During the 2010 protests on the streets of Bangkok when thousands of red-shirted demonstrators squatted in the ritzy area of Rachaprasong, gaggles of travellers and tour groups shepherded by Thai guides descended on the danger zone, walking past barricades of tyres spiked with bamboo spears and brambles of razor wire, through checkpoints where their bags were searched for firearms, and into an atmosphere that almost resembled a temple fair. Vendors hawked sunglasses, T-shirts and red, heart-shaped clappers. Noodle stalls served up bowls of soup. On the stage, in between leaders delivering diatribes attacking the government as a ‘dictatorship’ and, in displays of schoolyard bravado mocking the prime minister’s virility and sexual preferences, the crowds danced, cheered and grinned to the tune of the heartsick love songs that have long dominated the Thai pop charts.
None of the tourists could have missed the glaring disparity between the haves and the have-nots, reflected by the sight of hundreds of rural folks camped out beneath signs for designer brands in the soon-to-be-torched-and-gutted CentralWorld, where few of them could ever have afforded to shop. Many visitors also spotted a familiar figure walking through the crowd. Clad in army fatigues, the rogue general nicknamed ‘Seh Daeng’ was besieged by admirers. Group after group of Thais wanted their photos taken with the soldier who had defied army orders to become the red shirts’ security chief—a man who frequently boasted about how many communists he had killed in the 1970s; a man whose plan to oust the yellow-shirted protestors from government house in 2008 involved dropping snakes on them from helicopters.
But the general-gone-AWOL did not command such respect from the downtrodden for these dubious deeds and plans. Many of the protestors I interviewed expressed variations on a similar theme: at last someone in power had come over to their side; at last someone with military and political clout was treating them with respect and consideration. To be fair, the yellow shirts and the urbanites of Bangkok charged that the protestors were being paid by former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and used as pawns to checkmate the government on a political chessboard.
In person, it was difficult to dislike the charismatic and congenial soldier. Seh Daeng smiled and shook my hand. Patiently and politely, he answered all of the questions I fired off in Thai. And he was equally considerate to a troupe of travellers who wanted their photos taken with him. Watching the crowds surrounding him, a young Englishwoman said, “This guy is like a rock star.” She had a point. Where else in the world would a soldier command the kind of adulation usually reserved for rock and film stars?
Only a week later Seh Daeng was shot in the head by a still-unidentified sniper. He succumbed to his injuries a few days after. The mourning and celebrations that greeted his death were reminders of Thailand’s long-standing love and loathing for the military, paired with respect for men, women and children in all kinds of uniforms. That’s easy to see. Scan any street in the kingdom for the schoolgirls, boy scouts, bank tellers, bureaucrats, college students, soldiers and sailors, all in their neat and crisp uniforms. Watch the security guards in the gated residences of the rich as they give military-style salutes to the BMW-driving tycoons. Try and navigate the serpentine minefields of political, economic and judicial power that are tangled up in the red tape and remnants of military might. Work in any big Thai company where a militaristic structure of top-down rule ensures a chain of command that keeps the rank-and-file in a state of unquestioning subservience. Flip through any newspaper and the names of the main players in the theatre of politics, such as General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh and Major General Chamlong Srimuang, reveal a military pedigree. Even the most fundamental of Thai gestures, the wai (sign language for hello, goodbye and thanks), made up of palms clasped together and head bowed, reveals different degrees of deference to those of higher social rankings.
As a kind of buffer zone in the 1960s and ‘70s against the spread of communism in neighbouring countries, the presence of so many GIs and military bases on Thai soil caused seismic upheavals in the country’s cultural and political landscapes. As an aftershock, Thailand served as a double for Vietnam and Cambodia in many Western movies. The first glimpses most Westerners would ever have of the kingdom came from films like The Deer Hunter, with its infamous set piece of Russian roulette. At the River Kwai Floatel in Kanchanaburi province, where that scene was shot, you can still see the framed signatures of Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken, while Patpong Road in Bangkok stood in for Saigon’s red-light zone. Because there was a military curfew in Bangkok, the producers had to get the approval of the army to shoot on Patpong, where many of the bars had lock-ins after 1am, with patrons crashing out on the chairs and floors.
