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.