The Boys in the Cave

by Matt Gutman

  “We . . . we are from England” says Vollanthen chuckling to himself that starving boys in a cave would still retain the curiosity to ask such questions.

  As Stanton watched, proud of his friend, Vollanthen, the Cub Scout leader and dad to a kid just this age, began to lead the boys in cheers. He filmed them yelling “Goo, Thailand,” “Goo, America,” “Goo, Belgium,” and so on. The boys grinned at the divers’ enthusiasm, and he marveled at their spirit.

  With additional promises to be back “tomorrow,” as they gathered their gear to leave each of the boys came over and wrapped skinny arms around them. It was getting late, and the divers had been eager to set off, but for a moment they paused, letting the boys hold on to them for a beat or two longer, for as long as they needed. In a country where physical contact among strangers is unusual, and where a slight bow with hands pressed together in front of one’s face takes the place of a handshake, the series of embraces showed the enormity of the boys’ relief and gratitude. And the Brits were duly moved.

  The British divers assumed Thai authorities were going to take over, and there was a chance—despite their promises—that they would never see the boys again.

  “We were not in the position to get them out,” Stanton would say later. “We didn’t have a plan.”

  As it turned out, no one did.

  It was one of the few nights that Major Charles Hodges, the USAF Special Tactics team commander, had returned to his hotel before midnight. He was settling in when his phone rang. His operations commander was on the line: “Hey, we found the kids.”

  Every few days a rumor would ricochet through camp that the boys had been found, so Hodges took a breath and asked his officer to go back and confirm it again. He didn’t want to call his superiors—the colonels, who would call the generals, who would call the State and Defense Department bureaucrats—until they were absolutely sure.

  “Because this is going to have global ramifications here,” he tiredly explained to his sergeant.

  Five minutes later the phone rang again. His tactical officer had walked over to the Brits’ camp and met with the divers. “They absolutely found the kids. All thirteen are alive.”

  What surprised Hodges and many others was that the boys were all found in the same location. “I thought that they would probably have four or five in one spot, five or six in another spot. I certainly didn’t think that all of them would find one location in the cave that was dry enough and large enough for all of them to fit and be there for that amount of time.” When launching a rescue operation, it is far less logistically complicated to target one specific location than multiple locations.

  The boys’ group cohesion was no small piece of information. Hodges now knew that he was dealing with kids who had already aided in their own survival. To this point, they had done all the right things. They’d stayed together, found high ground, and had not tried to test uncertainty by trying to swim out of the cave. It told him these were kids who understood on an intuitive level not just how to survive, but how to survive together.

  Cheers rang out at the ragtag camps of soldiers and volunteers that had sprung up around Mae Sai. Austrian Mario Wild from the Chiang Mai climbing team was staying at a nearby temple along with some American troops and others. After having spent the previous few days in the jungle, he had finally showered, the mud and sweat and bits of leaves pooling brown around his feet. Toweling off, he had just called his parents when a racket interrupted the call. Still wet, he wandered out to see what the screaming was about. People were elated. And after nine days of rain, mud, crappy food (at least up in the mountains), and suffering, people were also mentally and physically spent. Some couldn’t get out of there fast enough. It was ten thirty at night that Monday as Wild watched one group after another clean off their gear, break down camp, and drive away.

  “It was like, job well done. Let’s go home,” he recalls.

  Minutes later Biw’s English teacher, Carl Henderson—who couldn’t have known that his little class cutup had tried to use some of the English he’d taught him—started seeing messages pop up on Facebook. When an announcement was made over the PA system in school the next morning, the kids jumped up and cheered and screamed.

