash with people rushing to praise and thank the self-effacing doctor and his retired vet dive buddy from Perth. Everyone wanted to speak to them, from the Australian prime minister down.
I approached Harry for a quick chat and a couple of questions. But what do you say to a man who has just thrilled the world, but lost his father—Harry, I’m so sorry for your loss. I was wondering, could you spare us five minutes for a chat?
Instead I asked him, ‘Could you just give us an idea of what was going on inside the cave?’
‘I can’t talk about it, I’m sorry.’
‘Please, just one line?’ I added hopelessly.
The corner of his eyes hinted, just for a moment, at what the man must have been going through. ‘I know people want to know about it, but I’ll leave it with these guys,’ Harris said, gesturing to the over-anxious DFAT staff. His reluctance to be interviewed, and his exhaustion, were understandable. Media requests were low on his list of priorities, and would remain so. As a friend of his
put it: ‘They are not your standard talent—not egotistical, money is not a concern, not interested in being famous.’
But on that plane flight home—the first opportunity for Harris to stop and reflect on the extraordinary events at Tham Luang—he opened up a bit in a Facebook post. The doctor sang the praises of the ‘awesome foursome’—British divers John Volanthen and Rick Stanton, who had found the missing boys on the night of Monday, 2 July, as well their compatriots Jason Mallinson and Chris Jewell. These four men had swum the boys to safety a week later.
‘The efforts and skill of these guys in blazing this trail cannot be underestimated,’ he said. ‘Following someone else’s line is very much easier than finding your own way.’
He also heaped praise on the Thai Navy SEALs, the Thai authorities and the international community for the extraordinary rescue effort: ‘I have never seen anything like it, man battling to control the natural forces of the monsoon waters.’ He also praised the effort to sustain the boys, as well as Dr Pak and the SEALs, who had volunteered to stay inside the cave with them until they were rescued.
In his typical self-effacing style, Harris concluded with a long list of thank-yous and humbly played down his role, and Challen’s, in the rescue. ‘Craig and I have had a spotlight on our efforts and we want to make everyone realise that while we might have become the face of this rescue for some reason, everyone should know that the role we played was no more or less important than all the many hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people I have mentioned. The part we played has been made out to be a lot more noble than it actually was. We just consider ourselves lucky to have had some skills that we could contribute to the wonderful outcome.’
But if Harris thought that post would be enough, and he could slip quietly back into his ordinary life, he was sorely mistaken. A few days later, along with Challen and the AFP and Navy divers, he was in Canberra to receive the Star of Courage and the Medal of the Order of Australia. Speaking reluctantly after the ceremony, Harris allowed that: ‘Frankly, and I think a lot of people have said that, none of us expected those boys to come out, certainly not in the time frame that they did.
The Great Cave Rescue Page 15