Hawkridge hated Laos, but I loved it deeply. It saved my sanity when I hit bottom as a Peace Corps Volunteer shortly before Christmas my first year in Thailand.

I was entering my “stupid Thais” phase.

We had been warned. Thousands of Volunteers had served in a hundred cultures around the globe by the time I joined in 1969, and Peace Corps discovered a recurring pattern. During the first six months of service, the Volunteer loves his country and host culture. Everything is new and exciting. By month twelve, what was once cute or interesting has turned stupid or annoying. Drop out rates jump. Volunteers who survive this gut check start their second year with an invaluable life lesson – foreign people and cultures are neither better nor worse than our own. They’re simply different. I hadn’t made it that far.

My Peace Corps housemates Sam and Ernie felt it too. It boiled over one afternoon when we all ran into homesickness, holiday blues and unruly students on the same day. I started the bitch session when I returned home from teaching English at Wat Bovornives.

“Do you know what kee nohk means?” I tossed my briefcase on the table and yanked off my tie.

“You mean what little kids shout at us, then start giggling?” Sam popped open a Pepsi and slumped into a chair.

“Yeah. I got kee-nohked again at the bus stop this morning. So I asked my friend Peerachat at school. He says it means ‘bird shit.’”

“Bird shit?”

“Bird shit is white. We’re white. So we’re bird shit. Get it?”

“Ha Ha.”

“I’m tired of being stared at,” I said, kicking off my shoes.

“Me too.”

“I’m not a fucking monkey in a zoo.”

“It’s OK in Thai culture to stare,” Ernie offered.

“Screw Thai culture,” I shouted. “I’m tired of little kids rubbing the hair on my arm, like I’m a freak. And every time I pick up a pair of chopsticks – Look! The farang can use chopsticks!  I add hot sauce. “Look! The farang can eat hot food!”  I’m tired of being the entertainment.”

“I’m sick of Thai food,” Sam declared.

“Me too. I’m sick of rice, and tiny, little pieces of meat. I want a big fucking slab of beef.  And mashed potatoes. Corn Flakes for breakfast.

“A Dunkin Donut,” Sam said.

“And I’m tired of speaking Thai. Racking my brains to remember a word.”

“Or a stupid tone.” I stared at my beer.  “I’m sick of the Land of Smiles.” 

It was Bernard who suggested the cure.

 An art student from Grenoble, Bernard ran into Irish Brian up in Laos. Brian told him I spoke French and suggested he hit me up for a place to crash when he got down to Bangkok. Bernard had been on the road a long time and Laos reminded him of home. The streets of the sleepy administrative capital, Vientiane, were lined with shady plane trees, their lower trunks painted white like they were in Paris parks, and the street names started with “Rue” even if they ended in Laotian. Vintage Deux Chevaux still puttered down the sunny, somnolent boulevards, happily sharing the road with bicycles and dogs.

“It is like a little piece of France,” he gushed. “One can find there wine and cheese and baguettes and Gaulois.” He stubbed his out in the ashtray. “It was our colony, you know. Many people still speak French.”

And it was all just across the border. The quiet town sat on the slow-moving Mekong River, some 300 miles northeast of Bangkok. You got there by overnight train. The small country of two million souls had no railways and only 700 telephones. Bernard took no photos, wrote nothing in his diary during his sojourn there.“You must stop thinking, be quiet,” he advised. “It is a place to try opium and dream.”

My knowledge of Laos was limited to politics.  I knew the war in Vietnam had spread to all three countries which once formed French Indochina. After the French departed, Laos fell into a civil war. The U.S. and the Soviet Union met at a conference in a far-away land and signed an agreement promising to let the people of the former French colony settle their differences themselves. Of course, neither side did. The Soviets and the North Vietnamese supported a communist insurgent movement called the Pathet Lao. We financed a right-wing Royal Lao Government neutral on paper but in our pocket.

Fighting was half-hearted and seasonal, except along the Ho Chi Minh trail which snaked through the jungles of eastern Laos and Cambodia down to South Vietnam. North Vietnam needed the trail to supply its Viet Cong allies in South Vietnam, and both sides viewed it as a key to victory in the Vietnam War. But because most of the fighting happened in the mountains far from Vientiane, the war in Laos was a poorly covered sideshow to the main action in Vietnam. That was fine with me. Along with my baguettes, I might be able to find a story for the Bangkok World or Bangkok Post to pay for my trip.

