Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand's Deadliest Prison (15 page)

Jaruk carefully kept his face expressionless—a bad sign. We spoke in English, as he had worked for the United States Aid in Cambodia with refugees for a few years in his youth. His English was a little better than my Thai, and he preferred to practice it whenever he could.

As I gave him my version of what happened, I had a sinking feeling as I saw he was unmoved, or pretended to be so. My plea to free the animal met indifferent silence. I knew the battle was lost.

When my story ran out, my emotional force spent, Jaruk hesitated for a few minutes, and then spoke kindly with a gentle voice.

“Bird is alive, no?” I grudgingly admitted it. “Yes” “If bird die, how you hurt?” I wanted to speak of the animal’s pain, but it seemed a lame argument when people were dying in agony all around us.

“It’s cruel and pointless. Why torture a poor owl?”

“Pig die, buffalo die, chicken die, you hurt?”

Through clenched teeth I admitted, “No.”

He did his best to quiet my outrage.

“Sure. Guard little bit crazy. Bad man, sure. Not your problem.

Many bad things in prison. Mai pen rai.”

With the last words, mai pen rai, my defeat was final. The Thai saying has more than one translation, but in essence means “never mind, oh well, life goes on.” It is often the only thing a Thai can say after unpleasant events. Poor consolation, yes, but it is better than no consolation at all. It is a peculiarly Buddhist attitude toward life’s troubles, a way of moving forward without bitterness or acrimony.

The day passed by painfully slowly. I was restless, unhappy, and unable to accept what was happening. Every sound was jarring, and I repeatedly heard the owl’s cries, in fact—and worse, I heard it in memory.

Hunger drove me to go to the coffee shop to purchase a few small pieces of pork for supper. I passed the table, and the sight of that hunter of the night bedraggled and ill, still struggling, was an emotional body-blow.

The wrongness of it rankled. It was disturbing to me on so many levels that I could not dismiss it from my mind as one more cause of grief among many. The owl had lived in a banyan tree in the hospital gardens. In the evenings, one could catch glimpses of it swooping down on prey. The owl kept the rat population in check. It was beautiful and free in a place that was neither. Such a slow and painful death was a wholly unnecessary evil. I witnessed countless acts of cruelty to animals in Thailand and Asia overall, but the gratuitous violence displayed in torturing the owl was beyond the pale. How could anyone be so vicious to something that harmed no one? What kind of person chooses to brutalize something that was only a beneficial presence?

I stayed awake late that night, probing and wrestling with thoughts to find some solution, some method of freeing the owl without repercussions. I
toyed with the idea of releasing it and facing down the guard; giving some speech about the sanctity of life. It was so patently absurd I could not sustain the argument in my imagination for a minute. Human life was near valueless to the prison system; what, then was the life of an owl? In any case, my sacrifice would be meaningless. It would not be free more than a minute or two. It doubtless would alight somewhere on the grounds and quickly be recaptured.

The next day I saw Somchai, the prison “doctor.” He was tall for a Thai, more than six feet, and weighing over 250 pounds. His moon-like face clearly marked him as a Thai-Chinese; his family was one of the wealthy merchant class. He had no medical qualifications and was uninterested in medicine, but some relation of his in the Thai Corrections Department (which prisoners jokingly referred to as the Corruptions Department) had given him the sinecure. He spent his days playing games on a hand-held electronic Nintendo Game Boy, complaining about the marriage his dominating mother was forcing on him. Over thirty, he lived at home and cut as mediocre a figure in society as he was useless in the prison.

On the positive side, in this book, anyway, Somchai had been ordered by his mother to take advantage of the opportunity I presented to improve his English language skills. He had a surprisingly large vocabulary; he watched American movies, listened to American rock ‘n’ roll, and felt privileged to talk to a farang as an equal.

