The Boys in the Cave Page 13
Most food, especially anything that is packaged, is buoyant—it floats.* Since hauling anything with substantial volume would severely limit the calories ferried in, Anderson had an idea. His team had brought more than one hundred military rations called MREs—meals ready to eat. Each package is designed to sustain a 180- to 200-pound soldier in strenuous combat situations and can go unrefrigerated for five years. The meals average about 1,250 calories; among the more highly caloric items is the pork patty meal, with 1,345 calories, 82 grams of fat, and 46 grams of sugar. Being packed with calories, MREs were just what the boys needed. And since the food provided at camp by the volunteers had been both delicious and plentiful, the Special Ops team had until now no reason to dig into their MREs.
Anderson enlisted some of his men, Stanton and Vollanthen, and even the pair of Tourist Police officers who had been assigned to serve as the Brits’ minders to strip down the MREs. They chucked the near-atomic-bomb–proof plastic wrapping, the Tabasco sauce, the gum, the matches, the napkins, the “flameless ration heater,” and anything else that was either not caloric or that might float. They were left with the vacuum-packed main courses—flavors included beef ravioli, beef taco, apple maple oatmeal, pot roast, garlic chicken, and chicken fajita—and desserts. Said Anderson, “Yeah, we figured they could use those too, why not?”
Anderson had calculated that if each person in Chamber Nine ate just one of those full meals a day, it would sustain the group for about a week. At least it would buy them time. They then tried to stuff 117 of them—every single one they had with them—into homemade, neutrally buoyant tubes the UK team brought with them. The tubes looked like missile casings—three feet long, a foot wide, with steel O-rings on either end and weighted down with lead. They had so much food and gear that they needed additional bags. So they borrowed three of the Special Ops team’s dry bags (giant waterproof duffels), crammed them with as much as they could, squished them to get the air out, and hoped they wouldn’t float too much. Stanton’s tube was neutrally buoyant, meaning it would theoretically stay wherever in the water column the divers took it—but that giant dry bag wasn’t.
“No problem,” said Stanton. When he got into the cave he asked his Tourist Police minders to grab a few rocks and a few handfuls of sand. “That’ll do,” he announced, dumping the dirt and rocks inside as the Americans stared wide-eyed. Stanton shrugged. “That’s what we do.” Cave divers sometimes rely more on resourcefulness than planning. Vollanthen carried two of the sand-laden bags.
Shortly before the Brits entered the water that day, rescuers and pump workers began scurrying around outside the cave. A Thai SEAL was brought out with some help after nearly drowning. It apparently happened in the sump between Chambers Two and Three, which had shrunk, leaving a submerged section a little longer than an average swimming pool. The foreign divers were confused—how could a scuba diver nearly drown in such a short section?
The answer was: when he’s not using scuba equipment. For the first time since June 26, the sump between Chambers Two and Three had shrunk to the point that a free diver could take a few deep breaths, plunge in, and duck-dive his way across—pulling himself on the guideline when necessary. That this was possible didn’t mean it was advisable. The U.S. team and the Australians—who had discovered they were simply too big to fit through the manhole-size hole after Chamber Three and had started helping the Americans with logistics—continued to use small tanks for this short dive. But one of the Thai SEALs, who was freediving the section, apparently became ensnared in some of the hoses or electrical wires running between the two chambers. A limp body bobbed up to the surface. Divers and U.S. pararescuers who happened to be there jumped in and pulled him out—he was unresponsive and seemed dead, but they pounded on his chest, tilted him to clear his airway and purge water, and after a few minutes of intense CPR they managed to revive him. A day later he was back on the rescue.
Nevertheless, the Thai SEALs forged on with the oxygen pipe plan. They didn’t really have a choice: military leaders had been talking about it as a fait accompli. A Thai junta spokesman, Major General Chalongchai Chaiyakum, told the press, “When the telephone line is ready, we will have relatives talk to them. The pressure will be immensely reduced.” This statement was completely divorced from the reality inside the cave, and served only to increase the pressure.
