The Boys in the Cave

by Matt Gutman

  But the time Vern spent exploring the mountain above the cave wasn’t all wasted. Up on the mountain he grew even closer to Master Sergeant Derek Anderson and the U.S. Air Force Special Tactics team that had been assigned to clear a helicopter landing zone in the mountains to enable choppers hauling drills to land. The better Vern got to know them, the more he was impressed by their organizational skills and energy.

  Anderson, who with his clean-cut features and beefy physique looks like a Special Forces poster child, stood out. He had grown up mostly in Ecuador, the child of a missionary who would fly him out to the remote Amazon to work with indigenous tribes. They would head into the jungle with local guides for two or three days, sleeping under the canopy of palmitos. The family lived in Quito for most of his childhood, with intermittent stints back in their native Syracuse, New York. Many of his friends were Ecuadorians, so he was bilingual and embedded in the culture. By the age of thirteen, he and his buddies would ride buses to climb the Andes, scaling twenty-thousand-foot peaks. He’d always known he’d be either in the U.S. Navy SEALs or in some other Special Forces unit. After high school he enlisted in the air force, which gave him more opportunity for the swashbuckling adventures he craved—mountaineering; high-altitude, low-opening sky dives; and rescues. In 2014 he was named the U.S. Air Force’s Pararescueman of the Year.

  With his organizational skills and keen mind, he quickly rose to the rank of Master Sergeant, responsible for much of the tactical team’s planning and organization—skills that were much in demand in the increasingly chaotic search-and-rescue operation.

  Stanton and Vollanthen were not there to make friends. But they did need allies. Vern, whom they had only met when they arrived, quickly became one of them.

  Vern continued to explore the area above the cave, hiking to a valley one thousand feet above the cave, where he met locals who live in an area called Pah Mee. They steered him to a sinkhole where a stream seems to disappear into the mountain. Their ancestors had been roaming the area for generations. They knew the cave and freely offered Vern and the military (and anyone else who would listen) a terrifying tidbit of information; Vern, who only went caving in the dry season, did not know that by around July 10 the cave was typically completely flooded all the way to the entrance. It would stay that way pretty much until December.

  When Vern finally stumbled back into camp on Sunday, July 1, he met Thanet again. He’d been trying to tell him that his water-table drilling project at Tham Tsai Tong was a waste of time. Now he had something concrete for Thanet. He described that mysterious creek and wondered whether it was feeding the Monk’s Series.

  Vern told Thanet that the Brits had finally reached the T-junction earlier that day, adding that Stanton and Vollanthen remained concerned about the water flow from the mountain above; they had also noted that the water flowing from the Monk’s Series on the right side was moving more quickly. They had offered another key clue: the water from the Monk’s Series was both clearer and warmer than the water coming from deep within the cave on the left.

  Both Vern and Thanet knew what that meant. The cave acts as a giant icebox. The longer water stays in there, the cooler it gets. The farther it flows inside the cave, the more silt it picks up and the murkier it gets. Clearer, warmer water meant whatever was flowing into the Monk’s Series had recently been outside the cave.

  Vern urged Thanet to find the source of whatever was dumping all that water into the Monk’s Series. It was a simple equation: tackling the Monk’s Series would result in less water flowing in (especially when it rained), which would give divers a chance to finally penetrate deeper into the cave.

  Thanet and his crew were allotted two military trucks, and they bounced along a dirt track about the width of a doorway, up hills with the vertical grade of black diamond ski slopes—not far from where the American team had cleared that helicopter landing zone. Tree branches thwapped against the truck. Its gears ground and slipped. They hiked the rest of the way up to the bowl-shaped valley called Pah Mee, whose local farmers pointed them toward a stream which Thanet matched with satellite imagery of the mountain. It was the one Vern had described.

