WaPo link..."the [USAF] officer, who spoke to The Washington Post with permission from his superiors on the condition that he not be identified":
...Air tanks were stashed along the muddy passageways, enough for the 12 boys, their coach, the four SEALs who had embedded with them, and the 18 divers who would carry them out. Riggers strung a web of static ropes for hoisting the cocoon-like stretchers over vast fields of jagged rocks.
By 10:30 a.m. on July 8, the core team of 18 divers was in the water: Among them, Brits, Thai SEALs and diving buddies from the Gulf of Thailand beach resort of Koh Tao.
One group made their way to the final chamber. By the time they emerged, the players and Coach Ek, as Ekapol was known, had elected the boy who would go first. Officials have refused to identify him, but friends and parents said he was Mongkon Boonpiem, a 13-year old with a lucky name: “the auspicious one.”
The wetsuit, the smallest they had, still did not cling to his emaciated frame like it should. They readied the mask, attached to a tank filled with 80-percent oxygen. The rich mixture would saturate his tissues, making him easier to revive if he stopped breathing.
Richard Harris, an Australian anesthesiologist and cave diver, gave the boy a final assessment. The boy was given what Thai and American participants described variously as a muscle relaxant or anti-anxiety medication. A panic attack in a chokepoint no bigger than a manhole would almost certainly be fatal.
Finally, the boy was swaddled in a flexible plastic stretcher — akin to a tortilla wrap, Hodges said — to confine his limbs and protect him from the cheese-grater walls. And then, with his teammates watching, they pulled him under the murky water.
The original plan had called for two divers — one in front of the stretcher, one behind. But that configuration was scrapped as too bulky for the shoulder-width passages and elbow turns.
“Having that second person provided you nothing,” the U.S. Air Force officer said.
Instead, a diver kept the swaddled boy in a body-to-body clinch for as much of the swim as possible, the officer said, handing the boy over to a fresh diver after his designated stretch. Keeping the child warm was critical.
“Even then the divers would get cold,” the Air Force officer said. “That is a lot of time in the water and water is constantly running in there because of the flow so that pulls that body heat away even if you have a wet suit.”
The worst portion of the swim was the last one, a deep tubular swoop that held the water like a sink trap. All told, it was a grueling two-hour trek through muck-filled passages.
“It is crawling through mud and underwater tunnels, and you can’t see your hands,” said Erik Brown, a Canadian diver who was among the 18.
But it was the end of the deadliest part.
“Fish on!”
The divers lifted the boy, and the crew at the edge of the water pulled him out. Their dry, final passage out was lined with more than a hundred rescuers. One of them, the U.S. Air Force officer, put his ear to the boy’s mask.
He was breathing. And now, the rescuers could, too.
“It was a huge weight off our shoulders,” the officer said.
'It was a little dicey'...
