Miracle in the Cave Read online

  Maps

  Dedication

  For my family, who let me wander and loved me still

  Contents

  Cover

  Maps

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Before the Cave

  1. A Ride, an Idea

  2. The Wild Boars

  3. The Sleeping Lady

  4. Entering the Darkness

  Into the Cave

  5. Trapped

  6. The Search Begins

  7. SEALs Don’t Live in Caves

  8. A Sense of Direction

  9. Plan B

  10. Help Arrives

  11. Hope and Heart

  12. Unraveling

  13. Getting Closer

  14. “Brilliant”

  15. Options

  16. Politics

  17. The Little Things

  18. Crunch Time

  Out of the Cave

  19. Preparations

  20. Last Words

  21. D-Day

  22. Three More Boys

  23. Five, Six, Seven, Eight

  24. Closing Window

  After the Cave

  25. Sending the Wild Boars Home

  26. Bittersweet

  27. Hunting the Wild Boars

  28. Controversy

  29. Appeasing the Sleeping Lady

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  “Oh, we weren’t bored; we were too busy digging.”

  Fourteen-year-old Biw glanced up. He was sitting cross-legged on a red woven mat. Soft translucent flakes of skin peeled off his feet, the result of more than two weeks in that dank cave. An adolescent fuzz brushed his upper lip—a boy on the edge of manhood, thrust onto the world stage.

  He looked around the living room before he went on. About a dozen people had gathered to celebrate Biw’s return home with a low-key party. Biw’s father, Sak, had invited me to join, along with the ABC’s (Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s) Thai producer Jum and cameraman David. The family was middle class, with a comfortable house and a pickup truck parked in a carport. But the women still preferred to cook the traditional way—outside, on small charcoal stoves. As we entered, Sak proudly switched on a rather large water feature taking up most of their courtyard. Inside, plates of food were spread out on the floor. The heat of the day had passed, and the tiles were cool in between the woven mats. The family and select friends sat cross-legged, like Biw, sipping beers and soft drinks and fussing over the boy. A brand-new bicycle leaned against the wall.

  Biw’s real name is Ekkarat Wongsukchan. Thai names are often long and difficult to remember, so most Thais have nicknames. Some derive from baby days (pink, chubby, small), some are aspirational (Benz, Golf), a surprising number are related to food (crab and shrimp are common), and some are just a shortened version, like Biw’s dad’s name: Adisak “Sak” Wongsukchan. But a considerable number of Thai nicknames can be traced back to a fleeting moment in the hospital, just after the birth, when a nurse asks about a nickname. In Sak’s case, his first thought was Leo—his favorite brand of beer. His wife, Khamee, suggested—not unreasonably—that their son might be considered a drunkard from birth. They settled on Biw, the nickname of a good-looking singer who was popular at the time. And so, Ekkarat Wongsukchan became known as “Biw”—which roughly rhymes with “seal.”

  That evening was the first time Biw had spoken in detail to his family about what had happened inside the cave. Jum, David, and I sat with the other guests on the floor, honored to have been invited to the party. As the only media there, we also felt a bit awkward at being included in such an intimate family occasion. I’d been talking about Biw and his mates for days, these boys from the Wild Boars Academy Football Club, joining many on the emotional journey of their rescue. Now here he was, telling us the story firsthand.

  Biw didn’t need much prompting from his uncles; he was keen to talk. His voice was quiet, but held the room.

  “We woke up at 6 a.m. every day because Tee’s watch had an alarm set for 6 a.m. and noon. Those that had strength would dig first, then the second shift would take over.”

  Little did they know at the time just how deeply trapped inside the cave they were, and how futile their digging was. Their escape route was blocked: two and a half miles of tunnels had been flooded in a sudden monsoonal downpour. Tons of earth and rock surrounded them in every other direction.

