More than 2,000 bodies had piled up at Yanyao Temple. Lieutenant Colonel Niphon Yanphaisarn had written up hundreds of reports so that family members could claim the bodies of their loved ones, but after forty-eight hours without any sleep, he finally hit the wall. He headed home shortly before midnight on Tuesday, only to hear his wife retch the moment he walked through the door. The smell of the dead had worked deep into his clothes, hair, and skin. He showered under the hose on the front lawn and put on fresh clothes, but when he went back inside, his wife said he still hadn’t gotten rid of the smell. He curled up on the back porch and tried to get some sleep. The sun awoke him a few hours later. He tried to ignore the heat crawling over him, but then his boss called. They needed him down at the station.
A stack of reports nearly a foot tall sat on his desk. While he had been working with the bodies at the temple, his subordinates had been out making arrests. In less than forty-eight hours, they had caught seventy looters. Since none of his subordinates were qualified to do investigative work, the reports had come to him. He began sifting through the files and saw that the robbers hadn’t just come from nearby provinces, such as Surat Thani, Krabi, and Nakhon Si Thammarat. They had come from provinces in the north, northeast, and northwest. A large percentage of them were Burmese who had come into the country illegally. Their looting activities also varied. Laborers working on construction sites had stolen electrical wires and metal faucets—anything they could dump onto a scale and sell wholesale. Others were hotel staff members who had broken into rooms after the wave hit and stolen all the foreign guests’ valuables. Still others were men and women who had thrown a plastic card around their necks and pretended to be volunteers helping to collect the dead bodies. They went looking for bodies, all right, but instead of loading them onto trucks, they’d strip them of their jewelry and wallets.
The more Yanphaisarn read, the more disgusted he grew. They had stolen chairs and tables and anything else they could get their hands on. One of the more organized groups had driven a truck up to a scooter shop, smashed in the door, and then driven off with fifteen Hondas. Yanphaisarn knew that for every one they caught, a hundred more got away. With the majority of the police searching for the King’s grandson and collecting the dead bodies, the looters pretty much had free reign. Only the unlucky or the completely stupid had gotten caught.
After looking over all the files, Yanphaisarn took a deep breath. This would take weeks. In each case, he had to interview the accused to get their side of the story, head to the scene of the crime and interview any witnesses, write a detailed report, and then send the case along to the prosecutors. He felt his time could be much better spent helping to identify the bodies, but this was what his boss had wanted him to do. So he plucked up the top folder, read it again, and then went to the jailhouse to interview the man who had been arrested.
“How many bodies did you rob?” Yanphaisarn asked him.
“No, no, I just came looking for my relatives.”
“Then why were you found with twenty wallets?”
“I picked them up to see if they belonged to my relatives.”
“Half of these wallets belong to foreigners. You have a foreign relative?”
The man opened his mouth to speak, but then he quickly closed it.
Yanphaisarn felt like slapping the crook. He’d been so consumed by the fortune he was making, it had never even crossed his mind to take the money and ditch the wallets. In some cases, with men and women who had been found with Rolex watches and diamond rings, he knew it would be hard to prove their guilt, because the previous owners of the valuables could no longer testify. Luckily a large number of those arrested had been in the possession of drugs as well, so at least they could get them on those charges. Yanphaisarn assumed that because of the shaky evidence, most of the looters wouldn’t get more than three years. If it were up to him, he would have locked them up for ten.
The day fell further apart when Yanphaisarn went back to the station. Sitting in his office was a man who claimed to be a volunteer working for the German Embassy. He had heard that passports and jewelry had been collected from German tourists, and he needed Yanphaisarn to hand them over. Yanphaisarn had a bag full of foreigners’ passports and jewelry under his desk, but he wasn’t about to hand it over, not to someone who claimed to be a volunteer working for the Embassy. Yanphaisarn said he didn’t know what the man was talking about and sent him away. Twenty minutes later, a volunteer working for the Swedish Embassy came by, then another volunteer from the Germany Embassy, then another Swedish volunteer, then a German one again. At one point, two Swedish volunteers demanding to collect valuables showed up at the same time, and they didn’t know each other. Yanphaisarn found it impossible to believe that foreign embassies would have sent five or six people to achieve the same mission. He told each volunteer the same thing—he wouldn’t release any passports or jewelry until the items had been properly documented, and once they had been properly documented, he would release them only to someone who could prove they actually worked for the embassy. Having been a police officer for more than twenty years, Yanphaisarn didn’t trust anyone. Chaos turned people into crooks.
