Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand's Deadliest Prison (5 page)

Depending on the guard and his mood, we’d either be rushed back upstairs to our punishment cell or moved at a leisurely pace to be locked into the Hill Tribesmen’s much larger cell next door to ours for the day. We’d take our bedroll and any other things we needed and set up an impromptu camp in our neighbor’s cell.

This allowed us some breathing room, a valuable commodity in short supply. We’d block our ears with wet paper towels and sleep or read the day away.

At 10:00 AM on Tuesdays and Fridays, with the exception of the many holidays that littered the Thai calendar, the members of a Congregational church in town made visits and purchased food and other supplies for us.

The consulates—American, British, French, and German—knew the missionaries, and a system developed whereby money would be handed over from consulates to church members, rather than force their nationals in prison to spend money with the loathsome prison officials.

An elderly American doctor, known to us as Dr. Ed, ran a missionary clinic and visited us each Friday. Pushing ninety, dedicated in a way that has all but disappeared for generations in the United States, he was our only source of health care. He provided Westerners with check-ups and free medicines at his own expense. His wife, Katherine, a middle-aged New Zealander, headed the church visiting group. Her dependability, unfailing cheerfulness, and willingness to shop for foreign prisoners were a rare comfort. The two of them and those that came with them from the church were literally the difference between life and death dozens of times over.

Visits lasted about an hour and were always interesting, as one’s friends and family gave irrefutable evidence of who you were as a free man. This
seldom matched the grandiose fantasies spun by fellow prisoners. Typically, most prisoners claimed to have been rich; the stories of their supposed lives replete with mansions, jewels, and mistresses. It passed the time … but listening to beggars who had been dumpster-divers for meals and were now claiming to be princes grew quite tiresome.

My visitors were limited to a good Australian friend who owned a bar and a couple of Thai girls. He’d show up with a big bag of sandwiches and sodas—enough for everyone—and was a welcome breath of fresh air. The Thai girls, on the other hand, cried a lot and made emotional scenes. They made promises we both knew were lies but were nonetheless appreciated for all that.

The parade of people was fascinating. Underneath the roof of the little visiting hut, stuffy and crowded, odd couples strained to hear each other through the two layers of chicken-wire separating visitors and prisoners.

Among them were a loud, heavy-set bunch of Israelis; more than a few good-looking European girls back-packing through Asia; down-at-the-heel expat barflies; anyone who thought twice about getting busted in the Third World. And always—the frightened, bewildered fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers of newly arrested prisoners. These last were unfailingly under immense pressure to somehow scrape together the money to pay the bribes, to make the deal to get their son or sibling out of the hell that was Thai prison.

When visits were finished, laden with plastic bags of whatever was brought to us, we’d trudge back to the large room for the rest of the day.

At last, in the late afternoon, like the gift of some pitying god, the band-saw would fall silent, marking the end of the working day.

If we were lucky, the guard on duty would allow us ten or fifteen minutes to go downstairs, to bathe and fill water bottles from a tap to last us the night.

Plastic PVC pipes pumped untreated river water into rectangular, waist-high concrete troughs. There were three of them, each four feet wide
by fifteen long. We’d strip naked, hanging our shorts on the barbed wire fence that ran along the prison back wall. We’d join the swarm of a thousand prisoners desperately fighting to wash off the day’s filth in the half-hour allotted by prison regulations, unchanged since the Japanese built and ran the place during WWII.

Most prisoners had cheap plastic or tin bowls with which to dip water from the troughs. Those without either used empty sardine cans or tuna cans. Near penniless Hill Tribesmen had to use harsh lye soap, crudely cut into lumpy brown bars. This soap would end up scraping their golden skin raw. Whenever a farang discarded a bar of Western brand soap as too small to use, they’d scuffle to snatch it up for themselves.

Frequently, we’d have an obnoxious guard or one who was impatient and irritable, and we’d simply be marched to our punishment cell, unwashed and sweaty from the day’s heat and humidity without any shower or drinking water.

Foreigners were not provided with jail ‘food,’ since none of us could eat the stuff. Sticky brown rice hard as a rock and fish bone soup—the food so bad that the cats that roamed the compound wouldn’t touch it—were the rations given out twice a day. Malnutrition and near-starvation had a major impact on prisoners’ immune systems. Hundreds of them saw mild ailments transformed into life-threatening crises, so weakened by a poor diet that they’d quickly succumb to the diseases that ran rampant in the prison.

Unfortunately, no day was complete for the authorities without torture. One or two people, almost always Hill Tribesmen, would work a little too slowly or fail to obey an order promptly enough to suit a blue boy. Typical punishment was making full circuits of the prison courtyard on one’s knees while hunched over, pushing a small wooden wheel with handles. The courtyard cobblestones cut cruelly into the feet of people wearing shoes, much less their bare knees. Making the circuit repeatedly for hours in the blazing sun caused the victim to collapse of heat stroke. The sight of a trail of flesh
and blood around the perimeter of the courtyard was commonplace. When a prisoner fell unconscious, it would ignite fury in the blue boys, who would scream at the person until they again resumed their punishment. If one was truly unconscious or beyond caring, a beating would be administered, usually a short one, as it was unsatisfying for the sadists due to the lack of a response from their victims.

Other common disciplinary actions were severe beatings using a thick bamboo stick wrapped in a ball of rubber bands at one end. The sickening thumps of three or four rubber-tipped clubs hitting bodies were a painful sound … worse still were the muffled whimpers of prisoners too proud to cry out in pain. The two usual infractions earning a beating were refusing to settle down at night and having nightmares.