  Outside, an unprecedented international rescue operation had been under way. The urgent need to get this soccer team safely out of the cave had attracted experts from the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, China, and across Thailand, as well as an army of volunteers. Millions of people around the world were glued to their TV sets, radios, and phones, anxiously following as hundreds of journalists at the scene reported every development of what would become the greatest rescue in living memory.

  But the twelve boys and their coach had no idea about all that. They just didn’t want to look like slackers when they were finally found.

  “We had to try to get out,” said Biw with a grin. “Otherwise when the officials came, they’d think we did nothing.”

  As he spoke, Biw flicked the middle finger of his right hand into a finger of his left hand over and over—a nervous tic.

  “You know, I never asked him these questions. This is the first time I’ve heard these details,” said Sak. “Did you cry inside the cave?” he asked his son tenderly.

  Biw shook his head, smiling shyly at the floor. His downcast eyes highlighted thick black lashes.

  For all those desperate days, Sak had kept a secret from the other parents: he alone had glimpsed the abyss, and it had frightened him.

  “Among the parents I was the only one who went inside the cave,” said Sak. “Even as an adult, I was scared.”

  Sak never let on how he felt to the others, but his experience inside the cave made him brace for the worst. In his mind, the best he could have hoped for was the closure of finding his son’s corpse. “I was the only one that thought differently from the other parents. They had hope, but I didn’t.”

  Before the Cave

  1

  A Ride, an Idea

  The road up Tung Mountain was brutally steep.

  It was a serious bike ride for the boys of the Wild Boars Academy Football Club—a fourteen-mile climb to a peak around forty-six hundred feet high. The youngest, eleven-year-old Titan (Chanin Wibunrungrueang), was finding it especially tough. But he wasn’t far behind the older boys. Even though he’d been cycling only for a year, he was keen. He even had modern cleat shoes that clipped to the pedals for extra power. They were hot pink.

  Titan had a cheeky smile and a way of saying things that weren’t particularly funny and got a laugh anyway. There was something naturally adorable about him. His nickname came not from the Greek god, as might be expected, considering his Thai name meant “great.” He was named after a car. His father was a salesman for Mitsubishi at the time of his birth and was promoting their new product—a 2.5-liter turbo-diesel compact pickup truck built in Thailand, the Triton. And so when a nurse, catching the father off guard, asked him what his newborn son’s nickname was to be, he declared: Titan.

  Ahead of Titan was fifteen-year-old Night (Phiraphat Somphiangchai), who earlier had turned down his dad’s offer of a lift in the car to the starting line, choosing to add an extra eleven-mile workout before the race even started. (Night’s father had also been caught off guard at the hospital, and had to come up with a nickname for his newborn son on the f
ly. Night’s older sister had been born during the Water Festival, so was known as Nam—“water.” This delivery happened after dark, so the boy became Night.)

  Together with the boys on that ride, as always, was their twenty-five-year-old soccer coach, Ekapol Chantawong. It was Coach Ek who had inspired a passion for cycling in his young charges. They joined around sixteen hundred other riders in the Spin to Doi Tung Temple, an event to promote Chiang Rai as a bicycle-friendly province, held on Sunday, June 10, 2018. Some were racing; most were just testing themselves against the punishing gradient.

  The first stretch of the winding road was shaded by the forest canopy, but at about the thirty-three-hundred-foot mark, the vegetation changed into thick green jungle. Jurassic-size palms sprang out of the layer of creepers that covered every surface. At intervals along the road, bamboo poles were hung with colorful vertical flags—the tung that gave the mountain its name.

  The finish line was the temple at the summit: Wat Phra That Doi Tung. Its two golden stupas overlooked a stunning view across the mountains. On a clear day, tourists might glimpse neighboring Laos and Myanmar in the distance. According to Thailand’s tourism agency, pilgrims visit the temple because one of the stupas is said to contain the left collarbone of the original Buddha, which is truly remarkable, considering that the holy scripts say Siddhartha Gautama was cremated.

