Perhaps many people have forgotten this story. Forget about the rescue that happened 4 years ago, as far away as Thailand.
At that time, we could also fly freely, and we could leave on the same day to Thailand, a country on arrival, and rescue groups from all over the world could rescue 13 foreigners who did not know each other.
If someone asks me, why should I go to a rescue documentary that records what happened abroad 4 years ago? I would tell him that it was the pre-pandemic world, and in that global village fairy tale, we were connected to everyone.
Wen | Luo Qian
Editor| Yao Lu
Photo | Documentary "The Rescue"
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In July 2018, I went to Thailand to report on two news stories.
The first is the 7.5 Phuket cruise ship capsizing accident, two ships carrying 127 Chinese tourists on the way back to Phuket, suddenly encountered a huge storm, respectively, on coral island and Metong Island capsizing, of which the Phoenix shipwrecked, resulting in the death of 47 Chinese tourists.
The other is the Thai Cave Rescue, where 12 children of the Thai Wild Boar Team and their football coach were trapped in the cave by the flood, and cave diving experts from all over the world gathered together for 18 days to rescue them.
I ran on both sides of Phuket and Chiang Rai. Phuket is heavy. Chiang Rai is hopeful. A clear contrast is that in Phuket, I met dozens of media colleagues, most of whom were Chinese and rarely had foreign faces. In Chiang Rai, there are very few media Chinese, and you can count them on one hand, but almost all the influential media in the world have arrived.
What kind of story is that would attract journalists from around the world to a remote thai town?
A group of teenage children on the Thai school football team, because they want to celebrate the birthday of one of their teammates, go to the Sleeping Beauty Cave Under the guidance of the coach (in Thailand, going to the cave is a sacred and safe sport), the result is that the monsoon comes early, suddenly encounters a torrential rain, the water floods the road, they can not get out of the cave, can only go deeper and deeper, until trapped in an unsubmed high ground, into a long wait.
They don't know if anyone will come to save themselves. One day, two days, three days, there was no food, and when I was thirsty, I drank the water on the rock wall, and when I was hungry, I endured. The coach is a Buddhist believer, and he teaches the children to meditate and keep their hearts at peace. In this way, it was not discovered until the tenth day.
In these ten days, rescue forces from all over the world gathered outside the cave. Thai Navy SEALs arrived the day after the child disappeared. The Chinese rescue team also arrived quickly, they were the Pinglan Public Welfare Foundation and the Beijing Green Boat Rescue Team. British adventure enthusiast Vernon Unsworth was invited over. Known locally as a cave-digging maniac, in 2014 and 2015 he made a detailed investigation of the Sleeping Beauty Cave where the children were trapped, and drew a drawing with friends of the Sleeping Beauty Cave at that time.
In the face of this flooded cave of more than 10 kilometers and a fork in the road, courage and unity are not enough, but the help of professionals is needed. Vernon advised the governor to invite the world's best cave divers to the rescue.
Soon, the best cave divers in the world came, the diving environment of the Sleeping Beauty Cave was harsh, it was a sewage pit dive, from the entrance, it was a rapid, the visibility was very low, the water was chocolate brown, there were many dangerous things under the water, wires, cables, pipes... All kinds of unexpected obstacles, the narrowest place, can only allow one person to pass, the diving god to call his wife, this is simply suicide.
But they stayed anyway. After 10 days of being trapped, two cave diving experts from the UK, Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, eventually found the children about 4 kilometers from the cave entrance. 4 kilometers, a walk on flat ground takes an hour, and Rick and John dive for nearly 3 hours.
When they were found, the children were confused, they spent 10 days in a dark cave, and suddenly saw two heads with respirators emerging from the water, playing flashlights and speaking English, and one of the children was surprised and said to his companions, We are lost in England.
The children were discovered, the media all over the world were exhilarated, amazing, magical, fantastic moment, and people had the luxury of describing that picture in the most beautiful words. But how to take 13 people who had never had diving training out of the cave 4 kilometers is an almost impossible task for divers.
