The Boys in the Cave

by Matt Gutman

  Even though Vern knew there was a passage to the left, they could not see it. The diver came back after a few minutes, saying he had found only rock walls and mud. Vern wondered if the mud in the water had clogged the entrance to the passage.

  The pump ran on a diesel engine. And while it seemed to siphon off a decent amount of water, it was also coughing out a cloud of fumes and carbon monoxide. The men carved little seats into the bank and waited. Minutes later the futility and the fumes drove them all out again.

  Like a failed siege of a medieval city, wave after wave of rescuers threw themselves against the cave, its water, and its walls. Increasingly bigger military units were called up for the assault.

  Later that evening a contingent of the Thirty-seventh Military District Unit based in nearby Chiang Rai was dispatched to the cave, under the command of Colonel Singhanat Losuya—who would play a key role later on in this saga. But that night, his chief concern was the parents. They were gathered at the mouth of the cave, weeping. As his team went in, they kept asking, “Colonel, can you find our boys? Where are they?”

  In the hierarchical culture of Thailand, rank and seniority are strictly observed, and the parents kept a respectful distance from the colonel. As the father of two boys nearly the same age as the boys in the cave, the colonel was moved, but he had no answers for them. His team was threading its way in, and at that point there was no way to communicate with them. Still, the arrival of the military frightened the parents. In the ranger hut where they fled from the rains they asked why they needed the military, was it that bad inside? Gently, the rangers told them the water was certainly something they could not contend with given the limitations of their training, and assured them the soldiers of the 37th would find their boys.

  The colonel’s first team in was comprised of nine soldiers and one officer—Captain Padcharapon Sukpang. This officer also had two district officials and a park ranger with him. The captain, a career soldier of over twenty years, kept a diary and faithfully logged his missions. He said his little group had no trouble making it to Chamber Three. It was there that they began to notice the water rising everywhere.

  They forged onward. The captain is in his fifties, but remains an athlete. He has a high-and-tight haircut and wears an even tighter uniform, even when the heat makes it hard to breathe in Mae Sai. But he didn’t mind getting that uniform dirty when it mattered. Which is good, because by the time they exited Chamber Three and began the 150-yard crawl onward, he was lathered in mud.

  The water was now seeping from the ceiling, as if the cave had broken out in a massive sweat. It was pooling on the floors, which dip lower on the sides, like a natural drainage ditch. When the group was a few yards away from the T-junction, they began smelling the fumes from Vern and the climbing team’s aborted pumping operation. The captain noticed a sandbag near the T-junction’s bowl and thought that using it was like trying to use a pebble to dam a river. One of his men waded out into the water—now about five feet deep. They also didn’t have the proper equipment so they turned back (a trend, at that point in the search).

  But before heading out they figured they could at least measure the speed of the water. They filled a water bottle a third of the way, capped it, and chucked it into the stream. They calculated it sped south toward Pattaya Beach at about twenty miles an hour, a startling speed given that they were inside a cave. And as they turned around to leave the captain spotted something. Names on the muddy cave wall. He showed me pictures of them. Some appeared to have been drawn with a finger in the mud-encrusted walls. Others seemed to have been carved with a tool or stick. He believed they matched the names of the missing boys—one of the names still legible was Pong. There was also an arrow, he said, pointing south toward Pattaya Beach.* The captain rushed out of the cave to inform his commander. It played big in the local papers the next morning, when a trickle of reporters and local TV outlets started to snoop around, wondering where the boys were.

  There were now a hundred people populating the little campground outside the mouth of the cave—many of them wearing thin, brightly colored plastic ponchos against the rain. The picnic area’s grass started giving way to mud under the ceaseless rain and the countless footsteps of nervous parents, volunteers, and newly arriving troops. Noting the repeated failures of the rescuers, the parents started making offerings to the cave spirits—incense and fruit juices. The spirit of the Sleeping Princess had been dormant for so long that no one could understand if or why the spirit had become angry. Finally the parents succumbed to fatigue and the entreaties of the park rangers. They collapsed onto thin mats on the floor of one of the ranger huts and tried to sleep as the mosquitos feasted on them.

  As Vern left the cave complex that night of June 24, he had two distinct realizations. The first was that his beloved cave had turned on him. It had become a monster that repulsed even its most faithful benefactor. The second was equally troubling: It could have happened to me. The Saturday the boys disappeared he’d extended his visa in order to explore the cave. He had planned to go in on Sunday, June 24—which he did, but as a rescuer rather than as a recreational caver. And because of the way the cave is configured, if one is heading for its far southern reaches there’s no way to hear or see the sickening surge of water from the Monk’s Series down to the T-junction. You wouldn’t know it until it cut you off on your way back. That’s what happened to the boys. And even as a seasoned caver, it could have happened to him.

  “The timing,” he said, “was just incredibly unlucky. It could have happened to me,” he repeated. But it didn’t. He was out. They were in. And clearly they needed help. At a meeting that night Narongsak decided to call in the heavy guns.

  Chapter Five

  “You have one last chance, or the boys will die”

  It was becoming a trend: high-ranking officials roused late at night. It was Asahna Bucha weekend in Thailand, a national holiday commemorating the founding of Buddhism. Observed on the first full moon in the eighth lunar month, it commemorates a sermon the Buddha gave twenty-five hundred years ago. It’s a long weekend, and that Sunday night, June 24, Rear Admiral Apakorn Yuukongkaew was settling down to sleep at his base near (the real) Pattaya Beach when he got a call. His Thai Navy SEALs were needed.

  “Send our team to help the boys, tonight,” the commander of his battle squadron, a full admiral, ordered.

  Apakorn, a Thai Navy SEAL vet with a tight crew cut and a hangdog countenance, had heard about the boys but hadn’t paid much attention to the story. He was the kind of leader who spoke to his men rather than shouted at them, whose pre-mission briefings were matter-of-fact, devoid of the rousing rhetoric of a Patton or a MacArthur. The men respected him because he was their commander, their senior, and because he respected them. He had the self-assurance to delegate to his junior commanders, allowing them to make tactical decisions in the field.

  By now it had been more than twenty-four hours since the search began. The news had started to make waves in the Thai press, and over the next twenty-four hours would be beamed across the world via a short bulletin on CNN. The Associated Press had started covering the story, sending out a few slim dispatches, as journalists started to book local hotel rooms. Satellite trucks were now parked alongside military pickups. Canopy tents to house the reporters went up and folding tables were placed in the mud. Government officials, including Governor Narongsak, were telling reporters that they believed the boys were alive. But it was just a guess, based only on hope, not on a single fact. Pictures published in the Bangkok Post and The Nation (Thailand) showed teams of uniformed police and volunteers in bright orange reflective vests lining the entrance to the cave, which already looked like an elaborate movie set. Panel lights lit up the cave walls as if for a massive museum restoration. One photograph showed Governor Narongsak, looking out of place in the land of rock and mud, hands in his pockets, staring down. He wore suit slacks, a crisp white shirt, black lace-up oxfords, and the unmistakable look of defeat.

>   It was Narongsak’s decision to call in reinforcements. By kicking it up the chain he elevated the matter to a national level. Now the head of the navy was involved, and by the time the sun warmed the Sleeping Princess’s forests the next day members of the nation’s cabinet would be alerted. Narongsak was nominally the incident commander, but he was no longer in charge. Nor, for that matter, would Apakorn be in charge of the military effort. The commander of the Thai Third Army would essentially be in command, and soon enough even he would answer to higher powers.