  This particular stream was a series of waterfalls, tumbling down the mountain and sluicing around three-ton boulders. Thanet had forty Thai troops from the Thirty-seventh Military District with him and a handful of local engineers. Squads of soldiers in knee-deep water dredged up sand from one of the creek’s pools; the villagers helped where they could, shoring up the dams. Filling thousands of sandbags, the troops began to pack them against one of the stream’s smaller cascades. But they had to drain it somewhere. Industrial pumps couldn’t make it up the muddy tracks, so they hooked six-inch pipes to the backs of locals’ souped-up pickups and dirtbikes and dragged them up the mountain. Using small power tools, they fit the pipes together and stuffed them in the dam. Finally, after twenty-four continuous hours of work, hacking through impenetrable thickets of bamboo, they had connected the full pipe system, changing the stream’s direction.

  The enforced idleness during the worst of the rain from June 27 through early June 29 had bred some discord among the divers in the camp. Divers like Ruengrit and Reymenants considered the British aloof, since they spent most of their time hunkered inside their headquarters office with the red sign on the door reading UK RESCUE DIVERS. The Brits surveyed some of the sites with Vern but didn’t socialize, leaving the other divers with the impression that Stanton and Vollanthen didn’t want to work with the Thai Navy SEALs—or with them, either.

  To some degree the accusation was true. Cave diving is mostly a solitary experience, determined by the confines of a cave. There is seldom space for tandem dives, and even rescuers like Stanton and Vollanthen, who have known each other for decades, only swim side by side when a cave is wide enough to safely accommodate two divers abreast. The rest of the time they basically swim in single file, but minutes apart. And as the British Cave Rescue Council vice chair Bill Whitehouse said, “People have accidents and general miscalculations. If something goes wrong, it’s a very unforgiving environment. There are many things you cannot put right, and that’s the end of it. In a cave-diving accident you are either alive or you’re dead.” Stanton and Vollanthen are not dead, he explained, because “they are not adrenaline junkies, and try to stay calm and collected all the time.”

  The two Brits had only reluctantly hung around camp. When a few days earlier they had asked the British Embassy to arrange flights, their Thai counterparts gently informed them that “it wouldn’t look good” if they went home so quickly. Weerasak, the Tourism Minister and the man who’d called Rob Harper (answering in his pajamas) at Vern’s request and who had asked them to come to Thailand also personally requested they stay just a couple more days. So they did. When they heard about Reymenants’s dive on Friday, June 29, the two Brits were impressed. He’d proven that guideline could be laid and that visibility had improved enough for some dive operations to resume.

  On Sunday, July 1, with the rains tapering off, Stanton and Vollanthen set off one at a time for Sam Yek—the T-junction. It wasn’t easy going, but they got there and back without any significant problems, laying their own guideline to map the route from where Reymenants left off to about 250 yards past Chamber Three in the direction of the T-junction.

  By Monday, July 2, early reports had it that the water in the cave had drained a foot. As with the earlier drops in water levels, no one knew for sure whether this was the result of that first effort to divert the stream, the pumps inside the cave, or simply the meteorological blessing of reduced rain. But now the pulsing currents from the Monk’s Series had subsided even more than before, those yellow measuring sticks in the cave were getting visibly more exposed, and the tunnel had become significantly more navigable.

  That afternoon, Stanton and Vollanthen suited up again. They had nearly a mile of diving ahead of them in a mission they reckoned would last eight hours. Everyone in camp knew that this would be a big day. At a pre
dive meeting that Monday morning, the Brits, along with the Thai Navy SEALs and Ruengrit and Ben Reymenants’s team, had decided that the foreigners would pave the way to the boys, but that it should be the Thai SEALs who made first contact. They spoke the boys’ language, and it was important for Thai divers to be seen as planting the flag—the country needed the morale boost. Stanton and Vollanthen would lay guideline to an area about one to two hundred yards beyond Pattaya Beach. The rescuers knew the boys were not at Pattaya Beach, because the SEALs had been there during the first days of the search, finding only footprints. According to Vern’s surveys and recollection, the next possible dry spot where the boys might have sought shelter was roughly three hundred yards from Pattaya, on a steep twelve- to twenty-foot slope high above the waterline. Ruengrit, acting as coordinator for the European divers, including Reymenants, told me, “We knew what the agreement was, and we all agreed to it.”

  That was not how it would turn out.

