The Other Side Of The Bridge
Life inside the Red Shirt encampment.
If you’re new here, start with the first story in this series: Barbed Wire And Red Shirts
Start at Democracy Monument first. Then head east down Ratchadamnoen Klang Road til you get to Phan Fa Lilat Bridge. As you cross it, you’ll find Klong Banglamphu beneath you. It’s a canal that separates Rattanakosin Island from the rest of Bangkok. On the other side, the Red Shirts’ main protest site.
At the protest’s peak, an estimated 50,000 Red Shirts camped in the area. I walked through one night, marveling at their sophisticated setup. Everyone had a plot of land big enough to fit their tent and other belongings. Televisions glowed from within some tents. Electric fans cooled others. None of them were far from cooking gas or running water.
The encampments were also lined with stands – dozens of them. You could buy everything from a red shirt to a plate of fried rice to a key chain. I had wondered if these sellers traveled all the way from rural Thailand with the Red Shirts or swooped in to capitalize on the chance to make money afterward. Either way, it was damn impressive.
Dead center in the middle of the whole thing was a stage. On either side were speakers the size of two-story houses. They served two purposes: first, to play rural Thai music during the day, and second, to amplify the voices of the Red Shirt leaders at night. Sometimes, if it was quiet enough, those voices reached my room at the Green Hotel, where I’d let them lull me to sleep.
When not sleeping or training Muay Thai at Sangmorakot, I spent most of my free time roaming the encampment. It’s also where I took my friends the night they landed in Bangkok.
Mind you, arriving in the Thai capital for the first time in your life can be quite intense. Your senses are bombarded with smells and sounds that Western noses and ears were never trained for.
Imagine being thrust into that same environment, except there’s an added layer of unfamiliarity – a social upheaval that’s boiling closer to the brim of the pot every day. Twenty-four hours ago in suburban New Jersey, my friends were taking trash cans to the curb. Now they were the cast members of a Oliver Stone movie.
It hadn’t dawned on me the magnitude of where they were. After all, I had become numb to everything around me over the last month and a half. “How was the flight?” I asked with genuine curiosity. My friends’ eyes were fixated on the stage in the distance and the sea of red that engulfed everyone and everything. “You have to give us some time to adjust,” one of them said.
Adjust they did.
A few days later, on the way to Sangmorakot for an afternoon training session, my friend climbed onto one of the massive Red Shirt caravans as it crawled through traffic. Hanging off the door with a smile that traveled from ear to ear, he posed for pictures.
I assumed life would carry on for months, maybe years, with Red Shirts driving up and down the government district in farm vehicles that were illegal to operate in Bangkok. But in April, they began to spread from the encampment at Phan Fa Lilat Bridge to other places around the city.
They laid barbwire across roads. They built fortresses made of truck tires and wood. Their smiling faces were now hidden behind black masks. Some of them marched up and down the streets.
One morning, we arrived at the park for our run and the Thai Army was there in a standoff with the Red Shirts.
Over the next few days I saw less and less Red Shirts and more and more men dressed in black. My family back home kept asking me to register with the US Embassy in case things went south, but I chuckled at the thought. A kilometer in every direction life carried on as usual in Bangkok.
What could possibly happen? I thought. The answer came the following week.
Read the next post in this series: Down The Ax Handle
Photo by Andrew Dyson.