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Thai soldiers emerge from the mouth of Tham Luang Cave in northern Thailand on July 2, the day a team of missing boys and their trainer were found. (LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA / AFP / Getty Images)
MAE SAI, Thailand – The US Air Force officer stood with three other rescuers on July 8 when they finally felt a strong tugging on the line that passed from their gloved hands, to their feet, a cloudy water table, a chain all along the cave flooded up to the room where 12 young footballers and their assistant were trapped for 16 days.
The call "Fish on!" echoes the stone, alerting the rescuers in the passage that their unfair mission was underway.
"It was the code word that someone came from," said the officer, who spoke to the Washington Post with permission from his superiors on the condition that he is not identified.
The first boy would come out of the water in ten minutes. "Everyone's heart has stopped," he said.
It was the moment that they were all waiting, but that no one had wanted. This meant that no new outings would be discovered or drilled, and that the members of the Wild Boars football team, aged 11 to 16, and their 25-year-old assistant coach could not leave behind. Another way. The incessant rains pumped daily deluges into the tunnels, constantly threatening to overwhelm the battery of borrowed pumps and overwhelm the boys' tiny hideaway as a horrified world watched.
This meant that the air was starting to fail, with oxygen levels falling to near – blackout levels. Everything was brought back to the latter, the best, most terrible option that planners thought would mean the death of some of the boys, none of whom could swim. It meant shooting a terrified child through the icy waters of the narrow, flooded 2.5-mile gauntlet that had already killed an expert diver.
"You could hear that everyone stopped breathing" The officer says:
The first boy would get out, but would he get out alive?
"I could not see anything"
The unprecedented rescue operation that seized the world and submerged for three weeks this mountainous outpost of northern Thailand, told here on the basis of 39 interviews with more than 30 participants, started on 23 June. a series of text messages: Many sons were late for dinner.
Nopparat Khanthavong, the 37-year-old Wild Boars coach, knew his assistant coach had brought some of the youngest players for a bike ride on Saturday while he was watching his older team to play.
After the final whistle, Nopparat checked his phone and saw at least 20 worried messages from his players' parents asking why the cyclists had not come back. When he learned that the children had persuaded his assistant to take them to the Tham Luang Nang cave six miles deep, he went that way. The cave was popular, but Nopparat, standing under a clouded sky, knew that the rainy season was not the time to be in those endless passages and prone to flooding.
He stopped to consider abandoned bicycles around the entrance and rains that were deteriorating on a lush wooded mountain slope. He ran in, shouting the names of his assistant and the boys.
"I did not have a flashlight," said Nopparat. "In a few meters, I could not see anything."
But soon he saw lights coming out of the depths. It was not his team, it was a group of park employees who had also seen the bicycles and had gone to investigate.
"If your players are there, they are trapped," he is told, imploring him to calm down. Several hundred feet lower in the winding and narrow passages, they had found water, blocking the passage and getting up quickly.
When the Napasorn Taturkarn phone rang, the mayor of Baan Moo 9 was with a group of neighbors. They practiced Thai music for the funeral and the wedding that she planned for the village of 700 houses less than two miles from the entrance to the cave.
It was his friend, Nopparat. "I think my boys are in the cave," he said. "Can you help?"
The first responders in a crisis that would soon captivate millions of people were the musicians of his court, said Napasorn. At the entrance to the cave, they found Nopparat frantically pacing the fading light. "Nachparat and the villagers made another trip, Napasorn called Siam Ruamjai, the local volunteer emergency team based in a pink building a few miles down the main road.
" I have already been to the cave, "said Niwat Tumploy, 27, who answered the call." But only when he was dry. In the rains, it is a bad place. "
Rescuers confer after journalists and non-essential personnel have been ordered to leave the cave site on July 8.
Ten volunteers jumped into an ambulance at the back From a pick-up At the cave, five joined the growing crowd at the entrance, five entered, including Niwat.The rain had become a torrent.The water in the passage was until their ankles even before they reached the water impasse.In the two hours it would be almost to their size.