In return for our rather listless chats, he provided a steady stream of gifts—music cassettes, special teas and sweets, and books. In addition, our “friendship” made the guards wary of offending me, as it would be the act of a moment for Somchai to fire them. His whimsy and pettiness made this threat a real one. He relished displaying his authority in the minor realm of the hospital, as it was the only place he wielded any.

Some instinct made me refrain from mentioning the bird during our afternoon hour class. It turned out to be a wise decision. He brought it up himself, and his attitude was enlightening, if repulsive.

We sat in his office, a large pleasant airy room, windows open to catch any stray breeze. We both sat in matching captain’s chairs, he behind his desk and I in front of it. He leaned back, his fingers laced over his capacious belly, his eyes dreamy.

“Have you see the ow’?”

The statement was a non sequitur, and at first I could not makesense of his pronunciation. “Ow ‘?”

“Yes. The Ow’. Nok! You know—the bird guards catch?”

“Oh yes. The owl. I’ve seen it.”

Somchai nodded forcefully, and launched into a monologue extolling the delights of hunting trophies. He had recently seen an African adventure film and spoke longingly of killing exotic animals. He wished they were plentiful so he could decorate a room in old British men’s club style, filled with severed heads, examples of his hunting prowess.

He mentioned the enormous python some Thai prisoners had fished out of the hospital sewer-canal. They skinned it, ate the meat, and handed over the snakeskin to the warden, who had made a belt and hatband of it. Somchai wanted one, and also desired the owl, thinking the stuffed creature would enhance the ambience of his office.

Clearly I had no ally in Somchai.

I did not bother speaking to the nurses about it, either. If anything, they were less sympathetic than Somchai. The central tenets of their primitive philosophy of life were equal parts selfenrichment, and self-glorification, preferably at the expense of others.

There was nothing to be done. I faced the fact that I had no choice but to watch the owl die in torment. I avoided the coffee shop as much as possible, but I still had to go there twice a day to buy food and medicine.

By the afternoon of the second day of its captivity, the owl had lost its ability to fight. Its feet were a bloody mess, rubbed raw in constant attempts to free itself. It could barely croak its distress, as the guard ordered that it
receive no water or food to speed up its demise. Each breath it drew ended in a soft, ghastly cry of suffering. In extremis, all living things share a bond, no matter how remote the link. From ant to elephant, mortality gives us a common cause.

We were captives together, and in its dying, I shared a portion of death. I keenly felt its helplessness and broken spirit. Bereft of all else, at least the owl would have a mourner.

The next morning I stayed away from the coffee shop, not wanting to witness the owl’s death. Excitement at mid-morning distracted me. Prisoners hobbled and ran off the ward, drawn by cries and bellowing in the hospital garden. I joined the exodus, wondering what new horror would greet me.

Down a footpath thirty yards from the coffee shop was the vegetable garden. A mound of garbage lay on one side of the garden—the hospital dump. With his back to the dump, facing off two blue boys, stood Lop.

Lop, a profoundly brain-damaged Thai prisoner, did the bulk of the worst jobs in the hospital. He made inarticulate sounds of distress, crying for help that did not exist. His eyes rolled wildly in their sockets at the menacing authority figures and the expectant crowd. Everyone able to walk gathered to watch this strange attack. Lop was as even-tempered and docile as he was simple, and the notion he did something worthy of caning was ridiculous.

The blue boys held bamboo canes with thick balls of rubber bands wrapped on their ends. Like dogs baiting a bear, they took turns striking Lop, his arms and legs taking the brunt of the punishment. Whenever Lop tried to grab or hit one of his attackers, the other would take advantage by whacking a vulnerable part. In short order, they reduced him to a pathetic blubbering wreck; curled into a fetal ball. His skin was puffy and discolored with rapidly rising bruises.

Eventually, the blue boys tired of beating a resistless lump of flesh. They left Lop lying in a mud puddle, covered with fleas from the dump, happily gorging themselves on an unexpected meal.

