The Boys in the Cave

by Matt Gutman

  The mountain was so waterlogged that as soon as the drill bits pierced the surface water geysered ten feet into the air. The pump-truck operators rolled up their pants and worked barefoot, siphoning off and diverting hundreds of thousands of gallons an hour, says Thanet. Later it would be over 2 million gallons an hour. Thanet supervised, sloshing around with a MacBook under one arm and a cellphone in hand, skinny legs sticking out of black rubber mud boots. Sometimes he wore pink knee-high compression socks to discourage chafing and foot rot.

  It was only once the project was under way, twenty-four hours after it started, that Thanet informed his superiors. “Retroactively,” he said with a wink, “they approved the plan.” Whether lowering the regional water table actually reduced the amount of water in the cave is debatable. But what became clear was Thanet’s industriousness. He started carrying so many maps, surveys, and lists of coordinates that his friend Colonel Losuya appointed two of his men to be Thanet’s full-time aides-de-camp.

  Thanet’s drilling efforts had opened up a new front in the battle against the water. Between his work and the efforts going on inside the cave, where pumps had been working nonstop to lower the water and reduce the current to diveable levels, everyone hoped that the water would begin to drop.

  Thanet next sought out the Americans in the camp—Major Hodges’s U.S. Air Force 353rd Special Operations Group, the air force’s commandos he had heard so much about. They’d arrived to some fanfare early on June 28 because it was immediately reported that they’d brought in some American-engineered superweapon. It was said to be an infrared device or a satellite that could peer deep into the mountain—perhaps the same one used to locate Osama bin Laden. In announcing their arrival, Thailand’s deputy prime minister, Prawit Wongsuwan, told reporters: “The United States Pacific Command (USPACOM) has sent thirty staff with equipment to help penetrate the cave walls.”

  A parade of Thai military commanders began stopping by the Americans’ little camp eagerly asking about their mountain-penetrating device. There was a hitch, though: no such system existed. Yet the truth did not seem to stifle rumors that not only did the Americans know how to find the boys, they already knew where they were.

  Which was why Thanet stopped by. He thought perhaps the bald-headed commander, Major Hodges, and his top noncommissioned officer, Master Sergeant Derek Anderson, might be able to help him find a way to harness all those idle drills and get down to the boys. He was informed that the concept of the American superweapon was risible. (Though their kit did include several pieces of equipment that would prove critical later on.) Once Hodges gently informed all comers that really, honestly, they didn’t have that equipment—that it didn’t exist—the Thai military commanders seemed to lose interest in the Americans. Still, that particular rumor was hard to kill.

  Thanet did not find the sensors he wanted, but he did find allies. Hodges, a little older than many majors because he had left the military for the civilian world for a few years—and perhaps wiser for it—was willing to listen to any idea. Anderson, his top NCO, was the same age as Thanet. They came from utterly different worlds but shared a sense of industriousness and an allergy to bullshit.

  So a shadow planning operation began to form in the corner of the cave’s base camp, creating a four-way nexus between Vern, who knew the cave best; the British divers, with the skill sets to penetrate the cave and bring the boys out—dead or alive; a Thai engineer who hoped to defy the deities by robbing them of their watery lifeblood; and the American soldiers who had the organizational skills to pull it all together.

  Which was why the weak central command and lack of organization was so frustrating for them. It took the USAF Special Tactics team days just to determine who was in charge from the Thai army, navy, and civilian side, and what everyone’s assignment was.

  “We were just trying,” said Hodges, “to basically bring everybody into the same room and say, ‘Hey, we know what the problem is. Now, let’s look at what possible solutions we could all provide and utilize and the assets that we have here, the manpower, the equipment. Our goal is to get all these kids out. Let’s try to approach this from, you know, several different angles.’ ”

  Using something the U.S. military calls Military Decision-Making Process, the Americans began to rank the options for saving the boys from the lowest risk to the highest. Everyone agreed that diving the boys out had the highest probability of failure. They printed out organizational charts and maps, and began to try to centralize information. There were now thousands of people crawling over and inside the mountain, and it would take days more to finally establish clear divisions of labor and coordination.

  The process was so excruciatingly slow that the Americans initially expected to send their own teammates in to fish the boys out, though they knew that—like the Thai SEALs—their divers lacked the training and equipment. While they knew the British divers had already rescued those pump workers, it took them a few days more to comprehend the totality of Stanton’s and Vollanthen’s skill levels and confidence—and to assess their willingness to lead a mission the Brits had made known to be as futile as it was dangerous.

  By Sunday, July 1, Thanet’s pumping operations had started siphoning a large pond’s worth of water per day out of the ground south of the camp. Thanet says that his ragtag army of roustabouts had lowered the local water table by twenty-four feet. Eventually that water would fill a 650-acre lake—nearly the size of New York City’s Central Park.

  At the same time, the one force that had started this mess also started to comply. Heavy rains still swept through, but they were short-lived. Imperceptibly at first, the ten-foot-tall yellow water gauges in Chambers Three through One started to reveal more numbers as the river in the cave started to drop. Whether it was from Thanet’s drilling operation, the pumping that had been going on inside the cave for days, or the decreasing rain was never clear.

  In the end, though, it didn’t matter why the water was going down—all that mattered was whether the divers would be able to get back into the cave.

  Chapter Eight

  Jungle Bash

  For the past couple of days military and police divers from around the world had been assembling in Mae Sai. It was like a commando convention. Thai Navy SEALs and the U.S. Air Force Special Tactics team led by Hodges were joined by Australia’s premier dive-rescue group and a Chinese team. Each country’s team had a small blue tent sprouting out from the main hub of the Thai SEALs operations tent. Like the Thai SEALs, the Americans, the Australians, and the Chinese were trained for open-water diving and most didn’t have the side-mounted tanks that would have facilitated technical cave diving.

  The Chinese team also lacked some critical language skills. Ruengrit, the GM manager and cave-diving hobbyist, recounted that on Wednesday, June 27, he watched the Chinese suiting up outside the swelling sump in Chamber Three. They had four main divers, a three-person support team, and a female translator. She was in her twenties and dressed to the nines. Ruengrit explained to the men through the translator that they couldn’t dive because the other teams would have no way of communicating with them once inside.

  That’s when the Chinese commander jabbed a finger at his translator. “You go in with us!”

  She was horrified. “She said, ‘What, you want me to go!?’ ” Ruengrit recalled with a giggle. Saving the translator from misery, or maybe even injury, Ruengrit stepped in and told the Chinese he’d find something else for them to do.

  For the next few days, some of the world’s elite military search-and-rescue teams were turned into mules. They began hauling hundreds of air tanks—first to the edge of the flooded Chambers One and Two, and later to Chamber Three, which became the dive headquarters. It was backbreaking. The conditions resembled an enclosed World War I trench—including the stench. When the Thai, American, Australian, Chinese, and other troops actually found solid ground to tread on, it was dangerous rock slicked with mud. Much of the slog with the heavy tanks balanced on the
ir shoulders was in water. When the water was knee high, troops’ legs disappeared when they planted their feet. Ankles turned, knees buckled, skin rotted. The buoyancy of deeper water offered a respite to battered joints but was slower going. And toward the third chamber, they were neck deep, forced into a quick scuba dive to the other side of the sump between Chambers Two and Three. They alternately froze from hours-long exposure to 70-degree water or sweltered in their neoprene wet suits.

  By now this had become one of the largest cave search-and-rescue operations in history. The rescue effort was allotted virtually unlimited resources. Governor Narongsak had ordered thirteen ambulances to stand by twenty-four hours a day on the off chance that somehow the boys would be miraculously found and brought out. An entire floor at the Chiang Rai Regional General Hospital had been cleared to receive them. Rotating teams of doctors, nurses, and mental health specialists were on call around the clock to treat possible trauma, organ failure, and infectious disease in the event that anyone was rescued alive. “If we find them, we want their families to know that we are ready to care for them,” one of the rescue commanders told reporters.

  And what many of the hundreds of troops and officers couldn’t have known, but might implicitly have felt, was that their lungs were methodically scrubbing the cave air of oxygen. Breathlessness became a problem, followed later on by a chronic crud in the lungs that troops and volunteers would later tell me lasted for weeks. Some would be stricken with mysterious fevers and dropped off the diving roster.

  Belgian diver Ben Reymenants was also ready to hang up his scuba tank. Having endured what he had considered a near-death experience, he was rattled and freely admitted that the seemingly jet-powered current was beyond his abilities. But when he reported to the Thai SEALs tent to inform them that he thought future dives were unsafe and he was pulling out, the Thai SEAL commander acknowledged his advice and said, “But I’m going to have to keep sending my guys in.” It’s unclear if he was calling Reymenants’ bluff, but it worked. Said the Belgian, “In my mind I saw these nineteen-year-old boys going in with no experience. At least I can go in to stop them from killing themselves.” By June 30 the water levels remained high, but the current had slackened and visibility was marginally better. That morning Reymenants and dive buddy Maksim Polejaka, a bearish Ukrainian who had gained French citizenship by joining the French Foreign Legion, stepped off into his “cappuccino whirlpool.” They hoped to lay 400 yards of line. The current was still too strong for them to use regular cave-diving guideline, so they opted in its place for thicker climbing rope that would enable future divers to pull themselves, hand over hand, toward the T-junction rather than having to swim through the current.

  Together Reymenants and Maksim put down a couple hundred yards of the rope and turned back. Because both they and the SEALs had been using the rope instead of the thinner guideline, it could only be tied off around big underwater landmarks. So instead of a laserlike, down-the-middle line of the type that cave divers are accustomed to, the rope line ping-ponged between sturdy stalactites or any geological version of a dock cleat that wouldn’t crumble under the constant yanking of divers on the ropes. But that zigzagging also meant the rope was often slack, as if a road-maintenance crew had drunkenly painted center lines in an undulating wave.

  While the tunnel is mostly a straight shot, it has many tricky cul-de-sacs. Reymenants now found himself in one of them. Walls were everywhere. He was wedged in. The more he kicked, the more silt the current carried into his face. Divers’ fins are designed to propel a swimmer forward. There is no reverse gear.

  “Adrenaline doesn’t help. So I closed my eyes and focused on breathing,” said Reymenants. From behind he started hearing high-pitched, muffled sounds: “Mmmmm, mmmmm.” It was Maksim trying to talk through his regulator. He’d caught up and was now gently tugging at Reymenants’s fins. When a fellow diver does that, there are two possible reactions: the first is to kick against it, indicating you want to be left alone and are capable of handling the situation yourself. The other reaction is going limp, which is what Reymenants did. As Maksim pulled him out, Reymenants realized he’d been sucked about two hundred feet into a false inlet, a dead end. They swam back, found an air pocket where they could stand, and surfaced for a breather.

  Maksim checked his gauge and said he was well into his reserve of gas—that last third of a tank that cave divers save for an emergency. The only direction he could dive was out. But Reymenants was on a rebreather, which recycles the oxygen (17 percent) that we exhale and enriches that recycled oxygen by an additional 4 percent or so. Under decent conditions a rebreather gives a diver about eight hours of dive time. He had the air, and now he had a surplus of adrenaline, so as they floated on the surface, Reymenants told Maksim to wait a few minutes in that neck-deep water. He ducked down and started pulling and kicking. The distance he covered is a matter of dispute—of interest only to the tiny and competitive clique of cave-rescue divers. But Reymenants claims that in about twenty minutes he put down another couple hundred yards of line, pushing well past the T-junction to near Pattaya Beach.*

  That day, Reymenants says, a Thai Navy SEAL helped him climb out of the sump at Chamber Three. He was older than the rest, with a taut smile, a thatch of black hair, and a runner’s build. He was among a group of reserve Thai SEALs who had volunteered for the search and rescue. He now worked at an airport, where he had picked up a little English, and offered to help Reymenants explain to the other SEALs how far he had gotten in laying the guideline. The man was thirty-eight-year-old retired Navy SEAL Saman Gunan, a husband and triathlete with a face that looked as if it were chiseled out of granite—a face that, within days, nearly every person in Thailand would recognize.

