The Gift

Previously I mentioned the gift of my second pair of combat boots to my hooch boy Ra-Win. For several weeks thereafter he pleaded with me to come to his village stating that his father wanted to thank me for the gift to his son. It was simply not that easy to venture out into the local villages, but after a few weeks of continued requests I told him I would go the following Tuesday.

Somehow, I stumbled across another GI with access to a jeep we could "borrow" for a few hours through some arrangement he had made. So off we went in mid afternoon with Ra-win traveling a few miles through the jungle to a thousand years into the past.

When we arrived there was a great celebration "The Americans Were Coming!" yet it was simply two enlisted men in a jeep. A water buffalo was slaughtered; tied by it's feet over a huge tree limb with it's throat slit and beaten with stave's to tenderize the meat. The hot blood gushed from the throat and eyes plucked and placed in a bowl for immediate consumption by the honored guests. Such was life in "the land of the liver eaters" where a defeated enemies power was consumed as a tasty meal without onions. The water buffalo was raised off the ground so in the minds of the villagers they were not then required to pay a tax to the local government.

While the buffalo was cooking a Thai Boxing match had been arranged, with even an elevated ring constructed which the villagers sat on benches facing. I'd never seen a real match in the jungle villages before, but knew it was going to be unusual when the contestants wrapped rags around they upper part of their knees as well as their hands, poured on wax and broken glass.

After the first round, they were both pretty much of a mess from what we could see sitting in the front row and I had been waiting for a change to get a light for my butt from a Thai Tiger Soldier strutting about with his M-16 smoking. So when I went over he told me in broken English "You brave GI, many Thai communists here!" Looking around at the benches there were a hell of a lot of unfriendly faces; who were evidently not to happy with Ra-Win's father who it turned out was village Chief.

Ventured back to my seat and informed my buddy quietly about the real situation; stating "don't look now but were surrounded by a hell of a load of Thai Communists and the only thing keeping them from killing us is Ra-Win's father so what ever you do don't piss off the old man." So of course first thing my bud does is twist his head around looking at all the frowns behind him.

Well, the second round was about half way through at this point and the guy who had been loosing picked up and drove his opponent into the corner on our immediate right and pined him there driving his knees into his lungs. After a few more well placed kicks I figured he'd back off as it was evident when the guys eyes started to glaze over there was no contest. But he kept at him for at least another dozen finally backing away for him to fall face first gushing out a pool of bright red blood a yard square. They dragged his body off by the feet, there was no question he was dead. Killed for sport in celebration of the visitation of the Americans.

We ate in the Chief's hut, which as most Lao style houses was raised off the jungle floor about four feet to keep out the king cobras and various other dwellers in the area. The meal was a bit rough as no matter how small a piece of the ol water buffalo I munched there always seemed to be a bit of broken bone fragment in it. The booze with the local homemade hooch where they take rice and ferment it in handmade clay jars buried in the red dirt for a few months in a sunny location which turns to pretty strong hooch.

Dessert was even better. Little woven baskets of rice that had also been buried for some length of time; probably a few months from what I could get out of Ra-Win. They were about four inches across and four inches high. Popping off the cover, the consistency looked like a matted grey softball on the outside. The Chief dipped his fingers in and ripped off the hard outer shell so we did likewise. Inside it was white and sticky like wallpaper paste or Elmer's Glue but tasted sweet enough. Everyone ate it with the first two fingers of their right hand. I remember thinking if I don't get the shits now I never will. I never did.

Then we got down to the real nitty gritty. Seems the Chief liked me giving his son the boots well enough to figure I'd take care of one of his daughters also. So he announced the present and a cute young girl (looked maybe sixteen but probably older as Asian women look young for their age) stood up and opened her sarong so that only I could see her naked body. This is not a normal custom, and I knew it was to seal the deal without question. In Thai and Lao custom it is stricly forbidden to have any physical contact with the opposite sex never mind a full display of nudity. The old man was driving the deal home for his daugher whom he loved enough to give up
to have the opportunity to go to the land where the streets were paved with gold.

Ok, so now I had two questions to answer, one faster than the other. How do we get out of the village without being killed and how I get out of the village and leave the girl behind without the old man loosing face? If he lost face, we would have been killed on the spot. Better us than him and if a lot of the villagers wanted us dead anyway he could not allow us to live if he lost face, then he most likely would end up on the short end of any hopes for a long life never mind Chief.
On the other hand if I brought Ra-Win's sister out of the village and dropped her off somewhere she could never go back home to the village and I would have ruined her life.

Maybe it was the hooch, but I stayed calm and the answer came in a quick flash. Hell, the answer had to be quick anyway and I'm sure it was a stoke of luck else I'd not be writing this blog. I smiled and thanked the Chief very much for such a gift that he cherished so greatly and that I would be back for her as I had to prepare a place for her to sleep. This would be a normal response even in the villages as far as I could tell, or at least I was betting our lives on the fact it would be acceptable since it showed concern and respect for his daughter and his position.