Thai political leaders had promised the world a “zero-risk” option to rescue the boys, which meant either waiting out the monsoons, drilling a relief shaft, or finding the mythical alternative entrance. The only way to ensure they didn’t die of asphyxiation before November or December, when the rains stopped or the drills found them, was snaking an oxygen tube to Chamber Nine.
The “zero-risk option,” however, referred only to the boys. In a photo of one of the planning sessions, just to the right of Rear Admiral Apakorn, is First Petty Officer Saman Gunan, examining the plan on the whiteboard. He was to be one of the divers helping to install that oxygen tube. Within thirty-six hours he would be dead.
On July 4, shortly after the Thai SEAL almost drowned in the sump between Chambers Two and Three, Vollanthen and Stanton dipped back into the water at Chamber Three on a mission to mule calories to the boys. As always, Anderson and Hodges knew they wouldn’t hear back from them for six or seven hours. Despite the lower water level, the current remained powerful enough that a leisurely swim would mean not moving. Between the current and the fact that they each schlepped dozens of pounds of gear that kept hitting snags, the going was slow. Their legs burned from kicking, and their hands were cracked and sore from pulling on the guideline. Their heads kept knocking dangling stalactites that they simply couldn’t see in the Coca-Cola-colored water.
Vollanthen is an ultramarathoner and Stanton has kayaked nearly nine hundred continuous miles around the island of Tasmania; still, by the time they reached the boys, they were heaving in their regulators. Vollanthen’s duffels were extremely cumbersome. He made frequent stops for ten or fifteen minutes—pit stops during which he told Stanton he couldn’t go on and had to drop one of the bags. It was Vollanthen’s most grueling dive, but he pushed through with the duffels.
When they finally arrived in Chamber Nine, “it was quite a ceremony,” as Stanton recalled. Foreign as it was, the mushy stuff in the aluminum packets was the first real food the boys had seen in twelve days.
This time the divers’ stay was shorter. Vollanthen and Stanton delivered another series of messages to the SEALs. They only stayed for twenty minutes and didn’t see the boys tuck into the food.
In addition to the meals, Stanton and Vollanthen carried in two bubble-wrapped palm-size packages and a letter to the boys and the SEALs. The SEALs received instructions, and the boys were asked again, this time in writing, to describe precisely the sounds they had heard. The SEALs were not going to give up on the notion of finding an alternative route out, as unlikely as it seemed. To that end, one of the small packages Stanton and Vollanthen brought in was an HTC phone, which the SEALs back at camp had asked the Brits to deliver to the SEALs in Chamber Nine in the hope that they might be able to connect to a satellite positioning system. (According to Stanton, such devices exist, but none are powerful enough to penetrate six hundred yards of rock.)
The other bubble-wrapped device came from the Americans. It was a confined-space air-quality monitor. Anderson had asked Stanton to take a measurement, but also to verify the readings: “Can you take video of it, too? I need to have exact proof of this, especially if we are going to show this to the decision makers,” Anderson told him.
Stanton did as he was told. The reading was 15 percent oxygen, and the meter began flashing red and beeping. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration defines anything below 19.5 percent to be hazardous. Oxygen levels between 15 percent and 19.5 percent cause “decreased ability to work strenuously” and “impaired coordination.” At levels below 14 percent, respiration increases, and people start to get loopy and their lips turn blue. While
the 15 percent reading in the cave set off alarm bells, Stanton maintains the reading might have been erroneous. He said the meter is designed to be calibrated first outside a confined space. But because they dove it in, Stanton had to calibrate it inside Chamber Nine. Given his experience mountaineering and in other low-oxygen environments as a firefighter, he surmised that the oxygen level was likely a little higher than 15 percent. Whether the reading was precisely accurate or not, it highlighted an emerging and immediate problem: there was an ever-dwindling amount of air in the chamber. Suddenly everyone began to focus anew on this problem of air.
Whatever the exact oxygen level in Chamber Nine, it was lower than ideal for seventeen people. Still, oxygen deprivation presented a possible explanation for the boys’ insistence that they heard roosters and dogs. After eleven days of fasting, the boys’ glycogen levels would have dropped, and low blood sugar could have led to low oxygen in their brains, which is associated with hallucinations. Or maybe the hallucinations were caused by continuous low levels of oxygen in Chamber Nine, exacerbated by dipping blood sugar.
