The Boys in the Cave

by Matt Gutman

  Coach Ek canvassed his boys.

  “We might have to swim,” he said. “You could get wet and cold.”

  Tee, the captain, volunteered to go in first. Gingerly he went out into the coffee-dark water.

  “Coach, it’s not really that deep,” he called out. A few moments later, everyone heard him say, “I got to a sandbank, you can all come.”

  To ford this water, the smaller boys like Mark and Titan hitched a ride on the bigger boys’ backs. A short time later they finally reached the Underwater City, where the boys poked around for a few minutes. But there wasn’t that much to see. Coach Ek checked his watch—there was no more time for exploring today; it was time to turn back.

  The boys were jubilant; for most this was the kind of adventure they had hoped for. Adul, the refugee from Myanmar, who sang for his church choir, played guitar, and craved any new experience, loved it—the otherworldliness of this place, the sense that they were exploring new territory, and the camaraderie. Each boy likely also daydreamed about activities that would follow the little expedition—Night’s birthday bash, dinner with the family, maybe a little World Cup viewing. Though they might not have realized it, they had covered the bulk of the cave in excellent time—better than that of some experienced cavers.

  But as they marched back home toward the cave’s entrance, just a short distance before the T-junction they encountered another body of water. They heard it rushing before they saw it.

  “Coach, we found water!” yelled one of the players.

  “Are we lost?” shouted another.

  Then their flashlight beams bounced off what seemed like a mirage—black water, and a lot of it. It was disorienting. Had they not just come from water about a mile back? A pooling body of water like that was a clear landmark. And it had not been there when they first came through. Coach Ek stopped to think for a minute. He’d been in the cave many times. There was no way they could be lost.

  “There’s only one path, we aren’t lost!” he called to his boys.

  Maybe not lost, but certainly stuck. This looked deeper and was moving faster than any of the stagnant water they had crossed so far. So the coach pulled a length of rope from his bag. He tied it around his waist and instructed three of the bigger boys, Night, Adul, and Tee, “If I yank the rope twice, pull me back. If I don’t pull it, I made it out and you can come.”

  He started swimming on the surface and then dove down. He swam by touch rather than sight. Even if he’d had a waterproof light, the water was so laden with silt, he wouldn’t have seen much anyway. He felt the larger rocks and the sandy bottom beside them. He wondered if he could dig his way out, unplug a hole. But the darkness and the depth and the tugging current had defeated him. He yanked twice. Night felt panic surge up inside of him as he helped haul in his coach. His heart raced so fast he could feel the rhythmic thumping in his ears.

  There was no way out. They could only retreat.

  It was now about 5 P.M. Thirteen-year-old Mark started getting nervous. Not about being marooned in this watery wasteland, but because his mother would scold him for being late. Night had to be home for his party, and Titan had exams the next day. Silently, they all knew none of this was happening. The boys’ questions started becoming more shrill.

  “Coach, how are we going to get out?”

  “Another way,” he responded.

  He suggested they start digging, so the thirteen scrambled to find rocks to use as tools and started carving out a channel to divert the water.

  An hour or so later, Tee sidled over to Coach Ek and whispered that they should probably find a place to bed down for the night. They’d been in the cave for hours. After the practice, the ride to the cave, and their nearly five hours inside, the boys were sapped. They hadn’t eaten in hours and most everyone was scared. Coach Ek was desperately afraid they would panic, so he told them something he didn’t believe himself, announcing that the water was likely a tidal phenomenon and would probably recede by morning.

  “You’ll see,” he promised them. “Why don’t we find a place to sleep,” he suggested.

  They headed back to the softer sand of Pattaya Beach, a couple of hundred yards from the T-junction, as the water continued to pile up. He gathered the boys to pray before they clumped together for sleep. The low chants were his nightly practice, and he was sure it would soothe them as well as himself. It did temporarily distract them, but when the chants stopped it was the sound of the boys’ sobs that echoed off the cave walls.

  Chapter Three

  “How can I sleep when my son is inside?”

  Coach Nok was just sitting down to dinner when his phone began lighting up.

  “Where are the boys?” a mother asked the Wild Boars’ head coach.

  “Why isn’t Night home?”

  “Are you still practicing?”

  At this point Nok was mostly irritated, because, as he would insist in the weeks and months following, he had no idea of the boys’ plans to go into the cave. Even though the cave is less than two miles from his soccer pitch, Coach Nok had never been beyond its main threshold—a well-traveled chamber which could easily fit a 747. The hole in the mountain is big enough for a little daylight to muscle its way into most of that first chamber. Still, Nok was never tempted to go farther into the narrowing passages beyond that nearly two-hundred-yard-long room—it was too dark, the purchase too slippery, too many spirits to tangle with.

