When I interviewed her for the ABC, she spoke about the joy of finding the Wild Boars alive as if it were the very first time she’d been asked. She talked glowingly about the spirit of volunteerism, about how wonderful Thai people were, and about the challenges of getting the boys out. It was just before America’s national day—the Fourth of July—and she said there was no place they’d rather be than helping Thailand in its time of need. The Thais loved her. The media loved her. I suggested to the Australians they could learn a thing or two.
As Jum, David, and I reached the bottom of the hill, where the lower path led up to the cave, there was a watery hub of activity. The two big orange generator trucks were parked opposite a police checkpoint. Industrial-size lights illuminated the area in an orange glow. At the center was the fountain of water coming from the pumps inside Tham Luang.
We stopped to wash the mud off our boots, tripod, and light stand in this blue-pipe fountain. Others did the same as they came off the mountain. It had become a welcome ritual. This nightly ablution signified the end of a day’s work. But there was something more. The water spouting from those blue pipes was a direct link between us and the boys stuck in the cave. It connected us to these Wild Boars, whom we spent all day talking about but had never met. And there was a sense of relief that every gallon that flowed out was helping to increase their chances of survival.
As we continued on down the road, lugging our TV gear, we barely spoke. It was dark and quiet and peaceful.
18
Crunch Time
By Thursday, July 5, it was becoming clear to the international rescuers that there was only one option for getting the Wild Boars out alive. The boys were rapidly running out of oxygen, and the next big rains were forecast to hit in a few days, most likely on Tuesday, July 10. Rescuers faced the prospect of once again being thwarted by raging torrents of water. The approaching rains posed the very real threat of another retreat back out of the cave. If the monsoon really kicked in, they might not get another opportunity. Waiting out the monsoon just wasn’t going to work. Suttisak’s drill teams would take far too long. The bird’s-nest collectors and other climbers had still not found another shaft to access the cave. That left only the riskiest option of all: diving them out.
At the time, the rescue organizers hinted that the boys were learning how to dive, and that’s what the parents were told. Some media reported that each boy would be tethered to an air hose, swimming out with one rescue diver in front and one behind. It turned out these details were untrue. Those who’d battled for hours through the muddy obstacle course knew there was no way the boys or their coach could make it out on their maiden dives. The conditions in the cave would be challenging even for an experienced recreational diver. The only hope was to sedate the boys and Coach Ek so the expert cave divers could carry them out, wearing full-face masks.
They didn’t need to worry too much about depth. Any deeper than thirty feet, and burst eardrums would pose a problem for the sedated boys, who wouldn’t know to squeeze their nostrils and clear their ear cavities to adjust the pressure. Fortunately, the deepest part of the flooded cave was only around twenty feet deep, according to Erik Brown’s dive computer.
Using traditional masks and mouthpieces was out of the question. Both could be easily knocked off the face by rocks or extreme currents. The dive instructors knew that if beginners panic, they sometimes try to scream, spitting out their regulator. It doesn’t make sense, but neither does breathing underwater for the first time.
But full-face masks have silicone seals that run from the top of the forehead, down the jawline, and under the chin, totally enclosing the face and allowing the person to breathe with both mouth and nose—something far more natural for a non-diver. Even if the boys were to lose consciousness, they should still be able to breathe.
There are several types of full-face masks on the market, with different ways of pumping oxygen into the face area. One type has a demand valve that opens only when the diver breathes. But for this rescue, the rescuers would use a “positive pressure” system that pumped a surplus of air into the mask. It was hoped this would gently force the oxygen-rich mix into the unconscious child’s mouth and nostrils, helping to keep his airway open.
The biggest issue was size.
Dozens of masks had been procured, but almost all were made for adults. They would be too big to fit the smaller boys. Full-face masks are generally used for highly technical diving—salvage operations, military operations, underwater documentaries where the divers need to speak. None of these activities are suitable for children.