It took a while to get a coherent version of events. The blue boys refused to talk and Lop was unable or unwilling to speak. The blue boys were nominally under Jaruk’s control, but in actual fact, they were creatures of the hateful guard. Exerting his authority, Jaruk summoned the sullen brutes to his office, and demanded they account for their actions.

By noon, the hospital denizens who had weaseled out the details told the story to avid listeners repeatedly. Lop, up early to begin the day’s labors, took pity on the owl, and filled a small plastic sauce bowl with water for the bird.

The guard torturing the owl was furious when he discovered it. Initially, suspicion had settled on me, but ultimately I was ruled out as I had not gone near the coffee shop. He had ordered the blue boys to administer the beating the instant Lop was identified as the miscreant.

The water only prolonged the bird’s agony. It lingered, until sometime late that night it finally died. The guard took the carcass, and hung it up on a wire laundry line, ostensibly to “dry it out.”

The fact that the guard was ignorant of taxidermy and was too lazy or stupid to make enquiries into the same mattered not at all.

At first, the owl’s body attracted a few flies, but was not much disturbed. As the days passed, this obviously changed; columns of ants, clouds of gnats, flies, and other parasites competed to feast on the corpse.

The smell, too, grew stronger, until its remains stank so badly that the prisoners who did the laundry refused to continue their work unless it was taken down.

The Building Chief was normally unsympathetic to prisoners’ complaints, irrespective of their merits. In this case, he took one look at the feathered ruin, crawling with insects, exuding a foul stench, and ordered it removed. The Chief was easily perturbed, and the offensive sight was enough to provoke a tirade.

The guard responsible was loudly questioned by the Chief in the presence of half the building’s occupants. At the conclusion of the harangue, he was curtly dismissed to guard tower duty (the worst punishment a guard could receive) for a month, his humiliation plain to see.

On the Chief ‘s orders, the dead owl was cast into the sewage canal, the sodden mass of feathers and gristle floating on the scum for hours. The entire hideous episode was a spectacle of meaningless suffering, a Buddhist parable brought to life.

In a perverse tribute of nature, the owl’s death became noticeable when the rodent population soared. The rats gnawed into sacks of rice and staples; popped in and out of the trash; dragged bloody bandages everywhere, and left colonies of vicious fleas throughout the grounds.

The prison cats, overfed and pampered by prisoners, could not be bothered to take up the slack. The poisoned bait set out to try and solve the crisis resulted in pestilent rat bodies scattered around, but left the majority of the vermin unharmed and as busy as ever.

It was the only memorial the owl received.

An Open Door

T
hree o’clock on a Friday afternoon in the middle of a mild winter, the best time of year, weather-wise, in South East Asia. The prison felt abandoned. The lane I stood in was utterly still; golden in the late afternoon sunlight. Paved with cracked and crumbling asphalt, the small avenue ran the length of the prison between two high walls from the Kondeo at one end to the hospital at the other. It passed beyond the hospital to a Buddhist temple outside the walls. About ten feet wide, the street was lined with concrete curbs holding three-foot-wide lawns of closely cropped Bermuda grass. The narrow lawns were punctuated at ten-foot intervals with towering, well-tended palm trees.

The walls bordering the lane rose twenty feet, smooth yet lumpy from ages of unevenly applied layers of whitewash. The lane passed the prison pig farm on the left, greenery peeking through its gates. Further on to the right was the hospital gate, the administration building visible over the top of the wall.

The prison property ended at a gate just a few yards after the hospital. This gate of slender iron bars did not impede my vision of the temple grounds on the other side.

I stood in the middle of the lane, twenty feet away from the gate to the temple. It was open, swung outwards, leaning against the counter of a guard shack. The booth for guards inside the hospital gate, and the outside booth were both empty.

In all my years of imprisonment in Thailand I had never been so alone. The solitude felt unearthly. Not a sound to be heard, but the gentle sigh of the breeze through palm fronds high above me. I had absolute privacy, the complete absence of human life.