Red Shirts And Barbed Wire
The day Bangkok's streets went silent.
Part of the process of writing one story per day for 30 days requires traveling to nearly forgotten moments in the crevices of the mind. If I’m lucky, I come across one that I can dust off and polish, until it becomes as clear as the day I was crossing Nakhon Sawan Road.
Ya came running out of her salon.
“John,” she said, “go back to your room.” She held out her arms and pointed her manicured index fingers at me, thumbs facing upward. The lady who usually cut my hair was now doing a nervous impersonation of Rambo firing a machine gun. “Army!” she said. “Coming!”
She rolled down the metal shutters of her storefront and ran as fast as someone wearing mid-height heels possibly could. When she turned left at the corner, my eyes darted to the right and locked onto the scene. Body snatchers – Thailand’s volunteer EMS workers – lined the street.
Chakkraphatdi Pong Road was empty yet full of tension. You could feel it in the rusty coils of barbed wire that snaked through the roadway. You could hear it in the leaves of the trees that swayed back and forth, shielding the midday sun from absolutely no one. The once traffic-congested, civilian-infested government district of Bangkok now suggested that something terrible was about to happen.
I ran back across the street to the Green Hotel. When I got there, an iron gate nearly five meters high sealed off the aging structure from the outside world, save for a rectangle hole that acted as a doorway. I climbed through and sprinted upstairs, clearing two or three steps at a time. Once inside the room, I spun the crank handle of the wooden casement window to survey an escape route.
Rooftops was all I saw, and a helicopter hummed in the distance. For the first time ever in Thailand, I felt a tingle of fear. But, as a man who hadn’t yet had two children or a wife who depended on him, I did what my now rational mind could only perceive as way too risky. I grabbed my camera and ran back down toward the road.
At the intersection, a group of Red Shirts wearing all black stood waving flags. “Look,” one of them said to me while pointing at the helicopter, “Abhisit.” He threw his arm up in the air and shook his middle finger while yelling exploits at who he thought was inside – then-Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva.
The Red Shirts had been occupying the area for well over a month, the government was being pressured to react, and what followed that night would change Thai history forever.
What will follow from today are the stories of the people I met and the scenarios that unfolded leading up to the violent clash between the Red Shirts and the Thai Army in 2010.
Read the next story in this series: The Green Hotel
Photo by Clint Oka.