by Matt Gutman
It was an ugly episode that continued to fester and would later morph into a distracting sideshow that neither Reymenants nor the Brits wanted. Ultimately the British team would concede that Reymenants was instrumental in paving the way for them to reach the boys, providing valuable assistance in laying a few hundred yards of guideline. Nevertheless, he was not someone they wanted anywhere around them, and they would work toward barring him from the camp permanently.
Disillusioned and slighted, Reymenants and Ruengrit headed for the Chiang Rai airport the next day—Tuesday, July 3. Reymenants was bound for the Philippines for that delayed family vacation and Ruengrit was going back to work at GM. They were being replaced by another team of Thailand-based divers, henceforth known to all as the Euro-divers.
Later that night, Stanton and Vollanthen were exhausted and got back to their guesthouse late. Not too late, however, to throw back a few beers, allowing themselves just a sliver of satisfaction. (It was actually Stanton who drank most of the beer, since Vollanthen rarely drinks.) Indeed, the world was now talking about these British divers, who doggedly maintained their anonymity—refusing interviews, even turning their backs to photographers. But in the camp, there were 144 Thai SEALs and ex-SEAL volunteers who’d been slaving away over the past few days, risking their lives; as some of them saw it, the Brits had robbed the Thais of their moment. The Thai SEALs planned to snatch it back in what would be the most harrowing dive attempted in the weeks-long rescue effort.
Early on the morning of Tuesday, July 3, without informing any of the other international teams, the Thai SEALs mapped out a plan to dispatch four divers to the boys. They would plant the flag.
Four Thai SEAL divers set out from Chamber Three. Details of their dive to the boys remain sketchy, but the plan was for them to return in about eight hours. None of the four SEAL divers had been that far into the cave before—in fact, none had been much beyond Chamber Three—which meant they had to swim fifteen hundred yards of unfamiliar tunnel without a guide. They had no official cave-diving training beyond the instruction-by-experience they had picked up in the previous few days—most of which consisted of the quick hop through the sump separating Chamber Two from Chamber Three, about one hundred times shorter than the journey to the boys.
The journey was apparently so harrowing that at one point one of the divers lost his mask. When they finally arrived at Chamber Nine, six hours after starting out at Chamber Three, two of the divers had used up nearly all of their air—they would not have enough to return. Nevertheless, twenty-four hours after Stanton and Vollanthen promised to be back “tomorrow,” divers again pierced the stretch of canal that locked the boys in.
Again the boys heard voices and saw lights rake the side of the chamber. They crept up to the edge of the water to see if maybe this batch of divers brought food. Before the divers said a word, the boys’ flashlights made out the Thai Royal Navy’s emblems on their dive gear and wet suits, and their hearts surged with pride. As the divers approached, they called to the boys, their voices thick with machismo:
“Here you are, Wild Boars, we’ve come to help you!”
If the trip was nearly fatal for at least some of the crew of four, they betrayed none of that to the boys. The boys helped the tired Thai SEALs up the bank and showed them their humble home. The divers had brought packs of energy gels for the boys, and also real hope that their ordeal was near its end. As they chatted, the boys tried to describe their experience. The Thai SEALs didn’t say how long they planned to stay or specify when a rescue would begin, and the boys didn’t want to press them.
Three hours after that first Thai SEAL contingent set off, another team settled into the murk in Chamber Three. This second group of Thai SEALs following up the first mission was comprised of a medical contingent for the boys, ferrying space blankets, medical supplies, a medic, and made-for-TV former SEAL Lieutenant Commander Dr. Bhak Loharjun. Dr. Bhak, as he’s known, heads the Thai Third Medical Battalion. What had become known as one of the world’s toughest cave dives would be Dr. Bhak’s very first.