The rescue divers said around forty full-face masks had been flown in from around Thailand and the world. In the end they found only four that would work. And even then there were doubts about how the masks would fit the smallest faces.
Titan was just eleven years old, but thirteen-year-old Mark was tinier. Getting the right fit was a matter of life and death. Once the boys were underwater, it would be almost impossible to check their masks until the next air bell.
The international team knew they had to try to convince General Anupong that this was the best course of action. And they knew they had to be ready to execute as soon as he gave the go-ahead.
Getting a plan like this to work was like assembling a machine with many delicate parts: should anything go wrong with any of those parts, lives would surely be lost.
Two of the most essential parts turned out to be Australian cave divers Craig Challen, a vet from Perth, Western Australia, and Dr. Richard Harris, an anesthetist from Adelaide, South Australia. They had traveled the world diving caves, sinkholes, and wrecks, sometimes as part of an eclectic group of Australian divers who called themselves the Wet Mules. The strange name came from the expression “enough money to burn a wet mule”—as in “That man’s so loaded, he’s got enough money to burn a wet mule.” But it also referred to the fact that they spent a lot of their time stubbornly hauling heavy loads of diving gear around.
Members of the club were intrepid in their diving, but modest to the point of self-deprecating. The Wet Mules’ motto was Lurching from Crisis to Crisis, and their mascot was a red bowling ball named Colin. The absurdity of carting around a heavy useless object made it the perfect mascot for these quirky hobbyists. Their website was full of matey put-downs and photos of Colin the bowling ball with them on trips, as well as photos and reports from some of their world-class diving exploits.
They were a select group of people, brought together by a difficult and highly risky sport. Cave diving is a pastime that requires absolute trust: failure to prepare properly beforehand or panic during a dive can be fatal. The serious depths provide no room for error and demand slow ascents to allow the body to readjust to surface pressures and avoid the bends. During a previous diving trip in Western Australia, Craig Challen spent six minutes plummeting over 650 feet to the bottom of the ocean, nine minutes looking at the wreck of the HMAS Derwent, and then seven hours and forty-five minutes coming back up. During one of those long decompression stops, a shark circled his group for about an hour.
The Wet Mules’ elder statesman, John Dalla-Zuanna, is philosophical about his reasons for cave diving.
“I just feel at home in a sense,” he told the ABC in August 2018 during an expedition to Tank Cave at Mount Gambier, South Australia—considered one of the most spectacular and most dangerous underwater caves in Australia. “It’s just gliding weightlessly through space. I just love being weightless and all I’m hearing is my breathing. I can sort of feel myself get in tune with the water. You’ve got no phones, you’ve got no pressure about what you do at work. . . . We’ve driven four to five hours in each direction to get to here, and all that stuff, that all goes away. We come here on a weekend and we come here for the sake of experiencing something like this.”
Craig is more enigmatic about why anyone would put their lives at risk to go cave diving: “We do have a saying that if you need to ask that question, you wouldn’t understan
d the answer.”
In July 2018, having recently retired, Craig had time on his hands to dive, and Dr. Harry had managed some time away from his anesthetist work. They arranged to meet halfway between their hometowns, to dive the underwater aquifers beneath the arid Nullarbor Plain. But, as the day of their departure drew closer, the story of the lost soccer team in Thailand loomed on the horizon. Craig and Harry tracked the story in the media and spoke with their friends in the tight-knit cave-diving community about the medical risks involved in diving the Wild Boars out.
“We’d been in contact with the British in the days leading up to this, so we were broadly familiar with what was going on in the cave and, yeah, to be honest, [it was] not looking good at all,” Craig told the ABC’s Four Corners after the rescue, recalling how he was feeling at the time. “It’s a long way in, most don’t know how to swim [a common misconception at the time], let alone dive, so we’re all wondering how this is going to possibly work, and, to be honest, the prospects are bleak.”