  Nok started calling the other boys in the soccer team’s bike group, soon connecting with a thirteen-year-old boy named Queue. With a set of jug ears and a short brush of black hair that hung forward slightly over his forehead, Queue was on the Wild Boars and went to school with several of them as well. Their school, called Mae Sai Prasitsart, with a student body of twenty-eight hundred, looks more like a colonial military campus than a high school. The boys wear traditional khaki shorts with high socks and matching blouses topped with maroon epaulets. The school’s entrance gives way to a concrete courtyard about the size of a college quad. In front is a raised platform centered around a towering Thai flag, where the school provost in military uniform addresses the kids every morning. The children sit cross-legged on the concrete in perfectly lined rows as he speaks to them and then leads them on a short meditation. Behind its main buildings there is a little pond and garden, which students tend as part of their ecology curriculum. The rows of two-story, lima-bean-colored buildings house classrooms with modern whiteboards, neat rows of newly purchased writing desks, and uniformed teachers.

  The students of Prasitsart are mostly good, middle-class kids attending a good school—the future of little towns like Mae Sai. Their families are proud Thais, the kind of people who hang framed portraits of the king and queen in their living rooms along with photos of graduation ceremonies and family trips to the capital city of Bangkok. As is perhaps universal for middle-class families everywhere, the parents of the soccer players had become satellites orbiting their children. Most of them had intentionally kept their families small, so they could devote more time and resources to each child. Almost all of the boys were enrolled in after-school programs for extra help in English or math or science. All of the boys studied at least four languages, reflecting the region’s geopolitics: Thai, Burmese, Mandarin, and English.* Under the yoke of demanding parents they were forced to study hard, but they were also rewarded with luxuries many boys in Thailand couldn’t afford: Nike soccer cleats, video games, satellite TV, and proper cycling equipment, which for some included clip-in cycling shoes.

  As thirteen-year-old Queue spoke to Coach Nok on the phone, the boy informed his coach of the plan to bike to the cave. Queue had missed practice that day because he had stayed up late the night before watching the World Cup; however, because he was on the Facebook group with the other team members he knew where the kids were going. Queue said that Coach Ek had taken the boys to the cave on multiple occasions. They loved it. Queue had been on four of those jaunts to the cave in the past year. Typically, he
said, they would spend five or six hours exploring, going as fast as they could before turning back. They’d bring the kind of cheap LED flashlights sold in the markets lining Mae Sai’s main road. Those flashlights are big business, since power outages are daily occurrences and many locals conserve electricity or lack it entirely.

  When the boys got as far as they dared, sometimes they’d scribble their names on the walls. The cave was the domain of bats and obsidian blackness, but they were always armed with flashlights, maybe some snacks, and the reassuring presence of Coach Ek.

  For some reason, though, after his first trip to the cave, Queue didn’t tell his parents about their adventures. Like the rest of the boys, he didn’t feel it was necessary. And apparently neither did Coach Ek. Because not only were parents unaware, Coach Nok insists his assistant never told him about the trips either.

  It didn’t take long for information from boys like Queue to filter through family members and up to Coach Nok: the boys had ridden their bikes to the cave.

  The families knew where it was. Everyone did. There’s not a whole lot to do in Mae Sai. There are no movie theaters, there’s no mall (though there is a giant Tesco store—the British version of a Walmart Superstore). So folks would sometimes head up the dirt track winding past the Sleeping Princess’s soaring limestone skirt toward the cave. Once a month or so, Boy Scouts from around the world would camp in a manicured field a few yards from the trailhead that led up to the cave. On weekends a handful of families from all over Chiang Rai province would picnic in a grassy area shaded by the canopy of towering dipterocarp oak trees. The far-off scent of sandalwood—burned as an offering for the Sleeping Princess—mingled with the smell of the visitors’ spicy “krap kao” pork. But the poorer farmers who lived in the flimsy, tin-roofed concrete homes in the villages that line the route to the cave would rarely if ever go much beyond the cave’s threshold. Local folklore discouraged such treks—it wasn’t worth mingling with the cave’s spirits, for whom the community had built and maintained a series of shrines just outside the cave. Anyway, they didn’t need to go in. The cave site’s ancient oaks and outside trails provided natural air-conditioning, beauty, and, for those who sought it, privacy.

  On June 23, though, those picnic areas weren’t quiet; instead, there was a jet-engine roar of rain—it was the start of monsoon season. Fat drops pinged off corrugated roofs, creating a deafening world of white noise that forces people outside to shout at each other in order to be heard.

  The monsoons are a part of life in Southeast Asia, and everyone who has lived through a wet season there knows what to expect. Monsoon systems build in the equatorial Pacific in late April and May; by June they begin crashing into Southeast Asia regularly. Tropical low-pressure systems can squat over the region for weeks. But the rain, especially from May through July, is not constant. The sun often pokes through, squeezing out sky-spanning rainbows. The rains provide a respite from the sapping heat, but more important, much of the local agriculture depends on the wet season—particularly the rice farmers whose paddies line Route 1 and the fields beyond. In late summer you see hunched figures mechanically dipping and planting the next crop.

  However, the 2018 rainfall through mid-June had been far above average. In fact, according to the Thai Meteorological Department, Thailand had been pelted with about three feet of rain in the early part of 2018, more than a foot higher than the average rainfall for that time of year. And just days before the boys went into the cave, a low-pressure system stalled over parts of Vietnam, dumping “heavy to very heavy rain,” according to the meteorological records. Those rains failed to trigger the flash floods that are so typical in that part of Thailand—when streets and villages are swallowed by water that in a day or so always seems to just disappear—so nobody paid much attention. The boys could not have known that the heavier-than-usual rain soaking the Sleeping Princess in the previous months had caused the mountain to become more waterlogged than normal for that time of year.