The cave where the incident occurred
Before discovering the child, Rick and John had met 4 trapped pump workers not far from the entrance, these 4 adults biting into respirators, diving in the water for thirty or forty seconds to the mouth of the cave, all terrified, they swallowed a lot of water, their heads hit the rocks, and they surfaced at the first opportunity to breathe heavily, the whole process was like an underwater wrestling game.
This is true for able-bodied adults, how is it possible to have 12 frail children dive in a cave for 3 hours? But if the children are not brought out in time, in a few days, the rainy season will come, and they may be flooded.
After countless discussions and struggles, the Thai side finally agreed that the divers would inject the children with sedatives, let them wear breathing masks in a comatose state, and the divers would be divided into 3 batches and brought out. The way home with the children was not smooth, some divers did not grasp the guide rope underwater, got lost, and even walked back; another diver was cut by a needle while injecting the child with sedatives, fortunately did not inject the drug, otherwise there were two corpses floating on the surface of the water.
In the end, all 13 wild boars were safely rescued.
During the 18-day rescue, no one cried, no one competed for food, and there was a transcendent purity and innocence in them. The formal rescue was divided into three days, the first day could only save 4 children out, the children made a choice that no one could think of, not by age, not by surname, everyone did not compete, they unanimously decided to choose the 4 children furthest from home to go first, the reason is that so that the four people can tell the parents of other children on the way home this good news. This is a choice that only a child can make.
If you have enough patience and understand it more deeply, the more you can feel that this story is beautiful like a contemporary fairy tale. The rescuer and the rescued are so cute. Outdoor magazine said of the rescue: full of bizarre, mysterious, desperate and reversal, even more miracles than the movie. The moment I learned that the children were rescued, a European TV reporter said to the camera that even if you are hard-hearted, you can't help but be impressed.
In the fall of 2021, Mr. and Mrs. Kim made the story into a movie called "The Rescue" ("Thai Cave Rescue").
Rescuers from various countries are developing search and rescue plans
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Before watching the film, I didn't expect much from The Rescue. I watched a lot of news reports about the Wild Boars during that time, and every development in this story, every breakthrough, those real and warm details, was reported, even I witnessed. As an audience, I not only know the ending of the story, but even see the text script of the story, and it is inevitable that I will look at the film with a kind of original party perspective.
One of the most unique things about The Rescue is that it spends a lot of time presenting the spiritual world of cave divers, which many reports didn't do back then.
Cave divers are a very niche group and a bunch of weirdos in the eyes of others. If it weren't for the extremes, not many people would have thought of them. After the child was trapped, the Thai side wanted to find the best cave diver in the world, and a small piece of paper was written.
Unlike the beautiful recreational diving, cave diving is like plunging into the mud, who would like such a sport? They are, of course, lonely and incomprehensible.
When the divers first arrived at the rescue site, they were wearing shorts and flip-flops, Rick was a little bald, John was wearing glasses, and at first glance they were two British uncles, compared with the soldiers in military uniforms in the camp, as if they were on vacation, dressed leisurely and sloppy. At first, the Thai military did not trust them at all, did not dare to let them into the hole, and once put down harsh words, if you insist on going in and die inside, don't expect us to collect your body.
But it was also these two middle-aged men, who looked ragged, who had participated in international cave rescues many times. In 2004, Rick and a diver rescued six British soldiers trapped for 8 days in a Mexican cave. In 2011, Rick and John salvaged the body of Polish cave diver Artur Kozłowski from the water in Ireland. Both of them have been awarded the Royal Humanitarian Society Medal for their cave rescue.
They are very low-key, do not like to take pictures, just arrived at Chiang Rai airport, the Thai side sent people holding a big sign that read: Welcome to the world's best cave divers. They were taken to the sign and had to pose, their faces full of embarrassment. The reporters at the scene tried to catch them on live tv and ask a few questions, they looked cold, the reporters could only explain to the camera, I tried to ask the British divers about the progress, but they were very shy in the face of the media. In fact, they have been very low-key. Just bury your head in the hard work.
