The Boys in the Cave

by Matt Gutman

  On July 1, Morris had hiked up with a military team to the south side of the mountain. They were hiking at the level of the river, which they knew drained out of the cave. They also knew they were already a mile south and at least 150 feet above where the boys were. A platoon of soldiers had been trying to widen a crease in the ground for days. When Morris wiggled in there he could tell immediately that it was a dead end. Cave entrances breathe, and this crease gave off not even a whisper of breath. The air was stale. This particular cave had likely collapsed 100 million years ago, he informed the officers. They insisted he keep trying. He told them that it might lead down, but anyone attempting the descent was likely “to climb through stacked boulders and end up in a 127 Hours situation, Aron Ralston style”—a reference to the movie based on Aron Ralston’s memoir of a bouldering accident that forced him to self-amputate his arm with a pocketknife.

  The following day, Monday, July 2, Morris and his team had linked up with the U.S. Air Force Special Tactics team trying to clear the helicopter landing zone near a possible drilling site. They clicked. On Wednesday, July 4, as Stanton and Vollanthen were making their supply run to the boys, Morris was assigned to join a Thai general whose team had been scoping out a cavern for four days: Twenty men had hunted around a single cavern for four days burning hundreds of man-hours. Once again he got there to find no air, no sign of depth, and no cool mist. Some of the crevasses they were checking out were only a foot wide, not to mention the fact that they were about fifteen hundred feet above the boys.

  The assignment, though, was not a total bust. On that day he had come in contact with Thanet Natisri, the enterprising Illinois-based Thai expat who headed some of the rescue mission’s water-management projects. They perused satellite images for dents in the topography which might lead to an alternative cave entrance, and planned to talk about their observations the next day.* On Thursday, July 5, the pair met at a coffee shop in the hotel in Pah Mee where many of the divers were staying. Thanet pulled a laptop from under his arm and showed Morris satellite images of promising sinkholes they could explore that day. Morris immediately liked Thanet. “Right away I knew the kid was switched on. He had maps and had done seismic studies.”

  They hitched a ride back to the mountain and Morris pointed at a cliff that corresponded to a possible sinkhole Thanet had shown him in satellite imagery.

  “Can you get a chopper to take us there?” he asked.

  Thanet happened to know a guy, as his benefactor at the camp was Colonel Singhanat Losuya from the Thirty-seventh Military District in nearby Chiang Rai. His unit had been one of the very first deployed in the search operation back on June 24 and he’d kept a finger on the pulse of the entire rescue operation.

  Morris and Thanet met at base camp the next morning, Friday, July 6, for their requisite flight briefing at headquarters. For Morris the chopper ride was a bit of a lark. The chances of finding anything related to that sinkhole were almost nil, and since his skills weren’t needed he’d been planning to leave that day at 2 P.M. for the four-hour drive back to Chiang Mai. He had rescheduled his flight to the United States for that coming Sunday, July 8.

  As Morris and Thanet received their briefing, in the background Morris heard a voice he recognized. He turned around to see the commander of the Thirty-seventh and Colonel Losuya’s boss, Major General Buncha Duriyapan—known as Big Black. Big Black knew Morris’s wife; in fact, fifteen years earlier, before she and Morris were married, the now-general had taken the two of them out to dinner—mostly to vet the skinny foreign suitor. Morris was not surprised to see the general there; a few days earlier, before Morris left for the cave site, his wife was watching TV and had exclaimed, “That’s him, that’s our general!” So after the flight briefing at base camp, Morris stood up and reintroduced himself. The two briefly reminisced about that long-ago night, and the general introduced Morris to the rest of the leadership as his old friend.

  In Thailand personal connections are critical and are known as “Sen,” which means “noodle.” There are three kinds of noodle that people talk about: “sen mee,” which is like vermicelli—a tenuous connection; “sen lek,” like fettuccini—a mid-range connection; and “sen yai,” the half-inch-wide noodles one might find in the Thai dish pad si yu—connoting a robust connection with someone that is important. By introducing Morris to his fellow commanding officers as his old pal, Big Black had just elevated Morris’s social status, giving him the “sen yai noodles”—i.e., pull—that would help him play a role in the cave-rescue drama that no one had anticipated.

  On their way to the military truck that would take them to the helipad, Thanet and Morris ran into Vern Unsworth, John Vollanthen, and a British diplomatic official. The Brits wore a look of defeat. They told Morris and Thanet about the low oxygen levels in Chamber Nine. Vern said bluntly: “If we don’t dive, everyone dies.” But they said no one seemed to be listening to them. Thanet had already gotten an earful about the problem from his American friends and from Vern. But to Morris it was a revelation. As Vern and the Brits continued on to a planning meeting, Morris nudged Thanet, saying, “I don’t think we should get on that chopper. I think we need to stay.”

  Indeed, Morris would end up staying for five more days.

  First, Morris and Thanet turned around and went back to Colonel Losuya, the deputy commander of the Thirty-seventh. He was the military commander first on the scene on June 24, whom the parents had beseeched for help. He’s the father of a boy who could easily have been a Moo Pa. He had been sympathetic to the poor drenched parents crying in the rain that first night, and he remained not only sympathetic but committed to their sons’ rescue. When Morris briefed him about the conditions the boys faced in Chamber Nine, his jaw dropped. He had never heard any of this. The colonel’s next few decisions would eventually derail his career, but he felt compelled to act.

  “It’s been more than three days since they found the kids, and nothing’s happened,” Morris told them. “We had no news from commanders. And information [was not being] shared. The Thai Navy SEALs were not sharing information with the UK divers. The UK team, the U.S. team, the international teams, and the Thais had no high-level meetings together.”

  Thanet had also been trying to tell people that, but for some reason on Friday, July 6, people actually started listening to this toothy American climber who spoke fluent Thai—somehow his foreignness and his “noodles” with Major General Buncha helped him circumnavigate the rigid Thai hierarchy. They huddled in a side room of the headquarters, and the colonel picked up his phone. He dialed a former military buddy who headed the prime minister’s bodyguard. The security chief relayed the message to the prime minister. A few nerve-racking minutes later he called the colonel back: “The PM himself does not agree with you.” The security chief told them that the government still considered drilling and piping in oxygen to the boys the best option. According to the three stunned people in the room, he said, “Stick to the original plan.” The security chief told them if they had a problem to take it up with the SEALs.

  While that answer sounded definitive, it remained unclear whether the Thai leadership had been informed that the drilling operation was a failure. A few dozen holes had been punched into the jungle, but none to any depth, and without seismic sensors it was like throwing darts at a map—being off by an inch was like being off by a mile. The distance separating the nearest drill bit and the cave was as great as the height of the Empire State Building. Maybe greater—no one knew for sure.

  Similarly, Morris, Thanet, and Colonel Losuya couldn’t be sure the decision makers knew that the operation to pipe in oxygen and wire a telephone line to the boys had effectively ended with Saman Gunan’s death just hours earlier. The two reasons that had just been given for not taking action were both lost causes—the “original plan” had already failed, but no one in a position of power seemed to know that.

  By then the flummoxed colonel had steeled himself to violate every cultural and hierarchical
norm in Thailand. He left Morris and Thanet at camp headquarters and told them to wait there. Half an hour later he returned. He had lobbied his fellow colonels. They were willing to support him, but only if he secured the backing of the SEAL commanders. Standing outside the headquarters, the color washed from his face, the colonel grimly informed Thanet and Morris that he had no choice but to doorstop Rear Admiral Apakorn. “And you’re coming with me,” he ordered Thanet and a now visibly agitated Morris. Marching ramrod straight toward the SEALs’ encampment, the colonel knew he was walking down a road from which there would be no turning back.

  The colonel was about to smash military protocol—going to a commander three ranks above him, from an entirely different branch of the military, to push for what would be a political decision about something entirely beyond his authority. That’s not how it works in Thailand’s military (or in most militaries) and the colonel knew it was likely to end disastrously for him.

