The original hot and overcrowded hootches that Max had inherited were now obsolete. He had replaced them with a vastly expanded complex of clean, airy attractive quarters that blended the native Thai talent and teakwood with American know-how on rain protection, drainage and sanitation. Each of our aircrews flying combat had a spot in an air-conditioned building, and the pilot who flight-planned, briefed and flew to Hanoi from two in the morning until two in the afternoon could now collapse under a cooler and sleep in the afternoon heat before rising to start the cycle again. He built a command center where we could think and move with some semblance of order, and we had an air base that looked like an air base should. He provided the facilities we needed to do the combat job better.
He also gave us a most adequate building known as the officers’ club. This was the only place for the officers to eat and as we were on a 24-hour-a-day schedule, the kitchen was always open. We also had a bar and game room and this was the off-duty rendezvous for both the Americans and our Thai military friends in the area. Colonel Rachain, the local Thai military commander, actually owned all the real estate we occupied and practically owned all the Thai labor we employed. He was most cooperative and pleasant, a fine gentleman without whose help we could never have progressed as we did. He got us the best help available to run this all-day operation and they turned out to be quite a snappy crew. The challenge of taking a fifteen-year-old girl out of the rice paddies and putting a white shirt, black skirt and shoes on her is one thing, but making her an English-speaking waitress is another. The Thais are the happiest and most industrious group I have observed in the Asian area and progress was rapid.
We kept the menu on the number system. One was sliced pineapple, bananas and papaya, which was delicious; number thirty-nine was the closest thing to steak available for the day; number forty-one was some form of chicken; number sixty-two was orange ice cream—I have never seen the like of it any place else in the world. It only took a short time to learn the menu by heart and ordering was a numerical recitation. We tried to break it up with Thai food prepared in our kitchen on a few occasions, and invited Colonel Rachain over to sample our first attempt. He was most polite, but allowed that Thai food American style—or American food Thai style—was a bit short on the hot peppers for his taste. We had him back for the second attempt and he attended, but gracefully indicated that he preferred to stick with old number thirty-nine.
The Thais identified themselves very personally with all of our efforts. From force of habit we each tended to eat in one section of the dining area most of the time, and the little girls could usually out-guess us on our meal order. They brought us flowers from home, they brought us Thai gifts when they went off on trips or visits to their relatives, they cried when their officers went back to the States and they cried when their pilots did not come back from Hanoi.
The housegirls, houseboys, barbers and the like were much the same. Most of them lived in the Thai military complex on the other side of the runway from our area, and they were almost exclusively Thai military dependents in one form or another. Colonel Rachain called them “my family,” and he controlled their employment and welfare in the firm Asian manner. He was the boss, everyone knew it, and there was no monkey business. The girl who cleaned my place up and did my laundry was named Boonaling, although we never got far enough through the language barrier to figure out how that should be spelled in English. Her husband was a Thai Air Force sergeant, and in Asian fashion her mother stayed home and cared for her five children while she and her husband worked. Like all the rest of the Thais, she could hardly wait for the annual spring water festival. This three-day affair signals the end of the dry season and the start of the rainy season. The name of the game is to douse everyone you see with a water pistol, a bucket or a push into the swamp, as a token of luck. My boss lived next door to me and Boonaling caught him in a grumpy mood, coming out of his front door with a clean uniform on, and let him have it right in the face. He was furious for days, and there was little doubt in anyone’s mind about that. It failed to dampen Boonaling’s spirits and she broke through the language barrier far enough to refer to him as Colonel God Damn from then on.
It is not supposed to rain on the first day of the festival, and that was the time for Colonel Rachain to entertain all of “his family” and his friends. He invited us to all of his functions and they were most enjoyable. Thai food, Thai style, is exotic and the results can be wild. The morning after his first exposure to one of Colonel Rachain’s spreads, my buddy SAM decided that the experience must resemble that of having a baby. The monsoon got twelve hours ahead of schedule for this particular party and we arrived in the midst of a monstrous thunderstorm. Nobody even slowed down and it is a wonder that we were not electrocuted from the makeshift extension cord network that threaded its way through the wet grass and puddles to the light bulbs hanging from the trees around Colonel Rachain’s house. The rain went on, the ceremonial dances with their fabulous costumes went on, and then as guests of honor some of us got to dance with some of the Thai ladies. This is something else, and since the man leads by progressing in snake dance style around the dance floor to the rhythm of an oriental beat, and the woman follows behind, I never did know how close I came to doing it properly, but we all had a great time, Thai style. When we got ready to leave we found out that someone had stolen Colonel God Damn’s raincoat.
Max and I had one project that we never did complete—a go-cart track. You might think that the middle of the jungle is a pretty crazy place for a go-cart track, but we had a real problem to divise things for our folks to do when they had a little time off duty. Max and I figured that we could get together and scrounge enough equipment, materials and money to make this thing a going concern. We struck out on this one because it did not meet the approval of some of the folks up the line.
At the end of his normal one-year tour things were not complete and Max had not polished his base to his satisfaction. It was still head and shoulders above everything else but it wasn’t good enough for Max, so he extended his tour. At the end of his first extension he was still not quite satisfied. It was better than ever, but not quite what he wanted, and he wanted to stay until everything he had started was complete and in number one order. Max put in another extension and would have stayed to manicure and polish the fine installation he had established, except for our command structure. I was forced to justify his extension, which is a reasonable requirement, so I submitted the justification to one of our three headquarters. Max proceeded, as we all did, under the assumption that the request would be approved and that we would have the opportunity to utilize his talents for many more months. As the date for his departure approached, we fired an inquiry to yet another one of our headquarters where we thought the paper work would be by that time, even with slow action, and found that they knew nothing about it. We traced back down the line to our next headquarters and lo and behold, the formal request of this terrific gentleman had been sitting in an uninterested commander’s personal in-basket, without action, for three months.
This was a heartbreaker to Max. The thought that the system had so little regard for what he had done and for his desire to follow his base through to completion was hard for him to accept.