We'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast was produced, the Galligall people of the Urination. We pay our respects to Elder's past and present.
It's November twenty twenty three and the world's detention is fixed on the towering Himalayas in northern India. A landslide has thus caused part of a tunnel to collapse, trapping forty one workers for seventeen days. These men are cut off from the outside world, their survival hanging by a thread. Enter Arnold Dix. Arnold is no stranger to disasters. He's worked on emergencies as complex as the Twin Towers collapse
and the London bombings, but this is different. Called in to oversee the rescue mission, Arnold brings a unique mix of expertise. He's a geologist, engineer, lawyer, and risk stress. Just bearded, calm and clad in hives, Arnold radiates confidence to a watching world. He makes a bold promise.
There's forty one men coming home and there's no one else going to be hurt, and that's the mission.
Mission mission.
Over seventeen suspenseful days, Arnold leads one of the most remarkable rescue missions in recent memory. He battles an unforgiving mountain and brings every man out alive. The result a victory that has made Arnold Dix a household name, not just in India but across the globe. I'm at Middleton and this is Headgame today, the story of a man who brought together science, leadership, and a touch of humility to achieve the impossible. Mister Arnold Dix, how are you, buddy? How's life treating you?
Yeah?
Well, and I'm feeling good and life's treading me very well. And I'm alive and yeah, I'm literally living the dream like it's fantastic.
Alive and kicking as I.
Said, Yeah, absolutely, And.
That's ultimately what you do. You keep people alive and kicking. Now, Arnold is literally a life saver. Donold, how was your upbringing? Talk to me about your upbringing and were you always interested in exploring in caves and tunnels and how does that come?
Yeah, so I'm just a hotel keeper's kid, and so in Australia, you know, my parents would go from hotel to hotel and so place to place, and it meant I was exposed to different people, different places, different just different stuff. And it made me a bit of an adventurer. So I'm interested in everything alive. I'm interested in everything in Jineer. I'm interested in from a very early age, rocks, which seemed a bit weird as a kid. And yeah
that's my early upbringing. Nothing flashy in my family, nothing flashy with me as a student, in fact, a remedial student early on, and as really get very basic Aussie upbringing. And yeah, so that's me, Like, there's nothing remarkable, you know, just that I'm sure.
I'm sure there is. And I'm going to coax out of you, nd I'm sure there's something in there. As a child, you say, you know, he used to like rocks. We all do as kids, you know. I think back in you know, in our era. And I say that because you know, technology wasn't a thing. But back then, you know, we didn't have phones. We didn't have iPads, We certainly didn't have mobile phones. We used to be out and about, didn't we pick up locks used to fascinate me. I used to pick up some rocks and
I used to compare them with others. I used to have a look at it to see if there were any diamonds in there. You know, just this the thing that you do as kids. So did that really spark your interest to become to take it as a career.
Yeah, so I think that is that that real excitement as a kid, like could there.
Be a diamond in it? Is there gold in it?
Yeah? Yeah, exactly.
And around where I lived so different different places of their old minds, so of course you went and tried to get into the old minds. When I got to about I think grade four, I was up in the mountains of Australia called Snowy Mountains, a lot of tunnels up there, with a snowy scheme and a lot of old blokes getting drunk and happy to take a kid under their shoulder to show them what they did, you know, a few years ago.
So rocks. There's also a link between me and the.
Old timers, like, come here, young fellow, I'm going to share a thing or two. And that was Yeah. I think that influenced me a lot. And there was I suppose a quirky thing as well. Those old timers were mostly refugees from post Second World War Europe, and you'd get like an old German guy who literally was X S S or something, and he talked to you like, well, the lady I work with in the kitchen, so I used to do breakfasts and she would talk to me about going to the rallies with Adolf and what it
felt like. Wow, And you're like, I'm just a little kid, like I'm just running breakfast trace and instead of watching the World at War on TV, I've got and I remember her name with Missus Kluger was her name, And she'd tell me stories of war, the you know, Second World War Germany. And so that combined with the men showing me the tunnels a very rich and unusual sort of environment to grow up in.