I bought a visa for 50 baht and booked the night train from Bangkok to Nong Khai, the Thai border town on the Mekong River. I splurged on a sleeperette instead of sitting up all night 3rd class on a hard, wooden bench. But the fold-down bunk turned out to be exactly six feet long, an inch shorter than me. Scrunched sideways on a shelf, I didn’t get much sleep. Around 4 AM in the morning the train pulled into Udorn. I peeked out my window and watched a knot of American soldiers hump their duffel bags off the train, undoubtedly heading for the big U.S. air base there. Their laughter faded away and we were rolling again.

It was dawn and surprisingly cold when I arrived in Nong Khai. Patches of morning mist floated on the Mekong, and the air was fragrant with the wood smell of breakfast fires, but the sun was up, the sky was blue, and I just knew it was going to be a beautiful day. A yawning government employee stamped my passport at the little concrete blockhouse serving as the Thai Immigration Office.

I climbed down the steep, muddy riverbank where a small, wooden ferry boat idled away, already crammed with a half-dozen passengers. You could swim across the narrow river; nobody but farangs worried about passports, and not even all of them. The border was just a line on a map.

My seatmate in the boat was a pretty Laotian woman in her mid-20s who taught French at L’Ecole Aurore in Vientiane. The boat nosed out into a strong current, slipping past a morning bather, and we struck up a conversation in Thai which I quickly switched to French; I was sick of Thai. When we disembarked minutes later on the Lao side at Thadeaux, we were old friends and shared a samlor into town.

“Where are you staying in Vientiane?” Manolie asked.

I told her I was on a student budget, hoping to sleep for free a few nights at one of the Buddhist wat (monastery). Then maybe a few nights at the Viengvilay hotel on Rue Nokeo Koumaine where Bernard had stayed. You could rent a room for 600 kip ($1.20) a night.  She wouldn’t hear of it.

“My cousin has a house in Wattay Noi, just outside the town. You must stay with them,” she insisted. She scribbled down their address and handed it to me. I promised to head over there if my money ran out.

I hopped out of the samlor at a sunny plaza called Place Vieux Marche and headed over to a small, shady café. Three noisy black and yellow mynah birds sat in a wooden cage by the door, whistling away in the sunshine. Bottles of Tiger beer and Guinness Stout lined the shelves above the wooden tables. Next to an old Air Vietnam poster inviting you to visit Dalat – which American soldiers were currently involuntarily visiting – the proprietor had scribbled in French on a chalkboard the day’s breakfast menu. No rice, no noodles. Real food. “Bifteck frit pommes de terre” Steak and potatoes. Just what the doctor ordered. I splurged a dollar on a breakfast steak, two eggs, a salad, fresh croissants, a baguette, butter, jam, and café noir in a steaming glass.

The café owner, a middle-aged, part-French, part-Vietnamese woman dressed in black pajamas and a light blue sweater, hailed from Saigon. She and her husband, the cook, ran a little restaurant there until the Americans came. They were colonials. Their allegiance was to France; their comfort zone the former French Indochina. They tried Cambodia first before ending up in Laos. They reminded me of the unpretentious, content fermiers I met working the fields attached to Madame Alcock’s Chateau de La Motte during the college summer I spent in France working as her chauffeur and immersing myself in the language. They only asked to be left alone to bake their bread and watch the river flow.

That evening, I bought four cans of condensed milk and a pack of cigarettes – gifts for the monks – and headed back to Wat Mixayaron. I had met a young Laotian monk there earlier that day who practiced his English on me. He had promised to ask the pra yai, the head monk, if I could sleep there that night. I arrived at the gate at seven and Pra Tongyanh went inside. He came back out and said I had been refused permission to spend the night.

“Why?” I inquired.

“He said that several times he has given permission to hippies to sleep here at night but they steal the blankets and mosquito nets in the morning when they leave.”

“Maybe I can speak to him and explain I’m not a hippy.”

“No, he will not see to you.”

Tongyanh wrapped his saffron robe around his shoulder and smiled. Don’t worry, he knew another wat where I might be able to stay that night. At the second wat, I was again refused. Sorry, the temple was filled up with monks who had come into town from upcountry for the Boun Kathin festival. Maybe Laotian monks have the power of invisibility, I thought to myself, because I don’t see many around. At the third wat, we were informed the abbot was not in; he had gone to Luang Prabang on business. Irish Brian and his buddies must have gotten there before me. It was getting late, 9:30 P.M. The streets were silent except for the murmur of crickets. I started looking for a graceful exit.

“Pra Tongyanh must return to his wat,” I said. “You have already been too kind to me.”  I figured I would try the Viengvilay.

“No. Let us visit my friend at Wat Ong-Tu. If I can’t find you a room there, you can go to the hotel.”

