The Cave

by Liam Cochrane

  19

  Preparations

  IN ORDER TO GIVE their plan every chance of success, the rescuers prepared in every way they could think of.

  The rehearsals started at a school ten kilometres from the cave, in Mae Sai town. It was Saturday, 7 July, the morning after the dive option had been decided upon. At Pornpikul Wittaya School’s indoor swimming pool, the colourful foam paddleboards had been packed away neatly. There would be no regular swimming lessons that day. The pool had been taken over by a select group of Thai Navy SEALs and US soldiers, as well as the British divers, for a secret practice run. In these controlled conditions, the team would simulate the most dangerous part of the operation: putting a child underwater and swimming them out.

  Standing around the pool were three boys of small, medium and tall builds – roughly the same sizes as the boys trapped in the cave. The boys had volunteered for the job. Paramedics looked on, first-aid kits open at the ready.

  ‘There were a tonne of medical people and they were obviously very concerned we were going to drown these children,’ said John Volanthen.

  The rescuers put each boy into a wetsuit, put a buoyancy vest on them and, finally, strapped an air tank to their fronts. To do this, the divers had modified a harness, adding a handle on the back to carry the boy, and bungy straps to the front to attach the cylinder – known to cave divers as a ‘bottle bra’. They added a lead weight to a pocket in the front. The theory was that if something went wrong and the boy somehow separated from his chaperone, the weight of the lead and the tank would drag him to the bottom of the cave, still face down. With luck, he would remain there – breathing – until the diver could find him again.

  The first boy stepped into the water. John and Rick knelt around him and put on the full-face mask. Rick was behind the boy, pulling the straps tight, while John – still wearing his spectacles attached by a red neoprene strap – checked that the silicone seal was tight and the hoses were all functioning as they should.

  Satisfied that the mask was on tightly, they carefully submerged the boy face down, standing over him, watching through the clear water. Bubbles rose from the mask. It was working. Then a diver with side-mounted air tanks took control of the boy, swimming just below the surface, holding the boy underneath him. More bubbles surrounded them. Bubbles were a good sign. In fact, in the murky water inside the cave, the bubbles would be the only sign of life available to the rescue divers. The divers practised passing the boys to each other, transitioning from water to land, and getting them in and out of their diving kit. The boys were told to try to stay still, like the soon-to-be-sedated Wild Boars.

  John and Rick felt the mood change. Until now, all their diving had been deep inside a cave in murky water. While it was clear the British men were able to dive in and out of the cave much better than anyone else, the Thais hadn’t actually witnessed their skills and methodical approach. After about an hour, John looked up from the swimming pool to see the medics on their phones, no longer watching them like hawks, convinced that no kids would drown today.

  ‘There was a change in the demeanour of the people watching us and there were phone calls made, and to me that was the moment when I think people started to realise that what we were saying was possible.’

  The practice run was a success. The team had proved they could put a young non-diver underwater using a full-face mask and a front-mounted tank, and move around. But this was in the relatively pristine environment of a school swimming pool. Would it work in the dark flooded tunnels?

  * * *

  The divers had rehearsed their jobs; now it was time for the whole rescue team – the British divers, the Euro team, the SEALs and the volunteers from Australia, the US, China and Thailand – to put the overall plan through its paces.

  The Americans suggested a ROC drill – a Rehearsal of Concept. As Ivan later put it, ‘A ROC drill is what you see in the movies, commando movies, when they’re sitting outside about to do this raid on the enemy and they take rocks and branches and say, “OK, this is the command post, this is you guys.” And they move it around to give a visual briefing of the mission.’

  In the dimming light of evening, the car park above the row of ambulances became a miniature Tham Luang, a scaled-down two-dimensional representation of the cave layout. The various actors in the rescue stood around, as if they were giants looking down through the mountain.

  ‘We built the entire cave, with the tunnels, the chambers, to scale,’ remembered Ivan.

  Instead of rocks and branches, the rescuers used 500-millilitre plastic water bottles to represent the key assets, wrapped in colour-coded tape.

