Note Benne: This is a recounting of soldiering in a third-world country. It is rated PG-17. If you are easily offended by profane language and course behavior, go away.

Don't let the page's title font fool you, US Army duty in Thailand was soft. In fact, a couple of years before I arrived, Thailand was the prime R&R spot for guys serving in Vietnam. As a result, it had the second-highest VD rate in the world. But, that was back in the days when a penicillin shot cured everything.

     I owe a debt of gratitude to all of my brothers in arms who had the sense to take pictures while they were there – something that I didn't – and the foolishness to post them on the web where I could snarf them up.

I was here

If you look in the upper right corner of the picture, X marks the spot where I was stationed. Ramasun Station, home of the 7th RRFS army unit, was about 20 miles south of the capital of Laos, Vientiane. In fact, dependents from the US had to exit the country to renew their visas. To do so, they would visit Laos.

    Udon Thani was the closest big city, about 20 kilometers – klicks – south of us. Near it was the Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base.

     The X may not be quite right since Googling around Thailand maps and some personal web sites has placed the installation south of Udon Thani.

Place Names – They're All Named "Peachtree"

The headline is a joke. If you've ever been to Atlanta, you know that half of the streets are names "Peachtree."

    From some personal web pages about the 7th RRFS, I've learned that the ville outside of the gates was named Nong Sung, or Ban Nong Sung, or maybe Dodge City, it's rather unclear. From what I've been able to see on Thai maps, "Ban" is the equivalent of "burg," or so I surmise from the use of the term on the maps. And, that's "burg" in the hick-town sense.

     There are about a half-dozen places that phonetically correspond to "nong sung." The best candidate is Nong Saeng. It looks to be a town larger than the wide-spot in the road I remember, but the other candidates are too far away to be likely.

     Another confusion about names is the label for the big town nearby. As you can see on the map – an official display by Thailand – the town is Udon Thani. Various other sources of recollections call it Udorn or Udorn Thani. To confuse matters even more, the nearby Royal Thai Air Force Base was Udorn. There was also another air base named Ubon.

     After some researching, I began to recollect nearby town names like Nong Khai and Nam Phong. Nong Khai was the Thai entry and exit town on the border with Laos where dependents would use to get into Laos to renew their Thai visas.

Greetings

This is the sign in front of the station's headquarters building. The "RRFS" stands for Radio Relay Field Station. Some other vets who were stationed there recall it nicknamed as the Rock and Roll Freak Show. I don't remember that at all. Maybe before my time.

     It was an Army Security Agency radio listening post that eavesdropped on radio traffic from China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, and just about anywhere else within a 5,000-mile radius.

     A word about my military service and how I ended up on that side of the world:

     When I flunked out of Bowling Green State University in Ohio – too much enjoy, as it were, more on that phrase later – I lost my student deferment. It took about six or eight months for my draft board to catch up to me, but catch up it did since I had a draft number of 27. Seems that even though I enrolled in Cuyahoga Community College – a junior college that was something of a joke back then in 1971 - 1972 – I was informed by Selective Service that going from a four-year school to a two-year did not continue a student deferment. Who knew?

     When I got my notice to report, I headed to the local Army recruiter to enlist, thinking I'd trade an extra year of service and pick a military occupation – MOS – that would keep me out of Vietnam, or at least out of the portion where people where shooting. The recruiters, always happy to see a warm body enter their office, got my reporting date postponed until they could take credit for inducting me. After reading the brochures about different military occupations, I opted for being a military reporter and told the recruiter I wanted to go to the Defense Information School at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis. See Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" to see how military reporters were kept out of the fighting.

     On the day I was supposed to enlist, the recruiter I'd been working with wasn't around. Instead I got some mean-looking guy who either through stupidity, most likely, or through malice, signed me up for the specialty of 71B20. That dolt had me going to clerk/typist school. Getting his assurance I was going to the Defense Information School, I signed away three years of my life. What a surprise at the end of basic training to find out that clerk/typist school was a back door to serving in a combat zone.