  Nevertheless, the distinct sense of urgency presented an opportunity for the Thai Navy SEALs to dip in and snatch some glory. Founded in 1953 (reportedly with help from the CIA) the Thai Navy SEALs maintain close ties to and even train with the American Navy SEALs. Like their American counterparts, they are their country’s elite fighting force. Each Thai SEAL undergoes a six-month training course that includes the Thai version of “hell week,” in which SEALs are subjected to torturous group challenges in order to weed out all but the toughest and most dedicated candidates. And given that Thailand’s two-thousand-mile coastline wraps around a big chunk of Southeast Asia, they are frequently deployed. With their work in counterinsurgency, antipiracy, and high-profile rescues, Apakorn thought it was “not a difficult mission.” After all, they were the kind of badasses who lived hard, smoked hard, and won trophy wives. But the orders came from on high, and Apakorn didn’t question them.

  By eleven thirty Sunday night, a spearhead of Thai SEALs began loading the unit’s Embraer jet. On the tarmac around the muscled men were dozens of hard-plastic Pelican cases and dive tanks. At 4 A.M. on Monday morning, June 25, a Thai SEAL detachment became the first wave of about twenty Thai Special Forces troops on the scene. After initially scoping out the cave, the team went in. The mission was nearly suicidal, but they managed to dive across the T-Junction and make it nearly to Pattaya Beach—farther in than any of the rescue teams thus far.

  Cave divers use a guideline to direct them. The line, typically a rope not much wider than a laptop cable, is strung along the route in a cave. It tells you where you’ve been and where you’re going. The first diver to an area spools out the line as he goes, weighing it down with small sandbags or tying it off and generally keeping right down the center of the passage. But that first contingent simply wrapped ropes around their waists and dove in. In a cave spiked with glass-sharp stalactites, a rope like that could easily snag or be severed. And with zero visibility, it’s an expedient way to get killed. But the initial troops hadn’t been trained in cave rescues or even cave diving. They had no cave-diving kit, which includes multiple air tanks (side-mounted tanks are used to slip through cave choke points without having to remove a tank from one’s back), proper guidelines, and digital compasses. They had no maps or surveys. What they possessed aplenty, though, was courage.

  According to the accounts of the Thai military, once the SEALs crawled up on Pattaya Beach and caught their breaths, they noticed footprints. Their commander says they saw a handprint on the wall. It must have been the boys, they thought. They had also apparently found a length of green rope, the same rope Coach Ek had used. By this time, the commandos had consumed most of the air in their tanks. Still they forged ahead. The Thai SEALs couldn’t have known it, but they had just passed the spot where the boys and the coach had spent the previous night.*

  Scuba diving in the open ocean is relatively straightforward—if things go wrong, your escape hatch is generally straight up and as wide as the horizon. In contrast, cave diving can be deadly because your escape hatch might be miles behind you. Straight up—or, for that matter, left, right, down, or sideways—is rock. Cave diving was pioneered by the British ducking into those goolie-shriveling sumps in northern England. Only a tiny fraction of people choose a hobby that can involve such inherent discomfort and risk, yet over the past ninety years more than 130 people from Britain alone have died cave diving. That’s a big number for a small group. The following is a grim sampling of the ways they died: crushed by falling rock, hypothermia, drowning, natural causes (e.g., heart attack), falls, asphyxiation, CO2 poisoning. Many of the casualties’ bodies weren’t recovered until years later.

  Because of this heightened danger, there are five basic rules of cave diving:

  Never dive beyond your certification level or your technical capacity.

  The rule of thirds—never use more than a third of your breathing gas on the way in—you will need a third to get out and the last third as a reserve.

  Maintain a physical guideline to the entrance of a cave.

  Never dive below the depth of your breathing mixture—a cocktail of gases that help prevent divers from getting “the bends” or decompression sickness, a condition that occurs when divers ascend from a depth and gases build up in their tissues. It can be extremely painful and potentially lethal.

  Carry at least three lights per person.

  Out of necessity and innocent ignorance of these rules, the SEALs violated all but rule number four, which also happens to be the only one that doesn’t apply in Tham Luang; they didn’t have to worry about the gas mixture because this cave had no deep dives and therefore no bubble-causing ascents.