Joe Cummings, the author of the original Lonely Planet Thailand guide, worked as an extra on The Deer Hunter, not long after arriving in Thailand to witness a massive burning of books with red covers on the front lawn of King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology in Bangkok. Directed by Michael Cimino and starring Walken, De Niro and Meryl Streep, the film won five Oscars in 1978, including Best Picture. Joe played one of the ten Marines who had to guard the gates of the American embassy in Saigon, which was actually a Catholic school in Bangkok. “In the costumers and props department we were issued full combat gear, including flak vests and M-16s. The props were real, although the rifle was missing the firing pin,” he said, adding that a Thai extra—who was a soldier in the 10,000-strong People’s Liberation Army of Thailand—tried to buy the machine-gun from him.
“For that scene four of us were stationed along the top of the embassy’s fence, standing on the rooftops of Jeeps. Cimino instructed us not to let any of the Thai extras, who were portraying Vietnamese trying to hitch a ride out of Saigon on US army helicopters, over the fence no matter what they did. Madness ensued take after take. I was knocked off the Jeep twice, and the soldier extra standing alongside me had his wrist skewered all the way through on one of the spikes at the tip of the wrought iron fence. They stopped that take and carried him away. A friend who was on the ground during that scene got punched in the face by Cimino, who was trying to rile him up for the scene.”
De Niro was in all of those scenes and Joe couldn’t believe how he “stayed in character all the time, even during the breaks when we Marine extras stayed in character by staying stoned and having fun.” In Patpong, he also got to have a bowl of noodles with Christopher Walken, who won the Best Supporting Actor for his performance. In person, Joe said, Walken projected the same aura of menace he usually does on movie screens.
Most of another Oscar winner, The Killing Fields (1984), was also filmed in different parts of Thailand, including the most agonisingly suspenseful part when the Sofitel in Hua Hin—a vision of pan-colonial splendour—stood in for the French embassy in Phnom Penh, where the real-life photographer Sam Rockoff (played by John Malkovich) tries to forge a passport photo for the Cambodian journalist Dith Pran, so he can flee the city which has fallen to the barbarous Khmer Rouge. Still later, Oliver Stone would shoot parts of a film called Heaven and Earth, based on the memoirs of a Vietnamese woman who survived the war, on the tourist-drenched isle of Phuket, where Good Morning Vietnam (starring Robin Williams) was also filmed.
The upshot of this interest, and the
presence of so many military bases across the country, was that in the late
1990s the Tourism Authority of Thailand began what may well be the world’s only
campaign to promote military tourism, with a team of Thai authors penning a
lengthy book on the subject and myself writing an English-language chapter for
a brochure on adventure travel. At the Cavalry Center in Saraburi province,
visitors can drive a rattletrap of a tank salvaged from the scrap yards of
World War I. At the Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy, which has polished
the CVs and credentials of many of the nation’s top brass, and is located only
a few hours outside Bangkok in Nakhon Nayok province, travellers can hit the
shooting range, play golf, go mountain biking and pursue a little “R ‘n’ R”
with the soldiers. The more intrepid weekend warriors, ready to work their way
through the rigmarole of bureaucracy and organise a tour group, can experience
the full arsenal of a serviceman’s life at bases scattered around the country.
Our three days and two nights of very basic training began at the army base in Lop Buri, which is the second biggest one in Thailand. Thirty-five new recruits (men, women and teenagers) from all over Asia and the West, wearing khaki vests and black baseball caps emblazoned with the winged logo of the Royal Thai Airborne, gathered in a clearing for a brief demonstration on how to catch poisonous snakes. Spinal cords slithered and women gasped as a Thai officer showed us how to trap a writhing cobra by putting his boot down on the serpents’ head. Then he picked it up by the tail. Although the snake-handling lecture was in Thai, Sergeant Paitoon was on hand to provide the Westerners with a running translation in English.