I can imagine. Did that really coax you into into wanting to, you know, go into a career and into further education to study.
Oh.
I just like learn and stuff and I like doing stuff, and so the combination drew me to practical sorts of things. So geology mining engineering is the first thing I do. And that's cool because you get to do sort of
nature stuff but in extreme environments. And so you can travel to these amazing locations and then get involved with really amazing machines, meet characters because in the mining area you meet all sorts of interesting personality disorders, which is wonderful thing preparing you for the future, and they combine
well with all the characters in the hotel. So I've always really enjoyed being a child, and I hope I never stopped being a child, but a child in a grown ups world and just watching how all the different characters and personalities come together to form groups and how they do stuff together, and that's really fascinating.
And what a combination as well, geology and engineering You've got. You know, you've got the fascination of how the earth is you know, is created, or how the earth you know, fits together, and then that side of being able to sort of dismantle it and have a look at it and you know, explore it in its entirety is a fascination combination.
It is.
And you, because you're doing the mining, you suddenly realize that the earth is alive, so it's not so rocks instead of being the e static things that you look at and maybe something you throw on a pond or at a friend or maybe at an enemy instead of just as a weab. You start to learn that they they're alive, and they move and they bend, and they can be plastic, and they can be elastic, and they can fracture and they can explode, and they can all do all of that in five minutes on your head
if you're not watching. And so suddenly what began as a childlike fascination with rocks ends up being, Oh my god, the world is alive, this this underground world, and these mountains are moving, and and to do the sorts of things that I end up doing, I have to be really sensitive to this very dynamic, very amazingly not.
What you think a rock would be like, Hello, I'm a rock. I do nothing.
No, no, no, These rocks are like, hey, Arnold, have I got some surprises for you today?
So, yeah, it's fascinating.
So you finished education and when when do you? Because you've been on multiple let's call them rescues or whether it's mines, whether it's caves, tunnels, you've been on when was your first call? And did you ever think that you wanted to go down that road of rescuing people or did someone to say, hey, this guy knows you know absolutely everything about about tunnels and geology and engineering. Let's let's give him a call.
Nah.
So actually I've never rescued anyone alive before, you see.
That's so this is part of the twist in all of this.
So normally when I get called in, everyone dies, and often some of us do as well, And so my job is to although of course we'd like to save people, despite what's in the newspapers, despite what's in the movies, normally everyone's dead.
And so.
I'm really I'm more about Yes, I come and we try and learn what's gone wrong. But normally people come out in bags. And in fact, in my book, I can't remember exactly the words I use, but I say, that's perhaps my biggest lie.
That's my lie.
By omission, I never told anyone I'd never managed to rescue anyone alive before.
See why.
I promised that we would rescue forty one people, and I promised that none of us were going to get hurt. But the fact is I've never done that before, because it never ends that way for me ever, not one wow. Okay, So I'm not that guy who says, somehow, rather good fortune follows me and somehow, rather I perform miracles, you know, somehow, Rather if you get me it's going to end differently.
I'm not that guy. I'm actually more like the grim Reaper.
And I suspect that's why no one had ever heard of me, because, you know, because no one who wants who wants to know about all the people who are dead, who wants to know about all the reasons for it.
Let's go straight into it with with with India. Where are you at the time when when you get the call.
I'm actually in Slovenia and I'm slightly involved in trying to work out some alternative rail links, freight rate rail links between Asia.
And Europe because of the war in Ukraine.
And so because Russia is no longer a path, try to work out, you know, we bring maybe bring the freight around with a different course actually down through the least.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so I get the call from India's chief engineer, Raju Raul Gupta, and he tells me what he's got, and he asks me for my advice.
And what did he tell you he had? Because I know that you're not shy or you're used to getting this information, but yeah, this one was was a pretty big one. Yeah.
