The Boys in the Cave Read online

  Shortly after 4 P.M., the WhatsApp icon on Major Hodges’s phone flashed red with a message from his captain, Mitch Torrel: “Hey, kid’s out and he’s safe.”

  With Anderson in charge of the granular planning, Hodges’s role was leading the mission and serving as its liaison to the U.S. command structure and the Thai government. He couldn’t afford misinformation. So just as he had when the boys were found, he asked for confirmation:

  “Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure? The kid’s breathing?”

  Response: “Yup. Kid is doin’ fine. He’s laying here. And we’re working to get him from the third chamber back to the second.”

  Hodges sat back. “It was huge,” he remembered. “Wow, our plan is actually working. We can do this. We knew once they got to the third chamber—it wasn’t as if they were home free at that point. But the hard part was done.”

  Note, who was the mission’s unwitting guinea pig, was definitely not home free. It took another hour for him to be hustled out of the cave, wrapped in the familiar package: full face mask, oxygen tank, fourteen-year-old boy, all enfolded in that plastic sled stretcher, with Mallinson carefully watching the whole way. Anderson decided to walk down the slope from headquarters and watch history being borne out of that wretched cave.

  At its mouth he met Mallinson, who told him, “Derek, they did a tank swap at [Chamber] Three, but you might want to check that gauge.” What Mallinson was getting at was that the boy had been on the same oxygen tank for about an hour. Those positive-pressure full face masks served the boys well in the water—pumping oxygen-rich air into their systems. However, if the air in the tank ran out the mask would become suffocating—like having a pillow pressed down on your face. Drawing a breath would require sucking air in hard through the rubber gauge at the sides of the mask. A focused and conscious person could do that, but not a comatose child.

  Anderson checked the tank’s pressure gauge, and his eyes bugged when he saw the needle was deep into the red, all the way at the last tick of the dial. The kid was minutes away from suffocating.

  Anderson grabbed the doctor accompanying the stretcher. “Hey, either this mask comes off right now, or he has to be up at this field hospital within the next five minutes.”

  The incident was sobering for Anderson: he now understood that even though the most perilous part of the rescue was the solo effort from Chamber Nine to Chamber Three, risk continued to accompany the boys all the way out. He realized that, given the complexity of the mission, until they were actually conscious and stabilized in the field hospital set up at camp they were not out of harm’s way.

  The next two boys, Tern and Nick, came out without any problems; Stanton, meanwhile, was bringing up the rear with the pneumonic boy—Night, the boy Dr. Harris expected to lose after that close call at Chamber Eight. At Chamber Five, alongside Karadzic and Brown, Stanton gave the boy another shot—his fourth. With Night comatose again, Stanton gathered himself for the trickiest part of the dive just after Chamber Four—the vertical line trap just before the last stretch of the dive—the one all the divers considered the most challenging. At this spot the guideline shot straight up and divers had to memorize both its location and the choreography of slipping through. Visibility was six inches, so Stanton had no landmarks to indicate he was nearing the trap. He had been caught in that spot on previous dives. “You can feel on the line that it’s going to somewhere impossible. It’s hard to find the right slot to get through.”

  He described it as picking your way blindfolded through a large room that has furniture strewn everywhere. There is a rope through the room, but it’s entangled in the stubby legs of a couch, or around the upended back of a chair. You have to feel your way around those dead ends while never letting go of the rope. Feeling one’s way is made more difficult when one doesn’t have a hand to spare—he was holding both the line and the boy. Stanton knew he was tethered to the boy, and at times he would simply place him low on the floor of the tunnel, resting on his oxygen cylinder, as the diver rummaged around to find the exit. Finally he found it, stuffed Night through, and steadily kicked the last 150 yards to Chamber Three.