  Over the previous few days, Vern, like most of the people in camp, had offered himself up as a pack mule, hauling in air tanks. His unique expertise, however, was his knowledge of the cave. With the rains slackening, he was willing to try anything—even digging through a haystack for a needle that didn’t exist.

  He and Rob Harper spent two days in what he called a “jungle bash,” hauling themselves up the treacherous slopes with the members of the Thai military who were still trying to find an alternative route down into the Monk’s Series. They tramped the jungle floor, clearing tangles of vines to shimmy into holes about the size of a bathroom sink. Towering dipterocarp oaks, with gray trunks that looked like giant elephant legs, blocked out the sun. Their cast-off leaves formed a biotic mash on the forest floor feeding bountiful fungi.

  The men were never dry. Vern’s shoes split. He and others suffered from jungle rot in their feet. They slept on the jungle floor, some of the troops falling asleep with rocks as their pillows. He and Harper tried to tell the commanders that their men were toiling in vain. The alternative route likely didn’t exist. They believed this because their dear friend Martin Ellis had written most of the guidebooks on caving in the region, noting that in all of Southeast Asia there was only a single known alternative entrance to a major cave system, and it was in Laos. Vern tried to explain to the Thais that Tham Luang ran horizontally and that any vertical shaft leading about fifteen hundred feet down to the main cave system would have been pinched shut by the glacial movement of the mountain millions of years ago. And even if by some freakish chance there was such a shaft, it would be so enormous that they couldn’t miss it. The problem seemed to be that there was no way to prove it, and so the Thais argued that the absence of evidence of a side shaft was not evidence of its absence. But given its almost limitless resources and drive to find the boys, the Thai military was willing to toil to the point of the exhaustion of both its men and every possibility.

  More frustrating than the search itself was the lack of coordination in search efforts. Mario Wild, of Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Adventures, had spent days with another Thai military team scoping out possible holes on the south side of the mountain. The team would divide its section in quadrants and search for possible leads. When they found
anything remotely promising they would call in rope and caving specialists like Wild. Wild and his boss, Josh Morris, had nearly four decades of climbing and caving between them, which had endowed them with the ability to sniff out a possible passage within minutes. The ingredients are simple: a cool draft and proximity to a main shaft. Wild felt they could cover much more ground if the officer just listened to the advice of specialists like Vern and him: a fifteen-hundred-foot vertical shaft to the main cave was a geological near impossibility—meaning that a promising shaft would be so big and would blow with such a draft that they would all likely notice it right away. But he said it was his role to explore possible cave entrances, not dispense advice.

  A member of the elite Austrian Mountain Rescue team, Wild understood that efficiency in searches is not just nice to have, it’s elemental. But soon after returning to camp from his few days stomping around the Sleeping Princess’s head, Wild learned that no fewer than four other teams of rescuers had explored the very same holes he had. And they boasted about it on social media. He was stunned by the inefficiency and the waste of resources. There was also an increase in people who seemed to be more focused on the potential for glory involved than the actual rescue. The more attention the story received, and the more Thailand and the world became obsessed with it, the higher the stakes were for individual rescuers. So many people wanted to be the discoverer of the hidden gateway to the boys. This “glory fever” was a malady that made some rescue teams cagey, said Wild: “When I asked people, ‘Where were you today?’ people were secretive about it.” That kind of sentiment was common and quickly became a fatal organizational flaw, preventing and actively discouraging information sharing that in turn wasted possibly tens of thousands of work hours.