“I’ll be in the third jungle, second rice paddy to the left.” Bob told his ex-wife when he left Michigan for Thailand last year.
“And that’s pretty close to where I ended up,” the Vietnam Vet tells me as we drive through northeastern Thailand in his king cab Toyota pickup truck listening to Dolly Parton wailing “The Rockin’ Years”. Bob says he’d rather meet Dolly in person than any American president. Who was his favorite president? I ask. “Nixon,” Bob says. “He brought us home with what little honor we had left.”
Bob is one of over 200 “gentlemen of a certain age” who have settled in the shadow of a former U.S. Air Force Base in Udonthani, Thailand. Bob and his best friend Bert, who is along for the ride, speak a language riddled with words like Charley’s, Lead-sleds, and F-14’s. Bert tells me his job in the war was loading bombs and Bob says his was detonating the ones that didn’t work.
“That must have been nerve-wracking work,” I say. “Let’s put it this way,” Bob says, “There are old explosives men and there are bold explosives men, but there are no old, bold explosives men.”
I am in Udonthani, Thailand to attend the wedding of Bob and Phun. I met the couple seven months earlier on Sukhumvit, Soi 3 in Bangkok at an open-air bar. Bob told me over a beer, “They shipped me home from the war when my girlfriend was seven months pregnant. I’ve been in Thailand searching for my kid - he’d be 35 this year. I haven’t found either of them yet, but I found Phun and we’re gettin’ married next Valentines Day.”
That was the beginning of a friendship between Bob, Phun, and me. And it was the moment I first saw Thailand in a new light - as a country where planeloads of broken hearted, misplaced men, come to find love and sometimes find a new home in the process.
Seven months later, Bob picks me up at the Udonthani airport, where I have arrived for the wedding. He talks me out of my hotel room and into staying with he and Phun.
“I pay $125 a month to rent this house and that’s too much,” Bob says about their comfortable 3-bedroom stucco home. The neighborhood is made up of similar looking houses with red tile roofs, in which similar gentlemen live with their Asian partners. Bob pours me a whisky and we sit at the dining room table under a photo of the king of Thailand. Bob comments, ” Today it was 32 below in Michigan and 90 above here. I’d rather take my clothes off any day than keep puttin’ em on. Yep, this is Thailand.”
Thirty-two years ago Bob tells me, there were only 15,000 people living in Udonthani. Today 330,000 people live here