The Boys in the Cave Read online

  Night’s parents wrote:

  “Dear Night. Dad and mom are waiting to arrange your birthday party. Please get out soon, and stay healthy.”

  Adul’s parents, Myanmar refugees camping out across from the cave with the rest of the parents, wrote: “Father and Mother want to see your face. Father and Mother pray for you and your friends, in order to see you soon. When you get out of the cave please thank all the rescuers. Trust in God.” (His parents, like Adul, are Baptists.)

  Titan’s mother urged the little guy to be strong.

  “I wait for you in front of the cave. You must make it! I believe in you. You can make it. I’m giving you moral support all the time. Love you so much. Your dad also misses you and loves so much.”

  Many of the parents urged their sons to tell Coach Ek that they were not angry with him.

  Almost every parent wrote a note. The single exception was Dom’s mother. She had gone back to help her parents with their amulet shop. The Thai SEAL who was compiling the letters noticed the absence of a letter to Dom, and instead of calling the mother to ask her to return to camp or to dictate a letter, she says he jotted one down himself: “Dom, your mother is busy with work today.” It had been a few days since Dom’s mother had wept, but the tears dribbled down again: the first words her precious son would hear from his mother after two weeks of hell were that she was “busy”? Dom’s grandmother, her elegant bangles clinking, held her daughter right there in the shop’s office amidst the boxes of goods, promising her she’d be able to make it up to him soon.

  All of the parents were devoted, but Dom’s mother was perhaps more than most. She is broad-shouldered and sturdy. She says that once the Thai SEALs arrived she’d started lifting water bottles and anything else in camp that resembled a weight she could lay her hands on “to train.” Maybe, just maybe, she thought, they would allow her to join the team going in to the boys. It’s not that she was delusional; she and nearly everyone else outside the cave woefully underestimated the treacherousness of the mile-and-a-half route to Chamber Nine.

  The boys and their coach, who had actually walked the now-submerged route, would have had little concept of how much more difficult it would be under water. They also had no notion of the “Cave Boys” hysteria that awaited them in the outside world, including the one thousand journalists just outside the mouth of the cave—and mercifully so.

  That is why when Coach Ek was asked to decide on the extraction order, he thought about it for some time and came up with a plan. To make the arrangement as fair as possible, he told the boys that those who lived the farthest away would go home first. This logic stemmed from the presence of the bikes that the SEALs told them were still leaning against the rail near the cave entrance. He figured that—weak as they were—all the boys would have to ride their bikes home (he was the only one with no bike waiting for him). So Coach Ek instructed the boys that upon exiting the cave they should ride to the nearest food stall or market (which weren’t far from the cave site) fill their bellies, and ride home. Dr. Bhak chuckled when he was informed of the plan. He had to admit that it definitely had a certain logic to it.

  He had grown remarkably fond of the boys and their coach in their days together. Their vigor returned after he got a few meals into them. To pass the time and relieve the boredom, the boys and the SEALs devised games of chess and checkers using clods of dirt and rocks as game pieces. Everybody but Titan played. The youngest boy was afraid of losing—perhaps rightfully so. They were playing against Thailand’s Alpha males, who were pathologically disinclined to lose—they weren’t going to throw a game just because these boys were stuck in the bowels of the earth.

  Still, the boys and their coach, as well as the Thai SEALs in the cave with them, were all shielded from the frightening truth: An elite athlete had already died in that rock-spiked warren of tunnels. If the boys made it out, they would be so heavily sedated that they would likely not wake up until they’d been ferried out of the cave, whisked away in an ambulance, and flown to a hospital. Blissfully unaware of all this, they continued to tuck into their dwindling supply of MREs and jabber about the proper Thai food they would eat when they walked out.

  After Harris and Challen completed the grinding swim back out of the cave complex, Harris told Stanton that he was unsure he would be able to take a boy out on his own if it became necessary—he was still too unfamiliar with this particular cave and the myriad ways it could conspire to kill or entrap a diver.