  Chapter Nine

  Contact

  At the morning briefing, Stanton and Vollanthen had been dispatched to lay guideline about 150 yards beyond the T-junction and keep pushing until they ran out of line. They finished one 150-yard bag, and then a second bag ended just before Pattaya Beach. It wasn’t much of a beach. The sand that the SEALs had said they walked on in the early days of the rescue had been submerged in water. They reckoned it was Pattaya Beach because—according to the compasses on their wrists—it was the only place that the cave jogged eastward.

  Kicking steadily onward from Pattaya Beach, they began unspooling their reserve line—a much thinner blue cord that ran about 250 yards. Again consulting the compasses on their wrists, they were now headed due south. They had committed to memory the little map that Vernon had sketched for them that morning, and knew this stretch was the longest, straightest passage in the cave.

  When they finally sensed the air pocket above, they moved up toward it. It was easier to swim underwater, but they inflated their buoyancy vests whenever there was an air pocket—it was standard operating procedure for rescuers to investigate air pockets in case somebody was clinging to a dry ledge above. Stanton checked his air gauge—they were running low on the first third of their air—and they were also running out of guideline. Stanton estimated they had only a few yards left when he and Vollanthen started to kick upward to the surface. Low on air and line, it was likely time to turn back, thought Stanton.

  But as soon as Stanton surfaced and took off his mask, he smelled them. He encouraged Vollanthen to do the same, and as the pair debated the source of the smell, they heard voices.

  Coach Ek was too tired to move. He knew twelve-year-old Mick had the flashlight and asked him to investigate. But Mick froze; the dark creatures emerging from the water were the first things to disturb the absolute stasis of their existence in ten days. Not a breeze, not a bug, nothing at all, had intruded or changed in Chamber Nine—except for the progressive wasting away of their bodies. The refugee Adul, bold perhaps by necessity, grabbed the flashlight, headed to the water, and scanned it for those voices. He called to them in Thai, but quickly realized they were speaking English.

  Following rescue protocol, Stanton and Vollanthen stopped on the far side of the canal to remove some of their diving gear—it would be safer over there. Sometimes “casualties,” as they are called, get panicky and demand to be rescued now, clawing at the fragile dive gear. As they paddled across the flooded passage toward the boys and the overwhelming stench, Vollanthen pressed Record on the GoPro camera the Thai Navy SEALs had given him when he’d set off from Chamber Three, to document whatever it was the diver would find that day.

  Following is a transcript of what would become one of the most widely viewed GoPro videos ever released. It begins while Vollanthen and Stanton are still in chest-deep water.

  Vollanthen: Raise your hands.

  Adul and a chorus of others: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!!

  Vollanthen: How many of you?

  Adul: Thirteen.

  Vollanthen: Thirteen?

  Adul: Yeah, yeah.

  Vollanthen: Brilliant.

  In the middle of it you can hear the boys chattering among themselves in Thai.

  Unidentified Boy: Do people know our bags are out there? Can you tell them about our bags out there?

  Adul: Okay! I will tell them.

  Unidentified Boy: I want rice.

  Unidentified Boy: Can the rescuers come already?

  The boys are sitting on their haunches, using their shirts to wipe the damp off their faces. They duck their heads to avoid the blinding beams of light. Adul keeps mustering a translation. He splutters out a sentence:

  Adul: Backpack? Backpack with you go inside?

  Vollathen: No, not today. Just two of us. We have to dive.

  That last word, “dive,” ends on an elongated upnote—explanatory but also deeply apologetic.

  Adul [in Thai to the boys]: No rescue today . . .

  Vollanthen: We are coming. It’s okay. Many people are coming.

  Adul: What day?

  Stanton: Many, many people. We are the first. Many people come.

  That promise would dog Stanton and Vollanthen with the sting of guilt over the next couple of days. They had no idea whether it was true. And the more they understood about the boys’ predicament, the less optimistic they felt.

  And then there was some confusion. Adul was trying to ask when their rescue would begin. Vollanthen, an ultramarathoner, seems to be breathing heavily. It’s adrenaline rather than fatigue. He draws three quick preparatory breaths, like a father gearing up to assure his children it’ll be okay when he knows it won’t. The answer: “Tomorrow.”