     Luckily, I test pretty well and did well enough on the battery of induction tests to be recruited by the Army Security Agency. While I was trying to get into that, however, I was reassigned to the Finance Corps and thus ended my dreams of being an Army spy. I ended up at Ft. Ben Harrison anyway, at the Finance School there. That's where my luck turned. After finishing the school, three of us, out of a class of about 30, ended up being assigned to an army detachment at Homestead Air Force Base, about 20 miles south of Miami. About half of the rest of the class went to Germany, about half went to Korea, and a few went to Vietnam.

     After a year's stint at Homestead, I got orders to go to Thailand. My office's commanding officer offered to keep me in Florida, but Thailand didn't sound that dangerous and was somewhat exotic. I'd take a chance. My assignment was out in the boonies, so I ended up at the 7th RRFS. An Army Security Agency station. Ironic.

Ramasun Station

Here's Ramasun Station from the air.

     The big, round structure at the top of the photo was the antenna array. It was nicknamed The Racetrack for obvious reasons

Welcome to My World

This is a view looking in at the front gate of Ramasun Station. Impressive, huh?

     The car on the left is a taxi. "Taxi" was a loose term over there. Usually it meant a burned-out Toyota or Datsun with a suicidal driver. Friendship Highway was the main drag outside of the station. It was two lanes of freelance road. I remember being in a taxi ditty-bopping toward Udon Thani when I saw a petroleum tanker truck heading toward us in the other lane. As it approached, a lumber truck loaded with logs the size of 10,000-year-old Sequoia trunks pulled into our lane to pass. I began to get nervous. The driver had one hand on the wheel, the other draped over the open window, casually smoking a Thai cigarette as big around as a rolling pin. He wasn't taking any evasive action.

     I was about to mention our impending deaths against the grill of a truck the size of the Lusitania, a Bhat Bus [more about those further down] pulled onto the left shoulder to pass both trucks. I gave serious reconsideration to walking next time, if there was a next time.

     When we were within closing distance to the oncoming convoy, the driver swerved over onto the berm and let the phalanx pass, not dropping his speed by so much as a mile per hour.

     The taxi run from Ramasun to Udon Thani was also fraught with highwaymen. It wasn't unusual to hear about a taxi or Bhat Bus being pulled over by robbers. Even the taxi drivers weren't above hijacking a fare. Security folks at Ramasun advised us to never take taxis alone.

The Outer World

This is a view from the main gate looking outward to Nong Saeng. I'm not exactly sure what that building directly across from the station was, but I know very near it was a tailor shop, restaurant, and a bar. In fact, if you were a Thai and could scrounge together a couple of Amana refrigerator boxes, you became an instant "nightclub" owner. Add some black lights, a juke box, and a velvet painting of a nude woman and you were set.

You Want It, They Got It

This is a small open-air market by the front gate. I don't remember whether it was just inside or just outside the fence. Probably outside since that would make much more sense security-wise, but the photo looks like it was inside. There you could get everything from lunch, to knock-offs of K-Bar fighting knives, to straight razors. This is where the Thai contract workers at the station would go for lunch if they didn't bring it from home. Sometimes I'd give the office girls a couple of bhat to bring back something for me, too. It was usually a ball of sticky-rice the size of a baseball along with some stir-fried mystery meat – it didn't pay to inquire too closely as to its origins – coated with hot oil.

     For some reason, maybe because most American's were pretty white-bread back then, they were amazed that I liked the oil as spicy as they did. They would watch in awe as a big-nose didn't bust-up crying because the food was too hot.

     The only purchase I ever made there myself was a cut-throat straight razor. I had some foolish ambition to use one for shaving. I tried it twice, and it was two-times too many. Schick and Gillette had nothing to worry about.

The Road to Perdition

This is the road from the main gate into the station, pretty long. I'd guess it was a quarter-mile or longer. Why? Maybe security reasons: it would take anyone will ill-wishes toward the station a few moments to get to anything important, giving defenses a little more time. That's just a guess.