"There was nothing we could do, "said Niwat." We needed the big ones. "
" Time is running out "
Governor of Chiang Rai Province, Narongsak Osatanakorn, just weeks away from being transferred to another part of the country, was getting ready to go to bed when he word of the missing children.He assumed that it was "just a few boys in the cave, no big problem, "he told the Post.
But after changing pajamas to drive 38 miles to the cave, he knew differently. Within hours, the first members of the Thai Navy SEAL team arrived and went into the water.
Thai SEALS practice open water rescues. They were not prepared for muddy, dark currents between sharp rock walls. Feeling their way along the jagged edges, they turned around. A larger group tried again, but when they reached an intersection in the narrow passage, they were disconcerted. The cave was a labyrinth and the water was rising.
"We could no longer fight with time or water," said Aparkorn Youkongkaew, the commander of the Thai Navy SEAL in charge.
A radio journalist arrived from Mae Sai; word began to spread. During the day, people brought food, a body of volunteer cooks that grew to more than a hundred. A truck arrived with a small industrial pump, which workers carried to the brink of flood, the good idea at the wrong scale.
"They were pumping, but they were not enough to handle so much water," said Kobchai Boonyaorana, a Thai disaster management official. "The rains became more difficult.
Technicians raise water pumps near Tham Luang cave on July 1. (LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA / AFP / Getty Images)
The call for pumps is out , and they began to arrive from all over the country.Worawut Imchit drove overnight from a shrimp farm 850 miles south, four flat trucks carrying four massive pumps that circulate water to across the ponds.
"It was three sleepless days for me," Imchit said. "I ran like crazy, up and down, back and forth between the pumps. to make sure everything was working properly. "
In three days, more than 40 machines had arrived, said Kobchai, at more than 400,000 gallons at the time, pumping power was stabilizing the level. of water and lowered it on drier days.In downhill, it flooded the fields of 128 farmers, destroying them rs rice harvests for the year.
Inside, divers said they were working without any sense of the day or time, in the devouring darkness.
As the teams sank into the cave, the radio links broke down. Teams used hand-written notes, running messengers and swimming relay announcements. Commanders lost contact with their men for hours at a time.
Asaf Zmirly, an Israeli living in Bangkok, arrived with radios from Israel that could operate inside the cave, adjusting to the topography and creating a network in which Daisy shape. Just the shallow incursion that he made into the water to build the system was daunting.
"If you look to the right or left, the mask will be torn off your face," Zmirly says.
Even when they could talk to each other, the researchers did not know where to look or how to find their way. The SEALs would be essentially lost after dives of several hours, without any sign of the young boys. On June 27, rapidly rising waters filled the cave – so fast that it would be the equivalent of a flood of the house in 10 minutes.
"Our three hours of drainage are nothing," said the commander of the Thai navy.
Rick Stanton, British expert in cave diving, leaves the cave on June 28th. (Linh Pham / Getty Images)
They found the help of an improbable expert.
Vernon Unsworth, a British insurance consultant and amateur spelunker, made an obsession with Tham Luang's cave system. He had explored miles for a decade, planning trips between England and Thailand during the rainy season. He was convinced that the Thais were not looking in the wrong place. Unsworth, a diver himself, had strong opinions about where to look and who should be watching.
"Time is running out," he wrote in a letter to the governor, according to Unsworth's wife. He listed the names of three British divers that he ranked as the best in the world. "Please contact them by ASAP Embassy of the United Kingdom."
[ Meet the British divers' A-team & # 39; at the cave rescue center in Thailand]
The Thai government agreed. were in the cave and a search that most had abandoned as futile took an electrifying turn.
On July 2, Rick Stanton, a former firefighter, and John Volanthen, an IT consultant, used Unsworth cards to reach a room more than 2.5 miles from the entrance. When their lighthouses emerged from the water, they were reflected in 13 pairs of eyes that had not seen sunlight in more than 200 hours.
They were alive after nine days of black isolation, six without food. Clinging to a slippery slope 15 feet above the current, they had licked droplets of water from the limestone walls. Their assistant, Ekapol Chanthawong, a former Buddhist monk, taught them to meditate to keep calm.