The only way to fit hundreds of people into the rooms designed for dozens was to have everyone lay on their sides, spoon-fashion, and in rows where feet and heads brushed against each other. This was a calculated bit of viciousness, as the head is considered sacred in Thai culture, and pointing one’s feet at someone is a grave insult. To have a stranger’s feet actually touching one’s head is beyond the pale. Wedged tightly together, it was a rare night when no one aroused the ire of the blue boys by trying to squeeze an extra inch or two of space.

At the least transgression, four or five trustees would converge on the miscreant and beat him with their sticks. Leaving no marks, or only faint red welts, these attacks produced enough internal damage that one would piss blood for weeks.

Equally awful were the nights when someone made noise due to bad dreams. The blue boys took turns prowling the room at night to keep the rows straight, applying a tap here and a blow there maintaining ‘order.’ It was impossible not to pity the person emerging from a nightmare to a trustee raining kicks and blows on them. One Hill Tribesman who had some sort of epilepsy was beaten every night for two weeks, as he woke up from grand or petit mal fits. Ultimately, the blue boys’ violence killed him.

The guards beat prisoners on the slightest pretext, pouring out their frustrations and miseries on helpless men with lead-filled nightsticks. They murdered one or two prisoners each month. This was very unpleasant to see or hear, but the screams never lasted long. Few stayed conscious after the first bone was snapped or shattered. Still, this was nothing compared to the deaths brought on by disease.

With a population of around 1,200, the mortality rate hovered at twenty percent per year. No drugs were provided for tuberculosis, AIDS, or malaria—the three big killers. Illnesses long vanished in the West still claimed their share of prey in Asia. Peritonitis, punctured lungs, appendicitis; the list went on and on.

Non-lethal but still agonizing were the frequent stomach and intestinal diseases, plus the ear, eye, and skin infections epidemic in the prison from the filthy water prisoners had to use for drinking and bathing.

During the year I spent at Chiang Mai Remand Prison, out of thirteen foreigners there when I arrived, three died, and all of us had close brushes with death. A fifty-five-year-old Englishman died of abuse and ill health, looking like he’d aged thirty years. A German and a Frenchman, both in their twenties, died of heroin overdoses. Unfortunately, the drug was the sole escape they had from the unrelenting torment that the prison brought. An Australian went mad from the conditions and two Israelis were beaten within an inch of their lives for trying to escape. None of us were unscathed by the experience; we emerged alive but suffered permanent and serious damage to our health.

As bad as it was, every one of us felt pity for the women in a separate building walled off next to the administration offices. When the wind blew from the south, a monstrously foul stench composed of the odors of old menstrual blood, baby shit, sweat, and rotten meat wafted our way. The pathetic cries from sick and starving children and bitter arguments amongst the women would also float on the breeze, making every prisoner thank God to have been born a man.

The slave labor forced on the women was sewing work. From dawn to late afternoon, they struggled to produce fine clothes for tourists, while they and their children dressed in rags.

Whenever we questioned Dr. Ed as to how the women prisoners fared, his expression would turn grim, and he’d say they suffered inhumane treatment. Katherine couldn’t bring herself to describe their plight, except to say it was ‘unspeakable.’

Chiang Mai Remand has since been converted into an all female prison, and since women in Thailand are considered chattel, the place is most likely much worse today than I’ve described here.

The Nicest Guy

D
arkness had just fallen on Chiang Mai Remand Prison the night Ling appeared at our cell door, his face radiating friendliness and good cheer. Trapped in the depths of a Thai prison, how could anyone be jovial? His amazing attitude made it impossible for us to resent him for further crowding our tiny dungeon.

Seven of us were stuffed into a cell designed for two, but we made room for him without much fuss. We slept in shifts; two stretched out while the rest sat on the rolled up bedding. The new guy was expected to tell his story to pass the time, and Ling didn’t disappoint us.

His nickname meant ‘monkey’ in Thai. He actually resembled that animal with his long arms, short stature, and wrinkled face. His lively, smiling brown eyes and comically large ears added to his simian aspect.

Less amusing were the obscenely heavy chains shackling his legs. These were the size of chains used by elephants to haul teakwood out of the nearby jungle, easily weighing five pounds or more per link. He wore two sets of them, and the other Thai in the cell wasted no time in discovering the crime meriting such a fearsome punishment.

As he talked, he made sure Peebul (a twitchy, English-speaking former cop who murdered his wife’s lover) translated his soliloquy, so we two foreigners could understand. This wasn’t some twisted effort to impress us but rather as an older uncle tells a cautionary tale to youngsters. His easy way of speaking, a smoothly flowing narrative, made it obvious this was a story he’d told many times before.

Ling was a peasant, born and raised in the rice paddies outside the city of Khorat (Nakhon Ratchasima) in Central Thailand. He was more ambitious than his family would have liked, particularly since they were poor farmers with only a few hectares of land and could hardly afford expensive secondary education. He received the typical schooling Thai peasants are given: five years in elementary classes run by Buddhist monks. This provided him with partial literacy in Thai, the basics of arithmetic, and a smattering of Thai history and Buddhist dogma.

This was less than merely inadequate. Ling considered it an insult to his intelligence. His father and mother failed to understand his position and chided him for it. Still, he persisted in pestering the monks with so many impertinent questions about the “outside world” that they expelled him from school.

Being small, Ling wasn’t much good at Thai-style farming. He couldn’t control the ill-tempered family water buffalo, he couldn’t carry or haul anything heavy, and he wasn’t much help with the harvest tasks. His future as a farmer looked dim.

His mother—the only member of his clan who truly loved him— couldn’t help but criticize her awkward, unhappy son. In the eyes of the family, he seemed unfit for anything except trouble.