     At the end of the road by the front gate was a spigot attached to a naked pipe sticking up from the ground. It was a potable water faucet. Those living on the economy would fill up their five-gallon jerry cans with drinking water before going home, since the Thais in the ville collected and drank rain water that ran off the roof and was collected in those four-foot-high jars you see at Pier One. And you thought they were for plants.

Wipe Your Feet Before You Come In

That's the headquarters building with the Ramasun sign in front of it. I think I was in the main part once when I got on station.

     The Finance Office was behind it in a steel-walled shack with a 20-foot-long covered walkway between our building and HQ. We took care of the administrative finance stuff, but the cashier was in the HQ building because it was more secure. Oh, I also remember we had no bathroom in the Finance Office, so we had to use the enlisted can in the HQ building.

Bombs Away, Dream Baby!

This is somewhat out of sequence. This is what passes for a toilet in Thailand. For obvious reasons we called them bombsights. I don't know any big nose who was comfortable using them for solid waste disposal since we couldn't get into that flat-footed squat like the Thais.

     Since the Thais thought sitting your naked behind on a toilet seat was a filthy practice – and given the picture on the left, it's little wonder – they'd take off their shoes and squat on top of the Western toilet seat in the HQ can.

     This "sanitary" procedure gave me a case of crotch-rot that would make Doctor Kildare wet his pants. Nothing more fun that reporting to sick call and showing the medic some nasty fungal infection.

     For the curious, the title of this cell is from a John Stewart [the musician, not the TV personality, Stewart was a member of the Kingston Trio an wrote the Monkees' hit "Daydream Believer"] album back in the 1979.

No Quarters Asked . . .

This is a long-shot of the barracks. There were two types for the enlisted personnel. An open barracks with just curtains between each two-bunk set-up and a barracks with individual two-man rooms. The latter was only for those with the rank of sergeant [or equivalent, such as a Spec-5, we were all classified as E-5 for pay purposes]. A couple of months after I arrived, I was promoted to Spec-5 and got my own room. I supposedly shared it with another Finance Corps guy, but he was living on the economy with his sweetie, so I had the room to myself.

. . . No Quarters Given

Life on the station was almost like living in a low-end Texas suburban development: wide streets, new buildings, and hot as Hell. Those are some of the barracks on the left.

All the Comforts of Home

Considering the first barracks in which I lived in the Army were built at temporary wooden barracks for World War II and still used in 1971, the enlisted quarters weren't too bad. They were air-conditioned, roomy, and the Thai employees took care of the upkeep for a ridiculous amount of money. Something like $5 or $10 per month, per GI, would get your clothes washed and starched, your boots polished, and your facilities maintained.

     The only thing missing was TV. We had TV of a sort. Each dayroom in the barracks had a small black and white TV that carried the Armed Forces Television Network. If you like re-runs of 1950 TV series you'd never heard of, or amateur newscasts from a 19-year-old with stumble-mouth, you'd like AFTV. We made up for it with expensive stereo equipment we kept locked in home-made cabinets. Armed Forces Radio wasn't much better, though that was where I discovered the old-time Nero Wolfe radio series starring Sidney Greenstreet. That shows how current their programming was.

     Most of the bushes that grew around the barracks were poinsettias.

     There were some trade-offs of the creature comforts. The station was built on what was a vast cobra den, thus the nickname Corbra-7. There were still a few odd snakes around. One medic related how he went into the A/C room to turn on the air-conditioning in the field station and saw a cobra rear up at him. He made a hasty retreat. There was a single dog allowed to run loose on the station. He'd been bitten by a cobra and lived to tell of it.

Wing Wipers

We had a large detachment of Air Force personnel on the station. They worked in the operations area, listening to voice or Morse traffic along with the Army Security Agency guys. Their barracks were separated from we grunts and outside of the Operations area, I didn't see many of them.

Life Is Hard . . .

That's a shot of the swimming pool. Having the ability to swim like a cinder block, I never took a dip, though I would lay out on the deck and catch some rays.

. . . And Then You Die

That's the library behind the pool. Since I wasn't much of a drinker, wasn't at all a doper, and kept my pants pretty much zipped, I spent a lot of time in the library. It was pretty small, but comfortable and had enough books to keep me occupied. That's where I finally read "A Tale of Two Cities." I thought it was petty good, much better than I remembered from an abortive attempt in Honors English in high school [Cliff's Notes was a good substitution]. I later found out that I'd read an abridgement.