  The kid sure felt lifeless in Stanton’s hands. There was not a single discernible sign of life from Night. The line shook, and U.S. pararescueman Ken O’Brien called out, “Fish on!” Stanton pushed Night out ahead of him. As O’Brien hauled him out, Stanton shouted, “Is he alive!?” The chamber went silent once again as O’Brien placed his ear to the boy’s chest, listened for a moment, then pumped out a thumbs-up: “He’s alive!” After the hour-long obstacle course with the ropes and the stretcher relay, he would at least be in an ambulance, if not necessarily home free.

  Even when the boys reached the ambulances, Anderson reminded the medics to maintain vigilance. The equipment on the comatose figures had to be carefully removed, so that it could be used again. There weren’t enough suits for all the boys, and only four masks. Over the previous few days, donors from dive shops and rescue organizations from around the world sent hundreds of full face masks—normally costing about eight hundred dollars each—to the camp. Not one of them was a positive-pressure mask. So, among the thousands of rescuers and volunteers and the millions of dollars’ worth of equipment stockpiled, there were only four masks that they knew would work—all of them brought by the U.S. Special Ops team. That meant they had to be gingerly removed once the boys were taken out of those flexible stretchers and loaded into an ambulance. More than once, Anderson recalls, he had to grab a doctor’s arm to prevent him from cutting into a suit or a mask’s rubber straps.

  I was preparing to go live for Good Morning America at the crossroads about four hundred yards from the mouth of the cave when emergency lights from a vehicle began reflecting off the trees in the twilight. Police or an ambulance? we wondered. Moments later we saw it, rolling unhurried down the rutted road—there were lights, and then a brief scream of sirens. Over the hours we had been providing wall-to-wall coverage, there had been very little communication with the media. We had watched ambulances come and go, so we knew something was happening when police and soldiers corralled the press in a pineapple field. We knew the rescue had started and had been alerted it would take eight to ten hours, but were ignorant of its outcome. There were cheers as the ambulance sped by; most of the journalists and rubberneckers who’d come out to watch were reflexively elated, but there was no way to tell if the ambulance was serving as a mobile doctor’s office or a hearse. But pretty soon someone believed to be in Chamber Three began leaking information to the media. There were four boys, they were all out, they were all alive. It would take days for the world to learn about the use of sedation and some of the close calls.

  And while the world was just waking up to the incredible feat that these divers had accomplished, the rescuers were busy preparing to dive four more boys to safety.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Complacency Gap

  The system was untried, unorthodox, and yet somehow successful. Still, there was room for improvement.

  Mallinson had been the first diver out, but he didn’t stop working. While the rest of his team had been threading its way through the tunnel with the last of the boys, he worked on preparing gear for the next day’s dive—tanks, regulators, and the boys’ gear. None of them could stop that night—there was homework to do. The dozens of empty tanks had to be refilled with air and replaced, the ropes had to be tensioned.

  And there were other systemic issues to talk about. Mallinson told Anderson they needed a stretcher at the dry area after Chamber Eight and another person to help Dr. Challen. Two men simply could not haul the boys in the alien dark for hundreds of yards—it was dangerously exhausting. Anderson had to recalculate the number of oxygen tanks for the boys—they clearly needed more of them between Chamber Three and the mouth of the cave. And there was something more important, Anderson told the group, which included the Thai Navy SEALs, the Chinese team, and the Chiang Mai climbing team: “Everybody needs to
take a step back, relax, take a deep breath. Once [the boys] come out, they’re still alive and breathing, you have to change their tanks. We’ll systematically assess them, put blankets on them. There’s no reason to be panicking.”

  He was specifically referring to some of the rescuers in Chambers Two and Three who’d teetered on the edge of nervous breakdown each time a boy was brought through, then crowded around as if to verify that the boys were breathing and snapped pictures. From now on, Anderson informed them, no one was allowed to leave their station until the last boys were out. And there was one more thing: they needed to know the kids’ names, needed to account for who was leaving. They decided the divers needed to talk to the boys and write nicknames on their wrists with indelible marker.

