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The focus of American foreign policy seems to change based on which area of the world seems to be the greatest threat to American interests. In the 1960s and 1970s, political theorists believed that, if America didn’t win the Vietnam War, the ideology of Communism would become very dominant in Thailand and then throughout all of Southeast Asia and beyond. This was known as “the Domino Theory”.
Later on, the focus was on those countries which seemed to have oil America needed to keep its economy humming. Still later, when fracking was invented and America had enough oil, the focus was a cyber and trade war with China. Of course, the whole world is affected by what America does or doesn’t do, so much so that it seems almost quaint to say, as some people used to, that, when America gets a cold the whole world sneezes. Now it’s more like if America can’t control the corona virus and its economy, the whole world might fall into Communist hands which, in fact, was what we were concerned about before.
This memoir is largely about a Peace Corps experience between 1971 and 1973, but, in the course of updating the story since 1977, half of the personal experiences disappeared to be replaced the findings of research I’ve done over the ensuing decades. And it’s true. The domino theory, at least in Thailand, didn’t prove true. American troops withdrew, and, half a dozen years after the later, the insurgents in the jungle all surrendered. But that’s only part of the story.
Many memoirs have been written by Americans about the Vietnam War and many by Peace Corps volunteers, some of whom served in Thailand while I was there. There’s even memoirs by CIA agents and assets, some of whom served in Thailand. However, I doubt that any of those memoir writing authors had the same passion I did for learning the truth about what was going on in Nakhon Phanom over such a long period of time. The truth about what? Although this may seem quaint as well, I wanted God to show me if Christianity was the one and only true religion even in a country which is 97 % Buddshist, 1.3 % Muslim, and only 1 % Christian. This memoir is also a substitute for an honest conversation I could never have with a woman who, just a couple months after telling me that, if I had to be a Christian than she could be one too, decided that I was too dangerous to ever talk to again. This is is what God showed me. My hope is that my findings can be of value to someone else.
People of my age might like the research I’ve done concerning the politics of the Vietnam War, especially as it played out in Thailand and how it affected the Peace Corps. This is also the most interesting part to me, because I've written my Peace Corps stories many times over, but much of the research is new. Those interested in spiritual truth and what it meant be a Christian. or at least open to Christianity, versus what it meant to be a Buddhist in a place like Thailand might be interested in the relationship I had with Joe, a Buddhist volunteer, and how our relationship with the culture differed. For other readers, the favorite parts of the book might be the parts where I describe cross-cultural blunders.
David Camp
I arrived in Thailand in August of 1971 with Community Development Group 38. Like volunteers from previous CD groups sent to Thailand, we were to be stationed, for the most part, in Northeast Thailand which was considered to be the most undeveloped part of the country. But our program was evolving. As with the three previous CD groups, Groups 12, 28, and 32, we were predominantly male—in fact, all of us were male—but there were only twelve of us instead of forty as in the previous CD groups. That, plus the lack of funding for projects, and the fact that no CD trainees arrived the following year, which would have been important if continuity was valued, led me to believe that our program was being phased out. Also, unlike the previous CD groups where agriculturalists and civil engineers had trained together, Group 38 consisted entirely of civil engineers, or at least entirely of young men who were supposed to be capable of supervising small water resource projects. That is, aside from David Camp. I probably knew David Camp as well as anyone, because, along with two other trainees, I was assigned to the same four-room cabin that he was. “I grew up on a family-owned vineyard,” David told me, “and was accepted into an agriculture program in Thailand. After we arrived for staging in San Jose, and I realized I was the only agriculture volunteer, I told the Peace Corps officials with us that there must have been a mistake. But they told me there’d been no mistake and that I’d learn about my assignment after arriving in Thailand.”
Once in Thailand, however, David learned there would be no agricultural component to our program and that he’d be attending tech. classes with the rest of us and learning about the design and construction of dams, spillways, and bridges. Another agriculturalist, Dr. John Merriam, an irrigation expert from Cal Poly, was originally on our training staff as well, but he didn’t stay long after Santee, our chief technical trainer, informed us that we wouldn’t be involved in any irrigation projects. “You won’t have access to excavation equipment,” Santee said. “You’ll be using hand tools. The small amount of water you’ll be able to capture behind your spillways will be useful for fish habitat, and fish are the major source of protein for villagers in the Northeast, but it won’t be enough to irrigate dry season crops.”
Dr. Merriam returned to California. I don’t know if he was disappointed, but he probably took it in stride. He may not have had an opportunity to share his irrigation expertise, but he and his wife did get an all-expenses-paid trip to a resort on the Gulf of Thailand. David could have stayed too. He could have adjusted to what appeared to have been an administrative glitch. The agriculture part of our program may well have been nonexistent, but, as I was later to learn, David wouldn’t have been the first CD volunteer to arrive in Thailand as an agriculturalist and, once upcountry, morph into a construction volunteer. But David refused to accept this fate. It took him a couple of weeks and several trips to the Bangkok Peace Corps office—catching a ride on the Peace Corps supply truck whenever he could—but eventually, he was able to negotiate an agreement whereby Peace Corps would pay for his plane ticket back to California and provide him with stateside per diem until they could find an agricultural slot for him in another country where Peace Corps did have a viable agriculture program. It was only later that I associated David’s experience in Thailand with something he said after joining our touch football game right after returning from one of his negotiation sessions in Bangkok. “They wanted me to join the CIA,” David told us, “but I told them I’d already joined the Peace Corps.” I doubt I’m the only one who heard him make that comment. Most likely, all of us did. But we never talked about David’s experience with a CIA recruiter, not to David and not to each other, even after he was gone. Perhaps, like me, the other guys believed the less they knew about the CIA the better. I also assumed that David had been talking about an encounter he’d had with a CIA recruiter in California before he’d arrived in Thailand. But we all make suppositions. We believe what we want to believe, and I didn’t want to believe the CIA had attempted to recruit David after he’d arrived in Thailand or that, unbeknownst to him, he’d been sent to Thailand with the Peace Corps at the behest of the CIA.
After David left our training site, Group 38 consisted entirely of young men who’d applied to be engineering/construction volunteers. We were the first Thailand CD group to be trained entirely in-country and one of the first which didn’t have a psychiatrist or psychologist on staff who could arbitrarily deselect any one of us for any reason. We weren’t taught community development theory or techniques, because it was thought that whatever such skills were needed on our projects would be provided by village headmen and/or Thai patanagawns, the Thai government social workers who served as the link between the Bangkok government and its citizens at the local village level. We were told that, as long as we proved we could do the job we’d been sent to do, we wouldn’t be deselected, and none of us were.
Santee and Christine
Santee had just completed his Peace Corps tour and stepped up to a staff position. I still remember John McKiernan, later stationed in Chiang Rai Province, grumbling about how arrogant Santee seemed when talking about his projects. “Santee talks,” John said, “as if the way he did things in Nakhon Phanom is the way things should be done.” And that was true. He did talk as if the way he operated in Nakhon Phanom was a model for how things should happen elsewhere. However, as I learned from a report about our program which RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer) Carolyn Nickels-Cox unearthed and posted on the Friends of Thailand digital archives, Sai Hutachororn, the Director General of Thailand’s Community Development Department, had used Peace Corps CD volunteers who were stationed in Nakhon Phanom as models for our program in 1968 when he wrote a report, and Santee didn’t even arrive in Thailand until the next year.
While Santee talked very knowingly about the construction phase of projects, he said nothing about how those projects were to be funded. It was Christine, our cross-cultural trainer, not Santee, who informed us that, once upcountry, we might not have any projects. With this in mind, she put us through a role-playing exercise with one of us playing a volunteer who, after a year in-country, has yet to find a job, and another one of us playing that volunteer’s Thai boss. The idea, as nearly as I could tell, was to get us used to the idea that we might have to do some groveling to find work. Christine also handed out case studies which had been written by early terminating volunteers before they went back home. “After a year,” she explained, “most volunteers can project what their second year will be like, and, if they feel their first year has been a waste of time, they might not be able to justify completing their two-year tour. These reports were written by volunteers who couldn’t get past this one-year hump and terminated early.”