As we hiked down a dirt road nearby, flanked by palm trees, we saw a ten metre-high jumble of rocks off to our left. Suddenly, there was a loud explosion and the soldiers in our platoon started yelling. Were we under attack? Everyone looked up to see two Thai soldiers standing on top of the rocks. Yelling and grunting, with a rope tied around his waist, one of them leapt, bounced and abseiled down the rock face.
After this demonstration, another soldier handed out ropes and showed how us to tie them around our waists and attach them to a clip on our belts. Wearing gloves and motorcycle helmets, we then practised walking backwards, our ropes tied around the trunks of trees. After that some of us were ready to cliff-walk and abseil. If becoming a soldier means learning to conquer your fears and trust the men in your unit completely, this was a great way to learn the ropes. While rock climbing is a potentially dangerous thrill sport, the Thai troops took such good care of us that nobody suffered anything worse than a few scraped knees, heart palpitations and some heady doses of adrenaline.
Those conscripts who didn’t feel like participating in any of the activities did not have to fret, because there weren’t any nasty drill sergeants spitting bullet-point orders.
After a ten-minute ride across a nearby lake in a big, rubber dinghy, we hiked through the jungle to a shooting range. There, one of the soldiers with a red beret and black shades showed us how to load, aim and fire an M-16. Each of us was then given five bullets and a pair of earplugs. While we loaded our guns, the soldiers knelt down beside us to give shooting tips and to ensure that no latent psychopaths were allowed to go ballistic.
Shooting an M-16 is a powerful kick. As Terry, a young Aussie backpacker said, “It feels a bit like playing God. You can see what Mao meant when he said, ‘Power comes from the barrel of a gun’.”
At the same time, it was frightening to realise how gunning someone down on the battlefield could be so easy and so impersonal. The paper target we were shooting at—meant to look like an enemy soldier—was about 20 metres away. I was reminded of a US Marine telling me in Bangkok how he’d shot two people crossing a river in El Salvador, “It wasn’t like killin’ real people, man. Sad to say, but it felt like target practise.”
Nonetheless, I don’t think the Marines will be recruiting me any time soon; all of my shots went wide of the target.
In marked contrast, the young Thai woman beside me, who smiled each time she squeezed the trigger, could probably freelance as a hit-woman for the Yakuza; each of her bullets pierced the paper heart of the enemy soldier.
As night cloaked the sky in indigo and staged a shadow play in the jungle, our unit sat on chairs in a clearing, watching another sergeant from the Airborne Division of the Royal Thai Army show us what kind of leaves are edible and which plants contain water. He then had us take turns drinking water from a particular kind of vine I didn’t recognise. While they grilled feral pigs and rice inside a piece of bamboo on a makeshift barbecue, the soldiers demonstrated how to broil fish when you’re nowhere near an oven. Inside a square metal tin they stood three fish upright in a circle. Another soldier then put the top on it and wrapped burlap sacks around the whole tin, before setting the sacks on fire. Ten minutes later, when the sacks were blackened rags, he removed the lid like a magician and—presto!—the fish were perfectly broiled.
For our open-air feast that night, we sat cross-legged on mats, in the usual Thai style, and ate a huge communal meal of barbecued pork, broiled fish, rice, and the spicy soup laden with lemon grass called tom yum goong. For dessert, there were slices of sweet mango and guava.
But it wasn’t time for bed yet. Instead, we were marched over to another pavilion where an informal ‘cultural show’ was about to get underway. From the speakers blasted Thai country tunes with trebly melodies, rhythmic backbeats, wailing vocals (that sounded as if the singer was being given a root canal without the benefit of anaesthesia) and a bamboo flute solo: mournful music for such a happy-go-lucky people, suggesting that some of those lip-service grins in the so-called ‘Land of Smiles’ are bypassing the heart. In typical Thai festival style, the music was cranked up to the point where it was distorting, but none of the locals seemed to mind.
Some of the soldiers and their wives got up to do traditional dances. Soon, they had most of the crowd on their feet and dancing around in a circle—the traditional ramwong. Since Thai society and culture are so regimental, none of the conscripts in our platoon (including the only two foreigners, myself and Terry) were allowed to go MIA.
