Bangkok Babylon - Jerry Hopkins

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when I was sitting belly-up to the stage in a go-go joint in one of Bangkok's numerous testosterone districts, I struck up a conversation with the guy sitting next to me. He told me he worked for America's Orderly Departure Program, helping relocate Vietnamese to the post-war United States. He also played a role in breaking the story on 60 Minutes about how the CIA secretly trained and air-dropped South Vietnamese spies to infiltrate Hanoi; every one was captured and tortured or executed, and my new friend was involved, a quarter of a century later, in helping their families get visas to the U.S., along with compensation.

      Another time, the next bar stool (different bar) was occupied by an Oscar-winning screenwriter who told me he migrated to Bangkok because he couldn't think of a nicer place to die. I met two foreigners who came to find Thai wives, and two American bar owners (helicopter pilots left over from the Vietnam war) who introduced them to the same woman (both married her)...a feisty American Catholic priest who lived and waged war against poverty and the Thai establishment while living in the slums for thirty-five years...an Australian photographer who helped blow the whistle on Air America's involvement in the heroin trade, swam across the Mekong River with his Laotian sweetie on his back, then went on to run a successful publishing company...another photographer (British) who made a name for himself selling bar girl calendars and ran an advertising agency that told five-star hotels and international corporations how to succeed in business...an American man who taught elephants to paint and play musical instruments, then sold the paintings for $500 apiece on the National Geographic Channel and got international distribution for two CD's...a Canadian circus dwarf and an English rock musician with a common interest in computer programming who opened a restaurant together, and a Yank lawyer who put Khmer Rouge officers in jail, all residents of Phnom Penh who came to Bangkok to celebrate their victories...the U.S. Marine many people believe was the model for Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, and his best friend who stayed in Bangkok following the Vietnam war to become a “fixer” for Hollywood film-makers (both were in the CIA)...the son of J. Edgar Hoover's secretary who taught English to Thai school children and businessmen...a bounty hunter who tracked down men who faked their deaths to collect million-dollar insurance policies...a gemologist who dealt in looted antiquities from Burma and Cambodia...and a high-society piano player at one of the world's most acclaimed hotels who became the first pedophile on the FBI 's Ten Most Wanted list.

      In Bangkok, as in few, if any, other places on earth, Larry Hillblom was just one of the guys, one of the legion who escaped from their past to recreate or find or lose themselves through travel. No less an authority on the subject than Somerset Maugham wrote, “It seemed to me that by a long journey to some far distant country I might renew myself...I journeyed to the Far East. Went looking for adventure and romance, and so I found them...but I found also something I had never expected. I found a new self.”

      The tales that follow may be out of the ordinary even in Bangkok, but they are not exceptional. One of the reasons I migrated to Thailand was because it had the most interesting expatriate community I'd encountered anywhere in the world. And for those considering going down the same path, it's important, obviously, to know who some of your new friends might be.

      Some of the characters in this book wear white hats (if smudged). Some wear black ones. I don't pretend that they reflect the overall expat community–there are a disproportionate number of Americans and media types, no surprise given they were selected by an American writer–and business heads and NGO's are woefully under-represented. Still, they have much in common with the larger expat community. Nearly all are long-timers and most have become disaffiliated from their home countries, many to the point of feeling like an alien when they return for a visit. Usually, things back home have changed...and in every case the expat has altered his psychology, if not his chemistry. And almost always, apparently quite comfortably.

      At the same time, in their adopted country they remain outside. No matter how fluent in the language and adept in hurdling the cultural barriers they may be, forever they will be foreigners, what in Thailand are called farangs. Yet, they are foreigners who can, as outsiders, reveal some of the secrets of Southeast Asia–a region long tangled in adventure and mystery (and bullshit)–that may be off the usual traveler's path, but may also be, in fact, never more distant than around the next corner or sitting slumped over a beer on the next bar stool.

      Consider this collection of profiles a how-to book, and let the expats be your guides. If you want a new experience, or want to re-invent yourself, or want escape, even if for just a night, or merely want a vicarious thrill or two, then this is the way, follow me.

      When in Bangkok, do what your mama told you never to do.

      Talk to a stranger.

      The Real Colonel Kurtz?

      When I heard that the government had kicked him out of the country, that he was persona non grata in Thailand after making it his choice of residency for twenty years, I wondered: what could anyone do that might be considered so offensive in Thailand as to justify deportation? When it came to behavior, this was the Southeast Asian country whose motto was mai pen rai, which is Thai for que sera sera. So long as you didn't badmouth Buddhism or royalty, it was a country known for its rampant hedonism and illegality. Anything you wanted or wanted to do was likely okay with the authorities, usually at an affordable price.

      Tony Poe arguably was one of the most colorful characters of his time and place, in Sumatra, Tibet and Laos from the 1950s through the 1970s, and Thailand in the years that followed. He was one of many survivors of America's “secret war” who decided not to go back to the United States when the Yanks packed it in and left what used to be called Indochine to the Communists. Hundreds of these ex-warriors stayed in Thailand, where they lived–and some still reside–many with their Asian wives and kids, operating businesses, and nursing livers as defeated as the armed forces with whom they fought.

      I never knowingly drank with Tony, although I might have; I drank in some of the same bars with his friends. One of them was Jack Shirley, with whom Tony ran Operation Momentum, the secret U.S. program aimed at organizing the Lao hilltribesmen into an anti-Communist army, so that it would seem that the opposition to the Viet Cong was homegrown rather than comprised of U.S. forces, who had no legal right to be in Laos in any case.

      Tony's grandparents immigrated to the United States from Prague in the 1880s, settling in Milwaukee, where grandfather Anton became a successful baker. Tony's father, John Poshepny, served thirty-five years in the Navy and while stationed in Guam, married a native of the island named Isabella. Tony was raised in California–born in Long Beach in 1924, attending high school in Santa Rosa–and at age nine was accidentally shot in the stomach by his brother. Soon after his eighteenth birthday, he enlisted in the Marines, served with a parachute battalion in the southwest Pacific and then was leader of a machine gun team that invaded Iwo Jima. On the fifteenth day of what was one of the bloodiest battles of the war, he was wounded in the leg, recovering in time to join the initial occupation force sent to a defeated Japan.

      After the war, Tony went to college on the G.I. Bill, graduating in 1950 with a degree in English and history from San Jose State, where he was known for his prowess on the golf course. This improbable encounter with the straight world apparently had little effect and in 1951, he applied for a job with the FBI, whose recruiter referred him to the CIA training school at Camp Peary, Virginia. He graduated in one of the organization's first classes. Shirley was one of his classmates and both were sent to Asia: Jack to help organize the Thai Border Police, Tony to work with members of an animist-Christian sect that had fled North Korea and were being trained to be sent back as saboteurs.

      When the Korean “police action” ended, he was sent to Thailand for five years and then assigned to a CIA team involved in an attempt to overthrow the Sukarno regime in Indonesia–an effort that included an arduous 150-kilometer trek through jungle and over mountains for emergency evacuation by submarine. That was followed by an assignment to train the Khamba tribesmen who in 1958 smuggled the young Dalai Lama out of Tibet.

      Thus, Poe already had a reputation as the Ultimate Drill Instructor by the time he arrived, in Laos in 1961. The French, who colonized what is now Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, had been defeated by the Vietminh in 1954, and less than three months later, a conference in Geneva cut Vietnam in

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