Thailand cave triumph: happiest of endings for a tale of great hope, faith and love

For a moment, park your cynicism. And don’t you dare roll your eyes.

Members of the Wild Boars in hospital in Chiang Rai. Picture: AFP

“How many of you are there? Thirteen? Brilliant!”

So began one of the most remarkable … oh, park your cynicism. Don’t you dare roll your eyes. Too many people are already doing that, over there in the fringe media, they are bleating about how the complex rescue of 12 gentle boys and their soccer coach from a mountain tunnel in Thailand tells us nothing about faith, nothing about hope, nothing about love.

They’re wrong, you know.

There was hope, that the missing boys could be found. There was faith, that they could be saved. There was love.

How do we know? Because children die without love. This we understand from the moment we lay eyes on them. This we know in our soul.

Now consider all that had to go right before anything could even start to wrong. Rain, and then nerve, had to hold. Equipment, and then men, had to work.

But we are ahead of ourselves.

The story starts not with the rescue but with the nature of boys, comprised nine-tenths of curiosity, for doesn’t it come with the snips, the snails, the puppy dog tails? Curiosity is what little boys are made of.

Now see 12 of them, out on a field trip, venturing into a place where they surely knew they shouldn’t go, which in turn was precisely why they went, and they soon were trapped.

Water began to rise.

Unable to go back, the boys went forward, seeking higher ground, led not by an Elon Musk but by a novice Buddhist monk, Coach Ek, who, in the days ahead, would become not only their leader but their spiritual guide.

Lost in the darkness, the group did not panic. Tempers did not fray. They sat, they waited.

They grew thin, as did oxygen. They hoped, probably, that their bicycles, stacked outside the cave, or else their muddy fingerprints would, like the crumbs in ancient fairytales, somehow show rescuers the way.

And show the way they did. And the boys were found, in difficult terrain, crouched in the darkness beneath the mountain. Entombed? Yes. But surely not doomed?

Consider now the complete humility of the Thais as they approached the rescue. Consider the careful calculations, the communication, the co-operation. An American effort would have its own flavour; an Australian rescue would be different again.

Immediately, the Thais, whose own SEALS are immensely capable, sought assistance from a community of experts, which from today can be considered truly global, and immediately, those experts responded, with three members of the volunteer British Cave Rescue Council dispatching themselves to the scene.

Yes, they had in mind a miracle. To mount a mission. To at least try.

Video footage recorded by the British captured the instant that the first of the divers laid eyes on the soccer team, sitting huddled on a rock shelf, and here now comes the moment that galvanised the world.

“How many of you?” a diver asked the wide-eyed boys. “Thirteen? Brilliant!”

All were alive. He praised them, too, saying: “You are very strong!” But from here, what?

Extracting the team would be perilous; indeed, the hazards were tragically apparent within hours as the first of a team of retired Navy SEALS from Thailand, Saman Kunan, died delivering oxygen. This effort, it could, it would, kill people.

A plan was necessary: drill through the top and winch the boys out, or go into the caves, shaped as they were like S-bends, filled with murky water? Also, would it do to be patient or was this a race against the devourer of all things, time?

Then came rain. And so, go. That was the decision.

The rescuers would go in — and let’s pause now and take a look at them, assembled at the cave entrance, laden with packs weighing 46kg, and with expectation, all of them quiet, humble, experienced, hopeful, determined, and gathered, it must be said, at so unlikely a place for a resurgence of human goodness, near a village not far from where Thailand, Myanmar and Laos meet in the Golden Triangle, at a place best known for drug-running, and poverty, and human trafficking.

And now watch them go, diving deep into the blackness, guided by the weak light of head lamps, and see among their number an Australian anaesthetist, a ginger-beard called Richard Harris, who courted no publicity, who asked for no payment, who dived every day and who would leave the cave for the final time only when the last boy had been extracted.

For days, exhausted divers slept in beds of mud and journalists — witnesses to history, messengers of hope — did so, too, supported by an army, real and volunteers, who came with coal-fired stoves, and rice pots, and rain coats, and blankets.

Watch now, as the best of humanity rises to the task of saving the lives of 12 children, among them a small boy called Adul Sam-on, 14, who was — another miracle — proficient not only in English but in Thai, Burmese and Mandarin, who could politely communicate with the British divers his squad’s greatest need. Food, please, he said, with a giant grin on his gaunt face.

Now allow yourself to get a little tingly as 150 men — British, Australian, Thai, Danes — form a human chain in the darkness to pass the stretchered bodies of little boys, shoulder-to-shoulder, hand-to-hand, overhead, through the tunnels, towards the light.

And now, here at last, comes the chirpy communication, sent via the Thai navy SEALs’ Twitter account: “We are not sure if this is a miracle, a science, or what. All the 13 Wild Boars are now out of the cave.” That post ended with a signature battle cry of the Thai navy SEALS: “Hooyah”. Yes, hooyah!

Yes, it’s syrupy, mawkish, unbecoming of a serious newspaper to consider this message from the mountain a miracle. Yet, just as the last of the boys had been rescued, just as the work of the clean-up had begun, Australia’s own AFP divers working at the mouth of the cave turned and saw 100 headlights running towards them.

The water pump had failed, and divers were running, splashing, dashing towards the exit. They barely made it out.

It can seem sometimes that our planet, more peaceful than at any time in human history, still too often is torn apart by petty squabbles, yet here we are, alive in a world in which the will exists for men to unite in the service of poor children.

And what did those children want, on surfacing? Chocolate on bread! Laughter all around, and yet, why not? They were children, after all.

And now the rescue is over, and the story is ending, although we don’t yet know it all. What did they tell each other, down in the dark? That it would all be OK? That somebody would come?

“I am the first,” the British diver said, on encountering the children. “There are others, many others. More are coming.”

And soon came hundreds, then thousands, and millions more in spirit, to long remember this moment in which they, below, were the 13, and we, for once, were one.