Well, what was really different about this one is he said at the time, he said he had forty live ones inside a tunnel and there'd been a collapse. The zoner collapse was in the order of one hundred meters. The mountain was still moving. They're experiencing earthquakes. It seemed to be in a very poor geological zone. Did I have any thoughts? And he couldn't show me any images. So I said, hey, can you get me some pictures?
And so he jumped in a helicopter, went up, and about a day or so later, came back to me with some images and it looked pretty bad, and so I said, like, look, I gave him my thoughts. This is all on WhatsApp. By the way, this is an It's not like some fan. It's like, hey, Arnold. Then he says, can you talk to a colleague of mine, and he sort of pans the phone around. There's another guy in the room and he's advised of the Prime Minister of India, and he said, just tell me that again.
I said, well, this is what I reckon, blah blah blah. And then they just said could you come and give us a hand?
Like that's just just just as simple as that.
Yeah, And I think part of the surprise for that too is so there's no contract, there's no there's no money. I mean, so there's no description of what I got to do, there's no description of what I can't do. All they asked is could I come and give them a hand? And so I made my way to India and ended up in you just.
Drop everything, just go right, yeah, I'm just going to drop tools and a way I go.
Yeah.
So I just mobilized, went there and on the way. Yeah, just by myself, yep, yeah, yeah, yeah, just just went there and they were waiting for me. They had to like the helicopter bit, like you know, the Rambo movies.
And so I find myself up in the Himalayas and now I'm part of this amazing team of people who, by the time I get there, are feeling sad and we're losing hope because it had been a few days and they had to sort of officially had press conferences and told everybody that the workers would be out but quickly blah blah blah, but they weren't. And also the machinery they were using had failed, and so things were looking pretty grim when I got there.
What were they asking you to do. And how was were they caught in a tunnel, were they caught in a cave? What was the situation because obviously they were workers, right, Yeah.
So you've got forty one young men probably lied about their ages because they're from very poor villages, so they're they're working. They've come from all around India to be construction workers in a tunnel. The tunnel is being built for the pilgrims, the Hindu pilgrims, to avoid having to go across the Himalayas and go through the mountains to get to their temples. And the situation when I arrived was there's about one hundred meters of internal collapse inside
the tunnel, so now it's completely blocked. There's a chimney of collapse rising up through the center of the mountain. So we're getting aggressive collapse crowding a huge cavity up through the center of the mountain.
There's like a.
Shear zone running along. Unfortunately the roof of the tunnel and the shear zone is moving. So the data we had from our survey and our lighter data was showing us.
That the thing's moving.
And what's a shear zone.
Shear zones when one rock is no longer one, but actually he's now got a big cut through it, and the whole thing moves along the cut like a bit like a fault or something. So and as you found, because you're a plucky gosh, you know better than me as a climber that mountain. People think the Himalayas is really tough rock, and it's not. It's really weak twisted, soft yeah, soft rock. And so this soft rock is
collapsing and they're experiencing minor earthquakes. There was progressive collapse occurring. And so the feeling, and I know that's maybe odd by putting it, but the feeling there they were losing hope. So and because I had no instructions, because I was trying to really sensitize myself to like what can I do here? Like do they want me on dishes? I can do dishes if they want, you know, do they want me on what do they want me to do?
I realized I had a really important role to play, and the role was to make everybody believe that we could do it. And that's the promise. See, I stepped in and I put my whole reputation on the line and I promised that forty one men are going to come home and that none of us are going to
get hurt. And yet no one asked me if i'd have done it before, because I hadn't, And I gave a time frame, and I said it with all my heart and all my conviction, because for some reason I believe that we could, And with that belief that we could, somehow that infected the team and somehow, because you've got me there saying unequivocably, we will save forty one men and none of us are going to get.
Hurt by Christmas.
I promise you, Yeah, I said, I promise, Like in the book, I've got QR codes down the back where I've actually got the TV interviews all from India, so they're all coming off the TV channels where I'm standing there, poker faced in front of one point four billion people, promising them that we're going to rescue all the men and none of us are going to get hurt, using the words I promise, wow.
Wow, and Arnold when you when you when you got there and you just talk about you know the feeling, you know, did you think to yourself? Right, I'm going to tell them this Was it a pre a preempted sort of statement, or did you hit the ground you said about that fear, you know, when you hit the ground and you feel either this is going to work out or we can do Did you feel that positivity?
Did you feel that you know, that reassurance of the situation to be able to deliver that statement in that moment, or was it something that you thought is a technique I'm going to use to breed positivity, to breed hope so we can get this job done as fast and as efficiently as possible. Or was it did you hit the ground and go, do you know what? Wow? Because I get that sometimes I go, I feel good here, we're going to do this. We're going to do this.
That's exactly what it is. And I felt it. I felt it on the plane on the way there, and I knew even before I got there that we were going to be able to do this, even though I've never done it before. Right, Yeah, I felt we could do this. And it didn't worry me. Well, it worried me a little bit, but it was just a small voice. It didn't worry me that I didn't know how I.
Felt you've never done it before.
Right, No, I've never done it before.
And I'm going to get two hundred of my new best friends who probably don't even speak English, and we're going to work as a team and we're going to figure out how to deliver this promise. And that's the way I was talking. We will save forty one men. They are coming home and we're not getting hurt, because it's important as the rescuers that we also feel like we're not going to get hurt. And I felt like we could do it. And it's exactly what you said.
I knew it inside, but can't explain it yet, you know. Yet I had a call about something else since then, and I knew that they were dead before I'd even thought of going there. I just knew, but I knew. I just felt that we could do it with these guys. And that's a huge dilemma for me, because up until
this stage in my career, I'm a scientist, engineer. I don't do promises when I don't know the answer, you know, like I I'm conservative, But for this particular mission, I felt felt, with a capital F and an exclamation mark and no substantive explanation why, that we would be able to do it, and we did.
Wow. You know what that is? I always say it and people say, ah, and you're speaking rubbish when I say the power of positive thinking. You know, when you just fill that moment, you react to the emotion that you're feeling, and you make a decision or of that emotion and normally you know, it could be a positive emotion, it could be a negative emotion, like you said, And I get it. I get it, mate, I really really do.
So you hit the ground, you give out this statement, you give out this promise, you know, hence the title of the book. What do you do thereafter? Is the team energized? So how does a planning what does that all that look like? Because obviously, like you said, you've got a team of what two hundred people?
Yeah? More, maybe even more. We've got a huge team there.
But there's something I did and which again I felt the most important thing to do when I arrived. So I'm in this old Russian helicopter, like seriously, it's probably older than me. It's a shocker, right. Anyway, somehow or other it lands up there. I stagger out of it thinking well that was good. I wasn't killed. There would have been a shame. Like all this excitement, I got killed in a chopper crash with the landing. Anyway, so
we get there. I asked the head engineer while I was flying on the plane if he could take me to the temple at the front of the tunnel so that I could pay my respects to the local god before I went in the tunnel. That was the first thing I did. And upon reflection, and why did I do that, I don't know. It wasn't like I was going through some complicated process. I just knew that that
was the right thing to do. Maybe maybe it's because of my mum, because she always said you got to like play by house rules, like who's Ever's house, you know, respect and all that sort of stuff. So I bowed at this little temple that had just been built because the earlier one had been knocked down. And that's why the local priests believe the tunnel collapsed. There's a whole sub religious story there, so they believe that it was disrespect of the gods which caused the collapse in the beginning.