“At first,” Dr. Bhak later said, “we thought the passageways would not be tough. But when we got in the water, it was so murky that there was barely a foot of visibility even with our helmet lights.” Even with the guideline to lead the team of three, Dr. Bhak, a Thai SEAL medic, and another Thai SEAL frequently swam into dead-end inlets and had to awkwardly maneuver backward. The passages were narrow, and though they pulled themselves along the guideline laid by previous divers, the current was stronger than Dr. Bhak had ever experienced in open water—it was like swimming against a rip current.
Like all the others, he had set out from Chamber Three. And like nearly all the others, he hit a snag. In his mission briefing earlier, the SEALs cautioned him about the countless obstacles that could emerge from the darkness to entangle dive gear, such as wiring from the early days of the search and the cave’s unseen teeth snarling from the cave wall.
All of a sudden, his mouth was full of water instead of air. His mouthpiece had been ripped out. “And then the face of my son and wife came up—this was it, the moment that I thought of life and death.” By windmilling his arms he managed to get a hand on his regulator, which was invisible in the murk. It took longer to get a grip on his racing pulse.
These were anxious hours back at Thai SEAL headquarters. Hours passed. Then an entire night. The Thai Navy SEAL captain in charge of dive operations suspended all dives during the time his team was inside.
When Dr. Bhak and his team finally dragged themselves up on the bank in Chamber Nine, they found the boys and the four Thai SEALs who’d stayed from the day’s earlier mission waiting with smiles. Dr. Bhak was initially concerned the boys had been traumatized, that they might be physically and mentally incapacitated, but the Wild Boars surprised him. They were stronger than he’d expected and didn’t seem to exhibit evidence of mental trauma. Dr. Bhak and the SEAL medic had orders to stay with the boys, along with two of the SEALs already there. The four had committed to staying with the boys, for the duration, come hell or high water.
Early on the following morning of Wednesday, July 4, the SEALs who were not staying made their way back to Chamber Three. When they arrived they were clearly shaken, describing to their commanders the horrific dive—those squeezes, the current, the eternity of darkness. They couldn’t imagine bringing children through an ordeal that had expended every reserve of courage and strength of elite navy divers. The Thai SEALs now understood that a rescue dive was out of the question, at least for them. But the trio of divers also brought back tantalizing information from the boys and a new GoPro video. The video was rushed out of the cave and onto the Thai SEAL Facebook page.
The parts of this GoPro video that were released are different from the video shot by the harried Brits, who were more interested in capturing proof of life than a portrait of the boys’ condition. The new video was shot in close-up—an intimate peek at the boys—and was meant to offer a booster shot to the morale of a worried nation.
The video instantly went viral—there were the smiling boys, and there was Dr. Bhak, robust and handsome, cheerily cleaning their foot wounds. The video begins with a pan, left to right, as Dr. Bhak dabs the boys’ minor cuts and infections with ointment and iodine. The boys had suffered injuries similar to those of their army of rescuers—mostly small infections to the hands and feet. At one point the camera again pans from left to right as the boys say their names and clasp open hands together just under their nose, nodding their thanks to everyone. This video was a proof of life, but it was also a perhaps-inadvertent snapshot of their physical distress. The first boy you see is Mark. His face is skeletal, the weight loss magnifying his ears and a chin so sharp it seems poised to pierce his skin. And even before the camera pans away to other boys, Mark’s smile quickly fades.
That pan reveals two sleeping boys, so weakened that they seem oblivious to the commotion and the cameraman’s pep. One of them is little Titan, who blinks awa
ke but makes no move to address the camera. Nick gamely but wearily flashes two bony fingers in a peace sign. As the camera continues its pan you hear the rustle of kids moving in space blankets pulled up to their chins. Some wear them like skirts around their legs. Then there’s Biw, all the chubbiness from those mid-lesson snacks in English teacher Carl Henderson’s class melted away. Many of the boys are so cold they’ve pulled their filthy jerseys over their knees—exposing patches of red polyester burnished brown by mud. There’s a moment of levity, though, when Mark thanks the press from around the world and everybody laughs.
The world was now watching even more intently—gripped by the incredible saga and the suspense of it all. How would they get the boys out of there? Millions of viewers toggled between channels broadcasting their favorite soccer teams competing at the World Cup in Russia and news outlets covering the plucky soccer team in Thailand. Players sent support, including Brazilian legend Ronaldo, who told CNN: “It’s terrible news, and the world of football hopes that someone can find a way to take these kids out of there.”
Those Thai SEALs who straggled back from Chamber Nine with the video of the boys may also have carried back hope. As soon as they arrived, still in their wet suits, they relayed to their commanders what the boys had told them: during their ordeal they had heard roosters crowing, dogs barking, and children playing. That morning, Wednesday, July 4, the commanders brought one of the exhausted divers to the American tent, and he again relayed this intelligence to a bigger group, including the USAF Special Tactics team and the British divers. Major Hodges and Master Sergeant Anderson were called in. Brits Stanton and Vollanthen were also there, busy stuffing waterproof bags with food they were going to swim in to the boys. Anderson questioned the Thai SEAL about what he’d heard; the Thai SEAL and his commander insisted that that was what the boys had told him. When Anderson and others asked the beleaguered commando whether he himself had heard anything remotely like humans, chickens, or dogs in the hours he had been in Chamber Nine, the Thai SEAL answered in the negative. The Thai SEALs’ operations commander then asked the British divers who had just returned from Chamber Nine thirty-six hours earlier if such a thing were possible.
“One hundred percent impossible,” said Stanton, explaining that the boys were six hundred yards below the surface and not in an area of any habitation. “It was almost laughable. Obviously we tried not to laugh,” said Stanton later, adding that it wasn’t funny that the boys said they had heard things and completely legitimate for the SEAL commander to ask about them, but he explained that the notion of a side tunnel that big was simply preposterous.
Hodges wondered aloud whether maybe there was something to it. Stanton looked at him cockeyed, knowing that the major had been awake for over twenty-four hours. Hodges and Anderson privately consulted Vern Unsworth and the British divers. Stanton and Unsworth explained that, were any such shaft to exist, it would have to be at least five hundred yards deep—a depth which could fit the Empire State Building with room to spare, and wide enough to base-jump into—so big that it would easily be spotted by a satellite. Anyway, everybody inside Chamber Nine would know if there was such a shaft, because a tunnel of that size, capable of carrying those sounds at such a distance, would deliver a gale of draft—since caves breathe, the bigger the shaft, the bigger the breath.
Satisfied by this explanation, Anderson and Hodges dropped it. The Thai SEALs didn’t, though, immediately dispatching more teams to the mountain above, trying again to find that possible shaft. The Americans declined to send a team up the mountain yet again.
Word spread quickly through camp that the boys were able to hear sounds of chickens and children. The media ran with it, raising expectations of an as-yet-unrevealed alternative entrance, one the spirits of the cave seemed to have hidden from the many hundreds of troops stomping all through the Sleeping Princess’s forests.
Despite the newfound comfort of knowing Thailand’s elite were with them till the end, the Thai SEALs’ arrival in Chamber Nine presented new challenges. In addition to the twelve boys and their adult coach, there were now four more grown men in the chamber with the boys—the equivalent of adding ten more Titans or Marks, who each weighed about seventy pounds. They were rapidly consuming the dwindling amount of remaining oxygen; like the boys, the SEALs would need to be provisioned with food, blankets, flashlights, and—ultimately—dive tanks, along with at least one new mask. The international teams struggled to understand why the “comfort dive,” as some called it, was not coordinated with the other dive teams, and why the Thai SEALs brought so little food with them.
Unwittingly, and to the head-wagging dismay of the international teams, the Thai Navy SEALs had significantly complicated the mission to resupply and rescue the boys. Instead of adding time to the mission’s clock, they had sped it up.
Chapter Eleven
The Zero-Risk Option
And then, after the Brits went in on July 2 and the Thai SEALs on the following day, dive operations skidded to a halt.
The Thai SEAL ops commander took to heart his commandos’ warnings about the hazards of the dive to Chamber Nine. He suspended any further Thai SEAL diving expeditions to the boys—they had made their point and risking additional lives was unnecessary. Anyway, the Thai pu’yais, as the political bigwigs are known, preferred waiting it out—drilling a relief shaft, finding another entrance, waiting for the monsoons to clear, anything that would not risk the lives of the twelve boys. And the Thai SEALs were not alone: pretty much everyone, including the Brits, considered a dive mission under the present conditions too risky.
The Thai SEALs started thinking about the long-haul survival of the soccer team, digging right back into their bottomless supply chain. By now, in addition to the sleek Embraer jets, lumbering C-130 cargo planes were delivering mountains of donated supplies, including over four hundred gleaming aluminum-alloy air tanks and half a dozen refrigerator-size compressors to fill them with. The rescue team had oxygen compressors in case they wanted to adjust the air mixture by jacking up the level of oxygen. They had dozens of inflatable buoyancy control vests, lead weights, belts, webbing. There was so much gear they had to erect a special tent to house it all. In addition to stuffing the cave with air tanks and setting up a high line in both Chambers Two and Three to more efficiently zip the tanks down to the divers below, they ordered miles of thin hose. If they couldn’t bring the boys out into the fresh air, they would pump fresh air in to them.
They already had the oxygen compressors. Now trucks began unloading thick spools of air hose right in front of the curious press, which was quickly informed of the audacious plan. Workers in orange overalls became human spools, clasping their hands together with the coils of hose unrolling on their forearms as Thai SEALs dragged them into the cave. But the farther the hoses were wormed inside, the slower the progress. Complicating the mission was the attempt to attach a telephone line to the oxygen hose. The thinking was, if we can get air to them, we might as well get them a link to the outside world. At this point, the only way of transferring information from Chamber Nine to the outside world was by diving it out. The phone line would enable the boys and their parents to speak for the first time in nearly two weeks. It would enable the Thai SEALs to receive orders from their commanders and to more precisely coordinate the supply chain. It would lift morale. It could make a four-month stay in a foul tomb more sustainable.
The UK dive team considered the notion of running an oxygen tube through a tortuously contorted, flooded tunnel lined with shark’s-tooth rocks a fool’s errand. It might have been possible if they had unlimited time and resources and the cave was dry, but there were now seventeen people in Chamber Nine. Past Chamber Three, physically pushing the manhole-wide coils through obstructions barely half that size would be impossible, and possibly fatal. (If you have ever tried to pull a garden hose through shrubbery or a few rocks, you might understand how difficult an undertaking this would be.) Dozens of segments of hose would need to be sc
rewed together. Even if they managed to thread it to the boys, maintaining each valve and connection would require an army of scuba-diving technicians.
The compounding number of tanks necessary to complete and maintain the hose would have sapped the supply chain. It would also have compounded the level of risk—packing more divers into places they were untrained and unequipped to go. The Brits weren’t chafing at this plan because it was unfeasible; they were uninterested because it required risks they felt were unnecessary. It’s one thing to take a risk when you believe in the end result; it’s another when the end result looks like failure. The Brits were the world’s top cave-rescue divers partly because they had an actuary’s knack for calculating risk, so when asked to help they politely declined.
While the Thai SEALs forged on with the oxygen hose plan, the Brits maintained, along with the U.S. Special Tactics team, that the first order of business must be to supply the boys with the food they would need to survive the next few days, and possibly the months of the monsoon season.
So on Tuesday, July 3, as the four Thai SEALs were winding their way to the boys, Anderson had canvassed Stanton and Vollanthen—who had seen the boys’ miserable living quarters—on what the boys and their coach might need. Items on the list were things like food, blankets, headlamps, and batteries. They started rummaging through the camp to scrounge up what they could. They found five headlamps and fifty extra sets of batteries. They found water pumps so the boys and the Thai SEALs could drink clean water. That would buy time. Getting them food would be trickier.