     As I aged, I found that no one under 40 should be required to read Dickens.

A Two-Year Investment

I think these next two shots are of the new PX. When I arrived at Ramasun in 1974, there was something of a building boom. They built a new PX and a USO building. These were both pretty nice places.

     It was the PX that finally cured my jungle rot. They began carrying Cruex powder, an anti-fungal talc. That eventually cleared it up.

     The reason for the hed on this section is that the Army built both the new PX and USO buildings around 1974. From what I've been able to gather on the web about Ramasun Station, the Thai government asked the US to withdraw in 1976.

United Service Organization

I'm pretty sure that this is the USO building. It was near the front of the station and within direct sight of the antenna array. I also kind of remember that the roofline had windows along the peak. Either it wasn't air-conditioned, unlike every other building on the station, or else they kept it uncomfortably warm. Once it was built I spent as much time in it as I did at the library.

     The USO had a small collection of second-hand books you could either read there or take with you. I spent one afternoon reading a thin paperback about the history of aspirin. Yes, I am something of a nerd, thank you for asking.

     It also had a very rudimentary cafeteria. I don't remember any hot food being served there – we had an excellent mess hall – but they did have great banana and zucchini breads for sale by the slice. It was staffed by civilians, most likely wives of officers.

Bonded, Pete Bonded

That's a long shot of the Operations building. This raises the question about photography. I'm surprised that so many pictures were taken of the facility. Granted, we weren't as security conscious back then as we are now – we weren't treated like criminals at airports – but I can't believe so many pictures, especially the aerial photos of a top secret facility. I guess the MPs couldn't be everywhere at once.

     The Operations building was surrounded by a chain link fence topped with razor wire. You had to show your badge and then go through a mantrap to get inside. You need a Top Secret-Crypto clearance to get in. I ended up getting one for the most mundane reason.

     Back then, GIs were paid with IBM punch-card checks. As they cashed their checks at the Finance Office, we collected them and then ran a report. To run the report, the checks had to be sorted. The only punch-card sorter was in the Operations building. When I got to the station, there was only one guy who had a clearance badge. They needed two, so I was picked for the clearance. The FBI did a background check of me that got my parents' neighbors wondering what I'd done since the FBI canvassed my hometown neighbors about me.

     Every payday I'd borrow a co-worker's bike, take a canvas sack of cashed checks to the Operations building, run them through the sorter, and then come back to the office. Thus my touch with the world of spooks.

Mass Transit

The site where I snarfed this photo proclaimed the pink vehicles in the background as "bhat buses." Maybe at the time the photo was taken, but when I got to Thailand, a bhat bus was more like the mini-pickup in the foreground. It sometimes had a couple of benches in the back, but sometimes not. You'd wait by the side of the road, or some obvious destination, like the Ramasun front gate, and when you saw one in the distance, you raised your hand with a bhat coin in it. The bhat was the national currency, worth about a nickel when I was there. Twenty bhat was equivalent of a dollar. If you were feeling generous, a night with a bar girl was 100 bhat.

     Back to less salacious topics. After the bhat bus saw you waiving your coin [that's a one-bhat to the left, front and back], it would come to a halt and you'd hoist yourself and your belongings into the crowded bed. The driver would then take off 'cause time's a wastin'. When your destination was in sight, you'd tap the coin on some metal part of the truck and the driver would pull over. You gave him the coin and he was off onto his appointed rounds.

     I'm not sure of the amalgam of the bhat coins, but they sure tarnished quick. They had a nice ring to them, so they weren't pot metal, but then again they sure weren't any kind of precious metal, either. Thais kept their coinage in circulation until is was worn down to the quick. In fact, it was unusual to find what looked like freshly-minted coins. Kind of like soda pop bottles. The 12-ounce Pepsi bottles you got from the Thai merchants looked sandblasted.