  As climber Mario Wild recalled, it was now clear that the American team had taken point in planning and organization; its message was clear: “We can do this.”

  A day earlier, on Friday, July 6, Wild had been reassigned from his duties vetting possible alternative cave entrances. The Americans wanted him and his team to look at something. They offered Vern as a guide. Wild had been toiling on the rescue for more than a week, but always fifteen hundred feet above the cave on the mountain. This was the Austrian caver and climber’s first time inside Tham Luang. “It was super beautiful. Amazing. There was this big mouth and there is a river flowing through it.” It took a fresh pair of eyes to see the wonders that this now-battered cave still offered.

  They splashed through the tunnels between the first and second chambers. Days earlier the Chinese diving team had drilled in a high line—like a towering clothesline—to deliver tanks up and down the steep embankments from Chamber Two to Chamber Three. It had worked exceptionally well, taking out spent tanks and zipping in new ones. It spared the Thai SEALs and soldiers from hiking up and down the sloppy mound separating the two chambers. To the right of that ramp was the drop of about forty-five feet that had so spooked Euro-diver Karadzic. But Anderson’s main rope expert, Sergeant Sean Hopper, needed to know if the high line could support something bulkier and substantially heavier than air tanks: children. Specifically, children on stretchers weighed down with oxygen tanks and some other hefty equipment.

  The Chiang Mai climbing team said, well, no. The bolts were not strong enough to support a rescue, not when human lives were at stake. So the next day—Saturday—Wild and Taw, who led the Chiang Mai rock climbing team into the cave on the first day of the rescue, were back inside. They used laser pens to determine the precise line of drop, careful to avoid the glass-sharp rocks that could easily sever climbing rope. With the help of the American team, they calculated the number of new bolts needed and the sturdiest parts of the rock in which to drill; within hours they’d bolted in a hardier system.

  During their work with USAF Special Tactics rope experts they noticed that the bundle of pump hoses dipping down the ramp in Chamber Three looked so much like a Slip ’N Slide, already greased with mud, that maybe it could be used for just that purpose. The climbing team reckoned that sliding the boys up on a pulley system might be easier than carrying them up. They also helped create a rope system that would assist in fishing the boys out of the sump at Chamber Three.

  The USAF team had created a sign-in sheet that required every person heading into the cave to check in and check out. There would be no more marooned workers and no more lookie-loos. If the initial days of the rescue were defined by heart and chaos, the planned rescue itself had to be defined by order and organization.

  The team was now fully assembled. Beyond Chamber Three there would be a total of only a baker’s dozen divers, upon whom the rescue would hinge: the two Australian doctors, Challen and Harris; the four lead British divers, plus three support divers they had enlisted—Jim Warny, Connor Roe, and Josh Bratchley; and the four Euro-divers (down one after Vollmar wrecked his equipment on that first dive and dropped out). The number of rescuers equaled the number of people to be rescued.

  But perhaps the biggest challenge would be communication—there would be none of it beyond Chamber Three. The only plausible way of dispatching messages would have been sending a runner (swimmer) from chamber to chamber—but that would risk head-on collisions underwater. So each actor in this saga had to memorize his role, timing, a
nd exact placement along the mile-long stage that was the route out.

  Anderson had a fix for that: “I was talking to the Thai SEALs. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘all this has been great on paper, but if we have the ability, is there a pool nearby here we can use? We have the kid-sized wet suits. We have the full face masks here. Like, let’s go try to run this to the ground and at least see how the equipment works. Let’s see if the full face masks seal. Let’s see if the wet suits fit.’  ” And with that, the SEALs scrambled to recruit a few local boys for a wet run at a local school pool that they kept top secret.

