Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand's Deadliest Prison (2 page)

The guards’ animosity towards me wasn’t personal. It was an uncontrollable primal thing that was extended to the dozen ‘farangs’ at the prison. This hatred of the rich farangs (derogatory Thai slang for foreigners) that came to their country was understandable. In their eyes, we were arrogant intruders that mocked their abject poverty and demanded their servitude. Most of the guards worked second jobs in the tourist industry, work they considered demeaning.

One played piano in a bar patronized by farangs; several others worked as porters and clerks at tourist hotels, and all but a handful earned their real pay as the hired help at local tourist spots. Forced to smile and acquiesce to the demands of Westerners, they had a depthless reservoir of hatred at feeling ill-used and despised by outsiders in their own country.

When presented with the opportunity of paying back the farangs they loathed, the guards seized it.

Surrounded by disease and despair, my own ill health seemed relatively inconsequential. My life’s end would be merely one more note in a chorus of death sung daily. Prisoners, most of whom were Hill Tribe people (Stone Age and sweet–natured clans that lived deep in the jungles of the Golden Triangle) were the victims. These innocents bore the brunt of the prison guard’s sadism and cruelty. The Thais considered the Tribes to be beasts of burden, without the redeeming features of draft animals. Working them to
death for profit was thought to be the logical course of action by prison officials, the proper treatment for subhuman brutes.

They died of tuberculosis because the guards stole the money for medicine. They died of AIDS, having been too poor to buy condoms and exposed to the virus by welcoming tourists into their hearts—and beds. They died of beatings handed out for minor infractions, such as not working quickly enough or not leaping to obey an order. They died of torture and of infections from malnutrition and starvation. Worst of all to watch, they died from simple homesickness. With a life prospect before them of nothing but unending pain, dying was truly the rational course of action to take. Giving up hope and self-preservation, it didn’t take long for them to die.

I had none of the illusions that many Westerners held as a matter of course or as an article of faith: that whites were ‘special,’ that they deserved respect and better treatment than the locals received. This myth—so widespread as to be universal among expats—had been debunked the first week I spent in Thai jail. If anything, the opposite was true. My death would be greeted with glee by the guards, a rare victory in a psychological war they knew they were destined to lose. It was fought all the more bitterly for that.

I peered through the iron bars and steel mesh screen of our cell door; the roof angle was such that I was able to see a tiny corner of the sky. Its deep cerulean blue was a strange source of comfort.

I forced myself to face death squarely. In this, my love of fatalistic Eastern philosophies stood me in good stead. I followed the ancient Japanese ritual prescribed by ‘Bushido,’ the code or doctrine of the military man; or, more accurately, the way of honor that a true warrior took as his path in life. Bushido held that honor was to be revered above life itself. At the end of life, one composed a final poem expressing an essential aspect of one’s philosophy, or a summary of the wisdom distilled from a disciplined existence.

These epitaphic haiku had a long and distinguished history, stretching back to the Tokugawa Shogunate of the 16th century. Its evolution began
with the absolute obedience demanded of the warrior class (the samurai) to their feudal lords (the daimyos). Should a samurai disobey or otherwise displease his daimyo for dishonorable actions—real or imagined—the samurai was “invited” to commit ritual suicide (seppuku).

At the hour appointed by the daimyo, the samurai plunged a short sword into his (or her, as females had many of the same responsibilities as their male relatives, and might also be forced to commit seppuku) abdomen, first slashing horizontally through the belly, then jerking the blade upwards to the heart. Prior to this gory, self-inflicted death, the warrior would first write his or her own
memento mori
(death haiku).

The haiku itself is any poem containing seventeen syllables. The most conservative, and to the Japanese the most pleasing, were three lines of five, seven, and five syllables each, respectively.

Ideally, the death haiku was a complex, artful poem communicating several layers of meaning … the finer the nuances, the better the haiku.

It became a morbid kind of contest, with samurai competing to leave the most elegant and delightful haiku to posterity. This showed their composure and supreme self-discipline at a moment of ultimate stress.

Just prior to battle, or before committing seppuku, how well one wrote one’s poem could make or break one’s reputation. It was not unheard of for an otherwise mediocre samurai to redeem himself with a witty or superb death haiku.

The ritual of preparing oneself for death evolved the characteristics of an art form. One first confronts the fact that the end of mortal existence is at hand.

This is an emotional act, wherein one recalls all the things that will never be accomplished. The words that were never spoken to loved ones; the wishes and dreams that will never come true. The leave-taking, a bittersweet reminiscence, bidding farewell to everything that brought joy, wonder, and delight. Facing this with courage is liberating. After dropping your regrets
and dealing with the central issues of one’s demise, death ceases to hold any terror. When one accepts the fact that life is a cycle that ends in death, it becomes something manageable. It is essential to truly feel the full impact of mortality. Without reconciliation for the emotions generated by death, the ritual is meaningless. Catharsis is precious and must be earned.

The last act of writing the haiku is so that it resonates in the heart of the reader. Often, metaphors from nature were used. Other common themes included the feelings that accompany the senses and the heightened awareness brought on by death’s imminence. Common, too, were haikus using weather: storms, rain, phenomena lending themselves to multiple interpretations. Cyclical things were popular subjects as well, including summer, winter, feast, and famine.

I considered my life as objectively as I could. What message did I want to impart? What could I say that others might benefit from or that communicated my beliefs about life?

In a matter of hours, I composed my death haiku. It read:

No destination

Is reached by clouds in the sky

Only endless change

I finished my will and mailed the documents to the United States Consulate in Chiang Mai, asking that they make the necessary arrangements for my funeral and work to overcome the difficulties of gathering, then disbursing assets scattered around the globe.