  Every day since they’d gone missing, the boys’ twenty-eight hundred schoolmates from the Prasitsart school had sat cross-legged in that quad and prayed for the boys to be found safe. An instructor then led them through a brief meditation. On Tuesday morning, after watching that GoPro video of the boys’ discovery, the instructor added an exhortation to practice physical fitness and English—using the Wild Boars as an example. One of the boys sitting there cried. It was Queue, the boy who had missed the cycling trip because he’d been up late watching the World Cup. Dribbling down his still babyish cheeks were tears of relief. A dozen of the jug-eared thirteen-year-old’s teammates were in that cave, and he was supposed to be there with them. He had been tormented by guilt—he got to go home every night to his parents, his bed and comforting food, but they did not. At least now he knew they were alive.

  The greatest jubilation, though, erupted in the little park ranger hut where the parents had been sleeping since June 23. Within seconds, cameramen had sniffed them out and poked their lenses through the open windows. Swept up in the moment themselves, the cameramen gave the thumbs-up. “Everything good!” they yelled to each other through the din. The celebration was even live-streamed. Parents stood up and cheered, high-fiving and hugging.

  “They found them!” cried one of the parents, grabbing Coach Nok, whose head still craned forward in a neck brace.

  The coach responded, “I’m very happy,” barely looking up from his phone. He was searching for the stills and video that he’d heard had started to circulate online, asking the others, “Can I see the pictures? Are there any pictures? I’m so happy for you. This is amazing,” he told the beaming mother of Titan, who, like her son, is smaller and seems younger than the rest.

  A father, his face flushed from cheering and triumph, pumped two fists toward the camera; “I’m super happy,” he told the cameras, showing equal parts victory and relief. “Thank you, all the news channels!”

  Dom’s mother, like them all, wept. Her family owns a corner jewelry shop in the local bazaar where thirteen-year-old Dom often helps out alongside his grandparents and sisters. The shop is famous for its amulets and most of the family members wear at least one or two of the plastic-encased figurines of the Buddha around their necks. Many of the amulets are blessed by Thailand’s most revered monks, and the shop proprietors say they can bring health, virility, or general good luck. The boys’ plight had confounded her—what had they done to so anger the spirits? At some point during the sixth day after the boys had gone missing she had a premonition that Dom was no longer alive. She didn’t dare tell the other parents or even her husband. But she simply knew the boys had gone too long without food. There wasn’t a chance they were alive.

  But now that was all behind her. That night, bathed in the cheers of fellow parents, she sobbed with gratitude to the spirits, to the divers, and to the Thai SEALs. And she allowed herself to savor the moment.

  Tomorrow, she thought, tomorrow, I will think about how they’ll get them out.

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  Suicide Mission

  The discovery of the boys was now officially the story of the summer of 2018. The hundreds of accredited media crowding what had once been the cave’s central picnic area now swelled to over a thousand. Reporters and correspondents were called in from all over the world. American networks like ABC News sent in massive reinforcements (including me). ABC News deployed resources from all over the globe, with producers coming from Los Angeles, Atlanta, London, Madrid, Hong Kong, an engineer from Los Angeles, and cameramen from London. We took up residence at a hotel about half an hour from the cave, eventually renting out a couple dozen rooms. Almost no expense was spared in covering the story. At one point we had sixteen translators on t
he payroll. And as it was for the Special Forces, it became a journalists’ convention.

  Yet a glut of reporters does not necessarily equate to better information, which was hard to come by. The government had instructed the rescue teams, as well as the parents, not to speak to the press. So aside from a few confidential sources, most reporters had to rely on the press conferences, which often gave us little sense of what was really happening in the cave away from our muddy live positions.

  As people around Mae Sai and the world experienced a mixture of relief that the boys were alive and anxiety about what would happen next, the diving camp quickly became a hive of activity—and tension. When Stanton and Vollanthen surfaced from the sump at Chamber Three, they’d immediately called out, “We found them!” The Thai SEALs were elated. They jumped up and excitedly grabbed the GoPro from Vollanthen, leaving the exhausted divers in the water; on every previous dive, those on solid ground had taken great care to help them up and out, but amidst their jubilation on this day they forgot the Brits. The Thai SEALs went to a corner of Chamber Three and conferred there. They immediately relayed messages through the walkie-talkie system to their commanders, and a few began scrambling out of the cave with the precious GoPro video.

  In the time it took Stanton and Vollanthen to unhook their gear and set off on the swim, crawl, and hike back to the entrance of the cave, they were already being heralded as heroes—shaking hands the entire way and getting clapped on the back.

  According to Stanton, by the time he and Vollanthen had reached the command center, still dripping water and sweat, the video had already been posted to the Thai Navy SEAL Facebook page and its two-million-plus followers—including nearly every member of the media. The funny thing was, the Brits had actually come to tell the Navy SEAL commanders to suppress the video. They feared it would put enormous pressure on everyone, including them, because they had no idea how they would get the boys out. But once they saw the global jubilation the video generated, they decided not to mention it.

  The Thai commanders mined them for every speck of relevant information: what the tunnels were like, the boys’ location, their health, their supplies, sleeping quarters, latrines—anything. They then thanked the Brits for their help and informed them that it would no longer be needed—the operation would now be in Thai hands.

  As Stanton and Vollanthen soon learned, the Thai SEAL commanders, while happy the boys were alive, were apparently less than pleased with the Brits. In their postdive meeting on Sunday, July 1, and predive morning meeting on Monday, July 2, multiple sources tell me it was understood that Monday would be the big push—if they didn’t actually find the boys, they would find evidence of where they had been or bread crumbs leading to where they had sought refuge. The conditions were right, the water was down well over a foot, and thick line had been painstakingly laid all the way past the T-junction. The best guess, using the existing surveys of the cave and Vern Unsworth’s educated guesses about side rooms that offered high ground, was that if the boys had survived, they were likely a few hundred yards past Pattaya Beach, huddled in that small dead-end chamber with a high slope offering refuge from the water. Which is pretty much where they were found, in a spot that would eventually be known to everyone as Chamber Nine.

  As the European divers, the Thai cave diver and GM manager, Ruengrit, and the other Thais understood it, the agreement among the divers had been that the SEALs would be the first to make contact with the boys—they had the language skills to communicate with them, plus it would reinforce the perception that this was a Thai-led operation. It presented an invaluable public relations opportunity that would boost national morale.

  Ruengrit recalled that the agreement could not have been clearer: “We knew that was the agreement and we all agreed to it. After our team [Ben Reymenants and Maksim Polejaka] dove that day [early on July 2, laying line to an area just past the T-junction], the UK divers said they wanted to go in and pass Pattaya Beach, but instead of laying guideline, they used their own primary spool [what the Brits called their “reserve” line because they used it when they ran out of the larger rope] to go through from the last guideline point.”

  Basically, Ruengrit argued, because the Brits had used up all their thicker rope and deployed that reserve spool—which was far lighter, less cumbersome, and made for swifter progress—they had in turn made things harder for the divers who would eventually follow them. For less-experienced divers like the Thai SEALs, who would need to follow the Brits’ guideline to the boys, the reserve line was much harder to work with. The Thai SEALs would need line robust enough to pull on—that thin blue line might as well have been dental floss.

  For his part, Stanton called the notion that they violated any agreement “ridiculous.” Everybody knew he and Vollanthen were the team who would likely find something, maybe even the boys, he said. They had never been specifically instructed simply to turn back at any specific point, and even if they had, they reached the boys before that blue spool of guideline ran out.

  As Stanton said later, “Now that we found the route, what were they expecting us to do? Leave them the last ten meters?”

  The concept of letting the Thais plant the flag with the boys made no sense to him. He and Vollanthen didn’t work that way—they would keep pushing until they either laid all their line, hit a dead end, ran out of air, or found what they were looking for.

  Regardless of which side remembered it correctly, the Thai Navy SEAL commanders were disappointed, and this discord over the Brits’ discovery of the boys was just the beginning of the unease in the hours after the boys were found. Before the boys had been located, the different groups of divers—the Brits, Ruengrit’s team, the Thai Navy SEALs, the Americans, the Australians, and the Chinese—had been largely aligned in their goal: lay as much line as possible to enable the farthest push into the cave. With the boys found, that goal had been accomplished, but now there was a bigger, more challenging question at hand: what to do next.

  Ruengrit, Reymenants, and their team were back at their hotel in Pah Mee, giving an interview to my ABC News colleague James Longman, when the news of the boys’ discovery started pinging on their phones. They stopped the interview—everything they had to say had just become moot anyway—got suited up, and went right back to the cave, with the ABC News crew in tow. They were surprised the Brits had found the boys and maybe a little envious.

  “We laid the red carpet for them and they laid the British flag,” Reymenants told Ruengrit.

  By the time Reymenants and Ruengrit arrived at camp, a group of divers, U.S. Air Force Special Tactics team members, and Thai SEAL commanders had already gathered at the briefing area under the jumble of blue tents housing the Thai SEALs’ operations center. They crowded around a pair of white folding tables lit by a batch of fluorescent lights. The Brits sat on one side, the Thai SEALs, including Rear Admiral Apakorn himself, sat on the other; USAF Special Ops captain Mitch Torrel sat at the far end. On the table was a 360-degree camera, recording the conversation. The Chinese team hovered in the background, trying to follow the conversation through its harried translator; beside them stood a hedge of other translators—mostly young Thais with notepads straining to catch up and relay the dialogue between the English speakers and the Thais.

  Vollanthen and Stanton told the Thai SEALs, and later the Americans, that diving the boys out would be “absolutely impossible.” Stanton remembers telling the group that the diving portion between Chamber Nine and Chamber Three was harrowing even for them: close to a mile long, in water so cold and so dark that it would spook even experienced divers. There were numerous line traps that would lead rescue divers smack into dead ends. At this point the rescuers had all been told none of the boys could swim.

  As if all that weren’t enough, those spectral figures squatting in the mud they had discovered a few hours earlier were clearly weak and desperately hungry. In a rescue dive, they could just as easily die of hypothermia as by drowning. It just wasn’t feasible.
Given their experience with the four flailing workmen they’d rescued a few days earlier, the Brits stated flatly that under the current conditions an extraction dive—at least, one in which they would take part—was an impossibility. According to Reymenants and several others present, the Belgian tried to approach the British divers—offering an olive branch and an alliance for the sake of the boys—but they rebuffed him.

  For his part, Reymenants refused to accept the concept of abandoning living humans in that cave, risk be damned. He echoed a more activist group within the camp willing to risk lives in order to save the boys, and he called for immediate action—now.

  Vollanthen cut him off, saying, “We can’t just go in and bring them out. They will have to stay a bit, they seem okay.”

  “Are you a doctor?” Reymanents snapped back. “Do you have medical experience? Are you qualified to discuss their medical condition?”

  Vollanthen demanded that Reymenants stop talking to him. To the Brits, who were now deeply committed to the boys who had hugged them hours earlier, his fervor wasn’t admirable—it was amateurish.

  The exchanges grew heated, and Ruengrit had to pull Reymenants from the tent and into the night to calm him down. The Thai SEAL commanders were there, including Rear Admiral Apakorn, and Ruengrit feared things would get ugly. Ruengrit’s crew left the meeting. He and Reymenants felt snubbed—after all, Reymenants had more dives under his belt and had laid more line than anyone other than the Brits.

  People in the tent that night tell me that everyone was trying to be measured, while the Belgian, according to Stanton, was “being emotive. He talked one hundred miles an hour and didn’t get anywhere. He was pushing to get the children out. ‘You have to do something; you can’t leave them in there.’ He was generally being annoying. And he didn’t have any answers.” In the necessarily hyperrational world of cave diving, “emotive” was synonymous with “hysterical,” and thereafter the Brits treated Reymenants as the camp leper. He would not step inside the cave again.