THAILAND’S SECRET WAR
Censorship and a lack of resources meant that many aspects of the kingdom’s involvement in the Vietnam War went largely unreported, writes Alan Dawson
For decades Bangkok remained the centre to cover regional news in Southeast Asia. This was certainly the case when the Khmer Rouge conducted their policy of genocide where the “killing fields” eventually prompted a sea of hundreds of thousands of refugees to move to the Thai border. Like the international news agencies, the Bang
kok Post was able to cover this major regional event, which comprised years of diplomatic jousting and ground conflict between Hun Sen’s Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh and the Cambodian resistance spearheaded by the dreaded Khmer Rouge.
But there was one major conflict years earlier that the Bangkok Post could not cover. The Vietnam War brought a serious problem to this newspaper and to all Thai media. It flowed from the Rusk-Thanat Agreement, touted as one of Thailand’s biggest foreign policy successes of the post-war period.
The agreement was signed on March 6, 1962. The Bangkok Post sent off foreign minister Thanat Khoman to Washington with a photo and story on the front page, welcoming him back 10 days later with similar fanfare. The agreement was a major diplomatic success for Thailand and a serious victory for United States president John F Kennedy. Thailand got the backing of the US for virtually any diplomacy, up to and including war. But trouble brewed rather quickly for the Bang
kok Post and other newspapers. The Thanom Kittikachorn government — with Thanat’s strong backing — went into censorship mode. By May 1962, Kennedy and his administration were successfully getting full Thai support for the US Southeast Asian policy of halting North Vietnamese expansion, beginning with Laos.
The Bangkok Post was presented with a difficult, if not virtually impossible task. It had to report developments in Laos without mentioning a lot of the Thai military, paramilitary and diplomatic activities that were the key to what was happening. The Thanom government decreed that while some US forces were allowed to set foot on Thai air force, navy and army bases, there was no warfare under way at all.
Each day, for years in the late 1960s, the newspaper reported hundreds of air strikes by US jet fighter bombers and B52s that appeared miraculously from somewhere or other, conducted operations and then flew away to somewhere or other.
At the height of the war, with 570,000 troops in Vietnam, the US ran seven airbases, a navy base and an army base in Thailand, all operating furiously against communist forces in Laos and Vietnam and, after 1970, Cambodia.
In 1967, it was front-page news that Thailand entered the war as a US ally and in defence of South Vietnam. This was described as following the tradition set by Thailand in the Korean War, although everyone would soon learn there was almost no similarity between the two theatres.
Thai troops fought for four years, mostly from the Bearcat Base between Saigon and the Australian area of operation to the east of the Thais at Nui Dat.
Combat presence was maintained at around 12,000 men as Thailand served as one of just five countries that sent troops to fight with the Americans and South Vietnamese. Of 40,000 soldiers who served one-year tours, 351 fell on the battlefield and did not return, while another 1,358 were wounded.
Little of this got into the Bangkok Post or other Thai media. The newspaper could not afford to post a full-time correspondent to Vietnam, while the foreign news agencies gave scant attention to Thai, Korean, Australian, New Zealand and Philippines combat activities.
Like the Seri Thai of World War II and the soldiers of the Korean War, Thai combat veterans of Vietnam were little recognised.
Even then, they received greater notice than the Thai “irregulars” who fought in Laos, often with US CIA officers. The Thanom dictatorship wouldn’t allow any mention of them, and so the phrase “secret war” was born.