And I was reading about that while I was on the plane, and I went and I bowed, and I gave prayer at their temple, and in doing that, I attracted one point four billion people's attention because he is an old bearded pink man jumping out of a helicopter, and the first thing he does is doesn't declare in some pompous colonial way that everything has to be my
way or the highway. Instead, I knelt at their temple and did a prayer, and then I went in the tunnel and that so it's really interesting, you know, like of all the things I did, I think that was the most important. Then I went and did some fact finding, so I didn't want to read anything to show me a tunnel. So I went in. I looked at it, I touched it, I listened to it, I smelt it, literally tasted it because you just to see what because
I want to know what's going on inside. And I saw twenty one prior collapses in the few hundred meters to the collapse zone. So this told me that there'd been twenty one warnings for a catastrophic collapse and nothing had changed. And so if there was a god of the mountain, it had given twenty one prior warnings, like twenty one warning shots before coming down before it trapped
these forty one men. So by the time I figured that out and went back to my first meeting, I'm like, guys, can you talk hello Hello, like Earth, Earth, to get real? Because if there's twenty one prior collapses, it also means that section that we have to walk through to form the rescue is inherently unsafe the danger zone.
How many more if you could go through?
Yeah?
Yeah, So so that was grim. But the thing, the thing that I loved and you asked me about how things are done. So in Indian culture, technical culture, engineering culture, you get all the engineers in the one room and you pose the question, and then every opinion is listened to at the same time, and so the room just explodes in this concophony of conflicting opinions and discussions and dialogues and all this.
Sort of thing.
And so what I discover from minute zero is that whatever preconceptions I had as to how to problem solve, I am in a different culture, and I'm in a different culture with another group of very intelligent, highly respected, very competent engineers and other technicians who do not solve problems like anything I've ever seen before. This is there's
a cultural dimension to the problem solving process. So I had to embrace that and that so becoming part of the team didn't mean me imposing how I thought we should problem solve. Problem solving began.
How do how do I.
Integrate, Yeah, in a in a not too dominating way, you know, being cultural aware and you know sensitive situation awareness, And I get it is a tough one, right because ultimately, and again you know, your expertise of just going in there and identifying these things, taste in the rock, smelling it, and is is is way beyond any of their probably you know, probably techniques or recognition, right, So is it hard to be Is it hard to be able to do that? Knowing that you've got it's quite a time
sensitive let's call it a mission. It's quite a time sensitive mission.
As well, it is.
And so you know, I'm partly a lawyer, right, So I've got a group of engineers who are terrified that if we kill people, they're gonna end up in jail, right because so so as a lawyer, and this is really interesting. So I peel that onion skin off my head and I go, okay, but I don't say I'm being a lawyer. But in that meeting, I would say to people, do we agree if we do nothing, they're going to die?
Yes?
Do we agree that we do not have enough information to make an informed decision?
Yes? Do we agree that we don't have all the equipment we would like?
Yes?
Do we agree that we have to do something today?
Yes?
Okay, And so in the absence of the information we want, the equipment we need, and all the rest of it, what are we going to do today?
And then the room would erupt.
That might take say, forty minutes, and then the sugar levels would finally drop and we get to, you know, a level where we calm down, and so we've got say, one idea, And then the lawyer in me, without saying it's the lawyer, would touch and I mean touch the person who's the decision maker, and I would say, no matter what, no matter what happens, I will say, I will always say that the decision you made here today was the best decision based on all of the evidence
that we have, the resources that are available to us, and in the knowledge that we have to take action today. And then the whole room would go, oh, yeah, that's a good idea, because everyone was thinking. I could tell I could feel it. They're going, oh yeah, if my ass was on the line, we all should stick together, shouldn't we. And so we had like a pact so that when we went out of the room, everyone was, yeah, we agree, this is what we're going to do today.
But you say that they had a pack, but also they had a leader, and they had a leader within you, because leaders make decisions like that. Leaders show their group that they have the top cover and the backing to go in and do that job. So even though you were a group, I've identified straight away the leader in you, mate, which is absolutely amazing. I don't know if you knew that. You probably do, But from that discussion there, they've got
a leader. That's probably why they were cheering. And we've got a leader that's winning to back us, that's willing to roll up his sleeves and lead from the front, which is extremely rare in this day and age.