The case studies Christine handed out were only a page or two long, and the volunteers who wrote them, presumably as they were being processed out, were frustrated not only because of their inability to be productive but also because of their inability to communicate their feelings appropriately to the Thais. For most Americans, even those immersed in a Thai language environment, the Thai language takes several years to master, and, as I was later to learn, even native speakers of Central Thai, the language Peace Corps taught, can have trouble understanding Isaan, the dialect spoken in Northeast Thailand. I remember one case study in particular. The volunteer described a typical day in the Peace Corps, or, perhaps more rightly the day that convinced him it was time for him to go home. His essay started with a scene on his front porch, right after he got out of bed. He was brushing his teeth and watching his neighbors watch him as they chattered back and forth in a language he still couldn’t understand. Then he went to get a haircut where he encountered a policeman. “I know why you’re here,” the policeman told him in broken English as he pointed to his head. “Psychology!” Without enough fluency in Thai to give the policeman an adequate response, the volunteer put his finger to his head and smiled. “Yes,” he told the policeman. “Psychology!”
Christine referred to early terminating volunteers as “washouts,” implying, without saying so directly, that they’d been failures. She didn’t, however, provide us with any suggestions about how to get over a one-year hump aside from begging our bosses to give us a job. I later wondered if this wasn’t because, having been a TEFL volunteer herself, most likely with a structured classroom routine and Thais around her who spoke both Central Thai and English, she had no way to know what kind of strategies CD volunteers upcountry were using to get beyond their one-year hump. From Christine’s point of view, it didn’t even seem to matter what we did to get beyond our one-year hump. To her, it seemed, any volunteer who completed his or her two-year tour ought to be considered a successful volunteer.
After eight weeks of classroom training, we traveled upcountry in vans. In addition to the eleven trainees remaining in Group 38, our party included a technical training staff of four and four or five language tutors. There were no women in our party. Our caravan started upcountry on Friendship Highway, which, when it was constructed by American Army engineers in 1957, had been the first highway in Thailand built to international standards. We stayed overnight in Koen Kaen, home of Peace Corps’ Northeast Thailand Regional Office, but we didn’t stop there. The next morning, we continued north until we reached Udon, where we turned east onto Highway 22, which had also been built with significant help from American soldiers. After a couple more hours, we stopped at Mama Sahn’s Restaurant in Sakhon Nakhon and were pleasantly surprised to see a menu of American food which we could afford and even American ketchup—Heinz or Hunts; I don’t remember which—on every table. After lunch, we continued east on Highway 22 until we reached the provincial capital of Nakhon Phanom and checked in at the First Hotel right across the street from the Vietnamese Clock Tower, a local landmark. The cold season had arrived by this time, so, the following morning, our trainers brought us to the provincial marketplace where we all bought quilts. Then we left for Nong Ya Sai, a village five miles west of a Vietnam-era Air Base which we’d passed the day before. I felt as if I were stepping back in time a hundred years as I sat on the Nong Ya Sai headman’s porch with my fellow trainees watching village girls carry water to urns in a makeshift bamboo enclosure that had been constructed so we could take private showers. The girls were very small, but each of them carried two five-gallon buckets of water; one on each end of a flexible bamboo pole balanced over a shoulder. The buckets bobbed rhythmically up and down with every step they took, and they’d taken the precaution of placing a banana leaf on the top of each bucket to keep water from spraying out. They made several trips to the village well to fill urns with the water we’d use to take showers and continued to do so every day until the last day when we watched some village men cart everything away. Without electricity, we bedded down at dark our first night in Nong Ya Sai, but it was still only eight o’clock, too early to fall asleep. Someone suggested we pass the time by contributing to an imaginary lexicon of vulgar English slang. Not knowing much vulgar English slang, I lay silently in the dark, amazed that my fellow trainees knew jargon for acts of depravity I could barely even imagine. The next morning, and for the next two weeks, a woman Santee had hired prepared French toast for breakfast. We’d elected two foremen, John McKiernan and David Kerkes. I was on John’s privy team, and we installed a standard Thai pour-flush toilet over a metal barrel. Meanwhile, David’s survey team crossed the highway and trekked along a dirt road for about a kilometer to the site of what was to be our training project. After their survey was completed, we went downtown again and stayed in Santee’s house for a day or two where Scott, one of our best draftsmen, drew a plan. One evening, some of us found our way to the Shindig, a GI nightclub with a live band, but, after a bargirl threw a drink on the floor, sending shards of glass flying, we decided it was time for us to leave. Then, after returning to Nong Ya Sai with our plan and making a final survey, we started digging our excavation, cutting reinforcement steel, and cutting boards for our concrete forms. We walked back to the village for lunch each day and then back to the project site where we worked until late in the afternoon. After dinner, a Thai meal cooked by the woman who’d cooked our breakfast and lunch, we still had time for an hour of language lessons before it got dark.