  ‘We had bottles with red tape – they were kids – so we had thirteen red bottles lying on a chair with a number nine on [it],’ said Ivan, referring to Chamber 9, Nern Nom Sao.

  ‘Then we had bottles with blue tape – they were normal air tanks,’ he said. These spare tanks were positioned at various stages of the tunnel. Once the rescue was underway, empty cylinders would be marked with a red glow stick that would last about twelve hours and be removed by support divers, where possible.

  ‘We had green bottles – bottles with green tape – they indicated oxygen or Nitrox80 tanks that were to be used for the kids.’ These special tanks had a mix of eighty per cent oxygen, rather than the usual twenty-one per cent found in air. The reason was sobering. The divers wanted to deliberately flood the boys’ system with oxygen so that if things went wrong, they would have extra time to perform a successful resuscitation. Essentially, they could be dead for longer and still brought back to life.

  The top leaders of the Thai government and military walked over to observe. The rescuers formed into teams according to the roles they would play in the rescue. Dr Harry would sedate the Wild Boars, and Craig would do the first medical checks in Chamber 8. Then there were the recovery divers, who would transport the boys – this job would be taken on by the British specialists: Rick, John, Chris and Jason. The support divers, Craig, Ivan, Erik, Mikko and Claus (others would soon join), would be waiting in some of the chambers to assist with getting the boys out of their dive gear and carrying them to the next sump. Once the ‘packages’ reached Chamber 3, the boys would be checked by US medics, put onto stretchers and carried across the slippery obstacle course to the entrance.

  ‘We started role playing,’ said Ivan.

  The ROC drill quickly showed flaws in the plan.

  ‘Stop, stop, stop, stop, everybody back,’ shouted someone, at the first stumble.

  As the giants stepped through their plan, moving red, blue and green water bottles from chair to chair, it became clear some of the tanks needed to be repositioned. They noted down the changes and started again.

  ‘Stop, stop, stop, stop, that doesn’t work.’

  Once they’d ironed out the biggest kinks, the overall plan worked, but the divers realised they each had a slightly different mental image of the cave layout. It wasn’t surprising, given the near-zero visibility underwater and the pitch black above the water. They realised that a diver going blindly through the brown soup, hand after hand on the guide rope, could simply swim past an embankment or a cluster of tanks, conscious only of a rock he brushed alongside or – more often – the sudden donk as his helmet crashed into an unseen rock ahead.

  Outside, in the bright tropical sunlight of the car park, the divers stood around the chairs and taped-up water bottles and lines in the dirt, and continued debating the layout of the cave. Their navigational clues were specific, only understandable to a handful of people in the world: ‘Yeah, you know when you come up and you have that stalactite, yes, that’s number 5, good, and number 6 is, you know when you just come round that corner, where you have the double-knot, yes, that’s 6.’

  In some chambers, the rope ran out of the water and up the bank, so the divers couldn’t miss the stop. But the fuzziest location in their collective minds was Chamber 6, the long tunnel-like chamber, flanked by muddy banks. The British divers had a
preferred spot for the temporary de-kitting and check-up station within Chamber 6, but Ivan and Erik weren’t one hundred per cent sure that’s where the tanks had been left. Even a sliver of doubt was an unacceptable risk for these highly trained technical divers.

  A simple solution was created.

  Two large numbers – five and six – were printed in black ink onto pieces of white A4 paper, which were then laminated. The following day, Rick and John would carry them in as they dived towards the boys, clipping the numbers on to the guide line, exactly where they wanted the spare air tanks and the support divers to be waiting.

  The ROC drill had a practical purpose, to visualise the rescue and do a dry run of everyone’s roles. But like the swimming pool rehearsal, it was also a chance for the foreigners to demonstrate their capabilities.

  ‘The drill was useful-ish,’ said John Volanthen. ‘But I think the key thing was it demonstrated to the governor, and whoever, that there is actually a plan and it is organised and there is some chance of success.’