"How many of you? Thirteen? Brilliant ?, said Volanthen. He assured them:" Navy SEALs will come tomorrow, with food and doctors and everything. "
Instantly, a search It was turned into a rescue.Hundreds of volunteers and military clogged the mountain roads up to the cave, an ad hoc battalion of experts and adventurers from around the world.
More than 1,500 journalists descended into the small town, running to feed insatiable interest to the teammates, some of whom were stateless migrants from a lawless area of neighboring Myanmar.The boys, supposedly lost, had now a chance to get out. "Their families, who had been watching in a muddy camp outside the cave, were jubilant.
[Rescuing Thai boys trapped in flooded cave will be a challenge]
Piyada Chermuen, 16, is from the same Myanmar village that Adul Sam-on, the English-speaking boy capable of communicating quer with British divers. They lived in the same Christian church with 20 other refugees, most of whom were sent to Thailand by their parents so that they could go to school.
Adul, 14, one of the best players of Wild Boars, speaks five languages.
"We were praying for him when the teacher ran and said that they had been found," Piyada said. Outside of his classroom, a series of Adul photos hung like prayer flags. "Thank God, we applauded so loudly."
Adul's classmates, one of the trapped boys, pay a tribute to the Wild Boars football team at the school. Ban Waingphan School entrance on July 9th. (Lauren DeCicca / Getty Images)
the cave, the activity exploded. Thai police set up satellite parking areas and shuttle volunteers – more than 9,000 of them. Commanders established one-way traffic lanes in the cave. More deeply in the room, four SEALs were watching the boys while their comrades were carrying rations and water.
Ideas came from every corner: a network of corrugated pipes that boys could crawl through; float them in body bags. The billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk began building a custom minisub.
But rescuers focused on three possibilities: diving, drilling, and waiting.
Several teams traveled the slopes to find a place to dig an access hole. After testing over a hundred sites, only 18 were deemed even viable remotely. And even drilling in the right hole could cause a deadly collapse.
Rescuers quickly rejected the rains. Unsworth warned them that the floods of the northern Thailand monsoon season can last until winter, raising the possibility that children and their guards would be perched on the cold, dripping slope. for five months. Feeding them would require about 2000 meals. And oxygen, which turned out to be a critical need in just two days. With more adults in the cave, O2 levels were down. Saman Kunam, a retired Thai Navy diver, was working to solve this problem on the night of 6 July. He and his team were installing oxygen tanks along the flooded passage, with tubes to route them to the boys' room. Navy commanders walked outside the mouth of the cave as the hours dragged on without the team telling them anything. They finally emerged seven hours later, carrying a lifeless body: Saman's own tank was dry.
Prayuth Jetiyanukarn, the abbot wearing the hill monastery where the deputy dormitory often slept, wrote a short letter to the young man, slipped it into a plastic tube and gave it to a Thai diver who promised to wear it. 19659069] "Be patient, try to build your encouragement from within," he says, according to the Abbot. "This energy will give you the power to survive."
Save the most or lose everything
Inside the cave, however, were 12 soccer players, still trapped in deteriorating conditions. Preparations for a water outlet were under construction.
Rescuers built a model of the narrow passageway with chairs. They practiced with local boys of the right size in a school pool, perfecting the muscle memory they would need in the cave, said the US Air Force officer.
Inside the cave, the boys and their trainer told their rescuers that they were ready to leave
"They were the ones who had the least need to convince," said Major Charles Hodges, who led the American team. and was so new to his new position that his business had not arrived in Okinawa.
On July 6, the US Army and Thai SEALs took a plan concocted jointly with senior officials of the Thai government. The Minister of the Interior was among those who arrived at the entrance of the cave as a cortege. Using Unsworth's maps and his understanding of the topography and hydrology of the chamber, they urged about sixty representatives of the civilian government: it was time to act, even they strongly believed that some of the boys would not survive. Their message: Save most of them now or lose them all soon.
"You can wait until this window of finite time is over," Hodges told Thai officials, "and I can almost guarantee you all will die."
The Thai Interior Minister asked Hodges and about eight others go to a private room. He wanted to hear their plan again. Hodges explained both parts of the mission, stressing that it would take a whole day of preparation before the first boy was shot through the water. The Thais would continue to search for a drilling site if the dive plan failed.
They got their green light.
Hundreds of rescuers with equipment swarm around the cave on July 6, the day before the mission. (Linh Pham / Getty Images)
On July 7 – two weeks to the day, the boys disappeared – the bailout, although not publicly acknowledged, was underway.
Air tanks were stowed along the muddy passages, enough for the 12 boys, their trainer, the four SEALs who had sunk in with them, and the 18 divers who took them away. The riggers tended a web of static ropes to hoist the cocooning stretchers over vast fields of jagged rocks.
On July 8 at 10:30, the core team of 18 divers was in the water: among them, British, Thai SEALS and dive buddies from the seaside resort of Koh Tao in the Gulf of Thailand.
A group went to the last room. By the time they emerged, players and coach Ek, as Ekapol was known, had elected the boy who would go first. Officials refused to identify him, but friends and relatives said that he was Mongkon Boonpiem, a 13-year-old boy with a lucky name: "the auspicious one".
The combination, the smaller one, still did not fit the emaciated frame as it should be. They prepared the mask, attached to a tank filled with 80 percent oxygen. The rich mixture would saturate his tissues, making it easier to revive when he stopped breathing.
Richard Harris, an Australian anesthetist and caving diver, gave a final evaluation to the boy. The boy was given what the Thai and American participants described variously as a muscle relaxant or an anti-anxiety medication. A panic attack in a chokepoint no bigger than a manhole would almost certainly be fatal. Finally, the boy was swaddled in a soft plastic stretcher – similar to a tortilla wrap, according to Hodges – to confine his limbs and protect him from grater walls. And then, with his teammates watching, they fired under the troubled water
The original plan had called two divers – one in front of the stretcher, one behind. But this configuration was abandoned because too bulky for shoulder-width passages and elbows.
"Having this second person did not provide you anything," said the US Air Force officer.
Instead, a diver kept the boy swaddled in a clinch for as much swimming as possible, the officer said, handing the boy over to a new diver after his designated stretch. Part of the swim was the last, a deep tubular descent that held water like a trap. All in all, it was a grueling two-hour trek through mud-filled passages.
"He crawls in mud and underwater tunnels, and you can not see your hands," said Erik Brown, a Canadian diver. 18.
But it was the end of the most deadly part.
"Fishing on!"
The divers lifted the boy, and the crew at the water's edge took him out. Their dry and final passage was lined with over a hundred rescuers. One of them, the United States Air Force officer, has stuck his ear to the boy's mask.
He was breathing. And now, rescuers could too.
"It was a huge weight on our shoulders," said the officer.
"It was a little risky"
They had three more that day, four the next day and four the next day. They were hard to distinguish with their masks, with the exception of Coach Ek, who still had his wolf ring on one finger. At each repetition, they were more effective.
On July 10, the lights of a helicopter shone on the town of Mae Sai, its purr breaking the night sky. Celebrations erupted – the last boy was alive, en route to the hospital. Rescuers opened beers, hugged each other and exchanged shots.
Then they caught up. Four SEALs from the Thai Navy were still in the deepest chambers, clearing their way after volunteering to watch the boys.
Disaster almost hit.
The pumps had held back water until the last moments, when one of the industrial-sized pipes burst, spilling water into the cave. The divers who stayed ran for it.
"The guys started diving on this hill and trying to get out," said the Air Force officer, who was the last person to come out of the cave. "It was a little risky."
In the city, drivers honked horns in the streets. Family members rushed to the 8th floor of Chiang Rai Hospital, an hour away. There, crowds gathered behind the barriers that surrounded the entrance and cheered every ambulance that arrived. Inside, doctors have declared wild boars healthy, broadcasting a video of their waving from their group room.
After 21 days together in the dark, they were still side by side in the bright fluorescence of a welcoming world.
Panaporn Wutwanich, Jittrapon Kaicome, and Katcha Rerngsamut contributed to this report
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