  The rains made a cave that was typically accessible to amateur cavers in the dry season completely impenetrable in the wet season. The cave complex is a series of tunnels connected by a main channel in the rough shape of a letter T. By monsoon season, the channel that runs through the center of the cave’s main chamber is a swollen river pumping out millions of gallons a day, backing up and flooding the main chamber.

  The cave was first officially surveyed in 1986 and 1987 by two Frenchmen. The survey ends shortly after the Underwater City, and is punctuated by question marks denoting places that remained to be explored. In 2013, British caver Vern Unsworth plunged into the cave to improve the survey, unaware of the central role he would play five years later in the drama of the trapped boys. During his 2013 survey, he added some annotations, but not many. One of the tantalizing details that British caving guru Martin Ellis would note about this cave in his 2008 survey of Thailand’s longest and deepest caves was the existence of vertical shafts leading hundreds of yards upward from the main cave tunnel straight up to the forest above. And in a sentence that years later might have helped launch one thousand troops on a search deep into the jungle above the cave, his paper says: “Elsewhere in the system several high-level passages remain to be looked at. The existence of narrow avens [vertical shafts] opening into the main passage suggest the necessity of surface prospecting as the depth potential is over 600m. The strong air current indicates that there is a link with the surface.”

  A link to the surface that no one had been able to find.

  The calls kept coming. Parents were quickly comparing notes. None had heard from their boys for many hours. At around 8 P.M. Nok got a call from the park ranger in charge of Tham Luang. Damrong Hangpakdeeneeyom had been the head ranger at the cave for two years. The rangers used to take tourists on quick jaunts into the cave—never more than half a mile or so, about a tenth of its total length.

  That evening, as the parents were piecing together what happened to their boys, the head ranger got a call from one of his deputies. The deputy park ranger had found a Honda scooter on the road next to the cave and eleven bicycles stashed nearby. Since locals know not to be in the cave after dark, he figured it must be a group of tourists who had gone into the cave, so he decided to scope it out. The deputy grew more nervous as the sun dipped behind the Sleeping Princess. Maybe the tourists were lost. He went in alone, but quickly noticed the rising water. He rushed out to call his boss.

  By 6 P.M., the head ranger had arrived with another deputy. The three went in together, their light shoes squelching into the mud. They were armed with older flashlights that barely lit the hazards.

  This was technically “his” cave, but the head ranger had only been on station a couple of years, and lacking proper caving equipment, he was terrified of the glowering cave with its now frothing water. At fifty-one, he was the youngest of the trio, and looked it—with a carefully cultivated swoop of black hair and a plump midsection. They made good time to the third chamber, and squirmed past a nasty chokepoint that led into a 150-yard crawl which opens up into Chamber Four—big enough to fit a semitruck. And there on a sandbank they found what would trigger one of the biggest search-and-rescue operations in history: first, a pair of neatly placed black sneakers, then ten pairs of Adidas-style slides and several mud-caked backpacks. Inside the bags they found shirts from the Prasitsart school and soccer cleats.

  From the shirts and the size of the cleats they now understood that the bikes and scooter outside belonged to a group of children. The first ranger was now angry with himself for not having inspected the backpacks next to the bikes outside the cave earlier—had he known they were looking for local children they might have come better equipped. Also inside the backpacks were phones and Moo Pa soccer jerseys. They snapped pictures of the backpacks as proof of their find.

  With renewed urgency, the three had made for the big T-junction only a few hundred yards on—locals call it Sam Yek. This T-junction has a central bowl-shaped beachlike area. But
now that bowl, with the rough dimensions of a swimming pool, was completely filled. Water was rushing in on the right from the Monk’s Series. They assumed the boys must have gone to the left toward the Underwater City, but the entrance was completely blocked by a churning cauldron of water. That meant the boys must be trapped somewhere beyond that submerged tunnel. The water was only waist high, but moving fast, and since they had only been this far into the cave on a couple of occasions over their entire careers, they agreed they’d gathered enough evidence and made a hasty exit.

  Mae Sai is a small place. Head Ranger Damrong knew the head coach, so he called Coach Nok and then alerted the local police and district officials. By the time the rangers got out of the cave, a few of the parents and Coach Nok were already making their way up there anyway. They had half jogged into the deepening slop of mud, and it didn’t take long to find the evidence they dreaded: the boys’ bikes and soccer gear, parked right in front of the cave. But no boys. Dom’s mother saw her son’s soccer bag and bike and cried into the night, “My heart is gone!”

  “At this point I was stunned and shocked,” Coach Nok said. “Because I know that cave, and if the water starts rising the entrance [to the cave] is going to get completely blocked off.” Coach Nok and the parents ran into the cave, calling out the children’s names. The park rangers, alert to the danger, begged them to go no farther. So they shouted into the cave’s entrance: