Remembering Saisith (Saisith Pornkaew‪)‬

Editor's Note: In this "remembrance" the author recalls a close friendship and how it was tested forty-three years ago. He recommended that his good friend, Saisith be appointed District Officer in a poor province of Northeast Thailand then under attack by Viet Cong-supported insurgents. The author knew that Saisith was the perfect choice, but Saisith did not want to go. Some twelve years later the two friends met again in Thailand. Saisith told his friend that he had done "a terrible thing" in recommending him but would try to forgive him. This is a beautifully told but sobering account of a friendship in a distant land.--Assoc. Ed. A few weeks ago, rummaging through a broken box of browned archives, I came upon a book, written in Thai by Saisith Pornkaew, one of the best of a group of young Thai field officers with whom I had worked in the 1960s during a Thailand assignment. The book, Fighting The Communist Insurgency With Village Cooperation, covered his difficult assignment in reorganizing a district in the northeast province of Ubol and the defeat of a growing insurgency fomented by Laotian and Vietnamese provocateurs. I opened the cover to read Saisith's hand-written dedication in English: "To the only man who knows Thailand and its people--William A. Sommers ... aisith, May 14, 1969." An impossible exaggeration by a true friend! But like Proust's tea-dunked Madeline in Remembrance Of Things Past, it conjured a detailed, if not totally involuntary, memory of a time I had all but forgotten. The book-happily-forced me to reconstruct the Saisith I remembered.