But the real soldiers joined in too. A few of them got on-stage to play a party game. An announcer called out the Thai names of different fruits: rambutan, papaya, banana and mango. In response, one of the soldiers had to do certain movements like shaking his hips or wiggling his butt. Given the Thais’ racy sense of humour, it wasn’t too surprising that the troopers had to do pelvic thrusts to the tune of ‘gluay, gluay’ (the Thai word for banana, which is quite similar to the one for a man’s closest friend, anatomically speaking). All the locals were in hysterics.
With our leg muscles begging for sleep, we then headed off on a one-kilometre moonlight hike through the jungle. But I couldn’t complain too much, because I had two Thai women, both journalists in their late 20s, clinging to each of my arms, not because they were scared of snakes or spiders. No, they were terrified of encountering some malicious jungle spirits.
After bedding down for the night in two-person tents, the members of the Royal Thai Airborne tried to wake us up the next morning at 6am. After they called Terry and I three times and we still refused to budge, one of them, laughing gleefully, collapsed the pup tent on us.
The highlight of Day Two was a three-hour trek through some lush jungle in a wildlife sanctuary. We marched along the trunk of a huge uprooted tree, crossed streams on slippery stepping stones, waded through knee-deep water in a cave, climbed up ropes beside gushing waterfalls, and soldiered on to a well-earned break beside a big lake with turquoise water so clean the military men drank from it with cupped palms.
Considering the fact that some of these paratroopers are highly decorated veterans who fought alongside the Australians and Americans in Vietnam, it was surprising that they were so boyish and friendly. One of the older guys kept swinging past us on vines while laughing and shouting, “I am Tarzan!”
In a way, their friendliness was very much in the tradition of the Thai military. During World War I, Thailand sent several thousand troops to Europe to bolster the Allied forces. Although their bravery on the battlefield was legendary, so was their compassion. After Germany was defeated, the Thais, along with many other Allied troops, were sent to Germany to help round up soldiers who hadn’t yet surrendered. Several groups of renegades said they would only give themselves up to the Thais because they treated their prisoners much more humanely than the troops from other countries did.
The Allies were similarly impressed by King Rama VI, who attended the Royal Military College in Sandhurst, England, and who also founded the national paramilitary group known as the Wild Tiger Corps in 1911, partly to protect the throne from the growing power of the military. That was a prescient move. Only a year later, the military tried to overthrow him in what was effectively the first coup in Thai history. But the soldier elected by lottery to assassinate him confessed and the coup was put down before a single shot was fired. For a short time Rama VI, a prolific playwright and the first person to translate Shakespeare into Thai, served as a lieutenant in a British infantry regiment. During World War I, he volunteered to fight with the Allies, but was refused on the grounds that it was too dangerous. A framed telegram on the wall of the museum devoted to Rama VI in Bangkok shows how King George V bestowed upon him the rank of Honourary General of the British Army. In 1925, the king’s deathbed wish was to have a full military-style funeral procession. The wish was granted just a few days after his only child was born.
On our second night of basic training, a local professor, who taught the soldiers about astronomy and meteorology, set up a telescope in the clearing beside our tents. It was a perfect, cloud-free night for stargazing, the forest and clearing tinted silver by a mother-of-pearl moon. Afterwards, we ‘liquidated’ bottles of sugarcane rum while reprising the bragging rites common to all servicemen: complaining of bruises and scrapes, and boasting of targets hit and accidents missed, like a bunch of overgrown boys playing ‘war games’. Much hilarity ensued. Alcohol—that great leveller of social rankings—washed away the usual divisions of Thai society and allowed Terry and I the chance to banter more freely with them. As it goes on any multi-day odyssey like rafting, diving or trekking, the intensity of the shared experience made for some intense camaraderie.
