THE CLOCK WAS TICKING
Inside the daring Thai cave rescue
The search for the lost soccer team known as the Wild Boars was in its 10th day when journalist Liam Cochrane arrived at the mouth of the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in northern Thailand. Privately, the ABC Southeast Asia correspondent was not enthusiastic about covering the story and many of his colleagues in the press corps felt the same.
“There was still this grim determination but also this realisation that after 10 days with limited food, you’re really starting to push into the red zone, especially for children. I thought it was going to be a pretty grim story,” recalls the Bangkok-based journalist.
The parents of the 12 boys who went missing on June 23 this year were also losing hope. Tote, father of the youngest Wild Boar, Titan, had managed to remain relatively positive until then. But, as he would later admit in Cochrane’s new book The Cave: The Inside Story of the Daring Thai Cave Rescue, on the morning of Mon., July 2, he was beginning to realise that even if his son and fellow teammates were found, it was unlikely they would still be alive.
Among themselves, the volunteer divers, who had gathered from across the world to help find the lost boys, began discussing how the rescue operation would likely become one of recovery. Expert British diver John Volanthen
– who with his caving partner Rick Stanton was key in helping fix lines of rope deep into the cave – was more blunt. “We weren’t expecting to find children, we were expecting to find bodies,” Volanthen later told Cochrane.
Navigation within the labyrinthine cave network was treacherous. It was frequently narrow, pitch-black and flooded with cold water now the wet season had begun, earlier than expected. At one point, deep within the mountain, Stanton took off his mask and smelled what he assumed were decomposing bodies. But despite this sense of eerie foreboding, not far from John, the Wild Boars were alive.
The team members, whose ages ranged from 11 to 17, and their coach, 25-year-old Ekkaphon Chanthawong, never intended on getting lost. They often went exploring as a team and collectively decided Tham Luang was the perfect place for their next adventure. But after walking 4km into the cave and swimming through one of the already flooded passages, when they headed back towards the entrance, the path home was blocked by more water.
Later, the boys admitted that by their 10th day in the cave, they were losing patience, hope and courage. Even so – and despite not having any food and only cave water to drink – the boys used what little energy they had left to dig through the back wall of the chamber where they had made their camp. They hoped there might be a way out behind it.
At around 8pm, on July 2, Coach Ek and the boys heard the sound of voices. Two men in diving gear appeared: Volanthen and Stanton. Against all the odds, the Wild Boars had been found.
Cochrane had already left base camp for the day when he got the news. He raced back to the mountain and worked through the night, broadcasting live to Australia to announce the joyous news. But soon came the realisation that getting the boys out of the cave might prove even harder than finding them.
“The families are really struggling” —Cochrane
“That supercharged the air because then the clock started ticking,” Cochrane tells WHO. “There was definitely that sense that the rains were coming and that it needed to happen within that three-day window.” Millions of dollars of resources were poured into the effort. As rescuers debated possibilities, suggestions also came from outside Thailand. Famously, Elon Musk offered a mini-submarine for the operation, an idea which was immediately dismissed as unsuitable by the on-site team.
By Thurs., July 5, time was running out. Oxygen levels were dropping in the cave where the boys were camping and big rains were forecast. Cave divers Dr Richard Harris, a recently retired Adelaide-based anaesthetist, and Craig Challen, a vet from Perth, were flown in. Harris would put the boys and their coach under sedation in preparation for the dive while Challen would perform medical checks. Both insisted on having diplomatic immunity.
“There was concern there could be problems if it all went wrong,” explains Cochrane. “If some or all of [the team] had died, there probably would have been some anger and a lot of emotion on the mountain.”
The challenge ahead became even starker when 37-year-old Saman Gunan, a retired Navy SEAL, died while in one of the cave’s inner chambers. The outside world began asking, if a professional diver can die then what hope did the boys have?
On July 8, the rescue team – made up of British, American, Australian, Thai, European and Chinese experts – were ready to attempt the first rescue. The boys’ parents signed authorisation papers; the boys wrote personal messages to pass on to their families. Coach Ek’s had included an apology to the parents.
Harris came up with a combination of three drugs to sedate the boys: an oral dose of alprazolam, followed by injections of the powerful sedative ketamine and atropine, to reduce the amount of saliva in the boys’ mouths. The divers were given pre-loaded syringes to administer more of the drugs along the route. Harris later admitted he thought there was “zero chance of success” for the mission.
An already wetsuit-clad 14-year-old called Note went first. After being sedated Note was put into a buoyancy vest, a harness with a handle on the back and an air tank was strapped to his front. The hood of the wetsuit was packed with foam for protection and a full-face mask put in place. The silicone seal around the mask was checked and re-checked to make sure water couldn’t get in. Then cable ties were put around Note’s wrists and clipped around his back to keep him restrained in case he woke and panicked during the journey.
Then the first recovery diver, Jason Mallinson, took hold of the harness and submerged the boy in the water and after Harris checked he was still breathing, began the five-hour journey to safety. The routine would become almost identical for each subsequent rescue. At chambers along the way, a quick medical check was given to ensure the boy was still breathing, then the diver would re-enter the water, holding the child while swimming and keeping in contact with the guide line.
Against all the odds, by July 10, all 12 boys and Coach Ek had been rescued. “There are probably only a handful of guys who could have pulled this off
in the world,” says Cochrane. “The number of things that could have gone wrong is quite extraordinary.”
During their first days of freedom, the boys’ families could only wave at them through a glass window at Prachanukroh Hospital because doctors were worried about infection. On day three, the families were finally reunited. A video was released by the Thai government in which the boys introduced themselves, thanked their rescuers and talked about the food they were looking forward to eating. They were discharged on July 18, all in good health despite their experience, and taken straight to a press conference to face the world’s media.
In the weeks and months that followed, the boys attended ceremonies, high profile events, photo opportunities and media interviews while attending school where possible.
In between, there were extended overseas trips to the Youth Olympics in Argentina, to the US where they appeared on The Ellen Degeneres Show and the UK where they attended the Pride of Britain awards. There’s been talk of movie deals and, as Cochrane reveals, living in the glare of international interest has caused strain. “The families are really struggling because they haven’t been able to work and many of them have lost their jobs because they’re fully consumed with being the parents of the Wild Boars,” he says.
For months after the rescue, Coach Ek returned to the monastery where he’d lived as a monk for 10 years. While it was a haven for Ek amid the media storm, most days after school the Wild Boars would ride their bicycles up to the monastery to be with their coach. “The bond between the boys and him is apparent and the bond between the kids remains very strong,” explains Cochrane. “They made a pact to stay together inside the cave and that has very much translated to the more complicated world outside.”