  Stanton jumps in, assuming the skinny boy with the sharply protruding jawline is asking about the day of the week. “No, no, no, no,” Stanton says. “What day is it?”

  Unidentified boy: What day did they tell you that we can leave?

  Fatigued themselves, and perhaps still jet-lagged, the divers are stumped. Vollanthen chuckles to himself, because he initially has no idea. Finally he says, “Mm—Monday. One week, Monday. You have been here”—he pauses to raise two hands and ten fingers, which obscure his camera—“for ten days. . . . You are very, very strong. Very strong,” something the two men sincerely believed.

  Adul and the boys had digital watches; they knew ten days had passed, but to hear someone else say it stunned him. He couldn’t believe it was true. Shriveled from hunger and trying to process math and English at once, he struggled to mount a response.

  Coach Ek snaps, “Who knows English, can you translate?” Tee says, listen to the foreigners. Adul responds that he cannot keep up with their fast-paced babble.

  Vollanthen and Stanton are still huffing. Maybe it’s from excitement. Yet what is most striking in that video is how composed the boys are. Rescuers are often concerned that their wards will try to grab onto them (which considering their plight seems entirely natural). But the boys hang back respectfully; they don’t bum-rush the divers, so they decide to proceed up the slope. Vollanthen says to Stanton, “Okay, let’s go up,” and waving to the boys he says, “Okay, go back, go back, we are coming.”

  The boys remind their translators to tell the divers they are hungry. Adul says, “I’ve already told them!”

  But then you hear the boys say in English, “We are hungry!” Vollanthen answers with genuine sympathy: “I know, I know.”

  The camera view skitters down as the men scramble up the mud-slicked bank. It is steeper and higher than they had imagined—a thirty-degree slope that goes up about forty-five feet. With the men struggling up to the boys’ perch on the bank, you hear one of the boys repeat, “Eat, eat, eat, eat.” The divers had not expected to find the boys and have no food to give them. And the news they have to offer isn’t fantastic, either. As they make their way up the bank, they ask the kids to move back. The screen turns black, then we see a flash of the divers’ shadows against the cave wall.

 
The boys ask when they’ll be back. The divers hesitantly respond, “Tomorrow, we hope tomorrow. The Navy SEALs tomorrow, with food, the doctor, everything.” They are fibbing again, knowing full well that only a handful of people in the world possess the experience to survive the round-trip journey to the boys, much less pull them out. Stanton thought to himself, How on earth will we get them out? Diving anyone through that passage will be impossible.

  For the third time the boys ask, with a hint of desperation: “Tomorrow?”

  Vollanthen assures them, “Yes.”

  Adul translates into the darkness: “An ambulance, a rescue truck will come tomorrow.”

  As Vollanthen’s camera sweeps again to the right, you briefly see the team lined up on their haunches at the back of the cave. The two divers start to fiddle with their flashlights, trying to detach a couple from their helmets to give to the boys. Vollanthen mumbles apologetically to no one in particular: “My torch is quite shit, really.”

  Adul: I am so happy.

  Vollanthen: We are happy, too.

  Adul: Thank you so much.

  That’s when the video that was released cuts out.

  But the divers would spend another twenty minutes with the boys. Stanton began inspecting their living quarters, easily finding the ten-foot-long “escape tunnel” they had been digging and the primitive sleeping area they had leveled out from the slope. He couldn’t find the latrine, and given the smell, he hoped they were using a parallel passage. He also took stock of the boys, noting that the little ones and the coach seemed lethargic and frail. Some of the bigger boys appeared surprisingly energetic given their ten-day fast.

  Hoping to ensure their message was properly conveyed, the boys began lifting up their soccer jerseys, revealing bony rib cages. Stanton had a Snickers bar in his pouch, which he never took out. It was just a single bar, and a dose of pure sugar could sicken them, he thought to himself. The divers and boys chatted some more. The plucky Adul asks the Brits where they are from.