When we arrived at our project site on our second construction day, we saw a flatbed truck full of soldiers parked on the side of the road. “What’s going on?” we asked our trainers. “Why the soldiers?” We were told that the blast we’d heard the first day from further down the road had been a shotgun blast and that a policeman had been killed. “But you have no reason to worry,” one of the trainers told us. “The insurgents would never harm us because the ramifications for them would be too great. They’re here to guard our language tutors who might be in danger because they’re with us.”
It didn’t make sense. There was no need for our language tutors to be on the job site. They weren’t pitching in, and they weren’t even teaching us Thai except in the evening back in the village. Mitch, a second-year volunteer, seemed to think it was kind of funny. “I’m stationed in Sakhon Nakhon, the next province over, where we stopped for lunch,” he said, “and sometimes soldiers guard my projects there. They won’t interfere. They’ll stay by their truck.” Years later, in 2006, I had an e-mail correspondence with Ralph who, along with David Camp and one of the other trainees, had been my cabin mate during the classroom phase of our training. “I remember those soldiers,” he reminisced. “One of our trainers told me they’d stay by their truck and that we’d hardly know they were there, and then I pointed to one of them standing right behind him with his M-16.”
We returned to Bangkok to be sworn in, at which point I learned I’d been chosen to be Santee’s replacement in Nakhon Phanom. Only then, when I got back to Nakhon Phanom again, did I meet the two agriculture volunteers who were working out of the same provincial CD office where I was to be employed. One had already extended his two-year Peace Corps tour and was on his third year with the Peace Corps. The other was a second-year volunteer. After a while, I came to realize that neither of them had a job and that no one cared how they spent their time.
Until I had my own place, I lived with Joe, the second-year volunteer, in a two-story house which, a couple of years before, had been shared by three Group 28 volunteers; one of whom was Santee. All three of them had moved out, and Joe, who’d arrived with Group 32, the year after they arrived, was now living alone. As nearly as I could tell, his routine revolved around going out to eat, sometimes on foot to a nearby noodle stand, and sometimes to a restaurant on his 100 cc Hodaka, spending time with Boone, the third year volunteer, and chatting with his nextdoor neighbor. Even though I’d been through Peace Corps language training, my Thai was not yet good enough to participate in their conversations.
The two-stroke Hodaka Joe rode had become the motorcycle of choice in Nakhon Phanom. Designed in America but built in Japan, Hodakas were only available at a certain shop in Bangkok, but Boone said I should consider buying one and having it shipped upcountry, because, while the Hondas, Suzukis, and Kawasakis the Thais rode cost ten thousand baht ($500), a Hodaka could be purchased for less than seven thousand baht ($350) which included the cost of having it shipped. As volunteers, we were only granted only a bicycle allowance of sixty or seventy dollars, because, as I was told, Peace Corps didn’t want to be liable for motorcycle accidents caused by its volunteers.
According to Boone, I’d need a motorcycle to do my job, and he suggested that I access a revolving fund at the office to buy a Hodaka, as he and Joe had done, and then pay off the loan over several months. This seemed like a reasonable plan, so I allowed Boone to take out a loan in my name for sixty-eight hundred baht and send a postal money order for that amount to the Hodaka shop in Bangkok along with instructions to ship up another Hodaka. Boone said I could expect my new Hodaka in about two weeks, and I think it might have come even sooner. As I was to learn, Boone was not only willing to facilitate the purchase of my new Hodakas but also willing and able to perform all the necessary maintenance and repairs on it for free. Of course, like Joe and now me, Boone’s Peace Corps wage was deposited automatically into his bank account every month no matter what he did, and, since he wasn’t getting work from the Thais, he had a lot of time to do favors for his friends. But even if Boone’s primary motive was just to stay busy, I appreciated his assistance, especially when everything was brand new, and I didn’t understand much Thai.
Meanwhile, Joe apprised me of the rules of engagement which, according to him, had been being observed by Nakhon Phanom’s contingent of volunteers before I arrived. “A lot of new volunteers think they need to have projects,” he told me, “but that’s an American concept and not so relevant here. My neighbor, the fellow who comes over most days to chat, doesn’t have a job. A lot of Thais don’t have jobs.