     The coins all sported a profile of the king. In fact, all of their money, coins and bills, all had the king's puss on them, like the 20 bhat coin to the left. Thailand was a constitutional monarchy, like the United Kingdom, but without the embarrassing antics of the horsy-faced British royal family. By comparison, the Thai royalty was pretty regal. And, boy-howdy, the Thais sure loved their king and his family.

     If I'm not mistaken, the image on the obverse of the 20 bhat coin was Ramasun, the god of thunder, after which our station took its name.

Abandon Hope All Yee Who Enter Through This Gate

This is the main entrance to the town of Udon Thani. A fine metropolis and the flower of Thai urbanism. That's the Seiko clock arch. Just beyond it were a set of traffic circles. Three of them, strung together like links of a chain. Only someone born to the system could navigate it.

     During the orientation for new arrivals, we were warned about traffic liability. If you hired a taxi, or were riding in some conveyance, you were the responsible party. If the madman driving the taxi got into an accident, we were advised to get out and run like the dickens or else we'd be held responsible for the accident. You see, if we hadn't hired the taxi, he wouldn't have been in the spot to cause the accident. Thus reasons the Oriental mind.

    We were also told to avoid Thai jail at all costs. Literally. If you could come up with enough cash on the spot to assuage the injured party, or give money to the Thai cop to "broker" a settlement, by all means you should, we were told. Thai jails were repositories for criminals. That's all. Food, clothing, blankets, even sanitary drinking water, was the prisoner's responsibility. If you got sent to the pokey and didn't have someone on the outside providing for you, you were SOL.

     More times that not, we were told, the army would bribe you out of jail for non-egregious behaviors like hiring taxis, getting into bar fights, or insulting a Thai. For truly criminal behavior, they sent your food and blankets and hired a local Thai attorney. You didn't want the former and certainly didn't want the latter.

     It seems Thais have a different set of insulting circumstances than we big-noses. You shouldn't touch a Thai on the head. You shouldn't touch a Thai with your feet or shoes. You shouldn't point your foot at a Thai, such as when you crossed your legs. Very bad mojo.

Downtown, Everything's Waiting For You

Bet Petula Clark hadn't been in a Third Word city. This is somewhat atypical of downtown Udon Thani. Notice that the sidewalks are relatively clear. No freelance merchants, no beggars. For some reason, even new buildings looked like they'd taken about a hundred years of abuse. Maybe it was the weather, maybe it was absentee landlordism. Whatever it was, the town reminded me of those photos and newsreels of ethnic New York neighborhoods in the early 1900s: lots of hubbub, confusion, dislocation, and stores chock-a-block.

     During one of my few trips into town during daylight hours, I went with a friend from the Finance Office who was going there to score some dope. I never partook, but I had no problem with others finding their own pathways to Hell. The guy I was with was a tall, thin galoot with whom I nominally shared my NCO quarters. Since he lived on the economy, I had my own room as I believe I said someplace above.

     We got off the bhat bus someplace amid the confusion and headed into a nightclub. Being daylight, it was empty except for the proprietor. I'll call him "Bugsy." He showed us upstairs and brought out a sheaf of Thai sticks. These are dreadlock-looking thing made up of marijuana. My acquaintance, nicknamed Blind Baby from a Cheech and Chong sketch, purchased his dope. Bugsy then pulled out a small matchbox and offered it to Blind Baby. "Huh?" thinks I. Bugsy opened it and it had a black, gooey substance in it. Blind Baby's eyes lit up. It was black-tar opium.

     Bugsy, brought out a bamboo bong with the spitting image of the eagle from the back of a dollar bill carved into it with great skill and artistry, smeared some of the opium into the bowl, and fired it up. He took a hit, and offered it to Blind Baby. Baby inhaled prodigiously and held the smoke in his lungs like he was about to engage in extended deep-sea free-diving.

     I could actually see his pupils expand. He blew out the smoke, coughed like he had tuberculosis, and offered me the bong. I declined. A moment or two later, a young lady employed as a hostess in Bugsy's establishment came up with a hypodermic needle. Now it was getting oogie. Blind Baby bought the matchbox and we left. I was happy to get out of there and Blind Baby was just happy. As we made our way back to his place, I was nervous. Drug trafficking in Thailand is one of those land-your-ass-in-jail-forever offenses. Even the army didn't help you much if you were busted for dope.