Over the next few days, I grew too weak to walk, although somehow a curious euphoria came over me. The awful noise and stench of the prison faded away and became hardly noticeable. I reached an inner space where the problems of this world ceased to have any importance. Objects, animate and inanimate, mundane and strange, began to shine with their own internal light. I was at peace, and I entered a transcendental state that revealed beauty and complex secrets hidden just below the surface of workaday reality.

When the worried faces of the prison commandant and his underlings materialized outside the door of our cell, I thought them to be apparitions, more of the ghosts that hunger brings.

The guards picked me up and carried me downstairs to an area of the prison I’d never seen; the inside of the administration building. Despite my feverish mentality, I could sense that something out of the ordinary was happening. The guards
never
did anything physical, delegating such tasks to the blue boys (prison trustees dressed in blue shirts and shorts). I didn’t have to wait long to discover the cause.

Tom, the United States Consul in Chiang Mai had received my documents and was there on my behalf. He was a decent and caring man. We’d met several times before and had established a good rapport. My condition must have horrified him, for his pensive face spoke volumes. He launched a vituperative verbal attack against the warden (who was conveniently absent) to the abashed prison officials. He demanded that something be done immediately to address my death by starvation. Fortunately, the food situation was corrected hastily. Tom left a bag of food from the Consulate commissary for me: tuna, crackers, fruit, and other staples. That week, the missionaries that visited Westerners at the prison were allowed to bring in food. Never to be forgotten, my short sojourn to the borderlands of death was at an end.

Court Dates in Hell

Y
ou were jerked awake before dawn by the blue boys rapping maliciously on the iron bars of the cell door with bamboo canes. These hated trustees could be heard spewing curses and raining kicks to rouse the Hill Tribesmen in the room next to ours. You were awakened by the blue boys whenever they could manage it. In a bizarre ritual, you ignored their screams to frustrate them.

The two rooms were separated by a waist-high concrete wall topped with steel bars that reached the ceiling. A thick steel mesh screen was bound tightly to the bars to prevent prisoners from swapping things between the two rooms.

Those with court dates had their names shouted out by the blue boys reading from a list. With shrill cries, they’d repeat the names over and over again, to bother prisoners out of spite. They’d tire of it after a time and then would expend energy trying to rush everyone into readiness. No matter how hard you worked to ignore them, some part of your mind heeded their false sense of urgency, and you moved more quickly than was reasonable. The fact that you knew you had hours of waiting ahead before leaving the prison did not matter at all.

With a bag of something to eat at court scavenged the night before (or not), the blue boys would herd those with court dates down the stairs to the courtyard.

Shivering in the darkness, for the mornings could be quite cold, you’d line up facing the low one-story building that housed the coffee shop, and an open-air office area where guards lounged at desks. Under the same roof, behind the office and through a door, was the long room where the iron shackles were put on and removed.

The blue boys brought out heaps of the ill-fitting “one-size-fits-none” brown, polyester court clothes. A short-sleeved shirt and shorts that were tied with string, their rough material ensured that you’d have a rash under your armpits and crotch by the day’s end. You dressed in these smelly rags and stuffed your own clothes in plastic bags, hoping they’d be there when you returned.

The knobby stones underfoot were too uncomfortable to sit on, so you were forced to squat on your haunches, waiting for the guards to take you through the next step: getting shackled.

Depending on which guards were on duty that morning, you might wait as few as ten minutes, or as many as forty. Either way, before the other prisoners were up for the day, those on the court list were lined up in the chain room. It was so narrow that we had to form a long U-shaped line that snaked along three walls of the chamber. The blue boys handed each of us a heavy iron chain, many rusty, and all of them filthy. They’d pluck them from the hundreds hanging on hooks in the back of the room. The links were fist-sized; ten or twelve to a chain, with larger links at both ends to accommodate the ankles.

The line ended at a long steel bar that fit into one of two devices: a crimper and a pulley. The crimper was a flat block of iron set into the floor with an indentation designed to hold the big oval link on the shackles. Above the block was another piece of iron also fitted for oval links, attached to a hinge. You fit the loose link over your foot, positioned it above your
ankle, and dropped it into the holding block. One of the blue boys would then drop the other block over the top of the link and pull the bar down, crimping the link tightly. If you were unlucky, the blue boy doing the crimping was a sadist who’d leave the link loose enough to rub your ankle raw throughout the day. Thanks to the crusted pus and dirt on the chains, more than a few unfortunates lost limbs from infections following a court trip. An iron hook attached to a ring set in concrete was the pulley. The long steel bar slipped into a different hinge, and using opposing force, spread the oval link wide to remove them after prisoners returned in the afternoon.

The prisoners would be shackled up, rattling and clanking like a troop of unhappy ghosts, and you were lined up on a patio just outside the chain room. You’d hunch there, looking at all the weirdness in the small square behind the Administration Building and the front gate.

Visitors to the prison would occasionally be allowed to see this first courtyard, and it was a deeply twisted reflection of what the prison officials thought the public wanted to see.

We sat on a wide patio of concrete blocks covered by an aluminum awning. Behind and next to us were the chain room and the back of the coffee shop. Ahead and in front of us to the south, was the three-story wood and cement structure that housed the prison administration offices and the front gate. It looked like a large, old-fashioned house with carved gables that curved upwards and other Thai-style embellishments. To the east and west of the square were other three-story concrete buildings, much plainer, that housed prisoners with lighter sentences, or who were considered low security risks.