Laughter in the Shadows (16 page)

It was an ignoble departure. We left like caravans in the night, a convoy of trucks and jeeps loaded with wives and children, dogs, cats, diapers, and four dispirited case officers, “baci” strings still tied around their wrists by Cham friends and counterparts during wrenching farewell ceremonies.

Buses were waiting when we disembarked in Bangkok to drive us to the Erawan Hotel, at the time one of two large hotels in Bangkok. The maitre d’hotel was waiting out front to welcome us, buoyed by the unexpected increase in the hotel’s occupancy rate, which had dropped recently because of fears about the situation in neighboring Cham.

We stayed in the Erawan for more than two months. When we finally left, the same maitre d’hotel was there to see us off, only by then he had had enough of the “refugees” who were not the preferred clientele for a grand hotel like the Erawan.

During our stay in Bangkok, the four case officers were ordered to check in daily with the station chief in Bangkok, who only grudgingly accepted our presence, resenting all the attention the smaller country next door was getting back at Headquarters.

Each day when we checked in, the reply was the same: “Nothing for the exiles.”

By the end of the second month of diaper changing, escorting wives to the floating market and Jim Thompson’s Thai silk shop, and visiting the Bangkok zoo, we became convinced that Headquarters had forgotten us.

Then a cable arrived, assigning a case officer named Jack as base chief in southern Cham, where the antineutralist General Novasan had set up his headquarters. A week later two other CUBS case officers got assignments, one to northern Thailand to run cross-border operations into Cham, and the other to work with Jack in southern Cham.

I was the last to be assigned. My orders were to set up a base in Luang Prabat in northern Cham. A radio operator was already en route to accompany me to the royal capital.

The “four horsemen” were no longer “nonessentials.”

The Cham diaspora families remained in Bangkok. Joy and the four children moved into a bungalow with the families and pets of two other case officers. For transportation they relied on buses, tricycle samlors, or sampans. The children played along the klongs, ate Thai satay from passing carts, rode elephants, and attended the International School. Joy went to work for the
Bangkok World
and, like the other wives and their families, waited for visits from across the border in Cham.

Luang Prabat, 1960–1961

What if I fail of my purpose here?

It is but to keep the nerves at strain,

To dry one’s eyes and laugh at a fall,

And, baffled, get up and begin again.

—ROBERT BROWNING, “The Life of a Love”

A rusted-out Dakota C-47 lay alongside the runway of the Luang Prabat airport, a reminder of the downdrafts and crosswinds that made landing in the royal capital a precarious venture. The terminal smelled of cooking oil from the charcoal braziers of would-be passengers waiting, sometimes for days, for the next flight out.

As a royal capital, Luang Prabat was scenic but without pretensions. The gabled-roofed hotel, with its fin de siècle lobby and high-ceilinged rooms, recaptured Luang Prabat’s colonial past. Aging Citroens and Deux-Chevaux were parked dutifully on the side of the boulevard dictated by the
jours pairs
(even-numbered days) or
jours impairs
(odd-numbered day) signs, more reminders of the colonial era.

Tribesmen and Cham wandered around the marketplace and along the river that ran beside the capital. In the evening Luang Prabat’s civil bureaucrats and Cham army officers gathered at the Cercle Sportif to
bavarder
(chat) and watch tennis matches between the province chief and the king’s chamberlain.

Luang Prabat’s main and only boulevard led from the town’s center down to the royal palace. There an arch of frangipani framed the entrance to the outer garden, while inside the palace in the main anteroom, the late King Rama Sipavong sat embalmed in a large glass jar, his body kept erect by the golden spike driven down through the former king’s spinal column. The king would remain seated erectly in the funeral jar until the perfect sandalwood tree had been found for his sarcophagus.

The Cercle Sportif at Luang Prabat
.

The current king, Vang Sathana, was not too well-known, unlike the capital’s other famous resident, the “Blind Bonze.” The aging monk was highly revered, prophesying from his tottering pagoda on a hill outside the city. Following the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the victorious Vietminh army had marched into Cham, moving toward Luang Prabat. The population panicked and most of the resident Cham were about to flee the capital when they heard a pronouncement from the Blind Bonze. He prophesied that the Vietminh would not enter the royal capital, and as predicted, the column of Vietminh bivouacked outside its gates. Three days later the Vietminh turned around and marched back to Vietnam.

With the help of General Ouane, the former CUBS president who remained in Luang Prabat after the Kong Le coup, I was able to rent a small bungalow for our base. Lucky rigged an antenna on a shed in the back and set up his radio. I sent the first message, advising Headquarters and Viensiang that the Luang Prabat Base was open and operational.

The pace in the royal capital was slower than in Viensiang. Ex-French colonials and Cham sat around the bar in the Palace Hotel, nursing licorice pastises and playing the dice game
vingt-et-un
,“21.”

