Peace and the sNorton Bird.
“So you guys are fuckin’ Peaceniks?” The mellow mood was over for Harley. “Let me explain something just once: our main job here at Ubon is to stop convoys coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Fuck the Geneva Accords and fuck politics—American or Vietnamese. If we don’t kill trucks, American soldiers get killed.”
Tom, the mellowest of the mellow, calmed things down. “Why don’t we call a truce?” And with that he lit up his bong, passed it over to Harley, and put on some Johnny Winters.
Late that night, lying on my bunk back at my hootch, it hit me—I was halfway around the world from everything I had ever known. Even on a base crawling with six thousand American airmen, I was lonely as hell without Danielle.
14 May 1971
The Ghetto
The sun looked like a juicy apricot floating in the thick syrup of tropical evening air. Tom Wheeler and I sat regally in a pair of high-backed wicker throne chairs on the second floor porch of Unit #4, Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng, passing some especially smooth and potent Laotian weed between us and chasing it down with Mekhong and soda. Lek, Tom’s part-time girlfriend, was cutting up fruit on a chopping block nearby, squatting on the floor as naturally as Tom and I were sitting in our chairs. As we neared the end of the joint, I watched Tom pull out his roach clip and take a drag, and I recalled how in the past year the Pentagon brass had denied there was any drug use among GIs in Southeast Asia. I remembered how a month or two later, after the press had proved them wrong, the same brass claimed their drug eradication programs were a great success. Neither the press nor the brass had ever visited the GI denizens of Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng, a motley assortment of hippies and soul brothers who called their dead-end alleyway the Ghetto.
Unit #4 was one of five newly constructed stilt-shacks that ran down the left side of the alley. We called the bungalows stilt-shacks because like traditional village huts all over Thailand and Laos, they were elevated on teakwood pillars that for centuries had provided protection from flooding in monsoon season and, the rest of the year, a source of shade from the scorching sun. Wheeler lived there along with Zelinsky, my boss, and Phil Groendyke, the Det 3 lab tech. I was just visiting.
For the average GI, Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng was an adequate place to hang your hat if you were sentenced to a year in Thailand. Wheeler, Zelinsky and Groendyke considered it a bargain. Sixty bucks a month bought them a stilt-shack made up of four slat-walled rooms with ceiling fans, a bathroom, and a wide, shaded front porch. The bathroom, or hong nam, featured cold running water for shaving and lukecold water stored in a large klong jar that you dipped a plastic bowl into for something like a shower. Zelinsky explained to me how in the tropics this was pleasantly refreshing—most of the year. Electricity was relatively new in upcountry Thailand and brownouts were not uncommon, but enough juice reached Ruam Chon Sawng to run a stereo and a mini-refrigerator twelve hours a day, more or less. A Thai with half a brain would not have paid more than twenty dollars American to move his entire family in, but Wheeler, Groendyke and Zelinsky didn’t mind splitting their sixty a month three ways.
A long, unelevated structure ran down the opposite side of the Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng complex. It might have passed for a barracks, more easily for a chicken coop, but it was in reality a row of one-room apartments. Each unit on the long, squat barracks side had a bed-sitting room, a private bath and a little area outside, boxed in with a cement wall and containing a cement bench, that passed for a patio. The chicken coops ran ten or twenty-five dollars a month, depending on whether you were getting the Thai or the American price.
There was nothing Tom and I enjoyed more when we were stoned than perusing the little world below us from our second floor perch. The two Thai national policemen who squeezed their families into the studio apartments closest to the gate often spent the late afternoon relaxing with their wives and children outside on their little patios. On our side of the alley across from the policemen, Mama-sahn, the brains behind Ruam Chon Sawng, often sat out in front of her two-story cottage with her son and a covey of half-naked grandchildren. Mama-sahn’s little palace had once been a stilt-shack like Tom’s, but the first floor was now finished off and the interior pine-paneled, a sign that she had done well in the war. She had done so well, in fact, that Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng literally meant “Bungalow People Come Together Two.” Number One, the original, was located downtown near the post-telegraph office.
Tom and I especially enjoyed gazing across his little cul-de-sac in the late afternoon and watching the most beautiful woman in Ruam Chon Sawng sitting out on her patio dressed in a silk kimono drying and brushing out her hair. Water was abundant in Thailand, and taking two or three showers a day was not uncommon. She spoke no English and was once visited every day at noon by a Thai soldier who was married and could not leave his wife. At one o’clock she helped him button up the shirt to his uniform and returned to her job giving manicures in a nearby beauty shop.
The most beautiful woman in Ruam Chon Sawng was proud of the fact that she spoke no English, but that did not mean she was not ambitious. She had carefully saved her money so that she could attend the really good beauticians’ school near the Chinese quarter in Bangkok. After she returned, she started saving money to open her own salon. She also made a change—a business decision really—in the boyfriend department, even though the Thai soldier had been very handsome.
Now a Thai kickboxer lived with the most beautiful woman in Ruam Chon Sawng. He got to smell the sweet, soothing incense that burned each night from the spirit house, a miniature temple that sat on a pedestal in front of the cinderblock wall that closed off the alley. I suspected that it had been a long time since the boxer had been surrounded with so much beauty. He was scarred and bruised and pasty-skinned from spending much of his life under the artificial light of gyms and indoor arenas. His wire-straight, close-cropped hair was thinning on top, his body seemed rough-hewn and gangly on his five-foot six-inch frame, and his flat face had been rendered flatter still by countless kicks and punches in the ring.
But now the most beautiful woman in Ruam Chon Sawng had a lover who might marry her someday and who promised to set her up in business when he won his next fight. Tom and I secretly admired how uncomplicated she had kept her life by never learning English. At the same time we were glad we had Lek and Pueng around to keep us up-to-date on Ghetto gossip.
Ruam Chon Sawng might have been considered a blight back in the States, but in May of 1971, young GI potheads and soul brothers lived in harmony there because it was cheap and far from the base—and because girls and drugs were plentiful. Thais lived there because, for bar girls and masseuses, for soldiers and policemen and petty civil servants, for musicians and the kickboxer and the beautician, for all these people the bungalows and studio apartments of the Ghetto were a great luxury after growing up in the thatched huts of rural villages. They now had tin roofs that never leaked, electricity instead of kerosene lanterns, and they no longer had to haul water in buckets from a well—they could fill their klong jars by turning a handle.
“Happy Happy Hour, dudes,” said Lek, who had finished slicing up a sapparoht, magically turning the ungainly fruit into a bowlful of sweet, watery pineapple chunks that she carried over to her boys. Lek always surprised me, looking and acting more Puerto Rican than Thai. She was petite, attractive, but the spit curls, the glossy lipstick and especially the intensity she radiated from her eyes brought to mind one of the sexy dancers in the chorus of West Side Story, if not Rita Moreno herself.
Tom took a pineapple chunk for himself and then put one into Lek’s waiting mouth, letting her lick his fingers before he slowly pulled them away. His eyes twinkled at hers, and hers twinkled back. We had started calling Tom Wheeler “the unenlightened Buddha” long before we left California for Southeast Asia. No matter