We walked another kilometer, the cool evening air infused with the fragrance of flowers, the quiet broken briefly by the half-hearted bark of a dog awoken by our passing footsteps. When we arrived at our destination, Tongyanh disappeared and I waited on a wooden bench inside the temple. Moonlight flooded the courtyard. Tongyanh reappeared.

“Do you have some identification I can show my friend?”

I handed him my Thai naam baht, my ID card which identified me as an English teacher in Bangkok. He went back inside. It was a star-filled night. A small boy stepped out of the shadows, stared at me for a moment, then retreated. Tongyanh returned with another monk, a smile on his face. I could stay there, but the abbot would hold my ID card and give it back in the morning.

“You must be gone by six AM,” Tongyanh warned me. He gave me a goodbye wai.

His friend led me to a small, bare room where we pushed together two long wooden benches for a bed. He handed me a thin blanket. A candle burned on a table and the room held a deep and profound silence. The dek wat, temple boy, brought a bottle of nahm cha, departed, and Tongyanh’s friend and I sipped tea in the flickering shadows and talked.

He was the fourth son of a rice farmer from Savannakhet, quiet but curious. He delighted in my description of New York City, fascinated by skyscrapers. There were no tall buildings in his ten-family village. The idea of an elevator made him smile and rub his shaven head in wonder. He had many questions for me when I told him I once studied to be a priest. When he offered me a cigarette, I teased him about smoking. He smiled. The Lord Buddha spent many years wallowing in the pleasures of the senses before he was finally able to renounce them and embrace the Second Noble Truth. “I am at the beginning of my long journey,” he said simply.

When he left, he pointed to the wooden door. “Please lock it when I leave, Khun Maitri. Don’t open it during the night. I will wake you tomorrow".

“Thieves, Pra?”

“Thieves, bad people, it’s not safe in Vientiane anymore.”

I found it hard to believe. Still, I threw the bolt when he left, just in case. The bed was hard but I sleep soundly, woke early and left a small donation.                 

The next day, I ran into Manolie at the Talaat Sao market. She again insisted I stay at her cousin’s house. I was running out of wats to beg a bed from, so I jumped on her little Honda motorcycle and we rode out of town about a kilometer past the North Vietnamese Embassy to their family compound. Its high walls hid a pretty, two-story concrete house with teak floors, wooden shutters and bright red bougainvillea in window boxes. The house was surrounded by yellow rice fields. Chickens pecked the dirt and family dogs dozed in the shade.

That evening, we sat around a fire in the cooking shed behind the house, chewing on roasted kwai, water buffalo, drinking home-brewed lao, and talking in a polyglot of Thai, Lao and French. Manolie’s brother Soukinkham passed me a black-and-white photo of his father taken years earlier.

In the firelight, a dignified, young junior officer wearing a moustache and an air of determination gazed back at me. The woman standing next to him was their mother. Their father was a career soldier in the French colonial army before the disintegration of Indochina. When the French were humiliated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 by Uncle Ho’s barefooted Viet Minh guerillas and folded their cards, Indochina split into three independent nations – Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. He became an officer in the Royal Laotian Army and, during the three-way civil war that ensued, he rose to the rank of major, fighting on the side of the American-backed faction against the communists and neutralists. Now he was fighting the Pathet Lao up on the Plaine des Jarres in northern Laos. Their mother was up there with him. Soukinkham ran the family in his absence.

“He’s fighting with the Armee Clandestine,” Soukinkham told me.

“The CIA’s secret army?”  I leaned in closer.

“You’ve heard about it?”

“People know it exists, but not a lot about it. An American airman from Udorn named Gary told me some wild stories one night at a Bangkok bar, but he was pretty drunk.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That it has about 30,000 soldiers, most of them Meo hill tribe people, led by a General Vang Pao. He claims the CIA flies in boxes of kip every month for Vang Pao to pay his soldiers.”

Soukinkham smiled. The CIA was doing more than paying the bill, he assured me. We were training, arming, equipping, feeding, paying, transporting and directing a guerilla army of 40,000 full and part-time soldiers. The headquarters of the Armee Clandestine was in Long Cheng, a high mountain valley accessible only by air and off limits to journalists. His father knew Vang Pao.

“People in Vientiane call the Meo ‘mountain monkeys’ because they live in the jungle, on the top of the mountains. They call us ‘frogs’ because we live in the valley. But my father says they fight well.”“

Gary said some of Vang Pao’s soldiers were mere kids – 13 or 14 years old. C’est vrai?”  True?

“Peut-etre” Perhaps. He nodded to his brother Souksengdao. Dao picked up his M2 carbine, then passed it over to Kham Sai, the family’s servant and bodyguard, a solemn young boy sitting in the shadows in the back of the shed wearing a surplus U.S. Navy jacket. Kham Sai rapidly broke down the weapon, then quickly reassembled it again before proudly handing it to me.