We departed a few minutes later as night set thanking all the village elders for their hospitality and gifts smiling and waving good by as we slowly drove out into the jungle darkness. Once we were a hundred yards around the bend, we floored the jeep and beat it back to the base. Who knew the gift of a pair of boots would kill one man and almost two more? Life is uncertain.

Follow Up: For the past several visits back to Nakhon Phanom I have tried without success to locate Ra-Win and the same small village. There were so many in those days 40 years ago that were the same approximate distance from the base. Ra-Win is probably dead. He was most likely a Thai Communist or became one as so many did who lived in the area and if so would have participated in the 1976 uprising there which was put down by the Thai military and never much reached the world press shortly after the American presence departed. My best clue is the dessert which seems to have been a specialty of that village as it is unknown to Thai's at other villages in the area today.

End Of The Line At The Edge Of The World

Ra Win was my hooch boy and at fifteen was only seven years younger than myself, but I found out a whole world away in many respects. Ra Win believed America was a mystical place where the streets were paved with gold and I could not convince him otherwise. He said his father called America the land of desires because what ever you wished for came true there. Ra Win shined my shoes, made the bed and took the laundry out in exchange for a small weekly fee which also ensured he would look after everything.

He had no shoes, so I gave him a brand new second pair of combat boots I had been issued. There was no way in hell I'd wear out the first pair in a year and it hurt like hell breaking them in. Ra-Win's English was about as good as my Thai. Thing was, we were actually speaking a dialect of Issan Pu Thai Lao. Seems when I arrived back in Bangkok on the journey homeward and spoke "Thai" one girl immediately called me a northern barbarian saying "I know where you been" and stomped off.

Little did we know the whole of northeastern Thailand, called Issan to which we were sent at Nakhon Phanom is historically part of Laos and the ethnic people who lived there strongly defined their culture, customs, music and language as Lao.

Most of them were not even strictly Buddhists but followed an even older Anamist spiritual belief system and combined the two together. Which meant our little welcome to Thailand culture booklets were more about propaganda than anything else.

The picture below is of the Pu Thai Anamist Priestess at our welcoming Bai-Sri-Su-Kwan ceremony cermony driving off evil spirits, empowering our good spirits and in celebration of our return to the community. The Anamist Priest and Priestesses must never marry nor drink or smoke, but must maintain their bodies pure in order to communicate with the spirits.

The center piece behind the priestess in the picture below is called a Bai-Si and must be made to exact specifications from banana leaves and flowers taking many hours of work by a group of women. The true beauty of the ceremony is the strings attached, which may be either one long string or many which have been precut and drapped on the Bai-Si. That pictured was one long string, which was passed to all villagers and guest unbroken who were sitting in circles surrounding the center piece. At the appropriate moment, the strings were cut and placed around the wrists of all guests many times; as each villager would put a string on each guests to bind their hearts together. Sometimes in more elaborate ceremonies an egg is used to be held in the left hand of each guest. This is symbolic to bring them fertility.

We called Nakhon Phanom "The end of the line at the edge of the world" because the Mekong River was the line and Nakhon Phanom which means "The City of Hills" was over shadowed by the rugged limestone karst on the Lao side which looked straight out of "Lost World".

Would have been nice if we had known at the time the population viewed the Thai’s as an occupation force as much as ourselves; to say nothing of the fact in their minds we were bombing the hell out of the other half of their homelands. The Mekong River was historically the unifying "highway" through the center of the Mekong Valley Tribal communities rather than a border between countries. Small wonder the locals were sympathetic toward reunification with their heritage and extended family members on the other side of the river and might be interested in what the Pathet Lao relatives had to say all the way around. So of course the little booklet never mentioned the fact that "Thai"tribal communists surrounded the entire area.

The only accurate section in the booklet concerned the thirty percent ethnic Vietnamese who had fled there since the first Indochina War but they had no idea that Uncle Ho actually lived at Nakhon Phanom for several years. The so called "Uncle Ho clock tower" in the square was a gift from some returning Vietnamese in 1960.

When Uncle Ho died in November 1969, the locals in town had black drapes surrounding nice pictures of Ho with little altars beneath filled with fruit, incense and flowers. Hell, the girls who worked passing out beer wore black armbands in memory of Ho. It was a strange war all the way around and we knew beyond any shadow of doubt that we were the strangers in the land. They called us Farang which in Pu Thai means foreigner.

In 2002 a new ultra modern two story museum dedicated to the life of Uncle Ho opened across the street from his former home where he had resided only a short distance off the main road to Nakhon Phanom about a mile from town. A delegation from Hanoi officially reviewed documentation and conducted interviews of those who had served Uncle Ho during the time he plotted the overthrow of Vietnam while he resided at Nakhon Phanom. So much for the war.

