Fascinating backgrounder on the Thai football team. Three of the players and the coach are all stateless minorities, who cross the Thai-Myanmar border regularly.

nytimes.com

Three of the trapped soccer players, as well as their coach, Ekkapol Chantawong, are stateless ethnic minorities, accustomed to slipping across the border to Myanmar one day and returning for a soccer game in Thailand the next.

Their presence undercuts a Thai sense of nationhood that is girded by a triumvirate of institutions: the military, the monarchy and the Buddhist monastery.

After years of reputational decline because of an army coup in 2014 — one of a dozen successful putsches since the country abolished an absolute monarchy in 1932 — Thailand’s military has been handed an opportunity to burnish its image.

Thai Navy SEAL divers became the faces of the rescue operation. And a retired Thai SEAL diver, Saman Gunan, 38, died during the effort to bring air tanks into the cave to aid in the rescue. On Monday evening, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha of Thailand, the nation’s junta chief, made his second visit to the cave site.