“Kham Sai has been fighting in the Armee Clandestine since he was 12,” Dao admitted.

I knew I could sell that story to the Bangkok World.

“Would your father be willing to talk to me about the Armee Clandestine?”  I asked.

“You will have to ask my father about that.”

“When will he come home?”

“Soon, I think.” Soukinkham stirred the fire with a stick and stared into the embers. “Things go badly now.”

Before I went to bed that night, I practiced my French on Noi, the baby of the family, a pretty, sixteen-year-old girl studying at the Lycee in Vientiane. She was still wearing her school outfit, a white blouse and blue skirt, but her dress was a mini-skirt compared to the uniforms Thai school girls wore back in Bangkok.

“Is your skirt official length?” I teased.

She smiled at me.“Mais oui." Of course.  I chalked it up to the French influence.

Noi distrusted the Pathet Lao and feared the North Vietnamese. She hoped America would stay in Laos for a long time. I told her about the massive October 15 march on D.C. and Gene’s experience. America was increasingly disillusioned with the war, I explained, and Nixon was starting to bring our soldiers home from Vietnam.

“Noi, we’re leaving Indochina. C’est fini.” I told her.  “I’m sorry, we should never have gotten involved in Vietnam.”

“But you did,” she protested.

“It was a mistake. Staying longer won’t make it better.”

She gathered up her school books. “Then it is finished for us too.” I didn’t know what to say.

The next day dawned sunny and warm and my aap nahm bath – cold water dipped from a tall stone jar – was survivable. Noi had laid out for me on the kitchen table a petit dejeuner of coffee, croissants and some imported Droste cocoa. Outside, Kham Sai was shining my shoes. I was embarrassed and begged him to stop, but he just smiled and continued polishing. Manorom, a cousin of Manolie, was assembling his rifle.

It was Sunday and the two were going bird-hunting in the jungle. Shoes shined, Kham Sai turned to cleaning an old Meo shotgun which looked like something out of a turn-of-the-century gun catalogue. The hand-made barrel had crude animal engravings scratched on the side. Kham Sai showed me how to hand-load gunpowder, straw packing and lead shot, and pack it down tight with a ramrod. He carried a pack of firing caps in his jacket.  The whole thing looked like it would explode in your face. Manorom, a teacher at the Lao-German Technical Institute in Vientiane, slipped his rifle into a gun case strapped to his monster BMW motorcycle.

“Khun Maitri, would you like to come with us?”

“Bien sur,” I smiled. Of course. I couldn’t wait to see Kham Sai fire his antique shotgun.

I spent the day watching them track and kill small birds I could barely see. Once we entered a clearing and I was startled by a sudden crashing of tree limbs. A family of monkeys emerged from the bush and surrounded us, chattering and bearing their sharp teeth. Manorom pulled some fruit out of his jacket and tossed it to them. They grabbed it and disappeared back into the dense forest.

By late afternoon, the light was fading and their bags were stuffed with a dozen birds. It was time to go. It wasn’t wise to be caught roaming around in the jungle after dark. We stopped at a wat on the way back to give the monks some of the game. In the back of the wat, I came across a crematorium, blackened by smoke and fire. A hunched figure squatted in front of it, a white robe pulled up over his head, rocking back and forth on his heels. Every few minutes, he would raise his arms in the air and begin to wail. Kham Sai came over to get me.

“Baa,” Kham Sai explained. A crazy man. He didn’t know why. Night came, Manorom switched on his headlight and we headed back.

I’ve always been a dreamer. My sister Jody says it’s because I’m a Pisces. I blame books. When I was a young boy back in Missouri, I read Rudyard Kipling and dreamed of roaming through his Orient – one filled with pagan temples and monkeys and jungles; sleepy, colonial backwaters where sarong-clad, dark-haired women bathed in slow-moving rivers; a solitary white far from civilization (me) sleeping under a mosquito net, rising in the morning heat to explore a river or a ruin, returning in the evening to write in a diary. I didn’t find that romantic world in Bangkok, but I found it in Laos. I returned often.

It’s been thirty years since I saw the madman at the crematorium. The Vietnam War killed thousands of Laotians, and the communist Pathet Lao triumphantly took over the country in 1975, driving Noi and her extended family into exile in France, Canada and the U.S. But Laotians cannot help being gentle and Buddhist, and 30 years later ideology sits lightly, largely ignored in daily life.

The country remains a pleasant backwater, an opium dream of quiet solitude and enlightenment for seeking Siddharthas like I was once.