Bangkok Hard Time by Jon Cole Read Free Book Online

Mike on the sidewalk in a rain puddle semi-conscious, vomiting and bleeding profusely from somewhere on his head. I removed my shirt and wrapped it around his bloody cranium.
    Some other ISB kids riding in a taxi pulled over to see what was going on. The Thai police were on the scene almost immediately and summoned the MPs, who arrived directly. One of the MPs exclaimed that the curdled vomit in the bloody puddle was Mike’s brain matter. He was really freaked out when Mike woke and, thinking he was getting arrested, tried to punch the MP. A US Army ambulance carried us both to the 5 th Field Army Hospital. On the way, one of the medics asked us what unit we were with. Mike turned to me and said excitedly, “Hey man, they think we are GIs.”
    Senior Prom night the following month was an overblown, neo-colonial affair as one might expect as the grand finale of our final year’s social events at the International School Bangkok. A Thai rock band called The Settlers filled the air of the expansive ballroom of a luxury hotel with all the right sounds as other locals catered to us as usual. Bobbie looked like a movie starlet. Hell, everybody looked beautiful and felt specially entitled.
    In the next few months, most of those present at this gala would leave Thailand, scatter across the globe and never see each other again. Things would never be the same. The following morning, the dawn of a wet Bangkok rainy season, found three dudes dressed in damp tuxedos stumbling into Lek’s tiny shack. Two of them were Mike and me. Lek and a GI who was already there laughed at us.
    Lek was happy to see us because the young soldier could speak no Thai. Lek, who understood little English and spoke even less, welcomed the minimal translation service we could provide. The GI had been dropped off at Lek’s by one of the rear-echelon soldiers stationed in Bangkok that he had met in a bar earlier that evening. He and Lek were obviously having trouble reaching any level of communication.
    The GI, only two years older that us, was burning up his last week of R&R before going back to the hostilities. Mike kept asking him questions about the war. It was disclosed that his platoon from the 23 rd Infantry Division, the Americal, had recently participated in the Battle of Kham Duc and had gotten its ass kicked. The remainder of his squad had been granted R&R in Bangkok. After explaining all this to us, he sat there silently with the thousand-yard stare on his stoned face. Eventually he asked us what in the hell we GIs were doing visiting an opium den at the crack of dawn dressed in formal wear.
    Our explanation of why we were wearing tuxedos and that we were really high school students was received with a distinct hint of melancholy on his part. He responded as if he was talking about an event that had occurred in another faraway lifetime saying, “I can remember my senior prom.” At that moment, the sky opened up with another brief torrent of rain, as if in cosmic sympathy with his sense of lost youth.
    Soon after graduating that year, Mike himself would be in Vietnam with a rifle in his hands. I didn’t know if I would ever see him again. As it happened, in an unbelievable coincidence, fate arranged for our paths to cross again some years later.
    My school years in Bangkok went by much too fast. As the summer of 1968 drew to a close, I found myself going to the American Teen Club with my trophy girlfriend Bobbie for the last time.
    Bobbie was a tall, pretty blonde brick house and every teenage boy’s dream date. What she ever saw in me, I still don’t know. She was very straight and had disdain for my trips to Bahn Pee Lek. Nonetheless, it came down to a matter of priorities for me that evening, and Pee Lek was more important. On that last night in Bangkok, I grabbed a friend named David, leaving Bobbie at the Teen Club for an hour or so while he and I hopped a tuk tuk. I took him to meet Pee Lek. David, a guy two years younger than me who