And I Mean EVERYTHING

This is a much more typical view of a downtown Udon Thani sidewalk. The folks sitting by the curb are grifters, buskers, merchants, and mendicants. They sold everything from their unwanted female children to used magazines to diamonds. You can bet that the quality of the gems from these folks were top-notch.

     Often you'd see someone wearing filthy bandages, crying out plaintively for alms. Sometimes they had leprosy, sometimes they were just pretending. It wouldn't be unusual to see what looked to be a wizened old woman with pancake-flat breasts, breast-feeding a child who looked to be two or three. It took a hard heart not to feel some compassion, but you kept your change in your pocket. If a big-nose dropped a coin in their bowl, you'd get mobbed by every beggar and grifter from there to the horizon.

Willie Go 'Round in Circles

The human-powered vehicle in the foreground is a samlar, a pedaled rickshaw. Taxis were cheap, but these guys were even cheaper. I don't think I ever saw one of these guys who weighed more than 83 pounds. How could they? They had calf muscles that looked as hard as angle-iron. I took one once just for the experience, but it felt so Ugly Americanski that I didn't use one for standard transportation again. Notice the qualifier. Read on to find out why.

Kentuck-Thai Derby

This was an unusual sight to see during the day: Samlar Races. We usually engaged in them after a fulsome evening of nightclub entertainment in town. Remember the traffic circles I mentioned above? After an evening of relaxation, we'd sometimes gather four or five samlars, each of us taking a seat, and then have races around the traffic circles. I don't know how much the samlar drivers enjoyed it, but we never had any refuse a race, probably because we rewarded the winner lavishly, maybe the equivalent of $20 in bhat with each of our drivers getting about $5 in bhat.

     The Thais were very willing to take US currency, but both governments frowned greatly upon those types of transactions. You can bet that the dope deal I described above used greenbacks and not the Thai comic book dough. Not only was the king's likeness on the paper-money once, it was on there twice. In the currency shown, there's a blank spot on each bill. Hold it up to the light, and you'd see a watermark of the king's face. OOoooh, magic.

     Each bill was a different color. The most common denomination used was the 20 bhat, that was equivalent to a dollar. In Thai hands, that would be like passing a $100 dollar greenback. As shown above, there was some commonality between denominations of paper money and coinage. The coins lasted longer, of course.

     As the size of the denomination increased, so did the physical size of the bill. I've scanned and posted the images all the same size, but in reality, the 100 bhat bill was significantly larger than the 20. The worn bills I've scanned don't do justice to the colors of the money. I suppose in a population with a significant amount of illiteracy, it was necessary to make the bill denominations different, but it still looked like comic book cash to us. We can't brag much anymore with the way the mint is changing or dough to make it more counterfeit-proof.

     A final bit of money trivia. The Thai paper-money was printed outside of Thailand. In fact, it was printed by the same firm that printed the Bank of England's currency. Each bill not only sported a watermark, each had a thin strip of platinum leaf embedded in it to give the down-home folks in Thailand confidence in their paper-money. When it looks like something from a Scrooge McDuck comic, you need that.

     Every so often, since we were so close to the Laotian border, we'd get some Kip floating around. Sometimes the Thais took it, often not. If my dough had an ugly cuss like that on it, I wouldn't think much of it either.

     The Kip was also printed by the Brits, but the bills were much smaller. They sported the same watermark and precious-metal strip as the Thai bills. It was a little like encountering Canadian coins here along the north coast. Most people will use and accept them as money, but every so often you'll run into someone with a stick up their butt who won't, and vending machines treat Canadian money with disdain.

Wild Blue Yonder

This is one of the entrances into the Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base. Wink, wink, nod, nod. Royal Thai. Get it? Get it?