For his part, Stanton says neither food nor oxygen had anything to do with it.
“It’s absolutely normal to hear voices and sounds in caves. It’s not even unusual for experienced cave divers, because the cave plays tricks on you,” he said. During his own expeditions in caves, Stanton had found himself turning to greet straggling cavers chattering behind him when his headlamp only illuminated an empty passage. Counterintuitively, it’s the silence that gins up the sounds. A cave is undisturbed by any of the ambient sounds that populate our lives: the rustle of leaves, lawn mowers, distant buses, dogs barking, the beeps of delivery trucks backing up, toddlers’ whining for attention. Therefore, what our brains would normally filter out as background noise in our world outside is amplified inside a cave. Each plip-plop of water colonizes one’s auditory senses—sometimes, maddeningly, it’s the only thing cavers can focus on. Those sounds have triggered panic attacks or even temporary madness among cavers. The boys might indeed have thought they heard something, and they may all have heard similar things.
“That doesn’t make them crazy,” said Stanton. “It just means they’ve spent too much time in a cave.”
In his daily press conference that afternoon Governor Narongsak reassuringly informed the world that the boys were safe inside Chamber Nine and that “there was no need to rush anything.” Narongsak himself told me later that he’d been averaging less than two hours of sleep a night, and he truthfully told reporters that day that “no one has rested since day one.” But then he added: “We hope that the telephone line will be completely installed by tonight. There’s nothing to be concerned about for the moment.” Except there really was. Because that telephone line would never be completed, much less in a few hours, and the risks to the boys were piling up.
U.S. Air Force meteorologists were feeding Anderson and his team the latest weather data. It didn’t look good. The satellite map showed what looked like a string of cotton balls headed their way: monsoons. The forecasts had been unreliable thus far, but monsoons can easily dump nearly a foot of rain a day, and everyone knew significant rainfall of even a few inches would force them to suspend operations. The pumps were barely holding out as it was. So Anderson started doing calculations: a meal a day for seventeen people for more than three months. Somehow he’d need to build a cache of eighteen hundred meals over the next ten days if the boys were not going to starve to death during the monsoons.
The Americans knew they would need more divers if any attempt at resupply was going to work. Feeling this urgency, they asked the Thai SEALs to start calling in the cavalry—any experienced cave diver. “Okay, call them in” was the response. And they scoured the camp for skilled divers among the many hundreds of personnel there.
After the commotion of the near drowning on July 4, the Americans walked over to the Euro-divers, the group of European expats living in Thailand who’d come to replace Ruengrit and Reymenants’s team. “Euro-divers” was a bit of a misnomer, but it stuck. This group consisted of Danes Ivan Karadzic and Claus Rasmussen, German Nick Vollmar, Finn Mikko Paasi, and Canadian Erik Brown. They were a motley bunch. Karadzic, Rasmussen, and Paasi are in their mid forties. Paasi and Brown had shoulder-length dreadlocks. Rasmussen, Brown, and Karadzic had arrived days earlier, but were told by the SEALs to sit and wait for an assignment. After the Reymenants episode, the SEALs, not wanting to agitate the Brits and unsure how to utilize the Euro-divers, ended up essentially benching them. For two days, until the American team’s Captain Mitch Torrel started chatting them up, the Euro-divers sat there in their wet suits, ready to dive, while the action unfolded around them.
Captain Torrel asked for their CVs, saying simply, “We need divers.” The American then began peppering them with questions: What kind of gas would they need? What kind of gear did they use? And as Karadzic remembers it, “they asked us again and again, almost as if they couldn’t believe us, if we were actually willing to go in.” They were.
Rasmussen, an instructor well known inside the insular cave-diving world, was their leader. He said the Aussies and the Americans “were trying to figure out what the hell was going on and what do we do now.” Rasmussen and Torrel, a pillar of a man who’d been a standout on the Air Force hockey team, got to talking. Rasmussen told him, “The Thai SEALs are following stupid procedures. Maybe they should use people like us if they are trying to do this right.” To Torrel that made sense. By the end of that day, Major Hodges and his team had officially recruited them; henceforth they would be attached to the U.S. Air Force team.