  * * *

  The arrival of Dr Harry, an anaesthetist, might have suggested that perhaps some kind of sedation would be involved in the rescue. But, at the time, this was a closely guarded secret.

  In a testament to the old adage ‘Never believe something until it’s officially denied by the government,’ Thailand’s prime minister, General Prayut Chan-o-cha, refuted claims the boys would be unconscious.

  ‘Who would chloroform them? If they’re chloroformed, how could they come out? It’s called anxiolytic, something to make them not excited, not stressed,’ he told the press in Bangkok on 10 July, adding that the anti-anxiety pills were the same medication he took to relax before shooting guns. At this, he raised up an imaginary rifle and pulled the imaginary trigger.

  But in fact, a powerful sedative would be used to knock the boys out during the rescue. They would be completely unconscious, it was their only chance of getting out of the cave alive.

  One of the biggest threats to the rescue operation was the boys panicking underwater. As Craig Challen later told ABC’s Four Corners: ‘If you put me in a full-face mask with no previous experience and dragged me out of the cave – it’s about a three-hour trip – then I would be terrified and probably panicking as well.’ Medically sedating the boys was considered the only way to save their lives.

  For Dr Harry, the question was: what cocktail of drugs should he use? What do you give malnourished boys so that they stay still, and aren’t traumatised by being dragged underwater through a hostile cave environment? This kind of rescue had never been attempted before, so there was no rule book. Dr Harry consulted widely, seeking the opinions of other medical experts in Thailand and abroad.

  In the end, the anaesthetist came up with a combination of three drugs. First, he would give them a 0.5 milligram oral dose of alprazolam, an anti-anxiety drug better known by its trade name Xanax. Giving the boys a tablet of this while they were still with their friends would hopefully take the edge off any fear they had as they prepared to leave.

  Next, he would inject ketamine into a muscle in one of their legs – this would be the main sedative. A powerful drug originally developed as an animal tranquilliser, it was also used as a painkiller for humans and, in more recent times, as a recreational drug by partygoers. It was known to knock out memories – perfect for the job inside Tham Luang.

  Dr Harry would use five milligrams of ketamine per kilogram of bodyweight, to put the boys to sleep. Ketamine acts fast but doesn’t last long – about an hour. The rescue, however, would take several hours. This meant that Dr Harry had to instruct each of the recovery divers how to re-administer the drug using a syringe pre-loaded with a top-up dose of 2.5 milligrams for every kilogram of bodyweight. The divers would carry the drugs and needles in pockets in their dive wetsuits.

  ‘They took that on themselves, to administer essentially life-threatening anaesthetic drugs to kids to keep them sedated enough to get them out of the cave, and I cannot tell you how impressed I am with those blokes,’ said Dr Harry later.

  John and Rick were in no doubt about the need for heavy sedation. Their experience trying to drag the four lost men through even five metres of sump showed just how essential it would be to render the boys immobile if the plan was to have any hope of succeeding.

  The last drug, atropine, was to reduce the amount of saliva in the boys’ mouths. This would also be injected into their leg muscles. The divers knew that a leak in the seals of the full-face masks could be fatal, but the Australian doctor thought of something few had considered – that excess saliva could drool into the face masks and become a drowning hazard for the semi-conscious youths.

  Dr Harry had carefully considered the types of drugs and dosages that would be used, based on his years of experience and the advice of other experts. Still, he was not at all confident.

  ‘Personally, I thought there was zero chance of success, I honestly thought there was no chance it would work,’ he would later admit. ‘So we set up a system for some feedback to come back after the first one or two kids and if they hadn’t survived that first sump, which was the longest one although not the most difficult one, then I was going to say, “Well, that’s all I can do,” [and] walk away at that point.’

  * * *

  The dive option was the best chance the boys had for ever escaping that cave, but a rescue like this had never been attempted before, and this fact weighed heavily on the rescuers’ minds. Amidst all their preparations, they were also mentally preparing themselves for the very real possibility that something would go terribly wrong.