     When the C-130 Hercules cargo plane that ferried me and about 10 other guys though a milk-run up north, landed here, I was amazed at the flightline, B-52 Stratofortresses lined up for what looked like a mile. This was one of the main air bases from which the B-52s staged for the bombing of North Vietnam. The US Air Force pretty much build and maintained the place as a "guest" of the Thai government. Sure, it was a "Thai" air force base.

     It also didn't hurt that the Central Intelligence Agency's captive "air force," Air America Airlines also had a large installation on the AFB.

     On paydays, a group of us from the Finance Office would check out M-16s and sidearms and take an International Harvester SUV from Ramasun to the air force base to pick up greenbacks with which to cash GI checks. Remember I mentioned the highwaymen on Friendship Highway? Well, to avoid any unnecessary unpleasantness, we'd drive to the AFB and come back via a UH-64 "Huey" helicopter. At first it was exciting, and then became routine.

     The joke was that it was probably safer to give the highwaymen the money rather than fire the poorly-maintained firearms they gave us from the armory.

     If you remember back to my description of getting a clearance to the Operations building to sort checks, I mentioned we were issued security badges. There were two of us who had them, myself, and ironically enough, Blind Baby. We weren't supposed to exhibit the badges except in secure areas, so we kept them in the breast pockets of our jungle-fatigue jackets; a big, slanted pocket with two buttons.

     On a helicopter trip back from the AFB, Blind Baby and I were sitting in the back of the Huey with the doors slung open. I never saw one of those choppers in actual use where the doors were closed. In fact, some had the doors dismounted. As we were sitting there with the air blasting in, there was a ruffle of color and a flash of orange flying through the door. Somehow the wind had sucked Blind Baby's security badge from his pocket and sent it fluttering into the brush below. We shouted what happened to the co-pilot. He shrugged, not much to do about it.

     After we landed, I took Blind Baby's weapons and mine back to the armory while Blind Baby went to security to explain what happened. About a half hour later, a couple of MPs fetched me from the office to the security officer's office. With great care I was sworn in and questioned about the circumstances of the badge's disappearance, then told to go back to work and tell no one about it. Fine be me.

     Blind Baby showed up an hour later, looking pale. He said he couldn't talk about what happened. It must have gone well because two weeks later he was issued another badge.

Home Is Where You Hang Your Hat

I've said a lot about living on the economy. Here's what it looked like. Palatial, isn't it? Looks like a cross between a Bayou Teche shack and a back holler West Virginia son of the soil house. Note the verdant yard. Running water usually consisted of gravity-powered piping fed from a cistern that caught rainwater from the roof. The toilet – see above – didn't even lead to a septic system. The "night soil" was sent to another cistern and collectors would come by and take it away for use a fertilizer. Waste not, want not.

     In the big-nose houses there was usually electricity. Got to have power to run the component stereo system that cost more than the house.

     The house sometimes came with a housegirl, sometimes you had to buy your own. Sometimes she just kept the house, sometimes she performed services in the line of duty. Some guys had a girl they'd found who hired a housegirl just to take care of the daily routine.

     About six months into my tour, we had a young African-American PFC join the Finance Office. Thailand was hog heaven for him. A week into his tour, he was on the economy. Two weeks into it he came into the office bragging how he'd bought a housegirl to "take care" of the place.

     Maybe I'm a righteous prig, but that pushed a button.

     "I don't believe it," I told him. "You people have only been free for a little more than a hundred years and you're bragging about buying people," I said.

     I doubt if it made any difference, but at least he quit bragging about it.

If I Were a Rich Man

This is the compound of a well-to-do Thai. It reminds me of the home of one of the Thai contractors we had working in our office. The one whose feet gave me jungle-rot.

     Visiting the guy was like taking a taxi into a Joseph Conrad novel. We got off of Friendship Highway and immediately be on a two-rut track in the bush. On one visit, the taxi driver got pissed because we were following a Thai leading a water buffalo when the buff decided to drop a five-gallon load of used food. No where to drive but through it. There went that show-room shine and new-car smell.

     The Thais were smart enough not to fall into that goofy social custom of growing lawns. Their yards were as vegetation free as a freshly-dragged baseball diamond. It kept unsocial critters from lurking by the doorway and popping up to bite when least expected.

