The day after my audition, I rode my bike downtown again, this time back to Woodstock Music. I was trying to decide between some Ludwig and Slingerland drumsticks when I struck up a conversation with Sommit and Vrisnei, the friendly young brother and sister who ran the music part of Yoon On Store for their eternally middle-aged Thai-Chinese parents. Sommit, the brother, wore casual Western clothes, spoke exceptionally good English and was crazy about American music. In a hushed voice, he promised top dollar for any jazz or rock albums I could bring him from the BX. It sounded good to me—a chance to make some spare change for doing musical missionary work. Vrisnei was a year or two younger than her brother. Wearing little makeup and keeping her hair pulled back simply under a bandanna, she was wholesomely attractive. It was while she was ringing up my purchase that Harley Baker came in looking for guitar strings. Sommit introduced us and told me, “Khun Harley play guitar very good!”
Baker was a twenty-three-year-old lifer in training, a hatchet-faced gunner with the 16th Special Operations Squadron, but it didn’t take much chatting to learn that he also played a mean, bluesy Les Paul guitar. And it didn’t take much more chatting to find out he was game to come to the Monday rehearsal and take a crack at joining the Band of Brothers. He was hired on the spot. And so it was that within two days a couple of jive white dudes joined an otherwise all-black soul band.
Wheeler and Zelinsky were finally able to talk me into dropping by their off-base bungalow once I started performing downtown with the band, enticing me at first with an invitation to join their merry crew for Thai food. Whether it was home-cooked or from a street vendor, it was a big improvement over chow-hall grub. Khaopaht gung, a simple, mildly spicy shrimp fried rice, cost twenty-five cents from a mama-sahn on the street and was more delicious than anything I had ever eaten in Boston, with the possible exception of Lobster Newberg. Soon I was spending a lot of my free evenings with Wheeler, Groendyke, Zelinsky and his fiancée, Pueng, hoping Lek, Wheeler’s new girlfriend, would show up with fresh fruit for dessert.
Before long, I was also stopping by to smoke a little weed, which didn’t seem to be anywhere near as dangerous to our bodies or souls as Sister Susan, Father Boyle, and the federal government had warned us. It wasn’t much later that Baker stopped in with me one night after a gig. When they heard he was from Fresno, Zelinsky and Wheeler, stoned, started reminiscing about California, which led to Norton GIs for 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