If it weren't for this film, we might never know that none of these great gods who love cave diving have good ball skills because they are not good at teamwork. Quiet, shy, apolitical, and unsociable, John feels like a loser and doesn't get along well with others. Including cave diving gods from other countries, many of whom were bullied during adolescence for not being gregarious enough.
In the world of cave diving, there are no young corals, cute Nemo clownfish, and many times, the cave is dark, and outsiders look as if they have jumped into a mud pit, and they don't know why this group of people is so obsessed with dirty mud pits. But these cave lovers say the mud pits make them feel relaxed. Every time you go into a cave, away from everything in normal society, it is like going back to the time of the cavemen.
They very sincerely dissect themselves in the film, and they tell them very delicately.
Whenever I see a dark space in a cave, I'm fascinated by it, as if, I want to know what's there, it's an unfamiliar environment for most people, dim and dark, and can also lead to claustrophobia, it's a disaster, but it's the kind of weird world I like.
No one tells you what to do, time is at your disposal, very liberating. Some dives can take hours, rely entirely on artificial lighting, artificial heating, just like in space, and this is perhaps the purest adventure you can ever experience.
I forgot about the worst people who treated me. As soon as I got underground, everything disappeared. I couldn't see anything, only the bubbles I spat out, far away from the world, and it was where I felt comfortable. I feel like I'm safe.
quiet and peace.
This kind of tranquility, the Chinese diver Denovo, who is obsessed with diving, once said in her tofu column: One of the most beautiful moments of closed space diving is to turn off all the lights and fall into the original, ancient, pure darkness. There is no glitz, no earthly noise, not even all-encompassing light, pervasive sounds, only absolute darkness and tranquility.
After watching "The Rescue", I understood from the bottom of my heart why divers call the sea blue opium, why they are so obsessed with the sport, as the famous line in "Blue Sea and Blue Sky" says, the pain of diving is that when I am at the bottom of the sea, I can't find a reason to surface.
Rick talks about his obsession with cave diving
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"The Rescue" is still a very Golden Guowei temperament movie in the end.
People who care about outdoor sports should be familiar with the name Kim Kwok-wai, who is an excellent outdoor explorer and extreme athlete, as well as an extreme sports photographer. He excelled at skiing and rock climbing, having climbed mount Mount Everest and skied on it, as well as trekking across the Changtang Plateau in northwestern Tibet.
His wife, Elizabeth Chai Vasarely, is a Princeton university-educated director and producer who co-directed Climbing Meru and Freehand Climbing, of which "Freehand Climbing" won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2019.
Kim's films always focus on people who love extreme sports, because he himself is such a person.
In terms of integrity, "The Rescue" is a film with many regrets, or difficulties.
Kim Kwok-wai himself is good at climbing, and for cave diving, he is basically a layman. Not only that, but due to the secrecy of the rescue operation, they couldn't even show up inside the cave during the 18-day rescue operation — how disastrous it sounds to have a documentary filmmaker who wasn't on the core scene. No wonder Vassarelli said in an interview with The Guardian that it was the most painful creative experience of our lives and that we had never made a film where we weren't present during the main action.
They also face extremely harsh copyright restrictions — the moment the children are rescued, the film and television rights battle for the story begins. Netflix took the lead in winning exclusive licenses from all 13 survivors, and they were going to make a miniseries called "Thirteen Lives." This means that the Kim couple's "The Rescue" will not have any increment about survivors, and will only use the video footage that has been published in the public media.
Unable to photograph survivors, the camera can only be aimed at the rescuers, and Jin Guowei fills a lot of information gaps with abundant interviews. During the more than three years that the film was filmed, Mr. and Mrs. Kim visited almost all of the core rescuers, and the Thai military, cave diving experts from around the world, the U.S. military, and other volunteers all made their voices heard.