     Each house seemed to have a dog. Just a hillbilly yard-dog of indeterminate ancestry. They were mostly early-warning systems for the home-owner and kept unwelcome critters from sharing the master's quarters. They were usually infested with fleas, lice, and ticks the size of M&Ms. Once they got to know you, they were friendly. That's the great thing about dogs, always willing to be friends.

King Klong

Any patch of standing water that didn't evaporate in the noonday sun was called a klong by the Thais. Sometimes they were just drainage ditches, sometimes they were ponds. Invariably they'd kill a big-nose who dared to dip a toe in them. Thai kids, on the other hand, would swim and bathe in them, and probably drink from them without repercussions. They must have white blood cells and antibodies swimming in their circulatory systems that could devour Godzilla.

     Klongs would be miraculously stocked with fish. Miraculously in that they generated fish without the help of human intervention. Spontaneous generation for all I know. The Thais, never ones to waste anything, would fish these things and eat the catch, fried whole and as crunchy as potato chips.

     Our Thai contractor, Udom Chundhapenia [that's as close to the correct spelling as I'm ever going to guess] would bring in what looked like a four-inch sun perch that had been scaled and deep-fried whole. It was his lunch. He'd daintily nibble the flesh from it until all that was left was the cartoon-like fish skeleton. MMm-mmm good; scales, gills, fins and all. Gave me the creeps. Then again, when he made coffee in the office pot, he'd add a hefty pinch of salt to the grounds.

You Looking at ME?

Here's a fine example of the livestock outside the gates and what went on in klongs. I'm SURE the buffalo NEVER went poo-poo or pee-pee when he was soaking his fly-ridden ass in a klong.

     These guys were the John Deere's of the area. They plowed fields, hauled wagons, and occasionally fell into wells. More than a couple of times, guys in the Ramasun motorpool were called out to bring one of the heavy tow trucks out to hoist a buff out of a well or some other spot where the brute got in, but couldn't leave. At the end of their useful life they enjoyed the retirement of being served in khowpot, the Thai version of fried rice.

Hellooooo, Ladies!

This is a shot of a housegirl I snarfed from another vet's site. No, she's probably not a soiled dove. The Thais had a strange sense of decorum. They could traipse around in their skimpies, but drew certain lines about public nudity.

     For instance. There was a girl who was a topless dancer at the NCO club. She'd gyrate for hours wearing nothing but the bottom to a bikini, three-inch platform shoes, and a bored smile. A few of us later saw her dancing in a bucket-o'-blood club across from the main gate. A few of us took it into our heads to have her shed her drawers while dancing. It took a fist-full of bhat and the vociferous urging of the Bugsy the club owner – not the same Bugsy who sold dope – to get her bottoms off. It lasted about 32 seconds and then they went back on. Hardly worth the investment.

We Love You Long-Time

Ever get a set of instructions for putting something together and it's obvious that the writer didn't have a vast depth of knowledge of the language? Here's a perfect example. That's the front and back of a small ad about the size of a business card that the Red Rose Bar was handing out. Rather than scanning the interior, I'll reproduce it verbatim:

Come   One    Come on    Come to

RED ROSE BAR

Opposit Air America Gate

We Would Like

To Serving You with All Kind You Need

We Re-Open With All Special News

We Re - Opene on Feb ₂₈ ^TH ₇₄ With Special Price

And Free Food

"Do Not Miss 15 Service Girls

To Serving

30-;

     Swear to God, that's exactly how it reads inside, and that's not my emoticon at the end.

     And now a word about "too much enjoy." I used it somewhere around here to describe how I spent my first and last year at Bowling Green State University and ended up losing my student deferment. I can't take credit for the term, though I had heard variants. A friend of mine who was a radar intercept officer in an F-4 Phantom, flying over both the north and south ends of Vietnam a couple of years before I visited SE Asia, told of a nightclub display of reproductive activities in which the young lady expressed her pleasure with the phrase "Oh, too much enjoy." Yep, that about says it all. And now you know the rest of the story.