  That Saturday morning, with Harris and Challen doing their first test swim in the cave, the group in the practice pool was intentionally kept small: a few Thai SEALs, members of the U.S. team, the British divers, and a few of the Euro-divers. In the background of the videos shot that day you can hear the recreational swimmers at the pool chattering amiably among themselves. The rescuers still had to preserve secrecy; they didn’t want the media finding out—plus, they were still not even sure the mission had been approved.

  Some of the boys were on the Wild Boars team. The SEALs suited them up in the wet suits that would soon be worn by their trapped teammates, then eased them into the pool to practice fitting the boys with full face masks so that the seal would remain watertight even if jiggled slightly. They strapped oxygen tanks to the boys and had the swimmers cruise around the pool with them, trying different placements of the tanks. Part of what they had to learn how to do was to “sink the boys” so they wouldn’t start bobbing to the surface like underinflated pool floats. But an element of this exercise was also ass-covering, so the teams could tell their superiors that at the very least they had tried to the best of their abilities to do the closest possible approximation of live practice.

  Later that afternoon, as SEAL teams continued stockpiling tanks in the cave—including the special tanks filled with 80 percent oxygen designated solely for the boys and their coach—outside the cave there was movement. At a flattish area near the main headquarters, people climbed into cars, started them, and began a Tetris-like maneuver to repark them. They cleared an area about the size of a full basketball court. Huge green tarps were slung up like curtains across the hill to prevent reporters from peeking in—it was the start of a period of increased secrecy, which to us reporters on the scene was a clear tell that something was up.

  Inside the cordon, Anderson’s team and the SEALs carried up red plastic chairs and more than ten cases of water bottles. They began building a mock-up among the mud and tire tracks—a scale plan of what the rescue would look like. They used rope tied to chairs to map the route and each specific chamber. The distances between each chamber and the number of air tanks needed at each place were marked by letter-size paper in plastic sheets taped to the rope. Several hundred water bottles were placed beside chairs denoting chambers. Bottles with green tape represented air tanks, bottles with blue tape meant tanks with oxygen earmarked for the boys, and bottles with red tape stood for the empty tanks. In military parlance this is called an ROC, or Rehearsal of Concept, drill.

  This was a military operation whose primary operators would be civilians. The two worlds don’t often play nicely. It would be the first time all of the separate teams would work together. For several divers, English was not their first language. They had previously been working as independent cells, each dealing separately with the U.S. Special Tactics team, but now they were compelled to work together, sharing the same space. And at first, some of the divers considered the exercise ridiculous.

  “I thought it was only something the military did in the movies,” said Karadzic. “I couldn’t believe they actually do this. But [Major Hodges] told me it’s standard procedure.”

  For the next couple of hours the eleven foreign divers walked through the primitive diorama; after the first round, the titters faded. During his turn, each diver went through picking up water bottles placed on the left where they thought they would need a swap-out and placing a “spent bottle” to the right. They also practiced their timing—trying to avoid nasty collisions of groups of divers in confined spaces. Hodges and Anderson hoped it would quickly build the divers’ muscle memory. One of the most confusing pieces of choreography was sorting the two types of cylinders—air and oxygen—while keeping an accurate inventory of the number of full and empty tanks (and ensuring they were separated and marked) at each “gas station.”

