MAE SAI, Thailand, July 19, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Members of the “Wild Boars”
football team rescued from a cave in northern Thailand prayed for good luck
at a Buddhist temple on Thursday morning after spending their first night
back home with family.
The teammates and coach were discharged from hospital Wednesday after
recuperating for a week from their 18-day ordeal inside Tham Luang cave with
no food and only rainwater to drink.
Authorities organized a tightly controlled press conference with the boys
the same evening in which they recounted drinking water that dripped from
rocks and trying to dig their way out during the first nine days before they
were located by British divers.
After spending a night at home many of the boys attended a ceremony the
next morning at Wat Pha That Doi Wao in Mae Sai near the Myanmar border where
they prayed for longevity and a good life.
They also paid tribute to a former Thai Navy SEAL diver Saman Kunan, who
ran out of oxygen and died while helping resupply air tanks along the cave’s
narrow passageways.
He was the only casualty in the otherwise successful operation that was
dubbed “Mission Impossible”.
Wearing threads of white string tied around their wrists and holding hands
together in prayer, the boys sat together in the temple while chants of
Buddhist monks filled the room.
Officials have advised families of the youngsters to avoid interviews with
the media for one month to let them settle back into their normal routines.
“They will live with their families first,” Punnawitch Thepsurin, the
director of a school in the area, said, adding that they will not resume
their studies immediately.
But cameras flashed away as the now-famous Wild Boars entered the temple on
Thursday, in a sign of the ongoing interest in the story.
Film production houses have said they are looking into a Hollywood-style
treatment of the harrowing ordeal, which captivated people around the world
as the risky operation to extract the team unfolded.
They walked into the cave on June 23 after football practice, thinking they
would only be there for an hour to explore, and then vanished for days until
they were finally found.
Foreign divers and Thai Navy SEALs spent three days bringing the boys out
by diving and carrying them through the waterlogged corridors of Tham Luang.
The youngsters, aged 11 to 16, wore full-face oxygen masks and were sedated
to keep them calm during the high-stakes operation.
Later rescuers marvelled that nothing had gone wrong in the extraction,
which ended on July 10 when the last five were pulled out.