  In their blue Lycra cycling tops, the boys slowly huffed their way up into the mountain mist, which thickened at times into drizzle. If they had any energy to take in their surroundings, they might have noticed a small shrine in the forest between the souvenir stalls and the temple. Next to the deities and offerings was a life-size concrete statue of an animal, its snout raised and pointing back down the hill: a wild boar. But chances are they were too exhausted to notice much at all.

  Not that they minded. They liked to push themselves beyond the soccer field. Often after training, Coach Ek would take them swimming, cycling, or exploring the mountains around Mae Sai, the northernmost district of Thailand’s northernmost province, Chiang Rai, where they lived. A few weeks earlier, they had done another tough ride up Doi Pha Mee (Bear Cliff Mountain). That day, they had all posed for a photo. It looked like they were standing on a raft, but it was actually a bamboo-floored viewing point high in the hills, a light blue sky with cartoon clouds behind them.

  This particular subgroup within the Wild Boars formed in the way posses of kids form all over the world—brought together by school, relatives, and shared sporting interests. Six of them went to the same school: Note (Pracĥak Sutham, thirteen), Tern* (Nattĥawut Thakhamsai, fourteen), Night, Mix (Phaňumat Saengdi, thirteen), Dom (Duangphet Phromthep, thirteen, soccer team captain), and Pong (Somphong Chaiwong, thirteen). Two of the boys—Night and Nick (Phipĥat Phothi, fourteen)—were cousins. Adul, pronounced “a-doon” (Adul Sam-on, fourteen), was the only Christian among the rest of the Buddhist boys. Titan was the youngest, but Mark (Mongkhon Bunpiam, thirteen) was physically smaller. The biggest kid of the group was Tee (Phonchai Khamluang, sixteen). The difference between an eleven-year-old and a sixteen-year-old is vast, but these boys were a tight-knit group and spent much of their spare time hanging out together.

  In the days after the ride up Tung Mountain, as their jelly legs returned to normal, talk turned to the next challenge.

  “Some of the children suggested a trip to Tham Luang for the next week,” said Coach Ek. “I’d been in the cave before, [but] some of the children had never been there. They asked to go and I said, ‘If we all want to go, yes, no problem, I can lead you there.’”

  The outing was no secret. On Wednesday, June 20, Coach Ek announced on his Facebook page that, after a friendly match at 10 a.m. that Saturday, they’d go visit Tham Luang.

  There was no official parental permission requested. That’s not how things worked in this small community. The parents trusted the young coach. He always made sure their children got home after their post-training activities.

  The boys were excited at the prospect of two of their favorite activities: soccer and adventure.

  2

  The Wild Boars

  Kamol Chanthapoon was raised by pig farmers, but as a boy he dreamed of playing soccer.

  Unfortunately, at that time, Mae Sai didn’t have a soccer team, or even a decent playing field. The most Kamol could do was watch games: he told Australian journalist Matt Blomberg that he and his friends would gather around an old television for a weekly one-hour highlights package of English Premier League.

  Years later, in 2016, as a grown man, Kamol founded his own soccer team. Originally, he was going to call it Moo (the Pigs), in honor of his agricultural upbringing. But moo was a bit too cute, a common nickname for chubby kids. It wasn’t quite the vibe Kamol was after, and it would be an easy target for on-field teasing. So it became Moo Pa—the Wild Boars. The club’s logo was a sharp-tusked beast with red eyes, front hoof raised, ready to charge.

  Everybody who applied to join was welcomed, and the club grew to eighty-four members. There were three teams, divided by age: under 13s, under 15s, and under 19s. There was only one female player: the daughter of senior coach Nopparat Kanthawong. The Wild Boars became a refuge for sports-loving kids who may not have gone to fancy schools or even had official papers; some of the boys from ethnic minorities in Myanmar remained technically stateless.

  The coaches worked their young charges hard, taking their training seriously and trying to instill a code of conduct both on and off the field.

  “They’re fighters,” Nopparat “Nop” Kanthawong told me after soccer practice. “They always honor their opponents, [and] they are good sports during the match, however long it takes, no matter what league.”