John Volanthen recalled seeing Dr. Harry’s initial response to the idea, a text message that said something like: “That’s bonkers, absolutely no way.” But the British divers knew of only two cave-diving anesthetists in the world—the other was a Frenchman. Dr. Harry had also established the first sump-rescue training course in Australasia, teaching emergency-service workers how to dive into the muck and save the day. All that made him the perfect candidate for performing the highly delicate task of putting the boys under sedation in preparation for the dive, while Craig would use his medical expertise to perform checks during the first stages of the dives out.
When the official request came to help—the day before they were due to leave for the Nullarbor—Dr. Harry and Craig put aside their holiday and quickly changed plans.
“I had forty-five minutes to get to the airport,” remembered Craig. “So in that time I had to unpack everything that I had, reconfigure, and get the gear that I needed for this trip and go.”
Getting them covered by the necessary legal framework was quite a feat. In the background, dedicated diplomats and bureaucrats worked hard to get the paperwork done. For Dr. Harry to be able to put his unique skill set to use, two things needed to happen: he had to be registered with the Thai Medical Board, and the Thai government had to grant both of them diplomatic immunity. Neither of these was easy to arrange in a hurry, but Harry and Craig boarded a plane anyway. When they landed, they were kept away from the cave, still waiting for the paperwork to come through. The two Australians were the only ones who would have diplomatic immunity, due to the high risk of what they were about to attempt and the very real possibility they might be blamed for the deaths of children.
On Friday, July 6, the immunity and license to practice were secured, and Craig and Harry arrived on-site at Tham Luang. As they walked through the tent city that had sprung up outside the cave, to the restricted area where the SEALs and foreign divers prepared, the Australians saw some familiar faces. They knew Claus Rasmussen from a Thai cave-diving trip the previous year. For ten days, Claus had acted as a support diver as Ben Reymenants, Craig, and Harry explored the depths of Song Hong (Thai for “Two Rooms”), a tree-lined sinkhole near the southern town of Trang. Ben had previously dived down to 580 feet, and the Australians were keen to push deeper if possible. One day, while at 430 feet, Ben’s underwater scooter suffered a “catastrophic implosion”—the loudest underwater noise the men had ever heard. Ben was unhurt, but some of his gear was damaged. He had to sit out while Harry and Craig pushed on the next day, eventually reaching 643 feet, before beginning a six-hour ascent. It was the sort of holiday the Wet Mules loved.
Rick Stanton was another diver the Australians knew well, an old friend of the Wet Mules club. Harry, Craig, and Rick had dived together at two world-famous cave-diving sites—the photogenic Cocklebiddy Cave in Western Australia and the mysterious Pearse Resurgence in New Zealand.
Craig and Harry arrived with little fanfare and kept a low profile—no interviews. They met with Rick and John, who had themselves requested that representatives from the British embassy join them at Tham Luang; they were worried that if things went terribly wrong, they might not get out of the country.
The Thais had their own diplomatic challenges. While the world’s attention was focused on a cave in the country’s north, another news story broke. A boat full of Chinese tourists had capsized in sixteen-foot waves off Phuket. The death toll grew by the hour. There were 105 people on board, and more than 40 of the tourists drowned. Soon questions were being asked about the tour operator, about the decision to travel in such seas, and about the Thai government’s response. Tourism from China was booming and, at a geopolitical level, Bangkok was balancing its long-standing friendship with America against the rising dragon of Beijing. Rescuer Li Shuo and his team from Peaceland Foundation were torn: they wanted to go help their countrymen, but their mission was already established at Tham Luang. They were working with the Australians, carrying in tanks and other equipment, getting ready for a rescue—whenever that might happen. They decided to stay, and got on with the tough work of hauling gear into the cave.