As the film was about to finish editing, they also got a very precious rescue record of the crazy things that happened in the cave. At first, they thought the video might be only 30 minutes long, no more than 90 minutes at most, but when it was opened, it took 87 hours.
Because of these 87 hours of precious video, coupled with the frank interviews of key rescue workers, Jin Guowei and his wife handed over a high-scoring answer sheet in a limited space - although the end of the story is known, "The Rescue" still gives people a good viewing experience, the plot is ups and downs, the editing is compact, the lines are accurate, Douban netizens scored 8.9 points, and the film also won 5 awards such as the Toronto International Film Festival Documentary People's Choice Award.
Jin Guowei's films are never just extreme sports, but people.
In "Freehand Climbing", Alex's real climbing time is less than one-third, and the film uses a lot of time to explain Alex's daily life, what he eats, how to know his current girlfriend, how to argue with his girlfriend, he buys a refrigerator most about the price, always chooses the cheapest. What kind of person was his father? Although he has always been encouraged to climb, he does not seem to be very good at expressing love, and his family never hugs. As for his mother, although there are many family photos on the table at home, she rarely encourages or appreciates him, and no matter what she does, she always feels that she is not good enough. Including why he was able to climb with his bare hands, wasn't he afraid? In "Freehand Rock Climbing," Alex does an MRI, and the amygdala in his brain, the thing that controls human emotions, can accept much higher stimuli than ordinary people.
The same goes for The Rescue. What is very impressive is that at the end of the film, Rick and John each have a conversation about the significance of this rescue for them, which is the most emotional moment of these two diving gods, at that moment, they are just two ordinary people who want to be recognized. What Rick is saying is that I'm proud that everything we've done is like defending my dedication to this ridiculously niche sport. The sport has never been taken seriously. What John was saying was that I had been worried that I was a little too cold to love cave diving, whether I was too wooden and ruthless, and now that I had found a transcendent purpose and purpose. You can use it to do good.
John
4
Almost four years have passed since the story of the Wild Boars. A lot of things have happened in these four years, and watching "The Rescue" will always give birth to a sense of being in a different world. Little by little, fragments of memories about Chiang Rai were picked up.
I remember that it was July 6, 2018, the day after I joined "People", I was urgently ordered to go to Thailand, and it was afternoon when I received the departure information, and the direct flight to Phuket was out of tickets, and I had to transfer in Bangkok. When flying to Bangkok, there was a Mexican girl sitting next to her, going to Thailand with her parents on vacation, she had ink-black eyelashes, we talked for a few days, she gave me a hand rope that she had knitted herself, said that she could be lucky to wear it, and I gave her a puppy doll that she carried with her.
The hospital in Phuket was full of cries, and I was there for more than a week. By the time Chiang Rai arrived, the rescue was coming to an end.
At first, the interviewers were stationed around the camp, and the mountains were rainy and full of yellow mud, but also full of volunteers. A deep impression was the toilet there, an old couple in Chiang Mai came to the toilet, they saw on the TV news that the toilet at the rescue site was always dirty with muddy water, and they felt that although they could not help much, they could sweep the toilet, so they rushed to clean the toilet. In order to take care of the fruits of their labor, people will consciously wash the yellow mud on their rain boots before entering the toilet, but it is still inevitable that the muddy water will fall on the floor, over and over again, but the toilet floor is always white. On the sink, next to each tap is a bouquet of small green plants, and the vase is woven from mineral water bottles.
Near the official rescue was approaching, and the interviewers were moved to an open area across the mountain. I've never seen a news scene like this, the food is free, coconut ice cream, mango, pineapple, chicken thigh rice noodles, Thai stir-fried powder, curry rice, fresh burgers, waffles... It felt a bit like a temple fair, passing by every stall and there were people looking at you enthusiastically and wanting to deliver food to you. Just such a temporary camp, there are special hairdressers to cut your hair, and truemove has also pulled the 4G mobile base station to the scene. Some people sent a circle of friends, and communism was realized around the camp.
