‘We knew that any attempt we made would have a probability of not total success. We had a probability of losing one of the boys, ultimately. And there was some pressure on us obviously because of that.’
* * *
As they emerged, the four boys were taken by ambulances from the cave mouth to the field hospital. They were checked by doctors and then put back in the ambulances and driven down the hill to a flat piece of land. If the boys weren’t so groggy, they might have recognised it – it was the Ban Chong soccer field, where they had played their friendly match fifteen days earlier. They’d come full circle.
Helicopters stood waiting. As each new ambulance approached, the blades of one of the choppers would start roaring, and the back lowered to form a ramp. Half a dozen bent-over figures then carried each stretcher across the grass in a half-run.
One by one, over the course of several hours, the choppers rose up, banked and pointed their noses in the direction of Chiang Rai, where a special hospital ward at Prachanukroh Hospital was waiting for the Wild Boars. There, doctors would run tests, checking first their breathing, and looking for signs of hypothermia. But doctors were also on the lookout for something known as ‘cave disease’, an airborne lung infection spread by bat droppings. The doctors didn’t know it yet, but there were no bats that deep inside Tham Luang. Like the upper reaches of Mount Everest, this was a death zone, where mammals like bats and humans were not supposed to survive for long.
* * *
Just as the lack of communications beyond Chamber 3 made for an anxious wait for the American and Thai soldiers stationed there, the support divers also had little idea of what was happening elsewhere in the cave. They knew that each boy had been alive and well when they passed through their chamber. But then what?
After Chris had come through with Night, Erik and Ivan tidied up their work station, ready for the next day’s operation. They then put on their tanks and masks and began the dive out of the cave.
When they surfaced at Chamber 3, many eyes were watching them. Those on land knew the divers needed a few moments to remove their masks and compose themselves before any news would sink in. US Captain Mitch Torrel let the silence hang even longer.
Ivan looked up at him from the water. There was no need to ask the question.
‘Ivan, they’re all fine,’ said Captain Torrel.
* * *
By 9 pm, the day’s operation was over.
‘Today is the most perfect day,’ said rescue leader Narongsak Osottanakorn. He was facing a banked semi-circle of cameras, tripods and people at the new media hub at the bottom of the hill. ‘We’ve now seen the faces of members of the Wild Boars football team.’
At the cave site, the divers and rescue workers gathered for debriefing sessions and to plan the next day’s mission. There had been one heavy shower that evening but the pumps kept the water level stable.
For British diver Chris Jewell there were mixed emotions. ‘There was a sense of euphoria mixed very heavily with a sense of – we were going to have to do this again, not just once but twice more. To go through the entire stressful process, start to finish, on at least two more occasions. The diving wasn’t going to get any easier.’
* * *
Sasivimon Yuukongkaew was one of the very few women to be inside the cave throughout the search and rescue. She was the wife of the SEALs top commander and an administrator of its Facebook page.
That morning, she wanted to somehow capture this moment of united purpose, this international cooperation. She asked three of the SEALs to pose for a photo, just of their hands. Each hand grabbed hold of the wrist of another, forming a triangle. She took the photo with her phone. It was a nice image but not quite right.
‘I need a farang hand,’ she said, using the Thai word for Caucasian foreigners.
She asked a Thai staffer from the Australian Embassy. Find me a white hand. Moments later a member of the Australian Federal Police rescue team – Sergeant Mark Usback was brought over. The three men locked hands. Better, thought Sasivimon, but the Australian was the only one wearing a wedding ring. She asked him to take it off for the shot. He did. She took one last photo. That was it! Two Thai hands (wearing Kruba Boonchum’s red bracelets) and an international hand with a sleeve of camouflage uniform showing, gripped together in a triangle of strength and cooperation.
‘The photo I think encompasses the unity we all had during the rescue,’ said Sergeant Usback. ‘It sounds a little corny but that’s how it was. The ability for so many cultures to come together and work as one was pretty amazing.’