Yanphaisarn eventually told his subordinates to send away anyone claiming to be a volunteer working for an embassy, and then he sat down to begin writing up his reports on the looting cases. Halfway through the first case, he got called out into the main room. He reluctantly headed out of his office, only to see a massive line of people that stretched from the reception desk, out the front doors, and then into the street. Everyone in that line held several sheets of paper that needed his signature so they could collect money from the government. Some documents were to verify that they had lost their mother or father or son, and others were to verify that they had lost their car or motorcycle or home. By the end of the week, there would be more than 30,000 cases, and with each case needing at least three documents bearing his signature, he would have to scratch his name more than 90,000 times.
When Yanphaisarn’s twenty-four hours at the station were finally up, he went home, showered outside in the yard, and then returned at once to Yanyao Temple. Doctor Pornthip, a famous DNA specialist and author of many best-selling books, had arrived a few days before and set out to establish a better system of identifying the bodies and releasing them to family members. Yanphaisarn had hoped that this new and improved method would have the report-writing process streamlined, but it didn’t. Now, four days after the tsunami, the bodies had begun to rot. Dressed in boots, smock, and mask, Yanphaisarn spent all day wading his way between bodies swollen to twice their size. Most of the bodies were no longer recognizable, and with fingerprinting having been rendered obsolete, due to the skin on the fingertips having sloughed off, it meant that DNA testing would have to replace the simplistic method they had previously employed. To make matters worse, the 2,000 bodies had now become 4,700 bodies. It hadn’t reached the point where mass graves needed to be dug, but it had gotten bad. He feared many of the bodies lying on the ground would never find their way into their families’ care or even receive proper funerals. It broke his heart to think of how many souls would linger.
Only two foreigners remained at Takuapa Hospital on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 28, and that made things a whole lot easier for Doctor Wut Winothai and the other general practitioners. Supplies were also trickling in at exactly the right time. A few hours before they ran out of surgical gloves, a box of surgical gloves came in. An hour before they ran out of alcohol, a box of alcohol arrived. Just as they started needing Formaline to preserve the dead bodies, that came in as well. Logistically, everything looked good.
On the treatment side, things didn’t look as good. The day of the tsunami, they had tried their best to stick to the emergency plan they had developed. A major component of that plan was to clean people’s wounds, stitch them up, and then quickly release people from the hospital so the doctors and nurses could deal with the more serious patients. It would have worked perfectly for a car accident, but this wasn’t any car accident. The murky water of the waves had worked down into every cut, scrape, and gash. Normal seawater contained several different types of bacteria, but the water of the tsunami had hundreds, most of which had come from the raw sewage it picked up off the roads. By the time Doctor Winothai realized that everyone who had open wounds needed to be operated on, the staff still had only three surgeons. As a result, they had no choice but to clean the wounds with alcohol and then stitch them up. Now the people who had been stitched up returned by the dozens, with infections. When the surgeons reopened the wounds, the infection had already eaten the patients’ muscles. Doctor Winothai and his fellow doctors would have stitched up hundreds more that day, but luckily they had run out of thread. It became clear that those who had been treated less had actually been treated better.
By late Tuesday afternoon, the number of returning patients had grown to nearly a hundred. Those who had left the hospital two days prior with just minor cuts now had festering wounds. Some had developed the beginning stages of gangrene. Many patients had developed blood infections, and others had developed pneumonia or lung infections.
Never in Doctor Winothai’s wildest dreams did he think the infections would have taken hold so fast. He pumped his patients full of antibiotics, but there were just too many different types of bacteria to kill. By evening, they had to amputate arms and legs. Before the end of the night, people started dying. It was hard for Doctor Winothai to take, because he knew if they’d had the right antibiotics and enough time to put everyone on the operating table on the day of the tsunami, all of their lives could have been saved. It made him wish he’d paid more attention to the patients with small wounds. That awful day made him wish a lot of things.