This is NBC Nightly News with Jose Diaz Ballard.

Good evening. We begin tonight with a remarkable rescue in Southeast Asia.

Four more men finally free after they were trapped in a cave for more than a week.

This was the scene in Laos earlier when those men were brought back up to the surface.

Survivors embracing their family members and the people who saved them. Take a look at this new video showing just how dangerous

conditions were below ground. You can see just how cramp that cave is, with one of the rescuers

literally pulling himself through a narrow, flooded passage.

Our Janice Mackey Freyer starts us off tonight.

After ten days trapped in a flooded cave, a remarkable rescue.

Four men were able to walk out, exhausted but elated to be alive. It took an international rescue effort involving divers and

specialists from at least half a dozen countries, the head of the operation, posting screen grabs

of two of the men smiling at the hospital. They quickly called to thank us, he wrote. It really warmed our

hearts. Every trip into the cave was a risk for rescuers, navigating narrow tunnels in the dark with

little room for error. Yeah. We made it. Volunteers pumping muddy water out around the clock

in a race against time, weather, and uncertainty.

Divers had been preparing to go in and get the men, who had been learning how to use the oxygen

tanks. Then, in a fortunate turn of events, the water receded enough for them to one after another

emerge on their own,

put on stretchers to get the medical attention needed

after being underground with no food and increasingly toxic air.

24 hours earlier, the first survivor was taken out by divers,

covered in mud, his hands injured.

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