For the Australian, the rescue would be the highlight of a thirty-year career in policing.
Sasivimon posted the image on the SEALs page and it became iconic, shared across Thailand and the world.
As the operation wrapped up for the night, she wanted to let the public know they should rest easy and look forward to the next day. She posted on the SEALs Facebook page: ‘Sleep tight tonight everyone. Hooyah . . .’
23
Five, Six, Seven, Eight
THAT SUNDAY NIGHT, IVAN became ill. Still, he showed up to take his place in the rescue team on Monday, but his colleagues took one look at him and sent him to the medical tent. There, he was given an intravenous drip and sent home.
The dive team was one man down, so they changed the stations slightly. Jim Warny took Ivan’s spot, joining Erik in Chamber 6, while another British diver joined Connor Roe in Chamber 5. Josh Bratchley had arrived the night before from his home in Devon, UK, where he worked as a meteorologist. He was an experienced caver and a member of the Devon Cave Rescue Organisation.
At the morning press briefing, the rescue commander was in a confident mood.
‘We’re one hundred per cent ready and expect everything to be completed faster than expected,’ said Narongsak Osattanakorn.
However, there was a very different attitude amongst the divers and those helping to plan the rescue.
‘My concern was that we would become complacent,’ said Major Charles Hodges. ‘Because, yes, it was huge. I mean we just hit a home run. Four for four – you can’t get any better than that. But in my mind the risk level didn’t go down any at all.’
The second day of rescues got underway at 11 am. Again, those with the furthest to swim into the cave went in first – Dr Harry, Craig and the four principal recovery divers, Rick, John, Chris and Jason.
The success of the first day of rescues had surprised everyone involved. It seemed their plan was almost perfect. They made only small tweaks. They wrote each boy’s name on his hand, so rescue workers could easily tell who they were dealing with. They moved some air tanks around inside the cave. And they decided that it was not necessary to keep the full-face mask on once the boys had finished the diving part and reached the Chamber 3 base camp safely. As much as the full-face mask was a life saver underwater, it could quickly become a death trap if there was any problem with the air supply from the tank while the boys were in the hands of non-divers.
There was one annoying hurdle to overcome the morning of that second rescue day, a technical one. The British divers had researched Thailand before they arrived and learned the standard connection between the regulator hose and the air tank was an A-clamp. They brought adaptors and had been using them successfully for several days. But on that Monday morning, they arrived to find the cylinders laid out for the rescue fitted with an alternative connection, known as a DIN system. It wasn’t a catastrophe, but it meant they had to take valves from other tanks and fit them to the filled tanks. It was frustrating and a waste of time.
There would be frustration too for little Mark, four kilometres inside the cave. Once again, he was eager to go with the second lot, but again was thwarted. The rescuers still couldn’t find a full-face mask small enough to seal over his tiny face.
Mix went first, with Jason. Adul was carried out by John. Third to go was Biw, in the hands of Chris. And Rick took the last boy out that day, team captain Dom.
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br /> Each one of the boys had to be re-sedated during the rescue, some of them twice. Several of the British divers held advanced first aid qualifications that allowed for the administration of morphine, so giving the intramuscular injection wasn’t too far beyond what they’d been trained to do. John kept his pre-dosed syringes in a pouch on one of his air tanks. When the child started to stir, he would stop, attach the needle to the syringe and inject it through the boy’s wetsuit into his leg.
On the second day of the rescues, when John was halfway through his dive with Adul, there was a problem.
‘Every time we put this kid’s head underwater, he stopped breathing and he wouldn’t start breathing,’ said John. ‘It took a number of attempts over about fifteen, twenty minutes to get this child to breathe underwater – realising he wasn’t breathing, getting him out of the water, into the recovery position, getting him breathing . . . there was a cycle until we [John and Josh] were comfortable that he was properly breathing, the mask was on and sealed and I was OK to carry on.’
