Nixon won over enough American hearts and minds to keep the war going. He may have talked about downsizing, but like every American president before him he was damned if he was going to be the first to lose a war. The U.S. Air Force was sticking around at full strength, moving to Ubon, several other locations in Northeast Thailand and, according to Wheeler and Zelinsky, a couple of secret bases in Laos where Air America may or may not have been operating. It was about this time that a lean, ramrod-straight stranger with dark, piercing eyes showed up and spent a week working quietly with Zelinsky in the corner editing cubicle. I guessed from his military bearing that his civilian clothes were a cover and that he worked for the CIA. From what I gathered, you could only get to his secret base by helicopter and then mule train, and it could have been located in Northern Thailand, the Burmese Shan States, the mountains of northwest Laos, or even South China, seeing as how the private thousand-man army he was training hailed from all those regions. Clearly Nixon wasn’t limiting his stealth to Thailand, but Zelinsky refused to talk much about the project other than to show off the flintlock musket the CIA man had given him as a little thank-you. The musket looked like something out of the Revolutionary War, but a Hmong militiaman had only turned it in a week earlier in exchange for an M-16.
When Colonel Grimsley, the base commander, announced proudly at my first monthly Commander’s Call that the U.S. Air Force had now dropped more tonnage of bombs on the Ho Chi Minh Trail than the Allies had dropped on all of Germany in World War II, I realized from the loud applause that I was deep in the heart of lifer territory. With my application for discharge still rumbling around somewhere in the labyrinthine USAF bureaucracy, I was glad to know Wheeler again had my back, keeping tabs on my case the way he had at Norton. It seemed like a good time to take Poser, Esquire’s advice and maintain a low profile following lawful orders while I waited for my hearing.
The first weekend after I arrived, Zelinsky took me on a tour of Ubon proper. With it came a great riddle: as much as the war turned out to be far worse than I imagined, Thailand turned out to be just the opposite. It didn’t matter that I was still a little woozy with jet lag—I was immediately intrigued by the lively Third World economy that swirled around us downtown—in the bustling shops of the business district and a few blocks away along the river at the open-air Noy Market. There, bartering playfully was as routine as it would have been unimaginable in a Boston supermarket or department store. When Zelinsky led me into air-conditioned Raja Tailors (“just to window shop,” he told me), the smiling salesgirl handed us each an ice-cold Coca-Cola, and before I knew what hit me, a tailor in a turban had taken measurements for two silk shirts and a pair of dress bell-bottoms, to be ready in three days. Zelinsky had a good laugh, as usual, and sipped his Coke while I was left scratching my head.
Stepping back outside, I smiled, soothed by the buzz of activity that drowned out the sounds of fighter-bombers taking off and landing just a few miles away. About the only thing that didn’t win me over that day was the stench of stagnant sewers and canals (what the Thais called klongs) mixed with the pungent aroma of pork, chicken, river fish and dried squid that were hanging in the market stalls.
A little before noon Zelinsky suggested we break for lunch. It was hot season, and it had been hours since the blistering sun had burned off the morning haze. He led me to a noodle shop that looked out across the Noy Market. Like noodle shops throughout Thailand, it had an open front, a steel grate that was shut at night when they closed and a shiny cement floor that was at the same time depressing and spotlessly clean. The tables were well-worn Formica, the stools an almost elegant hand-lacquered bentwood. In front of me was a glass and steel pantry displaying the day’s menu and next to it several charcoal braziers that kept an array of woks sizzling. In the rear was an industrial-grade, glass-fronted refrigerator chock-full of frosty Cokes, Fantas, Green Spot sodas, bean-curd milk and Thai beer.
Zelinsky was grinning when we stepped inside. “I know you won’t believe me,” he said, “but you’ll be used to the fragrance of klong water and dried squid by the time you come back tomorrow. Amazing organism, the human body.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m sticking with sorry-assed chow-hall food.”
A petite young woman in her early twenties wearing aviator sunglasses, a faded, loose-fitting navy work shirt and torn bell-bottom jeans was making her way out of the noodle shop carrying two plastic satchels full of the morning’s groceries. I hadn’t noticed her until I pulled out my chair to sit down and managed to put it directly in her path, nearly jarring loose one of her shopping bags. She recovered gracefully and gave me the special condescendingly friendly smile that Thais trotted out for clumsy farang. I only caught a glimpse of her before she disappeared into the steamy late-morning sunlight, but as a serious student of photography she struck me as a particularly photogenic representative of a country noted for an abundance of beautiful women. Zelinsky snapped his fingers, bringing me out of my momentary trance.
“Maybe you’re right after all about that human-body-being-an-amazing-organism stuff,” I muttered.
“I was talking about your nose adjusting to the smell of dried squid,” replied Larry with a twinkle in his eye.
The waiter, an old friend of Zelinsky’s, picked up on the subject of our conversation. “Pu-ying suay mahk, Sergeant Lar-ry. She very beautiful.”
Zelinsky exchanged a few Thai pleasantries before ordering us two Singha beers and some mildly spicy duck soup. The soup was delicious, and the beers did such a fine job washing away the dryness in our throats that we decided to have one more for dessert. Outside, we shook hands, soul-brother style, and Zelinsky headed home to spend the afternoon with Pueng, his reason for returning to Thailand. Given that this was my first trip downtown, I wanted to stay and take some pictures.
I meandered along Prommahtehp Road as it followed the Mun River toward the Warin Bridge. A block from the bridge I saw her again. Among hundreds of people thronging from jewelry shop to tailor shop to dry goods store to stationer, the lovely stranger in the teardrop sunglasses and oversized denim shirt somehow stood out by radiating just a tiny bit more grace and sensuality than the many other attractive young people around her. Her hair was just a fraction longer and silkier as it bounced to the cadence of her gentle footsteps. Her golden skin glistened ever so slightly brighter in the midday sun. Intrigued, I put on the longest telephoto lens I could successfully hand-hold and stole a few shots of this lovely stranger, mixed in with pictures of the shops and the many exotic products they sold. Even the cheap notebooks in the windows of the stationery stores captivated me, bound as they were in various patterns of silk landscapes.
After battling so hard to avoid being shipped overseas, I wondered that day why fate was turning out to be so kind, and I smiled to myself at how much I was enjoying my first day off. On a lark, I continued following my accidental model from the opposite side of the street even though I couldn’t frame her closer than a waist shot. As attractive as she might have appeared in close-up through my lens, this was a comfortable distance. I expected to marry Danielle when my tour was up and didn’t need any complications. Besides, I was fundamentally shy; without being able to speak Thai, it would have been hard to accomplish anything other than to scare her away if I had moved closer.
And so I kept following her, taking pictures from across the bustling thanon. A couple of times I lost her and was surprised to find myself feeling sad, for Christ’s sake! And then I’d spot her again. I’d feel a little surge of joy and have to laugh at myself. I followed her around the traffic circle that fed the bridge to Warin and the depot for the Bangkok train. Before I realized it we were at a dead end on the outskirts of town among rat-infested shacks that clung to the muddy embankment of the Mun River. The denim work shirt and bell-bottom jeans that belonged on a San Francisco hippie-panhandler suddenly looked like the silk robes of royalty when she was surrounded by a horde of tiny street urchins dressed in rags. Patiently she gave each one of them a piece of fruit and let them reach their tiny hands into a bamboo tube of sticky rice and scoop out enough to form into a riceball. When she opened
