Millions around the world heaved a sigh of relief as the last of the 12 boys from the Wild Boars soccer team and their coach, Ekapol Chantawong—by now an international figure of sorts—were rescued out of a narrow cavern flooded with rainwater. The tiny Tham Luang cave, on the cusp where Thailand, Myanmar and Laos form a triangle, will not be forgotten any time soon. Nor would the 18-day ordeal of the boys, aged between 11 and 17—locked in near-suffocating darkness, without food and with little water.
An expedition that stretched beyond the limits of imagination and endurance, it left the boys in a skeletal state, but not in dampened spirits. When the two British divers, the best in the world, reached them, the NYT reports, the first words the boys uttered were almost primal—it was about food and the passage of time.
That real life is stranger than fiction was proved again. In the hour of extreme inner drama, what came of use to the trapped boys was their coach’s training as a Buddhist monk. A teammate’s language skills helped too. While the coach made the boys meditate, their teammate’s proficiency in English helped them communicate with the British divers, the first to reach them. Ironically, both of them are ‘stateless’ subjects, belonging to a minority tribe that traverses the twilight zone of the Golden Triangle, transiting from Myanmar to Thailand for nothing more sinister than survival and better education.
It’s as if they were being acknowledged as world citizens, with a whole comity of nations coming together for their rescue—Australian military personnel, US Indo-Pacific commandos, experts from China, Japan and Israel, and maverick individuals, besides the stellar role played by the Thai Navy SEALs and the UK divers. While football nations struggled against each other in faraway Russia, it was a young soccer team’s struggle and resilience that transfixed the world. It showed that the best of stories emerge when the world unites in compassion on the basis of their shared humanity.