Jason Mallinson had a close call with one of his patients (it’s not clear which day or which boy was involved). As he was swimming through a partially flooded passage with no bank, the boy started to wake up. Jason kept his syringes in his wetsuit pocket and had to try to get one out and fit a needle, while also controlling the child in the water.
‘It was very tricky. I had syringes floating around on the surface, just trying to grab hold of ’em,’ Jason told the American Broadcasting Company.
Fortunately, the boys remembered none of these perilous moments. The ketamine had a strong ‘dissociative’ effect, meaning their thoughts were disconnected from their physical reality.
For Biw, his mind went on a magical journey during the rescue. Once Dr Harry gave him his sedative, the dark cave world quickly became even darker as the ketamine took effect. He stopped moving, but his mind lit up.
‘I dreamed that King Rama IX [the revered King Bhumibol] held my hand and the hands of the other three boys and he sent us off on a helicopter.’
The first Wild Boar that day emerged from the cave at around 4.45 pm, meaning the extraction went faster than the previous day. As before, the ambulances ferrying the Wild Boars raced to the helicopters. Huge white parasols were held up around the choppers to stop long-lens photographers snapping pictures as the boys were loaded up the ramp. In Chiang Rai, another ambulance shuttle took each boy to the same hospital ward as the others. Local residents lined the streets to cheer as the ambulances went by.
Once again, every time the media announced another successful rescue, there was a feeling of relief and joy around the world.
* * *
The birds nest collectors of Libong Island tried until the end. Even after learning of the rescue of the first four boys from the cave, that Monday they still hiked back up the mountain. While the world waited for news of the second round of rescues, the men lowered themselves once again into dark holes of unknown depth, just in case there was another, less risky option for extracting the Wild Boars.
Over the twelve days they had been in Chiang Rai, they had explored dozens of shafts. Some ended after just forty metres; others wound down through the limestone and granite for hundreds of metres, but ultimately they all turned out to be dead ends.
‘That longest descent might have got them close,’ thought Rawheen Joanglao. Could it have been the shaft that once illuminated Pattaya Beach into a dazzling aqua-blue pool? Was it possible the dead end at the bottom was merely a plug of fallen sticks, soil and rocks?
The birds nest collectors would never know. When they came down from the mountain that day to find another successful rescue had taken place and eight boys were now free, they decided to stop. They flew back to Libong Island, a journey taking them from the top mountainous corner of Thailand to the tropical south; from the dark confines of unexplored sinkholes to the turquoise seas of their home.
They had achieved no great glories. But they had tried their hardest. And they had risked their lives, dangling precariously from their single ropes, probing the crust of the earth for a way through. Somewhere below them, the boys and Coach Ek had been waiting; indeed, some were waiting still for that last rescue. But now it was time for Rawheen to go home, where his three children waited for their own father.
* * *
Mix, Adul, Biw and Dom joined their teammates Note, Tern, Nick and Night in hospital. They were placed behind glass in a sterile ward and restricted to a bland hospital diet at first. This was a considerable disappointment – the SEALs had been vague about arrangements once they left the cave, and the boys had just presumed they’d be eating home-cooked food and sleeping in their own beds.
‘In the morning, they complained about being hungry and asked for kao pad krapao,’ reported Governor Narongsak.
It was a good choice; a classic dish of Thai comfort food, available from street vendors and restaurants across the country: minced meat, usually pork or chicken, flavoured with holy basil, fired up with chilli and served with steamed rice.
Later that night – much later – as Jum and I got an order in before our hotel kitchen closed, I decided I too wanted kao pad krapao for dinner. So did Jum. When I looked around, almost everyone had ordered the dish. The next day, I’d find out that the same had happened at restaurants across Mae Sai. In a spontaneous act of solidarity, everyone was eating the delicious rice dish that the boys craved.
* * *
Little Mark was also dreaming of food from home.