  Moments before telling me this, he had been supervising the under 15s squad’s stretching session. Coach Nop walked over to a boy who was younger and heavier than the other players, and, almost without even looking, casually draped an arm over his shoulder just as he was about to topple over. It was a telling moment.

  Assisting Coach Nop at the Wild Boars was Coach Ek—quiet, fit, and devoutly Buddhist. He had spent his younger years moving between Myanmar, Mae Sai, and Lamphun, almost two hundred miles south, where his aunt lived. When his Burmese (or Myanmar, to use the modern term) parents died, Ek was left in legal limbo. Having lived for years in Thailand, he could have applied for Thai citizenship, but the process was slow and open to corruption. He decided not to bother, although he once applied for a work permit, which automatically cast him as a foreigner. He lived as a monk for ten years at a big temple in Mae Sai, which had a giant black scorpion statue overlooking the Myanmar border.

  When he left the monkhood, he turned to his other passion—soccer. In 2016, Ek offered his services at the newly formed club, the Wild Boars. He was in charge of the under 13s team, but his regular after-practice excursions to go cycling, swimming, or exploring made him popular with players of all ages. The boys adored him, and called him “Pee Ek,” or Older Brother Ek.

  He wasn’t the only stateless Wild Boar on the cave excursion. Tee, Mark, and Adul also lived in Thailand without proper papers. Adul’s parents had smuggled him across the border from Myanmar when he was just seven, hoping for a better life for their son. They lived in Wa State, a self-governed area of Myanmar once famed for its fierce headhunting tribes, now infamous for producing most of the methamphetamine that floods into Southeast Asia—ice, crystal meth, yaba. In the Mekong region, yaba is everywhere: little pills of meth and caffeine, cheap and dirty. It allows factory workers, enslaved migrants on fishing boats, and young middle-class partygoers to stay awake, for days sometimes. It is highly addictive and can turn normal people into violent maniacs with superhuman strength.

  Adul’s parents wanted their son to grow up away from all that. They placed him in the care of a Christian charity in Mae Sai. He boarded there, went to school and to church on Sundays. Adul thrived academically and at sports. Of all his teammates, he had the best grasp of English. Mae Sa
i’s location near the border meant that special “buffer schools” welcomed kids no matter what their backgrounds. Adul’s school—Ban Wiang Phan School—was a brightly painted oasis, with passionate teachers who could educate in ten different languages. Here, like at soccer practice, there was little discrimination between those who had Thai citizenship and those who didn’t.

  Initially the Wild Boar Academy Football Club struggled, as might be expected from a new outfit. But in 2018, they found form: in January the junior team came in second in the competition, while the under 15s came in third in their league. Then in May, the senior team took home the winner’s trophy for their division.

  This was an impressive feat for a team of battlers from a small town. It caught the attention of the Mae Sai District chief, Somsak Kanakham. He met with the eighty-four members of the Wild Boars club and made them four promises: he’d give them each a certificate of achievement, provide a small financial reward, try to get them playing in more out-of-town competitions, and try to sort out the citizenship issues for those who were stateless, including Coach Ek.

  For these boys who dreamed of being soccer stars, it must have felt like anything was possible.

  3

  The Sleeping Lady

  If you ask locals in Chiang Rai about Doi Nang Non—the Mountain of the Sleeping Lady—they will tell you the tale of a beautiful princess.

  A long time ago, in a kingdom to the north (now Yunnan Province of China), there was a princess who fell in love with a commoner, a stable boy. Their love was forbidden, but the princess didn’t care and became pregnant. They ran away, seeking refuge in a cave as the king’s men chased after them. When the stable boy went to find food, he was captured by the soldiers and killed.

  The princess was so distraught, she took a long ornamental hairpin and stabbed it into her head, killing herself. According to the legend, her fallen body became the mountain, her blood the water that flows through the caves during the wet season.