  Once they crossed the dry section of Pattaya Beach, the Thai SEALs were now staring at the cave’s longest submerged passage: over three hundred yards of snags, rocks, and a tar-black river of water. Not only did they not have the right equipment, they didn’t have a single map or survey—possession of which should perhaps be an unofficial sixth rule of thumb. Out of gas and pretty much everything else, they too turned back.

  Amid the mud-spattered crowd watching the Thai SEALs stumble out of the cave that rainy Monday evening were Vern Unsworth and Ruengrit Changkwanyuen, a compact forty-two-year-old with a hint of a goatee. Ruengrit is a regional manager for General Motors, based in Bangkok. But he is also one of the most experienced cave divers in a country where caving is mostly the domain of tourists. Like millions of Thais, he’d been glued to reports from Tham Luang. Unlike the millions watching on TV earlier that Monday morning, he wasn’t so much proud of that first contingent of Thai Special Forces that exited the cave as he was terrified for them. Watching from his home in Bangkok, he needed only one look at their equipment—the single tanks, the wet suits designed for combat in tropical water—to know they were in mortal danger. Within an hour he called his boss to tell him he was off to Mae Sai to help with the rescue—he reckoned he’d be gone only three days.

  As it turned out, Ruengrit possessed two skills that would prove invaluable. One derived from the other: he’d spent many years in Michigan, where he picked up fluent English and where he also learned to dive.

  That Monday evening, when he spoke to those Thai SEALs coming out he was humbled by their exploits and aghast at the risks they’d taken.

  “They were clearly willing to die to find these boys,” he recalled. “No matter what, they needed to find the boys.”

  That night—Monday, June 25—he told the Thai SEAL shift commander he could help. By six o’clock the next morning, he’d hauled up all of his personal equipment and given the Thai SEAL dive teams a crash course on equipment and technique. He was impressed by how quickly they learned. The commander’s eyes bulged once he saw Ruengrit’s gear—his side-mounted tanks, his helmet studded with lights, the rope he used—and immediately put in a call to the Thai SEAL base in Pattaya for side-mounted tanks, more regulators, caving helmets, and harnesses.

  By late morning on Tuesday, June 26, the Thai SEALs whom Ruengrit had briefed had hardly become cave divers, but at least they were no longer a suicide squad. He led what was now about the ninth search mission as they smoothly traveled all the way to the T-junction, where they found foaming, Guinness-colored water. It had been raining at the rate of a couple of inches an hour, off and on, for more than two days. By now, even-muddier water had begun surging up from the southern end of the cave—the direction of Pattaya Beach—and was slamming against the clearer water comi
ng down from the Monk’s Series. It looked like a miniature version of the waters off Cape Horn, where the Atlantic and the Pacific crash together. Even with Ruengrit’s skill and gear, they couldn’t pierce it.

  Instead they started taking measurements of the water level and tried to string out a guideline. But the froth was rising by the minute. Within three hours they’d been forced to back up three hundred yards. The current now pulsing toward the entrance of the cave was unstoppable. The only option was retreat.

  With the SEALs’ diving operation failing to make headway, attention turned to the idea of pumping the water out—it mattered little where the water was channeled to, as long as it was out of the cave and downhill. Governor Narongsak had already initialized plans to begin pumping water out of the cave—early on he had declared water the enemy—but total victory wasn’t necessary. All that was needed was a stalemate that could stabilize water levels and reduce the current that the divers had to fight against. With that in mind, on Tuesday a bright-orange industrial submersible pump had been delivered, along with miles of thigh-thick hose to siphon the water down the hill from the burgeoning rescue camp. Maddeningly, it arrived missing crucial parts and would sit there unused for another twenty-four hours. There were some other, smaller pumps going, but they did not seem to make a dent. With the near-constant rain, oil-slick mud, broken pumps, and impenetrable wall of water, things were looking grim that Tuesday afternoon.