Everyone was glad the paratroopers had effectively court marshalled a local ex-soldier on the tour, who had beer for breakfast and the bleary eyes and sour disposition of a veteran alcoholic. He had picked up on a silly Thai joke I had made to a couple of the real soldiers as we watched the women preparing dinner. Since few of the paratroopers spoke much English, and Terry’s local lexicon extended to about four words, I was charged with the task of playing interpreter, quipping that Terry and I were ‘too lazy to cook but not too lazy to eat’. The ex-soldier overheard this remark and began repeating ‘lazy foreigners’ again and again, until a fight broke out between the two of us on the green army bus taking us to the wildlife sanctuary. As far as fights went it was nothing to write to Manny Pacquiao about, but let that serve as a cautionary anecdote about some of the ‘weekend warriors’ you may meet on any of these tours of duty.
The scariest part of the weekend was the jump from an 11 metre-high parachute tower. Even the high-flying members of the Royal Thai Airborne go to pray at a nearby shrine to Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of the Hindu faith, before they do a jump.
After paying our respects to the deity, we listened to a lecture and watched some demonstrations on how to put on the parachute, and how to jump, keeping your elbows by your hips and your forearms straight out in front of you. Having a natural fear of heights, pain, paralysis and death, I had some seventh and eighth thoughts about doing the jump, but I wasn’t going to let a 12-year-old Singaporean girl make me look like a total wimp now, was I?
So I scaled the wooden tower, with the straps of the parachute grabbing at my thighs, and waited for my turn. Five cables were strung from the top of the tower, each one arcing hundreds of metres to the ground in the distance. This meant that five rookie ‘parachutists’ could jump at a time, one after the other. A Thai soldier connected the cable to my vest. After an excruciating wait, I was next in line. One of the supervising soldiers tapped me on the back and yelled, “Go!” With my stomach doing somersaults, I leapt, keeping my eyes on the distant trees. After freefalling for what seemed like an eternity, the cable snapped tight and my head whiplashed back and forth. Grinning at the distant mountains, I flew down the line.
In the afternoon we did a brief reconnaissance mission of the Military Museum in Lop Buri. Then there was a special ceremony, in which a high-ranking officer pinned badges bearing the insignia of the Royal Thai Airborne to our shirts. It’s a thrilling, but not easy to organise way of ‘earning your stripes’—made easier if you’re going out with a bigger Thai group. Even if you don’t have to face down any suicide-bombers or clean any latrines, you still have to combat your fears and test your mettle, discipline and teamwork skills to the maximum: invaluable lessons for travellers or anyone on the frontlines of business.
***
From the highest mountain passes of the north to the lowest roads of the far south, warring militias have made inroads in Thailand. Up in the Golden Triangle—the crossroads where the borders of Laos, Thailand and China converge—some of the roads were paved (quite literally) by the CIA and sealed with drug money, according to The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy and Cathleen B. Read, written when they were graduate students at Yale University in 1972. Remnants of the Chinese nationalist forces known as the Kuoumintang (KMT), which fled to the jungles of Burma after Mao Zedong’s communist party swept to power in 1949, then relocated to the Shan States of Burma, where they received CIA support to launch failed military operations into China and boost opium production. From 1950 to 1962, the authors estimate that opium production grew by a thousand per cent. Even after the KMT was ousted by the Burmese military, they set up base camps in northern Thailand where they continued running mule caravans into Burma with the help of the CIA and the Thai military. For the next 20 years, the KMT battled left-wing insurgents in Thailand. In a statement he made to many journalists, General Tuan Shi-wen of the KMT said, “We have to continue to fight the evil of communism, and to fight you must have an army, and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains, the only money is opium.”
After an amnesty was declared, the soldiers of what has been called the ‘Lost Army’ changed from growing opium to planting oolong tea. The town of Mae Salong where their descendants still live is an outpost of China, with Mandarin the dominant language and Yunnan-style pork a speciality in local restaurants. The popular Mae Salong Resort was built on the grounds of a former training camp for KMT soldiers.
Another small town in that area, Toed Thai, has a small museum devoted to Khun Sa, the opium warlord and mandarin of heroin who supplanted the KMT as the biggest cultivator of poppies in the Golden Triangle, who lived on and off again in northern Thailand.
