“Vientiane 1972” by Ingrid Brand

 

Nanda had stayed with my family the previous summer and now I was allowed to fly to stay with hers. Even though I had travelled long complicated routes involving busses, trains, planes and multiple transfers on my own when travelling the 36 hours home from school, I was very excited to make this short trip to Laos to see my best friend from boarding school. And, we had imagined exciting times together, just the two of us roaming the city.

I strapped myself into the seat after climbing the stairs from the boiling tarmac into the plane. Compared to the jumbo 747 jets that I flew home from Europe, this was a much smaller plane. Even at fifteen I could see that the aircraft had been around for a while.  As the stewardesses were preparing the cabin for take off, I watched a line of disciplined red ants marching around the inside of the plane and onto the seat in front of me. It shook my confidence in the oncoming flight.

Nanda awaited me at the airport in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. She had come in the family car driven by a military chauffeur accompanied by a bodyguard in full soldier’s uniform complete with holstered gun.

“What’s with the armed bodyguard?” I asked.

“My dad wants to ensure we’re not kidnapped or harmed in any way. These guys are here to protect us” She rolled her eyes.

Hmm, I thought a little impressed, “Our own security detail!”

When we reached her house I thought we had arrived at a military base. There were several armed soldiers with big guns standing guard at the closed gate who let us in only once they confirmed it was us in the car.

Driving along the dusty, wide and relatively quiet avenues of Vientiane, I noted the city looked more like the old part of Bangkok but a lot quieter.  The buildings were no higher than four or five stories, shops had wide open fronts, and there was an abundance of street vendors selling assorted wares. The streets were populated with few cars and many motor scooters. It looked much like the Saigon you see in Vietnam war movies. In fact, it was in the same era. My visit in 1972 happened just three years before the Pathet Lao took control of the country and established a communist government in 1975. That’s when Nanda’s father, the last remaining family member in the city, helicoptered out leaving behind precious family mementoes, to start a new life in exile.

But long before the Pathet Lao seized power they had been active in the country fighting against the U.S. backed Royalist forces to gain control. In an effort to stop the insurgents the U.S. had been bombing Laos for nine years, ending only in 1973.

Ingrid and Nanda, 1972

I was fully aware of the war as it had been the backdrop of most of my conscious life. It was in the news, people spoke of it daily, and we saw thousands of G.Is on their R&R ( time off from warring) in Bangkok with their  "hired" Thai girlfriends for the week. A pervasive presence at the movies, restaurants, shops, bowling alleys and beaches, they were a normal and accepted part of life around town. But they were also a constant reminder of the ongoing war. 

I knew that Laos had communist groups fighting to infiltrate the country, but there were such groups in Thailand as well. I had seen the maps in the Bangkok Post indicating with greyed out areas the considerable extent to which the insurgents had infiltrated the country. After an initial worry and some memorable nightmares, I just accepted it as another part of life then ignored it.

It was this ongoing war that Nanda’s father as Minister of Defence was occupied with every hour of every day. That is why we had two military men with us when we went anywhere which was always by car.

During my week in Vientiane, we did the normal things two teenage girls in an Asian city then might do. We frequented the abundant noodle shops where we hoped to smoke our cigarettes, a regrettable habit we had adopted to seem older, away from our disapproving parents.  Unfortunately, the constant watchfulness of the armed bodyguard lingering outside the open restaurant was an immense annoyance. It meant we had to be even more furtive to sneak our smokes. 

We sat on metal stools slurping the noodles out of our soup, talking and laughing for hours hoping he would get bored and wander away or find some distraction so we could light up. But he was good at his job and his attention didn’t waver. The consequence would have been too great for him. And us.

We would try to shake him by walking through the busy outdoor market full of shoppers and vendors sitting by their colourful displays. Stopping occasionally, I would question the vendors about their goods in Thai, a language I spoke and similar enough to Lao that I was understood. The vendors would always direct their answer to Nanda who being half Lao looked like she should have been the conversant one in their language. Only she had been raised in Geneva and New York and then sent to a Swiss boarding school once her parents moved to Laos, so spoke very little of the language.

Every now and then we would check around us and feel delighted when we couldn’t see the bodyguard, thinking our clever evasion efforts had worked.  Inevitably he would always amble into view shortly after we had allowed ourselves to hope.