On that evening of Wednesday, July 4, as the reporters trailed off, the workers at the food trucks started to bag and refrigerate the day’s mounds of rice, and mosquitoes began to feast on the bounty of humans still there, Rasmussen sat in on his first meeting at headquarters with the Americans, the Aussies, and the Brits. Stanton and Vollanthen had just returned from delivering the food and taking those oxygen-level readings in the cave.
The mood was grim, recalled Rasmussen. “Most of us sitting there were talking on a non-bullshit level, and I was very much agreeing with the Brits. Since the Aussies and Americans only had one guy who was cave trained, we needed more divers. So we started coordinating what we could feasibly do.”
Because of the weather forecast, the MRE resupply became a focus. Anderson figured he could get his hands on eighteen hundred MREs pretty easily. After all, the U.S. Air Force was sparing no expense on this mission—when a few days earlier Hodges and Anderson asked for that confined-space air-quality meter, the Air Force flew the palm-size gizmo and some extra gear in a C-130—a plane big enough to carry a tank. The question was less whether he could get the MREs to the Thai cave in time, and more whether he could get the MREs to the boys in the cave.
Stanton and Vollanthen had ferried in more than a hundred meals on their mission that day, and to those who saw them that night it was clear the trip had utterly exhausted some of the most fit and skilled divers in the world. Each meal weighed about half a pound. There were only a few divers in the world capable of completing the difficult journey, and supplying the boys would require about twenty trips—a hell of a lot of dives. The delivery divers would have to be completely self-sufficient—there were very few emergency tanks stockpiled beyond the sump after Chamber Three. There was also the risk that inexperienced cave divers brought in as “meal mules” could end up stranded with the boys and in need of rescue themselves—making more mouths to feed and more lungs to consume the limited oxygen.
The math just didn’t work. There would be no way of fully supplying the boys before the rains. Even as the Thais plodded on with the oxygen line, the foreign teams understood that it would never reach the boys in time, nor would the massive resupply of MREs. Hodges and Anderson concluded that they had no choice but to scrap the resupply. They had much less time than they thought. There was also some concern among the rescuers that if those eighteen hundred meals
arrived, the Thai authorities would press them into delivering them to the boys, risks be damned. Quietly, the teams decided not to formally request those extra meals. All this, plus their fatigue, contributed to the Brits’ overwhelming pessimism about a resupply mission.
Late that night the Americans, along with Stanton and Vollanthen and the Euro-divers, started throwing around ideas for a possible rescue dive. Assuming for the moment that a dive rescue was a necessity, they thought they could scrounge up thirteen divers who had the skill to actually get to the boys and bring them back. They debated doing it in a single day, the so-called grand-slam option: a long convoy of divers and their charges, one diver per boy. Given the boys’ weakness, the unpredictable cave conditions, and the new divers’ unfamiliarity with its jagged, seemingly booby-trapped labyrinths, the team calculated an 80-percent fatality rate—which would likely mean ten dead children. That attrition rate presented additional pitfalls: most of the Euro-divers were parents, some of whom, like Rasmussen, were bringing up children in Thailand—would they, as Rasmussen put it, “be willing to bring out dead kids, given that we live in Thailand?” For the right plan, Rasmussen answered, “I told them I was willing to do it.” It was a remarkably courageous decision for the fathers in the group, who possibly faced not only a lifetime of guilt but also the wrath of an unpredictable military junta.
Vollanthen is also a father, and he quietly told Anderson that he didn’t know if he could deal with the guilt of having a hand in the deaths of children—even if it came in the process of trying to save them. The Americans told him, “John, you don’t have to do this, you’re just a volunteer. We understand that. But wouldn’t you want to know that you tried and gave it your best shot? Because if you and Rick don’t lead this mission, you can pretty much guarantee that they are all dead if you leave.” It was enormous pressure, but it was likely all true as well. Vollanthen and Stanton stayed, and committed themselves to saving however many kids they could. But it would have to be done under very specific conditions.