While the Chinese and all the other rescue workers and divers prepared for a possible rescue attempt inside the cave, hundreds of people were working on top of the mountain to reduce the water flowing in. On Thursday, July 5, there was a serious accident. Four rescue volunteers were driving to the cave site when, at around 7 p.m., the driver lost control of the car. Their SUV plunged off a cliff and into the vegetation below. Three of the passengers sustained only minor injuries, but one was critically injured. A light drizzle fell on the scene as paramedics climbed down to the battered car in the ravine. It took a while for them to be able to safely move the critically injured person to the hospital.
After the British divers found the Wild Boars on Monday, July 2, they were relegated to an advisory role, working with the Americans to help plan and assist a SEAL-led rescue mission. The initial idea involved hundreds of air tanks being staged throughout the cave and a push forward modeled on a mountain-climbing strategy, known as a “siege.”
“On a mountain you’ve got ten people [who] support eight people going forward, who support six, who support four, who support two, who support one guy who gets to the summit,” explained John Volanthen. “That was the way the SEALs seemed to want to work. . . . The logistics were mind-boggling to be honest, but they’re an army, I guess that’s what they do in a battle.”
I asked John if he thought that plan was something the SEALs could pull off.
“It would be exceptionally difficult,” he said.
When Dr. Pak and the three SEALs were stranded at Chamber 9 on Tuesday, the other three SEALs emerged to describe how treacherous the diving conditions were.
“The attitude in camp changed the next morning, dramatically,” said John. “They basically said, ‘It’s too difficult, it can’t be done, we’re suspending diving operations.’ . . . They were very clear that the job is too difficult, [that] our men got back, but barely.”
This was hardly surprising. Diving instructor Erik Brown later explained to me that any country would struggle with such a specialized rescue. The only way to save the seventeen people trapped in the cave would be a coordinated effort by the world’s best divers and some luck with the weather.
On Wednesday, John and Rick became concerned that no serious moves were being made to resupply the seventeen people now trapped in the cave. They went to the Americans and asked them for MREs to take in.
An MRE—a meal ready to eat—was American war food, a modern-day upgrade on the C rations from the Vietnam War era. They’re about the size of a thick paperback novel, with a thick watertight packaging. Each one would typically contain a main dish that could be heated by adding water to the inner packaging to create a chemical reaction. There’d be snacks like biscuits and spreads, maybe some preserved fruit, powdered flavoring for drinks, instant coffee mix, creamer and sugar, a dessert, and pac
kets for salt and chewing gum. A plastic spoon would be included to eat with. But the Wild Boys and their minders didn’t need all that; they mostly just needed the high-calorie parts.
Rick and John went through the MREs, throwing away all the surplus items. They packed enough for a week’s supply into four tubular bags and did what they could to neutralize the buoyancy. They also packed a water filter, shiny space blankets to help everyone stay warm, and an oxygen meter.
“We told the Thais what we were going to do,” said John. “They didn’t help, but they didn’t stop us.”
Diving with this “monumental amount of stuff” proved to be extremely difficult, even for the world’s best. The food bags acted as an anchor and made the hours of diving much more strenuous. Halfway in, John considered ditching one of them, but persevered.
When the British divers finally reached Chamber 9 with the bags of supplies, they told Dr. Pak and the SEALs to ration the food. They had brought only enough MREs for everyone to have about a meal a day for a week. But their cavers’ instinct told him to be cautious. Make the food last two weeks, they told the Thais. At any moment a big monsoonal downpour could reflood the cave and make diving impossible once again. As hungry as the boys were, they should take it slowly. It was the first solid food the boys had had since they entered the cave twelve days earlier.
“I liked the MREs,” said Biw later. His favorite was macaroni with chicken.
John and Rick realized they might have to take on the rescue themselves.
They called in backup. The British Cave Rescue Council began to mobilize two more ace divers—Jason Mallinson and Chris Jewell—as well as Mike Clayton and Gary Mitchell, who would help support the UK team. Martin Ellis, who had produced the most up-to-date map of Tham Luang for his 2017 book, also joined them.
Miracle in the Cave Page 14