It was also there that I met the most of my peers. Two basketball courts as big as a place, there are probably hundreds of thousands of interviewers, the roadside is stuffed with interview cars, and several foreign reporters who appear in this film, I have seen on the spot, they are in upper suits, the lower body that has not been photographed is wearing high leather shoes, and the legs are full of yellow mud dots. At the press conference in the evening, the British brother next to him with curly hair was desperately typing on the keyboard with two hands, nibbling his fingers when he didn't type, and later I found out that he was from the BBC.
In Chiang Rai, I also met volunteers from China, Beijing, Hong Kong, Shaanxi. The night the children were saved, my colleagues and I met members of the Chinese rescue team at a restaurant. They were all very haggard, because they had been working for many days without getting any rest, and a cave diving expert named Tan Xiaolong was holding his waist when he got up, and his companions lifted up to look at it, and they were plastered with tiger plaster.
It was also on that night, after the children were successfully rescued, that everyone had the opportunity to sit around and eat a meal together like this, and at that dinner table, rescue workers from China were very moved when they talked about the situation in the cave, and several people cried. They talked about the Thai soldiers, and the people who came out laughed wearily, and the people who went in were full of energy, and every time before they went in, the commander would say a paragraph, and everyone would let out a majestic roar. Tan Xiaolong said that these Thai soldiers are really worthy of this military uniform.
That night, everyone raised a toast together, which happened to be the birthday of Zhang Guangrui, a member of the Chinese rescue team, and everyone said this: the first cup we wished the child a smooth out; the second cup we wished Zhang Guangrui a happy birthday; the third cup, most importantly, the former SEAL team member who left. All the people drank, including the rescuers who had been abstaining from drinking for more than a year.
Next to the dinner table, there are rubber shoes taken off, and diving dry clothes, and even the TV shopping channel has set aside half of the section to broadcast rescue news. We also met Thai officials, who were also having dinner and eating. At a later press conference, the Thai representative said: Those who came to help, from different countries, speak different languages, have different cultural backgrounds, gathered together, despite many misunderstandings, what we need is generosity and the strength of unity, only in this way can we succeed.
According to Thai statistics, the real rescue operation at Sleeping Beauty Cave involved more than 10,000 people, including more than 100 divers, dozens of rescuers, about 100 government agencies, hundreds of volunteers and police, and more than 2,000 Thai soldiers.
Many of these people became friends. Tan Xiaolong of the Chinese rescue team became friends with Mitch Torrel, the commander of the American rescue team, who guarded the guide rope together and chatted with the translator software on his mobile phone during the long wait. They talk about hobbies, both like to ride motorcycles, and at the parting dinner, Mitch Torrel crosses the crowd to find Tan Xiaolong, and the two hug tightly.
A year and a half later, the epidemic struck and the world changed. Douban netizen @Mi Nuo watched "The Rescue" and summed it up like this - in today's days of isolation and globalization being erected, it is a bit of a sigh to see such an international rescue documentary in the pre-epidemic period. Four years ago, the days when a cloud-piercing arrow gathered the world's best team of diving experts seemed to be gone. But the hymn of humanity is still an ode to courage, and as the widow of the sacrificed team member said: Generosity is the beginning of everything.
Remember that day? July 2, 2018, the day John and Rick found the kids. John had already overused the air, but he had a strong instinct to probe a little more, force himself, keep looking, and find it again. They surfaced, smelled a pungent smell that came from the nose, a silence, the smell was so great that they even thought they smelled a rotting corpse, when suddenly, they saw a flash of light, and in front of them sat a group of children, still conscious, one of whom spoke English. The children said they were hungry and asked, can you get us out?
They keep telling the children, believe, believe, believe that they will come back, and that more and more people will come to your rescue.
Later, the scene spread all over the world, and at the end of the video, the children followed John's words of thanks to the world: hello, Americans, hello, Thai navy, hello Australians, hello, Chinese, and thank you everybody else.
The members of the Boar team pose with Rick