  As they crossed the muddy encampment, brushing past the phalanx of unwitting reporters, Morris turned to Thanet and said, “Holy shit, I’m going to have to cancel my flight on Sunday.” They were trailed by Thanet’s two shadows, the pair of soldiers who followed him everywhere holding various maps and surveys. They passed through the checkpoint to the base camp of the rescue area—which by now had been cordoned off from the media by a one-hundred-yard-long green-mesh screen. They turned right and walked another forty feet or so to the SEAL tent. Inside, a pair of captains were busy with administrative work. It was as if a brigade commander of a National Guard unit based in Alaska had approached veteran U.S. Navy SEAL commandos in Virginia Beach. This was the SEALs’ home turf, and they were running the show.

  The colonel asked Morris, Thanet, and his men to stand back a few paces, and entered the tent. With his hands in front of him in a gesture of humility and supplication, the colonel asked the still-sitting captains for an informal chat with the commander. The military norms of lower-ranking officers deferring to higher-ranking officers was upended. The colonel knew these SEAL captains because his unit had been on the scene back on June 24, launching those failed initial search attempts as the first SEALs arrived. He was the one who had handed jurisdiction off to them, and they apparently trusted him enough to pass on the message to their boss.

  The trio stood there not saying much for about fifteen minutes. Finally the commander arrived back at the tent. Morris and Thanet’s eyes bugged when they saw the man. They didn’t expect “the commander” to be the rear admiral—the guy on TV every day. The SEAL compound was part of a long series of event tents joined together in the shadow of the cave. You could pretty much walk from the Australian section, through the American section, and into the Thai SEALs’ area without having to leave the shade of the tent. And due to the delicacy and scale of the breach of protocol the colonel was about to attempt, they had hoped for a meeting place that afforded some privacy, but the rear admiral showed them to a few plastic chairs in the corner of his operations area.

  They sat down. Nearly knee to knee. The colonel began by thanking the admiral for the audience. The veteran SEAL sat stone-faced. He looked impatient, perhaps even a little bored. It had, after all, been a rough twelve hours. He had lost a SEAL. The nation was mourning and his oxygen hose project was a shambles. He had things to do. After introducing Thanet and Morris, the colonel asked Morris to explain the British diving team’s position: Oxygen in the cave was running out, therefore time was running out. They needed to dive the boys out immediately. Thanet added that an atmospheric river was threatening to pummel the area by early the following week. Waiting for the monsoons to wring themselves out meant waiting for the boys to die.

  Apakorn was now paying attention. As this odd couple made up of an American climbing expert and Thai restaurateur/water-management expert spoke, Apakorn spotted a member of the King’s Guard walking outside the fenced-off rescue area. He called him in. A few handpicked members of the King’s Guard, composed of ex-military commanders, roamed the camp anonymously. Few there learned their names—they weren’t supposed to know. During multiple interactions, the king’s emissaries never introduced themselves to Thanet, Morris, or the colonel.

  Called Wongthewan, which translates into “divine progeny,” the King’s Guard is an elite unit of army officers and former generals traditionally considered the leading military faction in Thailand—a country that prides itself on being the only Southeast Asian nation never to be colonized. Founded in 1870, it is Thailand’s oldest unit and is tasked specifically with protecting the king and buffering him from other army units and politicians. The current Thai monarch, Maha Vajiralongkorn, had served in the guard himself during his tenure as crown prince. According to Paul Chambers, an expert on civil-military relations in Southeast Asia and a professor at Naresuan University, the king is known to be extremely close to King’s Guard army officers. Says Chambers, “Since the present monarch was clearly interested in ensuring a rescue for the trapped boys, King’s Guard senior officers were sent to act as the eyes and ears of the palace. Thus they alone could press for the ‘go’ call.”

  Morris and Thanet repeated to the King’s Guard member what they had just told the admiral. As a top representative of the king—who was heavily vested in the success of the operation—he wielded enormous authority, and Colonel Losuya was visibly intimidated. He stepped away from the tent to make a call. Moments later he returned.

  “I’m calling an emergency meeting. Now,” he informed them.