My life has changed in more ways than I would have ever perceived. From the narrow perspective of an inner city slum kid who never traveled (even within the state where he lived) to study and following of a philosophy conceived many centuries ago, half way around the world.

On my 22nd birthday, just a little over a month after mankind walked on the surface of the moon, I landed at Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base, in extreme Northeastern Thailand on the Mekong river bordering Laos 230 miles from Hanoi and deep into the secret war in Laos. I was assigned to the 56th Special Operations Wing at the Tactical Units Operations Center. We were not allowed to tell our families where we were or what we were doing. When men died, their families were simply told they had died in the service of their country.

What follows are two of some of the memorable experiences of the war which this blog will share to who ever reads it, yet without my name. I write for my own healing and with the conviction to put to rest these experiences as a testimony, perhaps not unlike a tombstone carries in essence the shortest summary of our lives in final rest. The reader should be understanding we are all filled with contradictions and so these stories are filled with both hope and love as much as with death and despair.


Knowing the needs of the orphanage at Thai Rae 50 clicks west we all wrote home to procure items for more than a thousand orphans. Everything from shampoo and fingernail clippers to baseball equipment and over five thousand dollars in American money. Another Sgt and I started the ball rolling.....it's amazing how generous everyone was....writing to their families and churches at home to collect items and gifts. Hell, we even had a both a Christmas tree and snow from Colorado flown in on the sly. Father Khai at the orphanage had the Archbishop up from Bangkok and had somehow managed to procure three cases of American beer and provided dinner for twenty of us who came to distribute the gifts. It was the best Christmas I have ever known away from home. The pilot who brought Santa on the Jolly Green and I are friends to this day.


Then there was another evening of which the memories prevail even now. Nakhon Phanom was a very small base, yet the location of the largest military computer complex in the world. This unit, hidden underground, was known as Task Force Alpha; responsible for more deaths than any other unit in the war. A computer which analyzed the data from sensors providing the locations of travel along the trails in Laos. Once the information was configured, the B-52 Arc Light Strikes would pound the enemy into oblivion by carpet bombing. Hundreds of thousands died even after the North Vietnamese figured out how it was being done and where Task Force Alpha was located. We called Nakhon Phanom, Naked Fanny, because the only thing which prevented its destruction was reliance on its location in Thailand, jutting out into Laos like an unprotected butt.


Just a few miles on the other side of the Mekong River one evening there was heavy bombing by B-52 aircraft delivering Arc Light strikes. From our vantage point, we could see only a wall of flame from horizon to horizon, feel the earth shake and hear the depths of the earth groan from the intense bombing nine miles away. Those who have seen an Arc Light Strike on the ground never forget the awesome power and it lingers forever in the mind’s eye. In the morning what had been a lush sea of green jungle was now transformed into an empty wasteland filled with an uncountable number of brown craters which looked like the surface of the moon.

All this....for man to achieve what? This was merely a quest for material greed and power which had got out of hand, larger than life. Today I understand Thoreau when he said "I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work" for I have been a student of The Tao Teh Ching and it's philosophy for many years now. If you have never read it, nor understood it, I can best describe it as a celebration of the individual within the flow of eternal life.

The North Vietnamese today call the Ho Chi Mien Trails through Laos “The Land Of Heroes”. This year I drove and walked through the infamous areas of the trail which are once again quiet jungle ford streams which do not reveal the horror of their past nor the ghosts who haunt the stillness.



Traveling north into the restricted zone to Long Tieng; eight hours through rugged jungle on rough cut roads to the secret Air America headquarters during the war bringing school supplies, putting in bathrooms, a water system and evaluating further needs with the local officials for new desks and chairs (all delivered now) was truly an experience of a lifetime.


This all commenced in 1997 when I returned, found Father Khai and made a donation to the orphanage. At the former base standing alone on the last of the pierced steel planking by the former runway parking area at Life Support for the HH-53's and OV-10's I knew the presence of the ghosts who surrounded me and within me.

Transformed to those earlier days in an instant I could hear the Skyraiders cough to life and those who had flown "over the fence" into Laos and vanished in the most remote triple canopy jungle in the world. At that moment I had my epiphany and knew the mission I was being given to aid the children in their memory then they would rest easy with their mission continued aiding the people they gave their lives to help and would not be forgotten by them.


Growing slowly; the men who served found each other, created a non profit charity and expanded aid into rural villages providing medical aid, putting in water systems, fish ponds, repairing schools and many other humanitarian projects working hand in hand at grassroots levels each and every project in memory of those American soldiers who did not return home.


I now have friends all over Asia....even into the deepest heart of central China at the summit of Wudang Mountain, in The Golden Pillar Temple home of the Inner Style of Wudang martial arts, which in true Taoist spirit exerts force from within to master another without harm. Ten years ago my fiftieth birthday was celebrated in humility at Wudang Shan being honored to share an evening with the Yellow Emperor, the head Taoist Master, sharing stories with many masters, laughing and drinking Wudang Wine together. Is this not happiness