Thailand: Reciprocating a Kindness

A century ago, Abraham Lincoln received a letter from Anna’s King of Siam offering a gift of elephants to “bear burdens and travel through uncleared woods and matted jungles where no carriage and cart roads have yet been made.” The beasts might have served well in the Civil War’s Battle of the Wilderness, but Lincoln politely declined the offer. The sentiment, however, was not forgotten.

From Bangkok to the Mekong valley last week, the $40-million-a-year U.S.-Thai military development program was proceeding apace. Two U.S. Army engineer battalions worked side by side in rising red dust with Royal Thai Army engineers, carving a broad, all-weather military highway—the Bangkok Bypass road—from the Gulf of Siam to the northeast provinces (see map). At the ocean end of the road, the U.S. is building the $11.9 million Sattahip Naval Airbase, replete with jet strips, a deepwater pier, and 70 ammunition bunkers. At the other end stands Camp Friendship, near the town of Korat, where 500 Americans and 850 Thais stand watch over $30 million worth of tanks, Jeeps, armored personnel carriers, and artillery, enough to support a U.S. brigade. The Royal Thai Air Force is soon to receive 18 Northrop-built F-5 jet fighters, while the tough Thai infantry’s Garand rifles will soon be replaced with light, fast-firing Armalites, which are much better suited to the miasmic conditions of jungle warfare. Radar and reconnaissance planes will add long-range vision to the 14,000-man Thai Navy, and swift patrol boats will give the 1,500 miles of meandering coastline additional security.

Lessons from Viet Nam. The U.S. presence in Thailand has grown from 4,800 men in 1962 (when President Kennedy sent U.S. troops during the Laotian crisis) to some 12,000 or more today. In deference to Thai touchiness (the kingdom has never known colonial rule), U.S. planes in Thailand do not operate out of “American” bases; technically, they are “stopovers” and no Americans other than couriers carry arms. But the three squadrons of U.S. Thunderchief and Phantom fighter-bombers that roar daily out of Korat for raids on North Viet Nam fly armed. Indeed, most U.S. strikes at the North are mounted in Thailand: another four U.S. attack squadrons are stationed at Thai airbases near Takhli and Ubon, while sleek RF-101 Voodoos fly from Udorn on reconnaissance missions above the Laotian part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail (TIME, Dec. 17). Gaily colored Thai trucks rumble by night up the U.S.-built Friendship Highway lugging bombs and jet fuel to the bases. New, laterite-surfaced “security roads” run up to Thailand’s northern borders, providing ready access for Thai counterinsurgency forces and routes for any future U.S. buildup aimed at turning North Viet Nam’s western flank. From Nakhon Phanom, a U.S. air-sea rescue team flies missions to recover pilots downed over North Viet Nam.

U.S. airmen have long been training Thai pilots, just as U.S. Navy Seabees cutting roads through the wilderness of the northeast are teaching Thai workers to take over construction jobs. The Thais emulate their Seabee trainers not only in their specially designed belts and insignia but in their rough-and-ready work habits. And last week Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister, General Praphas Charussatira, announced the payoff of the air-training program: Thailand is sending transport pilots to South Viet Nam, which sorely needs them, and is also giving military and police training to 1,000 young Laotians annually.

Beyond the immediate value of the burgeoning U.S. presence in Thailand lies a grander purpose. “We’re trying to apply the lessons of Viet Nam to Thailand early in the game,” says a top American military official. By laying a sound infrastructure of ports, highways and airstrips, bottlenecks like that currently plaguing the American buildup in Viet Nam are not likely to develop. When the bases and roads are completed, entire U.S. divisions could be airlifted into Thailand in a day’s time from American bases in the Pacific or from the U.S. itself.

Love Potion No. 9. The American presence is felt in ways other than the military. In Korat’s swinging nightspots (ranging from the Pizza Palace to the Playboy Bar), crew-cut G.I.s dance with Thai girls in skintight trousers and bouffant hairdos that glint with Helene Curtis spray (a top PX item despite the fact that no American military dependents are allowed in Thailand). Ubiquitous transistors thrum with American pop tunes (current favorite: Love Potion No. 9), and such examples of American cuisine as cheeseburgers and chicken-in-the-basket now grace the menus in Udorn. The U.S. Army’s Ninth Logistical Command employs 3,000 of Korat’s 80,000 residents, pumps $150,000 a month into the town in salaries alone. That does not count the greenbacks spent by Americans on food and drinks at the bars that are springing up everywhere, and on Thailand’s lissome young women. Such attractions have made Bangkok increasingly popular as a leave center for U.S. troops seeking “R & R” (rest and recreation) between bouts of combat in South Viet Nam.

Communist reaction to the American-Thai buildup has been predictably violent. Terrorists have murdered 24 “police agents” in recent weeks, and when Thai cops clashed with a terrorist band near Ubon early this month, they found expended cartridges of Communist Chinese and Bulgarian manufacture. Most of the Red terrorism has been concentrated in the wild northeast provinces of Thailand, which lie near Communist-controlled areas of Laos.

The presence in the northeast of some 40,000 North Vietnamese refugees, who fled there after the 1954 partition of Viet Nam, also complicates the problem of counterinsurgency, for many of the young Vietnamese are susceptible to Communist recruitment. Last week Peking announced that Thailand’s two Communist organizations—the Patriotic Front and the Thai Independence Movement—had merged under the leadership of the Patriotic Front. Both outfits together number no more than 1,000 members, but it is from just such hardened cadres that full-scale Viet Cong-style guerrilla armies develop.

For the moment, the Reds are demanding nothing more than an end to the American presence and a move toward “neutralism.” But as Thailand’s Foreign Minister Thanat Khoman recently remarked to visiting U.S. Senator Mike Mansfield: “Thailand does not want to become another guinea pig in a laboratory to use as a test of Communist good faith.” In that, the Thais can be assured of American concurrence.