It's funny, isn't it, Because what I did was I put my face as the face of both success.
And failure and they love that.
And what leader does.
Yeah, so I'm I'm saying I didn't mean to and I didn't mean to it's not a conscious decision. It's I've got a mission and to achieve this mission, and it is necessary for me to make these statements, and I believe that they are the right statements to make. Interestingly, you talk about leadership, I have no authority, right, I have no position. I am not even in the press conferences. You will not find anywhere on the internet one piece of video with me in a press conference.
And yet the.
Indian media followed me, found me, wanted to talk to me every day. So I became the face of the mission with no authority, just just doing what I do. And I felt that when you talk about leadership, I took a leadership position for the purposes of achieving the mission without having one star on my shoulder. But when I went back to India, because I asked them what did I do? And of course there's some voices who say, uh, you know, you were stealing the limelight, you're the face
of it, blah blah blah. And but when I asked them what I actually did, they said, you made us believe that we could do it.
You gave us hope.
And I think when you talk about leadership, ant the other for me, the thing that also is not spoken. Imagine what would have happened to me upon failure, because I was the public face and the declaration of success, and the Prime Minister's department had said to me, if this fails, you better get yourself to that helicopter, which is on the helicopter, it'll be waiting to get you out because there are thousands of people here, like mobs had formed for all the men inside there, all the families.
You've been up there, you know what it's like. It's not you know, you might think London's tough, but that's a tough mob up there in the Himalayas, and they will make you personally accountable and read between the lines that means possibly I will be in pieces. So like this, this was not a game, and the stakes, the stakes
couldn't have been higher. And there was general distrust in the government, so there was like there were sort of I wouldn't call it rioting, but lots of shouting and screaming and you know, men with guns to keep them under control and all that sort of thing. So this was no you know, it's no academic exercise like this is the real deal.
So talk to me about the action. How do you execute this mission, Arnold, and how does it go? Talk us through it? So us put us in there with you.
Yes, So.
There's what we do is we divide the rescue mission into multiple teams, divided along existing organizational boundaries. So we put one set of organizations in charge of vertical shaft drilling from the top of the mountain down. So we're aiming to have the option of coming down from the top of the mountain, hitting the top of the tunnel near where the workers are, and then extracting them, perhaps
through a capsule or something. We've got another team working on a side intervention where we've excavated a launch chamber for a tunnel boring machine coming in from the side. We've got another intervention that we're setting up from the back. It'll have to come through a fair bit of mountain, but in fact we abandoned that early because the tunnel on the other side is also in a diabolical state,
so we exclude that. Then at the main section where we ultimately do do the rescue, we've got the main augered tube which we're putting through, which is about eight hundred mil with a big auger and a big pushing device on it. And then in addition to that, we've got a second method, which would be a conventional mining operation, probably run by the army, where we'll build a small, small mine shaft using the side of the tunnel as one wall, and come alongside and see if we can
get the men. So we had multiple parallel things going on, but we had to coordinate each of them so that we didn't disturb the ground for each of the other. So the vertical one was going really well until it wasn't because we noticed that the amount of water coming into the tunnel was increasing and we were we were concerned that we might burst an aquifer and drown everybody, and that would be bad.
An aquifer is obviously a pool of water that's encapsulated within the rock.
Yeah, it's like a big ocean up up in the in there, because because the Himalayas used to be ocean floor and they've been pushed up. That's how you get your springs and things up there. They're actually oceans trapped in mountains up in the Himalayas. So one of the ways we regularly kill people in tunnels in the himal As we drown them. And so that's so not intuitive. So we had water coming in and we were worried we were going to trigger a collapse in the crown, so we stopped.
We actually halted that. The fact that the men who are in charge of the vertical drilling.
Operation were prepared to halt when they were so close to getting through the crown shows what a wonderful team we were, because you know what, it's like, we're the team and you've you know, wonder they were there, We're there. They were like just stump, yeah, So that's like super hard.