One evening in her bedroom at the corner of the one floor house, she told me about the multi-day vigil that had been held recently for her grandfather as he lay in the dining room, furniture pushed out of the way, on a funeral bier. Here he lay dressed but not in a casket, as is the Buddhist custom so that people could come to honour him before his cremation.  He was a prince of Laos from the province of Champassak which is also Nanda’s surname. According to custom the higher the rank of the deceased the longer the period to honour them. He lay in that house for several weeks, plenty of time for the soul to leave the body as the Buddhists believed.

I started to feel the goose bumps rise when she recounted how her grandfather’s spirit had visited in her room one night. Like all Thais and Laotians, we too believed in ghosts and spirits. Alone one evening, Nanda had been paralyzed with fear when she heard an old man’s chuckle coming from the corner of her room.

“When my father came back from the front lines, I told him that I had heard an old man chuckling in my room.”

“What did he say about it?”

Ingrid with cigarette, 1972

“He told me that it was my grandfather who had picked up on my father feeling sad that he was away on my birthday and manifested himself to me to keep me company.”

We felt cold and shivered, imagining that his spirit might return to the room we were sitting in when a grounds patrolling soldier walked by the bushes under her bedroom window. The rustle and shadow of the man scared the daylights out of us, and we screamed. It was the first time I had noticed the soldiers of which there were dozens who patrolled the property every night.

One day Nanda instructed the chauffeur to drive out of the city along a quiet river road. He was a little reluctant to do so, but she convinced him. It was our first, and only, venture out of the city and there was a frisson of adventure about it. Nanda wanted to show me a certain point where the river narrowed, and you could see across to Thailand.

Our destination was not far out of the city, but we had left all buildings behind and were now in a quiet country setting. We got out of the car and stood on the bank admiring the dense tropical vegetation along the wide, brown, fast flowing, Mekong River which divides the two countries. Further along the river, past Vientiane the Mekong flows into Champassak province, her ancestral home, of which she is a princess. We hadn’t been out of the car for long when the ever-present soldier who had been nervously standing guard hurried us back into the vehicle and we sped back into the city.

This seems like an innocuous outing, but it was in fact one that was fraught with danger and had been expressly forbidden by her father as the marauding communist Pathet Lao could have been lurking about in the underbrush and done us harm. When Nanda explained this, I finally got an inkling that the situation in Laos was slightly different than in Thailand and maybe her father wasn’t being overprotective after all.

This understanding was further substantiated one morning. While chatting with her father at the breakfast table about our day’s plans a servant brought a big brown manila envelope that had just been delivered by car. Mr. Na Champassak (his actual title: His Royal Highness Prince Na Champassak) opened the envelope and pulled out several 8x10 black and white glossies. He looked at them and smiled, then put them down on the table so that we too could see them. “There,” he said, “things are going well.”

We looked down and were horrified to see each photo of a Pathet Lao fighter lying in his contorted death pose. My eyes widened but I was too polite to say anything. Nanda gasped.

“But papa, why are you showing us these horrible photos?” she cried in exasperation.

“Because” he said calmly and matter of factly, “it’s better them than us.”

Nanda did some more outraged exclaiming, but he remained resolute. “I must protect my family and my country. There is no other way.”

I have always remembered that simple lesson of war.

After my week in Vientiane Nanda visited me in Bangkok for three weeks and we roamed all over the Bangkok noodle shops and markets and spent time at our beach house in Pattaya. Her parents felt that she might be safer in Bangkok.  We felt safer for a different reason, as we could smoke and roam unfettered by armed companions who reported back to their commander, Nanda’s dad. My parents were the usual watchful, but we ably outsmarted them. 

It wasn’t until many years later that Mr. na Champassak mentioned to his daughter that he knew what we did on our nightly beach walks in Pattaya. The walks away from the bungalow and the family to sit on the still warm sand alone and gaze at the stars in the inky sky with the sound of waves lapping up on shore. That is when we would smoke a joint and then a cigarette while baring our souls to each other. But Nanda’s protector had still been there, we just didn’t see him anymore.

*** 

Ingrid Brand has been happily retired since the summer of 2019. Retirement and the pandemic have allowed her the luxury of revisiting adventures and experiences in her past while growing up in Thailand, Switzerland and California. She is grateful that Brian Henry’s classes have helped shape some of those experiences into shareable stories. Her intention is to leave these stories to her daughter, so that she may read them when she is ready to know her mom before she became a ‘just a mom.”

See Brian Henry’s upcoming weekly writing classes, one-day workshops, and weekend retreats here.