Jim Algie

by Bizarre Thailand Tales of Crime, Sex,and Black Magic

  Part of Japan’s post-war reparations involved the setting up of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). From Mongolia to Madagascar, the agency has put that famous Japanese technical wizardry to work, with various transport and infrastructure projects getting off the drawing board in Thailand. They also financed the building, and oversaw the construction of the Japanese Village in Ayuthaya in 2005. Working with their office in Bangkok for nine years, Eri Nigasaki first came to Thailand as a teenaged backpacker, which has become a rite of passage for many young Japanese. Speaking about the roots she has put down in her transplanted homeland, Eri said, “It’s an easier way of life with less stress. You can talk about everything here. It’s not so closed as Japan. And you don’t have to wake up at 5am and then work until you catch the last train home.” She grinned. “Sometimes I like to stay out late drinking with my friends and get up late, but I couldn’t do that in Japan.”

  Living in Thailand has been a bonanza of strange opportunities for her, from playing a traditional Irish drum in a Celtic band doing regular shows in Bangkok to being a cover girl on a local travel magazine, and showing up on the first date with her current boyfriend covered in blood and flecks of glass glistening in her hair. “The taxi driver was too busy talking to me so he didn’t see the car in front of us. I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and my head crashed into the windshield. But another taxi driver let me get in his cab. I didn’t want to be impolite so I thought I should go to the pub and apologise to Peter for being late before I went to the hospital.” She smiled and cringed simultaneously. “Thai people are so kind. The driver let me bleed all over his taxi.”

  Bangkok’s notorious edginess, softened by Thai politeness, is a running motif when expats start trading their most bizarre stories. Ellen Boonstra, a former IT professional in Holland who later worked as a business analyst in Tokyo, before gravitating towards magazine journalism in Bangkok and then becoming a consultant in Thailand for Garde (one of the top Japanese interior design firms), recalled the bloodless coup of 2006, “All the TV channels went off the air before a message flashed up on the blank screens, which my Thai friends translated as, ‘We have taken control of the city. Apologies for the inconvenience.’ It was really sweet of them to apologise like that. Then a group of generals with royalist armbands appeared on the screen to say they’d ousted the prime minister and seized power.”

  Having never seen a tank before, her mother wanted to go to Government House the next day. Ellen followed the day after that, astonished by the fact that she could have her photos taken with the soldiers and even climb on a tank to hold the gun turret. “It was almost a tourist attraction kind of thing, with soldiers handing out bottles of water,” said Ellen, who is part of an 8,000-strong Dutch community in Bangkok.

  But tourists and expats also thronged Government House in 2008 when it was squatted for several months by yellow-shirted protestors, and two years later when the red shirts occupied the glitzy area of Bangkok known as Ratchaprasong. Some of the foreigners came for a vicarious thrill, some came to express solidarity with the protestors, and a loathsome few used it as an excuse for acts of malignant violence and vandalism. That also hasn’t changed since the golden heydays of Ayuthaya, as free and easy Thailand provides expatriates with endless opportunities to reinvent themselves. Like Jim Thompson, the CIA spook turned silk trader who disappeared in the Cameron Highlands in 1967, or Charles Sobhraj who sunk into crime and depravity, or even the famously powerful and wealthy Bill Heinecke—the son of a war correspondent in Bangkok—who rose above the mainstream and became a captain of industry and Thai citizen after building a business empire in retail, hospitality and fast food, which has seen him valued at US$400 million.

  And the expatriates still keep coming. While I was talking to author Jerry Hopkins outside the Old Dutch Restaurant at the end of Soi Cowboy, he pointed at the pharmacy across the street. “They shot some of the scenes from Bangkok Dangerous there. That’s where Nicholas Cage’s girlfriend worked in the movie. I watched them shooting ‘cause my friend Jim Newport was working on the set.” (A set designer in Hollywood, Jim recast himself as a vampire novelist in Bangkok.) “Some of the old CIA spook bars on Patpong are still there like the Madrid and the Crown Royal, but the older ones are dead now.”

  Did Jerry think that the expat community has gotten more conservative and less colourful in Thailand?

  “No, the other week I met the guy who came up with the infamous ‘Twinkie defense’. He’s been living in Bangkok on and off for quite a few years.”

  Jerry was referring to the trial of Dan White, a Vietnam vet, cop and firefighter elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. In 1978, White shot and killed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and his fellow supervisor, Harvey Milk, America’s first openly gay politician and the subject of the biopic Milk (played by Sean Penn). But White only received five years in jail for manslaughter, partly because of the half-baked defense insisting that his diet of sugar-saturated Twinkies was a symptom of depression.

  It was 10pm on a Friday night. Most 75-year-olds would be at home dozing in their easy chairs or talking to their cats. Not Jerry. Not in Bangkok. He was off to see a group I’d never heard of called Peter Driscoll and the Cruisers at a bar on Silom Soi 4. “You have to see Pete. He played the working class pubs of England for 40 years. The band’s great and he’s got an Aussie bass-player. It’s pure rockabilly!”

  Just when the jaded and calloused old hands of Bangkok think they’ve seen, heard, groped and grasped it all—the city is now a rotating bandstand for an unsung rockabilly singer that opened shows for gods of the genre like Eddie Cochrane and Gene Vincent; and a winter retreat for a lawyer whose ingenius defence has become one of the most often-repeated legal slang terms of the last three decades.

  In the suite dedicated to Graham Greene (The Quiet American) in the Oriental Hotel, there is a framed letter he wrote. “Almost anything may happen and one may meet almost anybody, from a mere author to an international crook on his way elsewhere.” Greene was writing about the Bangkok hotel, but he may as well have been penning a diary entry for any expat who ever resided in ancient Ayuthaya or modern-day Thailand.

  Weekend Warriors: Military Tourism in Thailand

  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 h
ad 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.”