  In their first walk-through they discovered a potentially disastrous flaw in the plan. Their designation of “chambers” was fluid. The only “chamber” designated on Vern Unsworth’s and Martin Ellis’s surveys of the cave was that hangar-size first chamber. The others, particularly those after Chamber Three, were basically arbitrary designations the SEALs and international teams had assigned to slightly larger spaces or openings along the cave’s main tunnel after the search-and-rescue operation began. The idea was to standardize everyone’s understanding of specific locations in the cave. For instance, all the divers knew how to pinpoint Chamber Five on a map. But put them in a walk-through of a simulated cave route, and that changed. This was partly because there were no landmarks demarcating those “chambers” in the cave itself; for instance, Chambers Eight and Seven were arbitrary terms for a stretch of mostly dry cave somewhere between Chamber Nine, where the boys were, and the T-Junction. The support divers who were to be staged at Chambers Five, Six, and Eight had different notions of where those rooms existed. They could be off by the equivalent of several city blocks—a continental divide in those darkened tunnels. If that happened during a rescue, it could lead to a fatality. So the team decided that Karadzic and the Euro-divers would move their “Chamber Five” one hundred yards closer to the T-junction than the spot they had originally scoped out. They also weren’t sure if the instructions to stage in a certain chamber meant, for instance, that Rasmussen and Passi should stage at the sumps between Chambers Seven and Eight, indicating the flooded areas that connect them or in the heart of the dry areas proper. The people who drew up the plans had never been that far into the cave—for that matter neither had the Euro-divers—which meant that even if they were right for the purposes of the drill, they had no idea whether that correlated to the actual reality in the cave. The drill was repeated until everyone felt more or less comfortable.

  The drill had a secondary purpose. Paasi, another ROC skeptic at first, soon realized that they were making a big physical statement, right on the doorstep of the headquarters brimming with generals and politicians. “We were showing everyone what we are planning, that it’s happening, and this is the way we are going to do it.”

  It succeeded in its intended effect. A crowd of curious officers and politicians gathered around. Within half an hour there were dozens of spectators, including the interior minister, who walked over to Hodges and Anderson and stood beside them. They asked him, “Do we have a green light?” He immediately answered: “Yes, absolutely. Move forward with this plan.”

  Some had emerged from the previous night’s meeting thinking the go-ahead had been granted; the operations planners, Hodges and Anderson, were not certain that was the case, and the interior minister’s blessing was the final authorization they’d been waiting for. And so, about twenty-two hours before they needed to launch the mission in order to have a chance of beating the rains, they had official permission from the highest levels.

  The media knew nothing and had little actual understanding of the remarkable efforts going on behind that green curtain separating our encampment and the screened-off operations area. So far there had been no leaks—in fact, even U.S. government officials working closely with the U.S. team were kept in the dark.

  That Saturday, July 7, the ABC News Pentagon Bureau broke a story about an internal U.S. military report listing many of the rescue mission’s details and intimating that it was close to happening. (This may have been another quiet measure to prod the Thai government into deciding on a rescue mission.) That afternoon I got a tip f
rom a confidential source that the dive operation was about to start. I was told the boys would be taken out by buddy teams, two divers to a boy. The operation would take three days. They would be wearing full face masks. The water levels had declined to the point that most of the way would be above water. The majority of this information dovetailed with the Pentagon report. But in trying to confirm the information that evening, I spoke to a trusted American official just hours before the mission was to begin. He waved me off—telling me a dive rescue would be “extremely unlikely,” a phrase he used multiple times. He called the diving rescue concept “extremely risky” (which was true), because rains could trap rescuers, creating an even bigger disaster (also true). He thought boring a relief shaft to the boys was still the option the Thai leadership would most likely choose and that the U.S. team was working in support of that. This was less than twelve hours before the mission was set to begin.*

  Further confusion came that Saturday afternoon. Walking up to the main journalist campsite outside the mouth of the cave, I ran into the Thai minister of tourism and sport, Weerasak Kowsurat, who had been involved with the early decision to call up the British divers but was not present at that Friday night meeting. We were standing on the mud-slicked road, just down from one of the many pumps shooting water from the cave into a canal. He told me he had just come back from testing an inflatable tube concept that might preclude the boys from having to “swim” out. He said he had tested it out himself, crawling into and out of a one-hundred-foot section in a nearby pool to test its durability. He listed a number of challenges, including keeping what would effectively be a mile-long sock-shaped bounce house inflated for long enough. “We had two blowers that provided air for one hundred feet, but that only proved that it would work over that distance.” I asked him somewhat incredulously if this meant a diving operation was precluded. “I have no idea. I do not have enough information about the conditions inside,” he said. He added that he had no idea how much time rescuers had to work with.