After a practice in June 2018, a Thai soccer coach took a dozen of his young players to explore a famous but flood-prone cave. It was one of the boys’ birthday, but neither he nor the dozen resurfaced. Worried parents and rescuers flocked to the mouth of a cave that seemed to have swallowed the boys without a trace. Ranging in age from eleven to sixteen, the boys were all members of the Wild Boars soccer team. When water unexpectedly inundated the cave, blocking their escape, they retreated deeper inside, taking shelter in a side cavern. While the world feared them dead, the thirteen young souls survived by licking the condensation off the cave’s walls, meditating, and huddling together for warmth.
Matt Gutman, Chief National Correspondent for ABC News, covered the rescue of the Thai soccer team on the ground in Thailand and returned to report on the story behind the story in The Boys in the Cave. Matt covered the story intensively, went deep inside the caves himself, and interviewed dozens of rescuers, experts, and eye-witnesses around the world. The result is this pulse-pounding page-turner that vividly recreates this extraordinary event in all its intensity—and documents the ingenuity and sacrifice it took to succeed.
Aspects Matt covers in The Boys in the Cave include:
-The miraculous rescue that was almost fatal: As Gutman reports for the first time, two of the boys nearly died during the rescue. One stopped breathing under sedation multiple times, forcing the divers to cradle him in the mud to keep his airway open. The other nearly died of hypothermia when his rescuer became hopelessly lost in the cave.
-An inside look at the cave with the rescue team: Through exclusive access to the rescuers, Gutman brings readers inside the cave with the divers, detailing what they saw, heard, and smelled as they worked to free the boys.
-The sedation of the boys: For the first time, Gutman details the dangerous sedation of the boys during each of the rescue dives, in which a cocktail of sedatives was used that left the boys comatose.
-The frantic early moments in the cave: Through exclusive reporting from the boys, their parents, and the first search teams on the scene, Gutman details the chaotic initial hours after the boys went missing and the boys’ first terrifying night.
Hear Matt talk about the book below!
Make sure to check out The Boys in the Cave, out on November 13, 2018.
-Lainey