Then we've got the Auger. I'll go to the Auger team.
So we've got the bigger eight hundred mil pipe, We've got an auger, and it blows up and so where the Auger is now completely disintegrated, that part of the machine's broken down. We're about ten meters away from getting through, but we've crashed into a whole lot of broken steel and reinforcements, which is the old tunnel, and it's wrecked everything. And in fact it's there that the decision is made.
We're going to now go to people in the pipe by hand digging and putting rock into a little trolley that we made I do welding, so I was down with the welding boys. So we we welded up a little trolley on a rope, so I got two men in an eight you know, eight hundreds, not march though, like little men by hand. And then we pulled the trolley out and over a period of a few days we did that last ten meters that actually works in
the end, and we held the tunnel boring machine. Launch was just held while we were doing that because we didn't want to trigger an avalanche, and we held we were fabricating for the mining operation, but we held so. And also the rescue workers. I was talking to them, and we knew there could easily be a catastrophic failure once we busted through, because we could see in the survey data and the light, our data and everything else
that the thing was moving. And so one of the things I was doing was going to each man who was going to go in as a rescue worker and say to them, look, when you get in there, if it starts to blow, can you go to the back, like go down the far end of the tunnel. And I promise another promise. This was going to be my second what was my second promise we'll come and get you. But remember it could take us two weeks or so on our best calculations, because we had a feel for
the rock. Another couple of weeks and we might lose power supply, so you might be in the dark. And in preparation for that, we'd had the guys who were trapped stockpiling food and water at the back of the tunnel as well, so if it caved in, so we were preparing for a second a second failure.
Wow, So loads of concurrent activity going on there for multiple options. If A didn't work, then then B didn't work, et cetera, et cetera. And talk about talk about a combination of skill sets. You say you're a worlder, a lawyer, and engineer, geologist, you're almost you're almost made for this specific mission at hand, because it was do you know what I mean by that? Because I'm just picking up all these things and I'm like, wow, wow, Wow, he's using all of his skill sets.
Ah.
And I know too well, which is part of the reason I'm so troubled. It's as if the universe prepped me for this one job. It's as a whole of my life, i'd been prepared. Yeah, when the rescue was finished, I can't, like still can't think of any skill I'd learned over the period of my life that I didn't use. And I can't think of anyone on the team who
we could have done without. Like it was like this huge, incredibly improbable jigsaw puzzle that, for some reason I still don't understand, came together and it's exactly like you picked it up. That's this is the problem I face because I look at it and I go and even through my life, I'm like, why why do I know welding? Why do I know about driving machinery? Like why do I know about geology? Why do I know about law? You know?
And yet there in the mountain for this rescue, all.
Needed still the stars aligned. Yeah, so when you breach through Arnold, you know that moment when do you get the message that we're in the tunnel and we're there and now it's a case of let's get them out. Yeah.
So I remember that really, really well. So I've been down there where all the preparations are being done. I'm down there doing that. But as soon as soon as I knew that we were nearly there, because you get like they're preparing for the actual getting in. I retreated, And the reason I retreated was I felt that this was a very special moment for the country because it had been so huge on their media. They'd been live coverage for seventeen days. And I didn't feel I should
be there. It's like my job is done. And so what I did was I Withdrew and I sat up behind the family because the families had been bought in and they had like little chairs for them to sit in the tunnel, but back from the zone of most likely collapse, and I sat with my back up against the wall behind their chairs.
Actually connected to the rocks.
I was actually kind of touching the mountain, like sort of going, come on, come.
On, Nelly, Yeah, we're nellly there.
We're nearly there, and life can be a bit not nice, you know. So you know, So I was sitting there and the and then all the cheering starts because the people start coming out. But what was extraordinary for me, and I'd never really thought about it. All the families were silent, and I think I think they felt like they were looking at ghosts. I actually don't think they
thought they would ever see their family again. And I suspect in their minds they were thinking that this was all some conspiracy or some fabrication, because a lot of them were questioning whether their loved ones were really alive.