  ‘The risk level was incredibly high,’ Major Hodges told ABC’s Four Corners. ‘When I was flat-out asked, “What do you think the probability of success was?” I told the governor I thought maybe a sixty or seventy per cent chance. So, I was fully expecting that we would, uh, accept casualties. Maybe three, four, possibly five, would die.’

  The hardest job of transporting the boys was given to the British divers, who had had the most experience with cave rescues. Despite this, they too had serious doubts.

  ‘It was [by] no means certain what the outcome would be,’ Rick told ITV News later.

  Chris Jewell said it would be hard to invent such a difficult and dangerous operation.

  ‘The scenario was almost a perfect storm of a rescue situation,’ he told Channel 5 News. ‘I couldn’t quite believe that these boys had managed to get this far back into a cave, the sections that were flooded were flooded so significantly, it was a lot of diving we had to do, and that the water level wouldn’t drop for months and months – it’s really quite an incredible series of events, a situation to create; you almost couldn’t write it. We didn’t actually know at that point whether we could get them out alive.’

  20

  Last words

  ON SATURDAY, 7 JULY, the parents of the Wild Boars were called into a meeting. They were asked to leave their phones at the door. Inside were some of the most powerful figures involved in the operation. They told the parents that the conditions were favourable for a rescue attempt. The water level was stable. The boys had regained their strength. The parents were told their boys were learning how to scuba dive, although this wasn’t actually the case. The boys would be taken out by some of the most experienced cave divers in the world. Everything was in place and ready. But they had to move now – the oxygen had lasted longer than expected, but was running out. And the next few days would be their last chance before the heavy rain forecast for Tuesday would completely flood the cave once again.

  They needed the parents’ authorisation to go ahead with the rescue attempt. The parents were asked to sign a simple form, which was just a few lines in Thai. There was no letterhead. There were spaces where they could write in their names and their child’s name. As well as requesting authorisation, the form asked if the parents agreed to waive their rights in case something went wrong. There was no mention of sedation. They were not allowed to have a copy or take a phot
o of the form.

  Naturally, the parents signed it.

  * * *

  That day, Jason Mallinson was diving in Tham Luang in order to familiarise himself with the route and deliver supplies. Considering the risk of the operation and the bleak predictions of success, he had an idea.

  ‘I had a wet notes pad, which is a pad with waterproof paper, and I just thought, “Here you are, write a message to your parents, write it on this pad and I’ll take it out,”’ he told ABC’s Four Corners.

  Jason knew the parents would be thrilled to see their boys’ handwritten messages. But also, if things didn’t go to plan, this would be the last words the boys said to their families.

  ‘We never knew what was going to happen,’ he said. ‘We never knew that we were going to get them out. So, I thought it was important at least for them to be able to send a message out to their parents, maybe just to put their parents’ minds at rest; to say, you know, “I’m not doing too badly under the circumstances.”’

  On white graph paper, specially treated so it could survive getting wet, one of the boys wrote a summary message in Thai on behalf of all them: ‘Don’t worry about us. Everyone is healthy. We want to eat several types of food. When we get out we want to get home right away. Don’t give us too much homework.’

  And then each boy and the coach penned their own messages in curly Thai script:

  Titan: ‘Mum and Dad, don’t worry about me please, I am fine. Please tell Pee Yod, get ready to take me to eat fried chicken.’

  Pong: ‘Mum and Dad, I love you, please don’t worry. I am safe now. Love you all.’

  Nick: ‘Mum and Dad, I love you, and I love Nong [a Thai term for a younger sibling] too. If I can get out, please take me to eat crispy pork. Love you Mum, Dad, Nong.’

  Mark: ‘Mum, are you well at home? I am fine. Please tell my teacher as well. Love you, Mum Nam Hom [her name].’

  Mix: ‘Don’t worry. I miss you all, Grandpa, Aunty, Dad, Mum and Nong. I love you all. I am happy, the SEAL team is taking care of us very well. Love you all.’