He was severely disappointed – he had been first in line for the rescues, eager to get out, but for two days now he had been left sitting on the bank of Nern Nom Sao. He longed desperately for comfort food, especially the rice congee that Thais call joke.
That night, Dr Pak heard Mark talking in his sleep.
‘I want joke, I want joke,’ muttered the thirteen-year-old, as he slept on the mud.
24
Closing window
FOR DAYS, THE WEATHER had been kind. There had been some showers, but nothing substantial. John had been tracking the water level deep inside the cave. On the first two rescue days, he had brought a bottle of water in to drink when he reached Chamber 9. He placed the empty bottle in the silt at the waterline each day and so could tell that the water level was dropping steadily. John – like Vern – didn’t think the pumps were having much effect beyond Chamber 3, but they both thought the creek diversions on top of the mountain were probably helping. That, and the lack of rainfall, was allowing the sumps to drain into the rock and out the cave entrance.
But on Tuesday, 10 July, that was all likely to change.
All week, the weather forecasters had been warning of heavy storms approaching – the sort of monsoonal downpour that had trapped the team in the cave in the first place; the sort that could push the divers back again, leaving the Wild Boars, the SEALs and Dr Pak stuck in an airless pocket four kilometres inside a mountain. If they couldn’t get them out before the storm hit, Chamber 9 would likely entomb them.
‘Today is probably the last weather window – and it isn’t a big window,’ said caver Martin Ellis, in a report published later on his caving blog.
There had been a lot of speculation over whether the divers would again bring four people out, leaving one in the cave alone for another day. But the weather made that impossible. The divers reconfigured and would attempt to bring out all five. As Governor Narongsak announced this decision at Tuesday morning’s press conference, the crowd broke out into applause.
Amongst the divers and the Americans, there was little celebration. The fact that they had saved eight children didn’t reduce the pressure. If anything, the public’s growing sense that this operation was a ‘done deal’ only heightened the tension.
‘It was clear from the first day that whatever Harry was doing worked, the sedation worked. So going forward, any children that didn’t survive, it was clearly down to that diver making a mistake,’ said John. ‘We haven’t been lucky, we�
��ve been very careful, but the risks are still the same.’
Overnight it had rained heavily, and was still raining as the divers arrived that morning.
‘Both Rick and I were very concerned as we’d seen how ferociously the water in the cave could rise. The other British divers hadn’t been there at high water,’ said John.
‘We were also concerned that if the cave flooded, we would be the furthest from the entrance, and so at the back of the queue to exit – behind Thai special forces, American soldiers and brawny Australians – we knew we weren’t going to fight our way to the front. That all felt a bit edgy.’
The recovery and support divers held their usual pre-rescue briefing outside the cave. Dozens of gleaming silver cylinders were lined up, all filled with air or eighty per cent oxygen mix and ready to go. But again, despite the previous day’s explanation, they were fitted with DIN valves, which all had to be changed to A-clamp systems before they could be used in the rescue.
At 10.08 am, the final mission began.
It was Coach Ek who went first on the final rescue day. His face had become gaunt, totally changing his appearance. For eighteen days, he’d kept the boys calm and together in the darkness, teaching them meditation, encouraging them to conserve energy.
The task of taking the coach out was given to Jim Warny, the experienced Belgian cave diver who lived in Ireland. He had taken Ivan’s place, and joined Erik in Chamber 6 on the second day of the rescue, but this would be his first time swimming out with an immobile body bubbling away in the sump water. Erik was left to manage Chamber 6 singlehandedly for the final rescue day.
John took Tee, the eldest of the players.
He had a scary moment as he dived between Chamber 4 and Chamber 3, the last sump before his part of the rescue was over. Being close to the cave command centre, it held the remnants of many failed efforts to get power, phone and oxygen lines through the tunnel.
‘There was so much debris in the passage – and bear in mind, visibility is a few inches. I was quite close to the exit of the sump and my child stopped moving,’ said John.
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