Daughter

One more nutty story for you folks. I do live my own life, sure, but tales from daydream island aren't necessarily as interesting as some of these old war stories.

John, flight mechanic based in Nakhon Phanom AFB in Thailand during the period.

begin transcription:

“ I had this hooch boy, his name was Rawin. He was 15 yrs old, and he lived in a little Lao-type… I think he was probably Phu Tai, you know, hill tribe. And I gave him my second pair or combat boots, because my first pair was tough enough for my feet. Only there for a year, certainly not going to wear out two pairs. So after I gave him the boots, he kept telling me that his father was village chief, so a couple days later the next line is that his father wants me to come to the village. Well, you know that’s nice, but I got no way to go there, but the kid keeps pestering me, so eventually I get this other kid, we were both buck sergeants at the time, three-stripers you know. So we get in this jeep with the kid, you know, and we got there, and to him, the Americans are coming! They had the old big feast routine, they had,… The first thing that happened when we realized that things weren’t what we thought they were going to be, when they had a thai boxing ring set up. And these people are sitting on benches and rows, raised elevated platforms and… This tiger soldier was there. And they were having a lot of matches, the soldier was smoking butts. So he had his M16 on, and we walk over, and the monkey fucked off his butt, and he says, “You brave GI. Many Thai communists here.”
Well, I hadn’t read the reports, the counterinsurgency reports, but it was shocking enough to me. So we go back and sit down. The other kid says to me, “Look at me. I really want you to not turn around and look at everybody, because; as soon as I told him of course he turns around and looks at everybody. And then in the meantime these guys are getting ready to do the Thai boxing. I’d never seen Thai boxing except like on TV or something. But these guys wrapped rags around their hands, around their legs above the knee. And do you know why? They put liquid candlewax on top of the rags, and then they put broken glass on it. And I’m sittin there like, this is their culture, this is, hmm… So one guy starts winning, and the other guy starts losing, and then all of a sudden he starts winning, and the other guy starts losing, and he gets him right up into the corner here, in this corner, and we’re sitting here. We’re in like the third row or something, and I can see that this guys definitely lost, his eyes glaze over, and the other guy keeps shoving his knees up into his lungs, blam! Blam! Blam! That often, and then all of a sudden he backs up and the guy falls right onto his face, face forward, and there’s a pool of blood half the size of this table. And then they pick up his feet, they didn’t even pick him up they just pick up his feet and drag him off. They musta killed him. And I’m thinking, Jesus, they’re doing this because I’m here? They killed a dude in a fight because I gave a kid a pair of shoes. So then we go in to have dinner with the old man, of course Lao style villages, they raise them up on sticks. So we’re up in there, and I don’t speak any thai, you know, a couple phrases, and the kid speaks pidgin English because he cleans the hooch. So he’s the interpreter, and it’s rough. Well then I find out why the old man invited me to the village in the first place. He tells me through his son, we’ve got this bottle of, this old whiskey bottle. And it’s got rice in the bottom about this thick. And they made homemade style rice wine out of it. And I’m sitting there watching this fly go in and out of the bottle, you know, and we’re eating this water buffalo, and no matter how small a piece you took, it seemed like there was a bone chip in it. So, they went and got dessert, I don’t know, you have to ask somebody here who’s Lao or Thai from Issan, but they had these little woven baskets. They get these woven baskets, and they dig it up out of the red earth. You ever had this? I’ve never seen this before, but I know that you eat what they give you. But they pull the top off the basket, I look in the basket, and it looks like somebody’s dirty old softball. But it’s rice, that’s been fermented. And the outside of the rice is just a crust, a brown ball of grey, and they take their fingers and stick them in and rip it off, and inside it was all turned into a white paste. Fermented. What I got out of the kid is they bury it for a certain length of time. We couldn’t figure out what the hell he was saying about how long, but I got this feeling from looking at it that it had been in there for quite a while. So I’m eating that, and I figure if I don’t get the runs from eating this shit, nothing’s gonna get me. But it tasted pretty good! And after that, that was dessert, the old man, through the pidgin English translation of his kid, he‘s giving me one of his daughters. And I don’t know for sure that that’s the exact translation. It was either that, or… but she was mine. There was no doubt about that. And I figured, well hell, I can’t take he r back to the base. I had heard, that if I took her out of the village, they wouldn’t let her back. I knew that. So I figured ok, better come up with an answer that saves face real quick. When you’re in those situations, you think pretty fast, you know, so I said, ’thank you very much, well I, uh, I’ll be back for her, I have to prepare a place for her to sleep. So then the old man figures I’m really gonna… Well he picked me because I gave the boots to the kid. And he wanted somebody to find a way to get his daughter over to the land of milk and honey where the streets are paved with gold. Of course he loves the kid, it’s just, westerners think ‘he gave the kid away, he doesn’t give a shit bout his kid, but no, I i he loved his daughter and wanted her to have a better life. So either way I can’t say, ‘no no, I can’t do this’ so… So things went ok after that. I mean, we left, and we got maybe fifty yards down the road and then floored the goddamn jeep to get the hell out of there. For three weeks, I was telling Rawin why I couldn’t keep his sister. And he couldn’t get it, he just couldn’t get it. So I’m working in the message center and the phone rings. It’s the guard out at the gate. So the village chief and the boys with their old flintlock weapons, they had brought her. Because I didn’t come back, they had brought her. They had my name from the hooch boy, so he got ahold of me, and wanted know…evidently, he must have called the wing to find out where I was working. Right in the office, the phone rings, ‘what do you want me to do?’ And I said, tell them I went home! So I didn’t go off the base for about two months after that."

Wow. Not really that much to do with my topic, but still. To have someone killed in your honor and then be given someone's fifteen-year old daughter, and to be unable to refuse politely.

A guy I know in Laos, he avoids big communal get-togethers in Laos. Not his cup of tea, so to speak. He's Lao, but he finds all the requirements of manners and face to be oppressive, particularly the continuously-circling cup of Lao-lao (rice moonshine) that you cannot refuse in politeness. Everybody gets sloshed off of this rotgut, and he's not a drinker at all. So he avoids these things. I believe many of your have had the good fortune to sample the Lao-lao that I brought back to New York last time I was in Laos. Mmmm. Cheap rotgut. My favorite.

I wonder if I could mix that stuff into the fuel from my motorbike. It's certainly flammable, and much cheaper than gasoline.

A bottle of cheap whiskey I brought back from Myanmar was dubbed "Burmese Two-Stroke" by the group of us, since it's good for cleaning out the buildup in your bike.