News of a new military coup in Thailand, elicits memories of the last one, which took place on 23rd February 1991. The events that eventually resulted from this event were tragic with a great deal of bloodshed, much murder and the suppression of the political rights of a gentle people. On a personal note – it lead to my exile from a country I love. However, all this was to unfold, and that Saturday night was anything but tragic.
On first hearing news of the coup, David and I were propelled into resolute action. Fiercely grasping our trusty cameras in expert albeit clammy hands, we took to the mean city streets of the Asian capital – streets that seemed so strangely innocent but which at the same time exuded an atmosphere of well-neigh palpable menace and sinister political intrigue.
I hailed a taxi, brutally barked instructions and we were heading directly into the very ‘heart of darkness.’ Our destination: the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, then located on the top floor of the five-star Dusit Thani Hotel on Silom Road, Central Bangkok. The journey took a matter of minutes yet it could have been an eternity. David spent the time fiddling with his Nikon, his knuckles white with suppressed tension; seemingly more relaxed, I nursed my Minolta on my lap as though it were some dangerously deranged child and merely ground my teeth. On reaching the hotel foyer, we gave a curt nod to the resplendently clad doorman, strode across the deep-piled carpet of the lobby and were wafted to the top floor by a turbo elevator. Brusquely pushing through the padded leather doors, we entered the Club. Aside from a couple of bar staff, we had the place to ourselves; there wasn’t a journalist in sight.
Congratulating ourselves at being first on the real scene of events and sneering at the so-called professional reporters who were doubtless merely at some besieged government building or at the Army HQ, we resolutely ordered the first beers of the night and took up strategic positions in a pair of really comfortable and tastefully upholstered armchairs. From there we could command an overview of events as they unfolded. We gazed through the tinted plate-glass windows at the panoramic view of the brightly-shinning city lights some thirty or forty floors below and thoughtfully slurped our ice cold Singha beers.
It can’t have been more than a few minutes after our arrival that David broke the silence. With a decisive yet strangely cynical curl of his lips – a true mark of the ‘old Bangkok hand’ – he suggested that we ordered a book of drinks vouchers. I grunted my even more cynical assent. It was going to be a long night.
In that atmosphere of sombre menace, soft furnishings and even softer piped string quartet music, strange things can happen to a man, even to hard drinking, hard living and hard-bitten journalists. Perhaps it was the sense of bitter irony evoked by the sight of the lights shinning so peacefully yet so deceptively in the distance but I felt a change coming over me. Suddenly I was James Woods's character from Salvador while David was apparently transforming into that played by Mel Gibson in The Night of Living Dangerously. We took it in turns to snarl “god damn it” at each other through gritted teeth.
At some point in the evening we decided that it was important to get a little local colour, to obtain an authentic Thai perspective. Given that David claimed to possess an unsurpassed fluency in the language, this was ‘his baby’ (as we journalist call it). He headed or perhaps lurched in the direction of the only remaining Thai, the other bar staff having long since given up and gone to bed. Even at this distance in time, I can still hear his earnest, almost conspiratorial yet oddly slurred tones as he interviewed the somewhat perplexed-looking barman. It is hard to judge exactly how much the latter actually understood – David explained that he was from outside Bangkok and clearly had a rudimentary grasp of the local idiom – but he did come over later with a bowl of peanuts. However, both David and I felt that it would trivialize the occasion to eat them. For once in cynical agreement, we ordered potato chips instead.
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