In the late afternoon, the mayor, province chief, military commander, and town notables gathered at the Cercle Sportif to play bocce (
petanque
), watch tennis matches, and gossip (
bavarder
).

Le Cercle was an ideal recruiting ground. General Ouane introduced me to most of the regulars, and I was soon able to develop a network of informants, including the mayor, the military commander, and the king’s tailor. The intelligence I gleaned from these informants, after sifting out gossip and hearsay, kept the Base fairly well informed on the situation in Luang Prabat and the surrounding areas.

The Pi

And in the air . . . there fly Things, Beings, Creatures, never seen by us but very potent in their wandering world.

—A. S. BYATT,
Possession

I wasn’t the only American in Luang Prabat. Frank Corrigan was the U.S. Information Service (USIS) representative, Dallas Voran directed the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program, and Colonel Oliver Nelson and his “sheep-dipped” (undeclared) Special Forces team, ran the military assistance program. The ambassador referred to us as his “mini-Country Team” in the North.

“Operation Genie” was the brainchild of Corrigan. Although USIS was prohibited from engaging in covert activities, Frank wasn’t bothered by bureaucratic constraints and liked to skirt these by playing spy. Operation Genie centered around the “Pi,” the mystical spirits revered and feared by the Cham. The Pi were invisible but were believed to be omnipresent in clouds, rain, forests, and the breezes wafting over the rice paddies.

The author in Cham
.

Frank’s plan called for collecting all the bottles we could find in Luang Prabat. We would then stuff them with leaflets before air-dropping them over villages known to be under Pathet Cham control. On the way down, the bottles would sound like the Pi making a whistling noise. They would break open and scatter the leaflets when they hit the ground, illustrated leaflets urging the villagers to “break” from the Pathet Cham like the “imprisoned” Pi had done.

The proprietor of the Palace Hotel supplied us with all the bottles we needed. Since most Cham couldn’t read, Frank drew caricatures of fang-toothed Pathet Cham, and Voran ran off the leaflets on his mimeograph machine. I requested a small plane from Viensiang to drop the leaflets.

When the plane arrived, we briefed the pilot, and at dusk, when the villagers would have returned from the rice fields, we took off. Once over a target village, the pilot would throttle back the engine and the plane would glide almost silently as we threw out the bottles. He would then gun the engine and fly on to the next village to repeat the operation.

We dropped bottles over twelve villages before returning to Luang Prabat. It was dark when we returned, but Colonel Nelson’s team had set out flares on the airstrip to guide the pilot. We had jettisoned our entire supply of Pi bottles.

“Genie” was a one-shot operation, and its success was hard to gauge. We did get some feedback, however. An itinerant rice merchant told the province chief he had been stopped by a Pathet Cham patrol, which warned him that American planes were dropping poison gas in the area. Another source reported that a village chief had called for a goat sacrifice to appease the wounded Pi that had crashed through his roof.

Corrigan’s enthusiasm for unorthodox operations like the Pi finally got him killed. He knew he couldn’t keep calling on the Base for planes for his airdrops, so he chartered the only private plane in the area for a special leaflet drop. The plane was an aging Cessna, and the pilot had a history of bouts of delirium tremens. The plane crashed into a mountain north of Luang Prabat during the leaflet drop, and when we pulled Frank’s body from the plane, he was still clutching a wad of leaflets.

To recruit and train paramilitary teams, I borrowed Colonel Nelson’s interpreter, a native of the area with good Cham and montagnard contacts. Within six months, Luang Prabat Base had ten teams trained, armed, and ready.

Coordinating with the regional military commander, the teams operated primarily in the insecure districts east of Luang Prabat. A month after the teams had begun operating, reports came in that the teams were having some success in a district formerly controlled by the Pathet Cham despite harassment by the Pathet Cham. The teams had dug wells, set up dispensaries, and organized hamlet militia for village defense.

Reports from isolated areas tend to be exaggerated, and before reporting on the teams’ successes, I decided to go to Muong La for an on-the-ground assessment of their effectiveness. Colonel Nelson volunteered to provide an army helicopter to fly us to the area where the teams were operating. The chopper dropped us off at Muong La, where we were met by the district chief. He had arranged for us to visit the hamlets where our teams were operating and, “for security reasons,” to provide an escort to return at night to stay at his house in the district capital.

Nelson and I made the rounds of the hamlets, observing the teams digging wells, fixing roofs, and training militia. The villagers got along well with the teams but seemed uneasy about the presence of the two foreigners. When I mentioned this to the district chief, he replied that the villagers were afraid of Pathet Cham reprisals even though our teams might try to protect them. Late during the second night in Muong La, we were awakened by the thud of mortar rounds landing not far from the district chief’s house. One of our team leaders rushed in and said we had to leave.