One Night; 400 Hours

It took 18 days for a global team of experts to rescue 12 boys and their football coach, trapped inside the Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand. Here’s how .they did it.

- Mathew T. George/ Mae Sai

The heavens opened up in the night, and no one is complaining. Doi Nang Non (Mountain of the Sleeping Lady) has pulled a coverlet of grey clouds over herself and gone to sleep. Deep inside the mountain, rescue personnel spent the night sleeping in the mud. Sixty kilometres to the south, hawk-eyed doctors watched over the 12 Wild Boars and coach Ek at the Chiangrai Prachanukroh Hospital. They have been vaccinated for rabies and tetanus, and those with lung infection have been treated. In the shadow of the mountain, Mae Sai is slowly going back to what it was—a sleepy farming village, a border trading post on the Thailand-Myanmar border and a stop on Asian Highway 2, which runs from Khosravi, Iran, to Denpasar, Indonesia.

But, Mae Sai will never be the same again. One cannot remain untouched, after having looked death in the face. One almost could grasp what poet Edward Thomas was trying to say in the opening lines of Rain: “Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain/ On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me/ Remembering again that I shall die/ And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks.” Rain. Solitude. Death. And, then, abundant life. That just about describes the 18-day drama in the Tham Luang Nang Non-cave network in northern Thailand’s Chiang Rai province.

It all began when Nopparat Kanthavong, 37, head coach of the Moo Pa (Wild Boars) football team, raised the alarm on the night of June 23, a Saturday. He had an engagement during the day, and had left the training of the junior team to assistant coach Ekapol ‘Ek’ Chanthawong, 25. In the evening, the senior Wild Boars had a match, so coach Kanthavong switched off his phone. When he switched it back on, he found a string of missed calls from parents of junior players. The boys were missing and Ek could not be reached on the phone. As night fell, Kanthavong was running out of options.