And there was always this uh, this, you know, this negative narrative that's very popular now where the government's not telling you the truth and there's really but and so when they came out, they were silent, and I wouldn't like I would never have imagined they would be silent. Then I was watching and then just just tears like they like just crying, like just quietly. Not so the rescue workers they're all, are you hear you know, and that's the stuff that you see on the on the videos.
But the families silent, And that was a it's really interesting. I'm still thinking about that.
So when number forty one came out, what did it feel like going from the grim reaper to an archangel? This being your your first.
Time, Yeah, that's right, my my rescue virgin moment. Yeah, So my job wasn't done because I had personal relationships with all the rescuers that had gone in, and I'd given them my assurance that I would come and get them if they got stuck. So I actually waited for all of them to come out. And so when I had all because remember my promise is two fold, Yeah, so I can't I can't just take one.
I've got to take both.
Right, So yeah, they you're going to rescue them all. And also no one's going to get hurt. Yeah, in the in the introm Yeah.
So when I had all of them come out, I felt and this you may well understand, and it's not intuitive. I felt enormous contentment. And so people say to me, oh, you must have been happier. No, it wasn't happy. Oh you must have been excited. No, it wasn't even excited. It was contentment. And even the word contentment probably doesn't
express it correctly. It's this feeling that, as a human being, you've discharged your duty honorably and you've been a part of something special, and it's like, maybe that's it, Maybe that's what I was here for. Like it's like a really we like it's a weird thing, like if I was a religious person, which I'm still deciding whether I am or art, but it's like, you know, it's like a Nirvana moment, I suppose, because I just feel contented, and I, yeah, that's how it felt.
Was the energy of that situation and of of that moment. Did it feel religious that and you mentioned that, did it feel religious that you've done the right thing by going to do a prayer at the beginning? Did that all come back around? And did you think you know, I've got to now, you know, because it is a religious you know, there's a there's a sort of religious side to that of praying to the mountain gods. And I do the.
Same, You do the same, so you get it on the mountains. Yeah, yeah, you get it.
So yeah, yeah, So so we've done this.
This is from the day after right, amazing.
Right, So so I'm told by the Prime Minister's department there's a helicopter waiting to fly me away, and I've got to get out of there because a happy mob is dangerous in the same way that an unhappy mob is because maybe they go, ah, we want some of his teeth.
Or we want his hair. You come back bedless.
Yeah, yeah, but I didn't. I didn't do what I was told. Instead, the rescue workers, the SDRF rescue workers and I we made a pack that we would go to the temple on top of the mountain and give thanks. And so the helicopter was waiting, doing its helicopter thing. So we snuck off together and we went to the top of the mountain and had the best celebration and
see for those guys just like me. Normally we bring people home in body bags and this time there were no body bags and none of us had been heard. And so there's this amazing video which is the guys made up a song about me. I've got no idea what it was saying, like except the Arnie Dix I know that bit. But we found this log up on top of the mountain where there's this temple, and they
put on a concert, a singing and dancing concert. And then I was like, oh, well I'll join them, because like, what the hell.
We're all alive.
And that video, which was totally unrehearsed spontaneously they did the singing and dancing. It had something like a hundred million hits in India. Wow, because it's just lovely.
Wow. So absolutely, it's pure it's lovely.
Yeah, yeah, it's just a.
Well listen, Arnold, You've been an absolute pleasure to have on my podcast. You are humble as you are, kind as you are knowledgeable, as awesome as your beard is. I couldn't compliment you anymore, mate. Thank you, sir, Thank you. And to learn more about Arnold's extraordinary career, you can pick up a copy of his new book, The Promise. I link the details in the show notes. Thanks for listening to this episode of head Game. If you enjoyed it,
please leave me a review. I'm at Middleton. See you next time.