Many of the roads built in the mountainous northeastern provinces of Loei and Petchabun were constructed by the Thai military to attack outposts of the People’s Liberation Army of Thailand. Joe Cummings, the Lonely Planet author, said, “The military would do roadwork during the day and the reds would come down from the mountains at night and destroy the equipment again.” Many of the insurgents were students from Bangkok protesting against a military regime. They fled to the jungles after the military-backed crackdown and bloodbath at Thammasat University in 1976. The most famous photo from the massacre shows a student who had been lynched and set on fire by a right-wing paramilitary group. As he hung from a tamarind tree in the green oval of Sanam Luang, an older man was about to smash him over the head with a folding chair.
Around 8,000 left-wing insurgents came out of hiding in 1982 when they were granted a general amnesty by the government. Touring those tortuous roads of the northeast with a Thai guide in tow, or listening to the older folks spin stories of those days, illuminates some dark corners of Thai history.
In the early 1980s, many of the guerrillas hiding out in the southern provinces also laid down their arms. Dick Chandler, one of the country’s oldest adventure-travel entrepreneurs, visited a cave in Khao Sok National Park, “where there were tables, chairs, blackboards and a whole classroom” in 1985, after setting up a company called Lost Horizons and establishing Our Jungle House. None of those caves are on their regular trekking itineraries, but they will do tailor-made packages for military historians, said Dick, who also spent a weekend doing military training with the troops and travellers at the Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy in Nakhon Nayok province. “It was really fun, especially the shooting range.”
Holed up in caves and jungle lairs in the far south, around the town of Betong, the last holdouts of the People’s Liberation Army of Thailand did not lay down their arms until 1989. Now and again travellers return with tales of visiting those outposts and lairs, with older guides providing local, colour commentary on the left-wing’s last stand in Thailand.
During the ‘Black May’ crisis of 1992, which took place almost 18 years before the bloodshed of 2010, the soldiers’ shooting of protestors on the streets of Bangkok was precipitated by the military toppling the elected government of General Chatchai Choonhawan, after accusing his administration of being ‘unusually wealthy’, and installing its own party the National Peacekeeping Council in place. Yet another charismatic rogue in a long line of martial leaders, the Harley-riding Chatchai’s favourite slogan was ‘Turning the battlefields of Indochina into marketplaces.’
With military tourism, the late statesman’s words have proven prophetic. In northern Laos, the caves where the left-wing Pathet Lao once lived have become tourist attractions, with guides telling visitors about the direct hit from an American bomber that killed several hundred people at once and how the ghosts of their cries still echo through these subterranean chambers. In Vietnam, the military museums and the tunnels of Cu Chi, where the Viet Cong once lived, are flashpoints on travel itineraries. And in Cambodia, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields, near a military shooting range, are perennial hits with travellers. Some people think it’s an urban legend on the backpacker trail that, for a sum of about US$100, you can kill a goat with a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG), or an AK-47, on the shooting range used by Cambodian soldiers on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. That’s not a myth. It’s true. A young American traveller sent me the photos and the story, which we published in Farang Untamed Travel magazine. The images show him killing a goat with an RPG before posing for photos, naked except for a strategically placed army helmet with two local prostitutes serving as his ‘cheerleaders’ and ‘handmaidens’. (I wonder what PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, would make of that?) For the Khmer troops it was no big ordeal; they would have killed the goat anyway. Afterwards, they carted it off to serve as sustenance for the soldiers.
None of the tours of duty in Thailand are that extreme, but the military still ranks right up there with the most powerful echelons of Thai society. Much of the tug-of-war between the red shirts and the government in 2010 was over who would control the annual military reshuffle in September. Signs of the army’s fiscal and political might are everywhere—broadcast by the military-owned Channel 3 and bankrolled by the wealth of bank branches across the country. Once known as the Thai Military Bank, the name has been shortened to the more innocuous TMB. Nevertheless, the two dots above the M have always struck me as strange. Do they look more like bullet holes or eyes?