In Buddha's Company: Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War

Conclusion

on 24 december 1967, a few days after news reports of the Queen’s cobra regiment’s first major battle with the Viet cong were published in thailand, the Bangkok Post ran an editorial praising the “historic role” that the volunteers seemed destined to play in the Vietnam War: “Perhaps in [the] not too distant future the country will honour our brave men in south Vietnam by erecting a memorial as a permanent reminder to our people of the glory earned in the battlefield.”1 More than two decades later, the country built just such a monument, yet few in thailand are aware of its existence. concealed in plain sight, the monument goes largely unvisited despite its location near one of thailand’s biggest tourist draws. the people it was designed to remember have largely been forgotten, but the few who do come to view it need no such reminder of thailand’s accomplishments in south Vietnam. the monument is visited almost exclusively by the veterans of the conflict. By the early 1990s, political and diplomatic circumstances in mainland southeast asia had changed dramatically. the wars over communism had come to an end in the region and the world. the thai government no longer required the potent anticommunist symbol that its volunteer forces embodied . their image—once bathed in the glorious light of an intense government propaganda effort constructed on the theme of national salvation—could be removed from the spotlight, their memorial relegated to an obscure army camp far from the monument-choked boulevards of the capital city. thailand already had enough symbolic and genuine victories in the war against communism to render the image of the volunteers—and their casualties—politically irrelevant and, perhaps, diplomatically awkward. Conclusion An Intimate Monument Hidden from the World’s View 214 : conclusion the communists won the second indochina War, but Bangkok found it could claim a string of shadow victories in the wake of hanoi’s postwar missteps. the waves of boat people and other refugees fleeing the communist regime handed Bangkok a moral victory over its ideological adversaries almost from the moment that saigon fell to the north Vietnamese army in april 1975. hanoi’s invasion of cambodia in late 1978 not only left the newly unified Vietnam isolated and impoverished but also seemed to confirm american and thai warnings about the expansionist nature of the communist regime. thailand’s own communist problem evaporated soon after, a process that began with Beijing’s cessation of political and economic support to the thai insurgents in the late 1970s. the amnesty schemes overseen by Prime Minister Prem tinsulanond finished the job, bringing in all but the most die-hard ideologues. the tense standoff with the Vietnamese along thailand’s eastern border abated following hanoi’s withdrawal of its troops from cambodia in 1990. By the time Prime Minister chatchai chunhawan declared that an economically booming thailand would lead the association of southeast asian nations (asean) in transforming the battlefields of indochina into a marketplace, the thai volunteers were a rapidly fading memory in the collective consciousness of the thai public. thailand’s leaders, however, remembered. and they kept their word. on 22 october 1990, Queen sirikit dedicated the Monument to the Bravery and sacrifice of the thai soldiers on the Vietnam Battlefield within the grounds of the royal thai army’s base at lat ya, Kanchanaburi, the camp near the Burmese border where most of the thai volunteers received training in counterguerrilla warfare techniques before leaving for south Vietnam (fig. c.1). a formerly remote location, the area now sees waves of day-tripping tourists who come to view the sites associated with the Japanese death railway project beside the Khwae river. Most tourists stay in Kanchanaburi long enough to have their photograph taken on the steel bridge that spans the river. some visit the military museums and cemeteries that memorialize the allied PoWs and conscripted asian laborers put to work on the death railway by the Japanese imperial army. almost no tourists—thai or foreign —realize that the town houses thailand’s principal monument to its involvement in the Vietnam War. almost none of the day-trippers go there. the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, as it is commonly called, does not appear in any guidebook or tourist brochure. there are no signs advertising its existence . nearly all who visit it are thai veterans or their families. as an official monument, it tells the story of the country’s involvement in south Vietnam, using...