  There were also challenges for the newly deputized diver anesthesiologists. That night, Sunday, July 8, Karadzic felt ill. He said he had a fever and the camp doctor benched him. Given that everybody was burnt out already, Stanton’s take was that the real source of the mystery illness was Karadzic’s understandable discomfort with administering sedatives to mumbling, nearly comatose kids. He lived and worked in Thailand, and knew what a mistake would likely cost him. Regardless of whether it was because of that or because he really was sick, Karadzic sat out the next two days.

  Adding to the stress of administering the ketamine were the dose sizes themselves. The divers were given a smaller dose for the smaller boys and a bigger dose for the bigger ones. But with the kids in wet suits, their hands bound, it was hard to tell who was big and who was little, particularly with the thirteen-to- fourteen-year-olds. It made for some agonizing decision-making and fumbling for syringes in the photon-free dark. Most understood enough to know that what Dr. Harris had told them about their inability to overdose the boys was not entirely accurate when dealing with emaciated children. So the team asked Harris to just provide them with a single generic dose to simplify the decision-making process.

  Whether it was because of these adjustments or because the team had already been through the process once, the most memorable thing about the next round of rescues on the following day, Monday, July 9, was that none of the divers remembers much about it. It went remarkably smoothly. Harris told the remaining eight boys and their coach that their rescued teammates were safe and recovering in a hospital. As soon as the boys padded down the slope to him at the waterline with the help of the SEALs, Harris began chirping at them in his Aussie accent, flashing his gap-toothed grin, knowing full well that they wouldn’t understand him. His goal was keeping things light in that creepy place. There’s a term medics use for it: psychological first aid. So Dr. Harris deployed his Wet Mules brand of humor. One time, as he buried one needle, then the other, into a boy’s legs, he quipped to no one in particular, “Oy betcha didn’t see THET one coming, then.”

  They didn’t. The shot of ketamine was nearly painless, but the boys seemed to suffer more with the atropine, the drug that would ensure they didn’t choke on their own saliva or mucus. They winced, they groaned, but not a single boy cried.

  On that second day, Nick, Adul, Biw, and Dom were brought out without a single incident or scare. The ambulances crunched over the gravel, moving away from the Tham Luang cave bound for the soccer field where the boys had last scrimmaged two weeks earlier. Their pitch had been turned into a helicopter landing zone, now home to two Russian-built Mi-17 transport helicopters. Within minutes they were in a hospital in Chiang Rai. It seemed breathtakingly simple.

  On their Facebook page that evening, the Thai Navy SEALs posted “8 boys out in 2 days—Hooyah! (The unit’s rallying cry).” It was promptly commented on by Mark Zuckerberg himself: “From everyone at Facebook—your bravery has been amazing and congratulations on the successful rescue of eight Wild Boars. Best of luck as you work to get the remaining four players and their coach to safety.” Eight dives, eight boys, eight successful rescues. The rescuers, who had initially calculated only one of those original eight would survive, were now eight for eight.

  About ninety minutes after Dom, the eighth boy rescued, was pulled out that day, Thailand’s prime minister and junta leader, retired general Prayut Chan-o-cha, rumbled to the site in his motorcade. First, the prime minister, followed by his entourage, marched to the SEAL tents beside the cave. The old infantryman led the SEALs in a few rounds of “Hooyah!” Watching from a distance was American climber Josh Morris—who was now acting as de facto liaison between the Thai government and the foreign divers after his deft handling of that climactic meeting with the interior minister two days prior. He would be assigned to translate for the prime minister when he later met the foreign divers, but as he watched the prime minister he thought to himself, These men needed this boost. What a great thing for them.

  After meeting with the SEALs, the prime minister followed Morris and others, making a beeline for the four-pole tent where the British team was tucking into some of the noodles and green papaya salads prepared by the camp kitchens. The man who had taken power in a coup in 2014 arrived holding a large box of snacks for the divers, and with an arched eyebrow began reading the labels: “Ah, these are new coconut snacks in Thailand.”

  That broke the ice.