  The little group, which had tentatively walked the hundred yards or so from headquarters to the SEAL base, now crossed right back to where they had started forty minutes earlier—this time with an entourage. It was shortly after noon when they sat down in one of the war room’s side chambers. The king’s emissary dialed a number on his cell phone. Thailand’s interior minister picked up. In the room were several representatives of the king, the lieutenant governor of Chiang Rai Province, the commander of Thailand’s Third Army, a batch of colonels, Apakorn, Morris, and Thanet. There was some fidgeting in pockets as multiple people present searched for the record buttons on their phones. Some needed to document their very presence in the meeting, others needed to cover their asses in case things went spectacularly bad.

  The bigwigs spoke first, then ceded the floor to Morris. To get close enough to the cell phone speaker to hear and be heard, several of those present had to play musical chairs, taking turns in the seat closest to the King’s Guard officer. The interior minister, Anupong Paochinda, was all business. He had patiently listened to all the generals and politicians. Now he peppered Thanet and Morris with questions about the drilling operations and the possibility of running in air to the boys. Morris settled in.

  “You have two terrible choices,” Morris told him. “I don’t envy your decision. In one, everyone is going to die. And in the other, some people are going to die.” The minister and some of the politicians had pointed to the 2010 rescue of thirty-three miners trapped twenty-three hundred feet below the surface in a Chilean mine as a possible template. But Morris explained to the interior minister that it took sixty days to rescue the Chileans. Drillers knew precisely where they were located—plus, the miners had food, they had a safety room, and they had air. Those drilling teams had also worked on relatively flat terrain under clear skies. In sixty days, Morris continued, the boys will be dead, having either starved to death, been drowned by rising waters, or been asphyxiated by dipping oxygen and rising carbon dioxide.

  “Okay, I understand,” the interior minister said. He asked to speak to Rear Admiral Apakorn and ordered him to officially abort the already abandoned operation to route oxygen and a phone line to the chamber. Every effort was now to be directed at stocking the cave with air tanks for the rescue.

  He told the group he was boarding a chopper and flying there that evening for a briefing on their rescue plan.

  Rescue plan? Thanet and Morris didn’t even know what that would look like.

  Chapter 1
5

  Getting the Green Light?

  Thanet and Morris crossed the camp once again, heading down the muddy hill from headquarters to the base camp, through the fenced-off area, and into the American section of that giant operations tent. They told the Americans about their round of meetings with the Thai bigwigs, informing them that the interior minister was on his way and that they needed to form a detailed rescue plan.

  “We’ve had a rescue plan for a couple of days,” Derek Anderson told a noticeably relieved Morris and Thanet.

  Indeed, over the previous thirty-six hours, Hodges, Anderson, the Brits, the Australians, and the Euro-divers had engaged in a blitz of planning; they’d come a long way from where they’d started Wednesday night, when they’d ruled out extracting all the boys in one day and accepted that the boys would all have to be sedated. At a subsequent meeting on Thursday, they’d changed tactics, beginning with their initial assumption of the impossibility of a dive mission. Standing in front of a blank whiteboard, “impossible” was a word that neither Anderson nor Hodges was willing to accept.

  “Just to say it’s not an option, we were not satisfied with that,” Anderson said.

  They gently prodded the exhausted British divers. “Okay, let’s just say we can only get four to six [boys] out,” said Anderson, acting as sort of a life coach trying to build a perfect world scenario. “Better than not even trying. Let’s try to whiteboard some plans. Talk about feasibility.”

  There was no template for this, but they started throwing out more ideas, with Stanton, Vollanthen, and Vern growing more enthusiastic as the scribbles began to creep across the whiteboard. First they drew a rudimentary map of the cave. Vern helped them calculate the distances and the possible water levels at different stages of the cave. Stick figures depicted the path of the divers and circles represented the air tanks built up in the different chambers. Two divers would take a single child—the lead diver would hold the child, the second diver would provide backup and maybe carry the boys’ air tank. They crunched the numbers, assuming that a diver might need to change tanks up to eight times during the dive—in a casual dive for experienced divers at that depth, that much air could last sixteen hours, but this would be no casual dive. They figured they would have to stage the tanks in a series of key locations along the route—those “gas stations” that the Euro-divers had set up. But they would need more of them.