  There was little formality, aside from a few handshakes and a couple of snapshots. The prime minister gamely took a seat on one of the plastic chairs encrusted with a film of cave junk; surveying the table, he congratulated them on the eight successful rescues, but added that the job was not complete, so “no drinking tonight, no drinking yet!”

  The prime minister then asked if there was anything he could do for them.

  “Yeah,” said Stanton, glancing at Vern, who had to leave the country after each sixty-day visit on his tourist visa. “Get Vern a [permanent] visa!” They all had a laugh at his cheekiness.

  By then the prime minister had been introduced to every member of the group—including Vern’s life partner, Tik—and so he quipped, “Vern, why don’t you just marry Tik and then you can have a visa.” He then reached into his breast pocket for a pen, suggesting that he would officiate the union right there. Vern called out, “No, not yet!” Now they roared with laughter.

  By now the rescuers were feeling really good and quite comfortable with the prime minister; Vollanthen pointed at the two Tourist Police officers who had been assigned to be their minders-cum-shadows. “These two”—he jabbed a finger in the direction of the uniformed men, whose eyes so widened in anticipatory terror that Stanton was worried “they might shit themselves.” “These two,” Vollanthen went on, “have been excellent to us, they deserve recognition.” Again, peals of self-congratulatory laughter. The two lead British divers had become quite close with their escorts, who also served as their aides-de-camp, even helping prepare their gear and stuffing those MREs into the dry bags for the boys a few days earlier. As the prime minister left, he gave Vern a friendly smack on the belly and a wink, as if to say, “Marry the girl,” and walked off into the night.

  The scene was lighthearted and congratulatory, which made Hodges and Anderson all the more nervous. In the military, said Anderson, “we always reminded ourselves that after a success, there’s a huge gap for complacency. And complacency always works its way in.”

  Just after the completion of that second day’s rescues, Anderson was chatting with Harris. “Doc, you know, what are your thoughts? Eight are out. There are five left.”

  “Man, this has never been done before,” Harris answered. “This is actually working. We’re actually succeeding at mission impossible.” And then he added, “I was fighting the urge to get a little prideful.” Harris possessed the self-awareness to detect the blaring alarm of complacency and to know that it often leads to failure. Anderson wanted to ensure that everyone was aware of it, so he gathered the team that night and said: “Hey, we are not done until all thirteen are outta the cave, and all four navy SEALs are out.”

  He had reason to be nervous. The forecast overnight—ahead of the third day of rescues—was for more rain, pos
sibly a couple of inches. The U.S. planners had decided they would suspend the next day’s rescue if the rainfall topped fifteen millimeters (about two-thirds of an inch) an hour. Anything above that mark would likely overwhelm the pumps inside the cave and Thanet’s dam above the Monk’s Series. And if that happened there was no telling how long they might have to leave the remaining boys, the coach, and the four SEALs in there. That fear was compounded by the understanding that the rescue divers could not camp outside the cave indefinitely: Vollanthen and Stanton had already been there nearly two weeks, and they and the other eleven rescue divers eventually had to return to their jobs and families. But Anderson needn’t have said anything. Many of the divers wore good humor as a mask hiding their own private worries.

  “Now the tables had turned,” said Chris Jewell. “Now, actually, the expectation was that we would get them all out. So suddenly the chance of losing a single child would be catastrophic, and the pressure on us individually increased at that point.”

  It was a stunning turnabout from forty-eight hours earlier, when they’d thought getting just a couple of the boys out alive would be a “success.” They’d become victims of their own skill, with the increased weight of expectation upon them. Now Stanton started wondering what would happen if they lost a single child. “There was so much pressure after that second day. Everyone’s expectations reset for 100-percent success. If there had been [one who died], would the mission have been seen as a failure?”

  The Thai prime minister actually had one other person to meet that night, the tech titan and founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company, Elon Musk. Six days earlier, on the afternoon of Tuesday, July 3, a Twitter user based in Swaziland, a tiny African nation squashed between South Africa and Mozambique, politely tweeted at Elon Musk: